holy shit this url is open

Hey, this is my CPUK blog! Im currently rewatching s3, so of course i'll be posting about characters that arent even introduced yet :) Also my name is AV (he/him)

[drorder]

hey im editing cpuk again and i forgot (and missed on my first watch after downloading #14) that Dark Jimbo got beat up by his dad??? like obvi you cant take the character too seriously and it was the first episode and its also a smash tournament so thats just kinda the medium for storytelling, but damn

[drorder]

oh also i just realized that later on (like TWENTY EPISODES down the line) theres some REALLY cool stuff i could do with Prism but i need to do all the episodes before then first and I’m EMPLOYED… 😭😭😭 im so impatient. i have no idea how video editors have the patience for a full notetaking stage, much less how they keep from just jumping ahead to the most fun parts. anyway i need to go back to woodworking……

[drorder]

hey im editing cpuk again and i forgot (and missed on my first watch after downloading #14) that Dark Jimbo got beat up by his dad??? like obvi you cant take the character too seriously and it was the first episode and its also a smash tournament so thats just kinda the medium for storytelling, but damn

[drorder]

heres a wip from episode 14! its a set i’ve edited down a bunch and i think i did a good job? I think i’m gonna put down the editing for a couple days because re-editing the 720p60 footage was really tedious and i lost a bit of steam. still open for constructive criticism btw. I dont even know if ive watched this whole video through start-to-end so it might be paced weird

[drorder]

Btw, downloading the 720p60 vod and cutting it down, then redownloading it worked out well. Now i just have to match it up to the footage ivecut down already which is unfortunately weirdly hard because it doesnt have an audio track to help match to the stuff i have so far. But i’m using a burnt-in timecode and thats def helping

Edit: i just found a better workflow for matching the footage which should speed things along a BUNCH thank god. its happening!!

[drorder]

good news: i found a way to download cpuk vods from youtube and have started on an edit of #14. bad news: i just lost 6 hours of my life to it without even realizing and i’ve only carved off 40-ish minutes of a 5 hour VOD

but it is happening!! Maybe i’ll finish it idk. I’m gonna try and SUPER cut down the first round matchups, highlights-style, to get them to not be half of the runtime of the VOD, and focus on plot development and late-competition matchups. I’m not sure how much that will mess with the overall experience to make cuts in the middle of the rounds, but tbh im not an ssbu fan so most of the gameplay goes over my head anyway and there’s always the actual vods for the full matches.

on a higher-concept level, i’d like to try and make a full video for an intro segment to go over the Rhythm Heaven intro with the basic gist of CPUK, the different teams, and maaaaybe some plot recap stuff. Also explaining that Jenny is Jenny now. I just don’t want to cut out the mashup intros bc i feel like thats a really important part of the experience, and if i actually FULLY changed the visuals to something CPUK themed (like, if i reanimated the whole thing, which I cant and also shouldnt do lol), i feel like it’d be cool. Or maybe I’ll just start with a cold open ‘hook’ like a lot of twitch stream edits do.

and id also like to come up with (and idk what software i could use for this, maybe canva or something) some kind of bracket motion-graphic showing the whole bracket and the progression of characters through it. I’d like it to have motion graphics, for what i’m imagining, so it can show characters dropping down into losers vs being eliminated, because then I can cut out Jenny’s explanation of the bracket system and save more time.

later in the series i’d love to make some graphics for the cutscenes, either just sketches of the characters in their environments, animatic-style, or something more visual-novel style with sprites of the characters’ fan-designs that could be re-used over different episodes, so that I only have to roughly paint the environments & add some lighting overlays to each scene. But I’m SUPER getting ahead of myself here.

Also: should i keep the fanart showcase? I’m gonna cut down pauses & whatnot for pacing anyway, but I really want to keep the community and each piece of art included. But maybe theres a better way to do that?

