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locust city archive
Cosimo Galluzzi
art blog(derogatory)

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Acquired Stardust
cherry valley forever

pixel skylines
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Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
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Origami Around
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oozey mess
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
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AnasAbdin
will byers stan first human second

祝日 / Permanent Vacation
noise dept.

izzy's playlists!
Monterey Bay Aquarium

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@despairtwins
antigone, ⚧, adult blog runs on a queue.
locust city archive
"I WANT TO EAT BUGS WITH YOU UNDERGROUND" by JULIE DANHO.
The scientist on the radio said that humans will survive, and, at first, I was buoyed, but she meant only some of us, the ones living in tunnels, eating crickets to survive when the rest had died from mass starvation after droughts lasted longer and seas rose faster and wars killed bigger because everyone wanted what little was left. I’d be fine with being one of the billions dead unless you were still alive. Under a down comforter or by a trash fire, I want to be where you are. You know how poorly I dig holes, how angry I get when I’m cold, how twice I’ve accidentally maced myself, and still you’d take me with you down into the earth, give me more than my fair share of caterpillar.
"I want there to be fictional universes that talk about our own real life experiences. About the political problems we’re facing, the geopolitical structures around us, the problems of the modern world, etc. Universes which don’t leave us feeling numb, alone, and abandoned after we have finished exploring them. Universes which actually equip us with life tools and provide context for what’s happening to us. Which give us the strength to carry on with our lives, instead of making us feel empty to the point where we say, “Oh my god, I want to go back to the land of the Elves, but I can’t; I’ve already seen it all”.
The best aim behind this revolution in how worlds are built is that of changing how people interpret escapism. I want them to feel good when they return, better equipped, ready to accomplish things, with new tricks to use as they go about their business. Siths and Jedis are really just tired metaphors for talking about politics. They’re dulling our minds; they don’t explain anything.
Voldemort can’t help us understand what Trump is about. It’s senseless; it makes you stupid. Fantasy worlds provide tools with which to face the world, but the wrong tools will render us incapable of doing that. I want us to build worlds which make us capable. Which help us deal with the world better."
- Robert Kurvitz, writer of Disco Elysium
C
YOU - Wait, first — what's being *Elytical* even about? RHETORIC - Failure. It's about failure.
Much of our modern theater seems rooted in the Shakespearean discovery of the modern mind. We’re stealing instead from an earlier, less-traveled construct—the Greeks—lifting [The Wire’s] thematic stance wholesale from Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides to create doomed and fated protagonists who confront a rigged game and their own mortality. The modern mind—particularly those of us in the West—finds such fatalism ancient and discomfiting, I think. We are a pretty self-actualized, self-worshipping crowd of postmoderns and the idea that for all of our wherewithal and discretionary income and leisure, we’re still fated by indifferent gods, feels to us antiquated and superstitious. We don’t accept our gods on such terms anymore; by and large, with the exception of the fundamentalists among us, we don’t even grant Yahweh himself that kind of unbridled, interventionist authority.
But instead of the old gods, The Wire is a Greek tragedy in which the postmodern institutions are the Olympian forces. It’s the police department, or the drug economy, or the political structures, or the school administration, or the macroeconomic forces that are throwing the lightning bolts and hitting people in the ass for no decent reason. In much of television, and in a good deal of our stage drama, individuals are often portrayed as rising above institutions to achieve catharsis. In this drama, the institutions always prove larger, and those characters with hubris enough to challenge the postmodern construct of American empire are invariably mocked, marginalized, or crushed. Greek tragedy for the new millennium, so to speak. Because so much of television is about providing catharsis and redemption and the triumph of character, a drama in which postmodern institutions trump individuality and morality and justice seems different in some ways, I think.
An interview with David Simon
Realizing how many DE fanfics Dick Mullen-ify case fics and like. There's nothing wrong with that, but I just realized that a lot of them kind of forget how busy Precinct 41 is. Harry has a bunch of cases in his ledger and has an obscene workload. Some of them are more serious than others.