[larrythefloridaman]

feel like doing a design critique of the cpuk team emblems because i have significant beef with most of them on a pure graphic design level and i figured itd be fun, so-

Starting with Team Calibur:

Starting with my favorite- i really think team calibur's emblem works. The crown has interesting shape language, both flowing and pointed in an elegant yet threatening way that sells the combined sense of pride and dominating that's essential to the character of the team- calibur is for people who know (or think) theyre better than you and unafraid to express that. The central diamond-like framing and jewel of the crown visually evokes an eye in communication with the crimson emblem's diamond shaped iris, a visual callback to the team's origin. The indigo and violet color scheme boosts the regal connotations, and its balanced well in the design with most of it being dark but using brighter color as embellishment and to highlight the central point of interest, and its actually the only team logo where i feel the gradient usage in these logos feels effective and doesnt take anything away from the design because it evokes a metallic surface without overdoing it here, although i think it'd serve it to be a subtler transition from light to dark. Solid 4.5/5 this is kind of the only one i have zero real gripes with its all just nitpicks. Its all kind of downhill from here though,

[larrythefloridaman]

Team Cash Money:

What a nothingburger of a design. Like its fine, it evokes the basic principle of what its supposed to but when you're crafting a sports team logo I'd hope for a little more nuance and creative ingenuity than slapping gradients on a cartoon shorthand for the american dollar. Something that becomes apparent with these as you go down the list is the inconsistency in vision- some of these designs are overdesigned and some are underdesigned, like this one. There are so many visual motifs associated with wealth and money accrewal and this is just an icon in a circle, and its simplicity broadens its potential for meaning in a way that technically encapsulates what the team is about but with zero interesting specificity. If i had to keep the dollar sign motif, i would at least make it smaller and turn the background circle into something with a little more visual interest, like the silhouette of a money bag or give it ridges around the edge like a coin. I also think this one suffers from not taking advantage of wealth also being associated with the color gold, because the fully green color palette isnt helping it. But if i got the chance to redesign it entirely, id want to replace this with a stylized paycheck- Team Cash Money is in it for the money, thats the heart of it, which attracts everything from despicable billionaires looking to get even richer to the most downtrod and longsuffering of the work force just trying to make enough to have a life, which i think is better captured in specificity by something that better conveys the act of Payment, and not just currency in the abstract. 2.5/5. Utterly middle of the road, its greatest crime is being boring.

[larrythefloridaman]

Disclaimer/Legal Boilerplate which applies to every stage of this post: I've been informed that these were originally meant to be placeholders purely for wiki use only, and while they aren't explicitly credited anywhere in the discord to my awareness (which really shouldn't be the case even with the next bit in mind,) they were primarily the work of One Jackass who made and implemented them with no oversight from the rest of the wiki organizers before they were faintly 'officialized' by their addition to the server emotes, once again with no input from anyone else on the old wiki team.

Anyhow, with that out of the way, Team Charm:

You can tell a straight guy made this. 'Graphic design is my passion.' Corporate pinkwashing logo. god's ugliest bumper sticker an otherwise conservative yuppie puts on their car when their son comes out in a weak attempt to make him talk to them more. I know it's hard to simplify the rainbow down well for iconography, it pisses vexillologists off every day but good god with that default ibispaint-ass rainbow gradient this is half uninspired and half ugly. Garishly bright and lacking in balance or purpose like a toddler with no color sense given a highlighter, the lipstick mark's texture contrasts unpleasantly with the smooth polished shape of the heart and the shape of the filled and empty space inside the lips between it and the heart just makes it look misaligned and hastily applied. For that matter, why lipstick? Team Charm is meant to be a team centered on queer community and doing good in the world- what is intrinsically queer about lipstick? What is intrinsically good about lipstick? Lipstick typically signifies traditional femininity, and while misogyny and homophobia are often tied together by patriarchal society, theres nothing inherently queer about performing femininity in a vacuum and some forms of queerness are far more tied to performing masculinity, which results here in some pretty confused messaging. The heart is... fine, if very boring as the very simple textureless shape that it is. Start over. 1/5. I'm trying to be relatively professional about this but some of these make it hard,

[larrythefloridaman]

Team Chonk:

This could maybe work if the team was team chomp or team cronch or something. Still awkwardly shaped but workable, i suppose. The maw does sort of exist in an awkward off-center implied perspective while also flaring outward like a cartoon duck beak or pinched lips in a way no predatory jaw has ever moved, but like im not demanding pure realism and objective sense here. But this is meant to be team chonk. Whose central uniting feature is meant to be Weight, Size, Heft, either literal or metaphorical. It's team heavyweight. Which this fails in every conceivable possible way to actually convey. Theres not even a real attempt to convey weight in this. I think this has to be 0/5 because its just objectively failing to communicate anything of any relevance. Also, why red? Theres already two other red team logos and they cant change but this couldve been anything else to reduce redundancy. Deep blue maybe.

[larrythefloridaman]

feel like doing a design critique of the cpuk team emblems because i have significant beef with most of them on a pure graphic design level and i figured itd be fun, so-

Starting with Team Calibur:

Starting with my favorite- i really think team calibur's emblem works. The crown has interesting shape language, both flowing and pointed in an elegant yet threatening way that sells the combined sense of pride and dominating that's essential to the character of the team- calibur is for people who know (or think) theyre better than you and unafraid to express that. The central diamond-like framing and jewel of the crown visually evokes an eye in communication with the crimson emblem's diamond shaped iris, a visual callback to the team's origin. The indigo and violet color scheme boosts the regal connotations, and its balanced well in the design with most of it being dark but using brighter color as embellishment and to highlight the central point of interest, and its actually the only team logo where i feel the gradient usage in these logos feels effective and doesnt take anything away from the design because it evokes a metallic surface without overdoing it here, although i think it'd serve it to be a subtler transition from light to dark. Solid 4.5/5 this is kind of the only one i have zero real gripes with its all just nitpicks. Its all kind of downhill from here though,

[larrythefloridaman]

Team Cash Money:

What a nothingburger of a design. Like its fine, it evokes the basic principle of what its supposed to but when you're crafting a sports team logo I'd hope for a little more nuance and creative ingenuity than slapping gradients on a cartoon shorthand for the american dollar. Something that becomes apparent with these as you go down the list is the inconsistency in vision- some of these designs are overdesigned and some are underdesigned, like this one. There are so many visual motifs associated with wealth and money accrewal and this is just an icon in a circle, and its simplicity broadens its potential for meaning in a way that technically encapsulates what the team is about but with zero interesting specificity. If i had to keep the dollar sign motif, i would at least make it smaller and turn the background circle into something with a little more visual interest, like the silhouette of a money bag or give it ridges around the edge like a coin. I also think this one suffers from not taking advantage of wealth also being associated with the color gold, because the fully green color palette isnt helping it. But if i got the chance to redesign it entirely, id want to replace this with a stylized paycheck- Team Cash Money is in it for the money, thats the heart of it, which attracts everything from despicable billionaires looking to get even richer to the most downtrod and longsuffering of the work force just trying to make enough to have a life, which i think is better captured in specificity by something that better conveys the act of Payment, and not just currency in the abstract. 2.5/5. Utterly middle of the road, its greatest crime is being boring.

[lilacchao]

jenny chongo's nelson in cpuk ncct 🤝 scout clowndepot's natalie in los santos walkies

there's just something about incorporating the audience into a perspective character in a live work, that the author then interprets and interacts with on the fly to make something coherent

like, there's non-audience-interactive works where audience involvement mostly ranges from none ("you experience it and that's it") to various forms of allowed vandalism and live heckling, and there's full-audience-interactive works where the artist basically leaves the audience to it and only gets involved to avert disaster (like twitch plays pokemon)

and then there's this, fitting into neither category, inviting the chaos and weaving it into something workable, trusting and relying on the audience to engage constructively in return for added involvement and i guess… seeing the sculpture in the stone?

it's such a special kind of performance and i love it

[lilacchao]

further thoughts: it's like approaching theatre as a 1-to-many roleplay using the technology of a group chat

the performer does all the typical managerial role (gamemaster) stuff (setting up and deciding how everything goes, stage setting, npcs, any amount of overarching story), plus all the typical performer stuff (entertaining, any scripts, deciding how to play their roles), while using a variation on the mechanisms of roleplay to give the audience en masse a role in the production

members of that audience can join or leave at any time, can be silent or talkative without issue, there are low stakes for any individual! but the performer is relying on and making space for the audience to be involved - if the audience is quiet, they lean more into a typical performance, if the audience is loud, they do what they can to manage it

i guess it could be called something along the lines of crowd roleplay? and it's very fun to be in the audience for, and very impressive for the performer

both examples im familiar with have a sole performer, 1-to-many and never 2-to-many (even if the 1 wears many hats in the show), if only out of both happening on a whim and getting the audience involved in lieu of having other performers involved - i wonder if it's possible to have multiple non-audience cast members? it's possible the theatre of it would clash with the crowd audience, but maybe it'd work out?

[lilacchao]

oh, and honourable mention to mspa (most famously early homestuck), which derives from a similar process - mspa is to crowd roleplay as comments are to chat (ie, the only real difference is pacing)

[larrythefloridaman]

you ever just think about an interaction from almost a year ago and randomly feel like drawing about it. anyway i wanted to take a crack at some what-if designs because the name ideas were cute.