I don't think it'd be unreasonable for RCM officers to have multiple murder cases going on at once. Sometimes the murder cases split into another murder case. You have like 10 different trails you're following. Shit slips between the cracks. Wires frequently get crossed. Pryce transferred your case to someone else. No, suddenly you're picking up another case you know fuck all about and have to learn everything about it. What was covered, what wasn't, what needs to be revisited? Nothing's coming up on this one, so put it on the back burner for now. Solve like 5 cases over the next week. You almost die seven times. Three months later, you're like, shit, I forgot about that one, has anything happened? I should prioritize this. Fuck, hold up, I have another case. After two weeks you realize, oh, it's the Mazda, I can't do anything about that. Wasted my fucking time. Sorry, give me a week to get back to you. I'm literally drowning in paperwork. Another case just cropped up on my beat? Cool
Like obviously there's a reason why there's only one case at a time in case fics and mystery thrillers in general. It's a lot less messy and it's easier to keep the details cleanly cut. Just realized that in reality, those RCM officers are barely scraping by off of chaos, confusion, and coffee. The ones that care, at least.
"The standard police procedural, even including great dramas like NYPD Blue and Hill Street Blues, adheres to time-honored narrative conventions. It focuses on good, if sometimes imperfect, cops trying to find the real bad guys — the perpetrators — and bring them to justice. The episode begins when a crime ruptures the social fabric and ends when guilt is determined and things are put to right. The standard procedural is concerned mainly with individual fault and individual heroism. It does not raise disquieting questions about the criminal justice system, the legal system, or the social and political arrangements that lead to a permanent underclass."
"In standard cop shows, the crime is a given — it appears, unbidden, at the beginning of the episode. But The Wire shows a world in which police are inundated with cases and information. The question is not how the police will solve "the case," it's how caseload priorities will be determined."
— Susan Bandes, in the Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law
X7 Masterpost so I can stop getting confused where to find my stuff
My stuff:
Acts 1-3 Summaries Acts 4-5 Summaries Narrative Overview (Non-Summaries) Acts 1-3 Narrative Overview (Non-Summaries) Acts 4-5, + Analysis & Endings Design Section, Part 1 Design Section, Part 2
Other cool folk:
wykwryt: Box of Locusts Miro Board, Content Slide revacholreverie: Act V Plot Details, Tasks, and Endings (blog contains more rips from the video if interested) vacholierette: Screenshots from the video, mainly artwork vampire-pierrot: Gif'd animations skeletor9000-blog: Many more screenshots, including gameplay etc
Backed with evidence this is the true story of events that took place in Zaum studio between June 2022 and February 2024.
One last look at the mismanagement and misinformation campaign which killed Locust City.
August 21 2025: New Medium posts on the Locust City fallout by Argo and Dora.
After all Zaum studio’s doors closed behind me a year and a half ago, why stir the pot again? The defamatory statements my former home-studio decided to give People Make Games for their follow-up episode to the Disco Elysium story — great documentary by the way, I sincerely recommend watching it — is the reason why. I want to challenge them. *Hard* and with evidence.
MIRRORS: Web Archive: Argo / Dora Internet Archive: Argo / Dora Z-Library: Argo / Dora LibGen: Argo / Dora Torrent
SANDERSON: A rule of thumb: Age of your protagonist minus 2 is about the age group you're intending the book for. That's why you see a ton of 15- and 16-year-olds. People will generally read about someone older than them, and they don't like reading about someone younger than them.
STUDENT: I have kind of a follow-up question. My central character is 8.
SANDERSON: Your central character is 8, yep.
STUDENT: What are the dangers of that? Why don't we see more adult books written with--?
SANDERSON: Yeah. Why don't we see more adult books written with child protagonists? Number one, they're hard to write, and number two, the marketing people just don't know how to market them. But, I mean, Ender is 8 through a big portion of Ender's Game. How old is he when he's in battle school? He's still not that old, right?
STUDENT: No, he's 11.
SANDERSON: Yeah, he's like 11. Ender's Game is a perfect example of a book that really is thematically YA, and you would call middle grade by age of the protagonist. But it's usually given to young adults. Young young adults, right? But it's usually read by people that Ender is younger than them.