Arguments for transmasc chartreuse:

- inherent gay transgenderism of leaving a role expected of you because you fell in love with someone who is a part of a group you were taught to distance yourself from all your life to your own painful detriment and destroying that role, that version of yourself entirely in order to become the same thing as them and free yourself, although it still comes with the stress and challenges of the powers that be looking down on you and desiring to force you back into a role that only ever hurt you and made you miserable

Arguments for transfem cobalt:

- i could forgive most of big blue's character flaws if she was a woman

[larrythefloridaman]

FolkRock would be a confusing ship name if cpuk didnt have a present fanbase small enough to fit on a party bus

[larrythefloridaman]

shamrock transitioned from french to irish

[larrythefloridaman]

the thing about cpuk godhood is to me its allegorical. but its allegorical for something that encapsulates a pretty broad range of malleable experiences which means it exists as something that means different things for each of the gods in the show and is thus a bit difficult to pin down if you havent plucked out what said experiences thematically have in common

[larrythefloridaman]

its the experience of being othered by exclusion btw. Whether that be because of trauma, marginalizations, the consequences of ones own choices and personality or some messy cocktail of those (as theyre often connected.) And the different gods (and the wannabe/ascendent/unwilling prospect gods) all have their own unique relationships to that experience. Some self-exclude. Some are rejected. Some are both in different ways. But all of them are othered somehow for reasons unique to them as individuals that are not intrinsically connected but are thematically tied to their relationships to godhood

[larrythefloridaman]

The ciblings were raised as gods excluded from other people by their special status, which shaped their entire lives and personalities in response to that isolation and the dynamics within it- until crimson and chartreuse attempted each to bridge the gap in their own ways and dragged cobalt along with them, their dynamic with eachother and Prism was what shaped their whole lives, their godhood innately connected to their experiences as abused and sheltered from outside perspectives.

Chartreuse escaped it and began to heal through connecting with someone outside of the dynamic so deeply she was able to learn what it felt like to feel normal, effectively symbolized by her becoming mortal, but can still tap into what shes learned from those experiences in the imagination, because those experiences made her the person she is, they are the ancient and grounding foundation beneath her.

Crimson both enjoys the perks and suffers the drawbacks of being Special and Unique and an Outsider™ every day, it gives it a perspective and a positionality it wouldnt trade away for anything because it is useful and fulfilling and it can weather the natural drawbacks like a champ- the problems come with the fact Crimson still suffers when singled out as special in a Bad Way, as anyone might. Uniquely Wrong and Bad and Duplicitous, Heartless and Cruel, troublesome just by existing, they say. But Crimson tries to take those (decidedly unnecessary, extraneous) consequences of others perception in stride too, and fails spectacularly because, naturally, it hurts and is profoundly frustrating and disheartening to be endlessly labeled and percieved that way and to accept that as deserved and innate and involuntary on the part of others is a one-way ticket to self-loathing.

Cobalt, meanwhile, has not meaningfully bridged the gap himself yet, as his own social difficulties as well as his enmeshment in the family's toxic dynamics make it difficult for him to seperate himself from his percieved and actual privileges which alienate him from not only those outside the dynamic in isolation but also both his siblings within it as they develop and change to grow beyond it.

Prism is excluded by the circumstances of her own creation- she was born, made, to do a particular job, one which her whole life and personhood has revolved around, for the powers that be and she never grew beyond it, and through her dedication to her special role she both created and alienated most of the only people who could perhaps truly relate to that, and as her role approaches her conclusion she is stricken with existential dread as she realizes its all amounted to so little, because in her special isolation she never grew to value a relationship with anything that wasnt special. A party of one, alone at the end of the world, grasping at connections with people who rightfully turn her away, as they've suffered her or been close with someone thats suffered her.

[larrythefloridaman]

the thing about cpuk godhood is to me its allegorical. but its allegorical for something that encapsulates a pretty broad range of malleable experiences which means it exists as something that means different things for each of the gods in the show and is thus a bit difficult to pin down if you havent plucked out what said experiences thematically have in common

[larrythefloridaman]

its the experience of being othered by exclusion btw. Whether that be because of trauma, marginalizations, the consequences of ones own choices and personality or some messy cocktail of those (as theyre often connected.) And the different gods (and the wannabe/ascendent/unwilling prospect gods) all have their own unique relationships to that experience. Some self-exclude. Some are rejected. Some are both in different ways. But all of them are othered somehow for reasons unique to them as individuals that are not intrinsically connected but are thematically tied to their relationships to godhood

[larrythefloridaman]

The ciblings were raised as gods excluded from other people by their special status, which shaped their entire lives and personalities in response to that isolation and the dynamics within it- until crimson and chartreuse attempted each to bridge the gap in their own ways and dragged cobalt along with them, their dynamic with eachother and Prism was what shaped their whole lives, their godhood innately connected to their experiences as abused and sheltered from outside perspectives.