This does happen. Most of the time you're safest just saying it's an adult book, and if they decide to publish it somewhere else, great. The Golden Compass is another great example. His Dark Materials, where Lyra, it's like, how old is she in these? Is this a YA? Is it not? Nobody really knows. This kind of speaks to, another tangent. Remember that genre, and all the things we talk about with genre, are marketing tools. This is why we have sections in a bookstore. It is a marketing tool. That marketing tool can be very handy to people whose books naturally fit into one of these categories. If your books don't naturally fit, it can be harder for you. That isn't a reason to not write them, but it is a reason to try to do a little bit of the marketing people's jobs for them by saying, "This is an adult book with a child protagonist."
Brandon Sanderson, 2020 Writing Lectures at BYU
new martin luiga tweet
41ST PRECINCT: I always find it really interesting when you have a world such as Elysium - or any other - and there’s a certain bleakness to it. There is no more effective way to communicate the darker side of that world than through children. So I’m really like - Cuno and Cunoesse are probably the characters that fascinate me the most.
So - where did they both come from? Where did Cuno come from?
ARGO TUULIK: Well, honestly, proto-Cuno, Kuno with a K, comes from a summer, maybe 2005 or something like that, where Robert and I were working in this medical filter factory. Factory sounds so industrial, but it’s kind of in this small fishing village in Estonia where the lover of my father organized a summer job. Don’t ask. And I’ve thought about - how or why was this image and this manner of speech in my head? And I want to trace it back to Myron from Fallout 2.
Like, if you think about the facial features, and sort of this arrogance that Myron speaks to, I think there’s some roots there.
But one day, walking to work - it was like a five-minute walk from the apartment where I lived to the factory - I think I saw a guy with a bicycle and a flat tire or something like this. That was the trigger. And it echoes back to - remember when I told you that Kurvitz and I, we have this habit of coming up with characters?
Well, I created this scene in my head where you’re in the countryside road in the middle of nowhere, like, 30 kilometers of no civilization, and you get a flat tire. And just as you’re about to give up - like, what am I gonna do? Carry it on my back? You see this kid. Basically that perfectly fits the description of Cuno.
Ugly kid, makes you think about countryside incest a little bit, teeth all fucked up, you see him like an angel of God walking down this dirt road holding a tire pump. And you just look at it for a second, like an omen. Like, fate does exist. And you speak to him.
You say, “Hey kid. It’s so great that you’re here. Can I get the pump for a second?” And he completely ignores you.
Keeps walking. And you’re kind of thinking, like, maybe I’m not making it clear? So you’re like, “Hey.” You point to your tire. You’re like, “See? Tire is broke. Wheel no go around. Can I get that?” He’s still ignoring you.
Eventually you sort of grab his shoulder, and you say, “Please! My tire is broken!”
And now comes the translation bit, like, the line he uses is “Miks see Kuno keppi?”. In Estonian the direct translation is, “Why does it fuck Cuno?” The first English translation was, “Fuck does Cuno care?” That’s much more elegant in English. But what it loses is this introduction into this dualistic worldview of Cuno where everything in the world is categorized into the things that fuck Cuno and things that don’t fuck Cuno. Guess which one your flaccid tire falls into.
And the scene and why it stuck with me and why I played around with it in my head is I’ve always found something exhilarating and hilarious about - how do I say this? Circumstantial impotence meeting undeserved arrogance. Like, there you have this absolute power dynamic. You’re an adult. You’re a grown-up. Like, this is a kid. A kid with a tire pump. First of all, you don’t expect his arrogance. No one would expect this arrogance. You don’t expect that you would have to explain yourself to this kid. And furthermore, how the scene progresses is, you go from reasoning to pleading to threatening to physically trying to take the pump from the kid. But ultimately, at the end of the day, what are you going to do if he just doesn’t give it to you? Like, you are in this predicament where you feel validated by the circumstances. ‘Because I am an adult, because I am in the middle of nowhere, because my tire is broken: He needs to give it to me!’ But he doesn’t.
I tried to get a little bit of that across in this branch of Cuno where you can hit him, but fail, and then you’re locked out. And now you, an adult, are put into this situation where you basically have to make amends with him. It is essentially your origin story of Cuno.
Argo Tuulik for The Human Can Opener Podcast
cuno and cunoesse
Cuno & Cunoesse concept art by Anastasiia Ivanova for Locust City.
Cuno concept art by Anastasiia Ivanova for Locust City.
Cunoesse by Anastasiia Ivanova for Locust City.
Cuno concept art by Anastasiia Ivanova for Locust City.