Chartreuse escaped it and began to heal through connecting with someone outside of the dynamic so deeply she was able to learn what it felt like to feel normal, effectively symbolized by her becoming mortal, but can still tap into what shes learned from those experiences in the imagination, because those experiences made her the person she is, they are the ancient and grounding foundation beneath her.

Crimson both enjoys the perks and suffers the drawbacks of being Special and Unique and an Outsider™ every day, it gives it a perspective and a positionality it wouldnt trade away for anything because it is useful and fulfilling and it can weather the natural drawbacks like a champ- the problems come with the fact Crimson still suffers when singled out as special in a Bad Way, as anyone might. Uniquely Wrong and Bad and Duplicitous, Heartless and Cruel, troublesome just by existing, they say. But Crimson tries to take those (decidedly unnecessary, extraneous) consequences of others perception in stride too, and fails spectacularly because, naturally, it hurts and is profoundly frustrating and disheartening to be endlessly labeled and percieved that way and to accept that as deserved and innate and involuntary on the part of others is a one-way ticket to self-loathing.

Cobalt, meanwhile, has not meaningfully bridged the gap himself yet, as his own social difficulties as well as his enmeshment in the family's toxic dynamics make it difficult for him to seperate himself from his percieved and actual privileges which alienate him from not only those outside the dynamic in isolation but also both his siblings within it as they develop and change to grow beyond it.

Prism is excluded by the circumstances of her own creation- she was born, made, to do a particular job, one which her whole life and personhood has revolved around, for the powers that be and she never grew beyond it, and through her dedication to her special role she both created and alienated most of the only people who could perhaps truly relate to that, and as her role approaches her conclusion she is stricken with existential dread as she realizes its all amounted to so little, because in her special isolation she never grew to value a relationship with anything that wasnt special. A party of one, alone at the end of the world, grasping at connections with people who rightfully turn her away, as they've suffered her or been close with someone thats suffered her.

[amphibifish]

never do any sort of collaborative storytelling with your friends youll get addicted for life

[larrythefloridaman]

Been trying to make some Weird Funky God Designs for fun, ones that actually Feel more alien and inhuman, rather than my usual take on them which are sort of People+ shell over Raw Form core. This heres an old one for the Big S themselves because i just realized I never posted it outside the discord

[larrythefloridaman]

Thinking about spectrum again recently and finding their nature very difficult to discuss so heres a funny collage

[metal-autistic-coven]

it is always morally correct to put the character in the evil torture science lab. btw

[redstonedust]

i am a slut for "thing that was a silly joke in the beginning of the story is later recontextualized as actually kind of fucked up" . especially when its a longrunning series and you can tell its a product of the author re-assessing the writing of their younger self. chefs kiss.

[larrythefloridaman]

Y'ever think about how peppermint has multiple character arcs in the nccts and none of them at any point explicitly resolve in her learning that respecting boundaries is important. She's been expertly dodging that lesson specifically for multiple novels worth of text. She saw time inside out and backwards unlocking a profound new perspective on all of reality and is still parasocially obsessed with someone she cornered in a bathroom stall for several hours who only escaped after she'd fallen asleep on the tile floor. I dont even go there but this feels like a series of sentences that should only be said about like, a jojos bizarre adventure character or something

[larrythefloridaman]

also in the nccts theres a reference or two to other ships shes abnormal about besides her rpf selfship and some of them are. unfortunate. like morally. 'As a kid someone should have taught you better, as an adult you should know better' type shit. And yet, according to the streams, what she draws the line at and dislikes is selfcest, and the nccts make it clear she thinks interest in furries is weird. (or at least does if she already hates you and is looking for shit to burn you over.) of all things. Baffling woman. 2000s insular deviantart fujoshi type artistic and ethical priorities. i know this girl used or maybe even still uses the term 'mary-sue' unironically

[taffyglitch-art]

thinking about j0hn and transgenderism. did some silly sketches about it. also just a normal pre-dorder j0hn cuz i think he's fun to draw <3