Mom, techie, and Sims fanatic. I post stories from my game and write Pets mods. I only play Sims 3, but I'll follow a story/gameplay blog for any game! More recently, I talk about Minecraft YouTube, a fandom I am legally too old to be hanging out in. Blame my teenager.
So, yeah, I think I am legally too old to be a part of Minecraft YouTube fandom, but they're stuck with me. Blame my kid.
I will never get over Vampires SMP.
I'm interested in film editing, and I edited VSMP into a TV show format as a way to play around with building a narrative through editing. You can find it here: Vampires SMP TV Series.
I have a tag #literary analysis of minecraft storytelling where I write walls'o'text analyzing MCYT creators and their block people. Usually it's VSMP, but I expect that will expand with other POW Creations YouTube exclusive stories. I don't have the resources to follow streamed stories. My kid watches and writes me up Cliff's Notes on those.
I also have an AO3 account, where I am writing a series of novels called The Monster and the Lunatic (series == 1 complete and 1 in progress right now) about Vampires Avid and Scott Goldsmith both being really messed up but somehow helping each other anyway with assistance from Shelby and Drift.
I chatter about writing it on the tag #the monster and the lunatic.
For anyone NOT in the VSMP fandom who might want to peek at it, I wrote an overview of the premise as it relates to TMatL. The sequel, The Monster and the Demon, probably stands on its own, with most relevant backstory included.
Previous to me falling into the MCYT hole, this tumblr was devoted to The Sims 3. I write mods, which you can find at ModTheSims. There are also several Sims stories, all of which are currently on hold but I hope to return to.
I know somebody did a couple of Vampires SMP characters in Heroforge and posted pics, but I went bonkers and did everyone from My AU.
I didn't do Owen because he keeps his canon death and is mostly not present for TMatL.
I really like how they came out! You can do amazing facial expressions in Heroforge, but the hairstyles were a real challenge. Most Heroforge hairs look great on actual RPG minis and don't suit these characters at all. Also, shoes that are not part of armor and/or don't require tucking pants. Argh.
Anyway....
The Goldsmith
(Yes, the wine glass holds an ambiguous red liquid -- knowing Scott, it's probably wine AND blood.)
Shelby
(Heroforge hands are huge, and it really shows in Shelby's pose.... I know the correct way to fix this is to make the whole mini huge so they'll be proportional, but I'm resistant.)
Pyro
(My scared boy with the scary face. Not part of the TMatL Goldsmith Coven, but he's out there in the world, not looking like this anymore.)
Drift
(Heroforge has a monacle, but it's not customizable and looked awful on this face -- anyway, she doesn't need it at Tier 3.)
Avid
They're even scaled to my headcanon heights. It would cost a small fortune to have them printed in color, but I I'm considering it anyway. I'm sure I couldn't paint them this nice.
I'd do them with the 1920s looks they have in my fic, but Heroforge clothing options are difficult enough.
My kid actually started that fic. Pyro, being a good scholar from the turn of the last century, has some ancient languages under his belt. Scott turns him first to have him as a translator, and also to jumpstart his own understanding of modern English with a dip into Pyro's mind.
Huh! No, actually. Hers is mostly not on AO3. Just looked that fic up, and it looks interesting! I guess it's not surprising that someone else jumped on this premise. Scott Goldsmith was a compelling character, but VSMP was both Trauma Bonding SMP and Absurd Anacronism SMP 😁😁.
For one thing, my kid's fic leans into Scotland. Goldsmith's native language is Gaelic, and he's fluent in Middle English, which would be appropriate for a Scottish noble of the 1300s. I believe he and Pyro have Middle English in common. Eastern Europe is a better setting for a vampire story, but Smajor fans have a hard time leaving the Scottish accent behind. 😉 I did the same thing in my AU -- placed Oakhurst close to the border of England and Scotland.
My kid actually started that fic. Pyro, being a good scholar from the turn of the last century, has some ancient languages under his belt. Scott turns him first to have him as a translator, and also to jumpstart his own understanding of modern English with a dip into Pyro's mind.
This is just unspeakably gorgeous. I feel like all the characters were just nailed. Avid looking into the mirror and seeing a flash of his vampire self, Scott rising terrifying from the fire, all the framing around Sausage and his stories.
tbh im not entirely immune to a villain with a tragic backstory but i do think villain origins are a lot more interesting when the focus is less "here is the original sin, the first big bad thing that happened to them that made them who they are" and more "here is the first time a person who maybe otherwise felt powerless in their life realized that they could hurt someone and get away with it"
you can get a lot more mileage out of analyzing a truly abhorrent character through the lens of like. what sort of conditions would allow or even incentivize this kind of cruelty? what kind of person benefits from those conditions and how? over the more typical who hurt them type analysis. imo.
Some villains ought to be analyzed in a way that humanizes them. Others, and I'm looking at you Mr. Goldsmith, ought to be analyzed in ways that focus on them being both inhuman AND internally consistent.
I don't think circumstances alone can build certain kinds of villainy. They have to be accompanied by some kind of psychological flaw in addition to circumstance.
I also think that, when folks are looking specifically at Scott Goldsmith's reform arc, they tend to conflate two things:
Having been hurt by caring in the past, and thus needing to build the courage to care again.
Having never cared about anyone and not even viewing it as something desirable.
Learning to care is fundamentally different from learning to care AGAIN.
I'm enjoying watching all the Paralives stuff on my feed. I signed up for their Patreon before I burned out on simming. I haven't actually purchased the game yet. I'm iffy on early access in general, though I know a lot of idie games use this as a placeholder for games with ongoing content releases.
Like, for example, Vintage Story. Afaict, VS has been effectively in full release for some time. The content it has is production-ready, accounting for the expected amount of bugs from every content release. It's just committed to a long schedule of additional content releases, just like Minecraft but with way more long-term planning. I don't know why it feels it needs to still label itself as early access. Seems like Paralives is in the same paradigm. I don't know when, or if, Paralives will take itself out of early access.
In contrast, Subnautica 2 has a deep mystery plot that I wouldn't want to spoil or screw up when the game is buggy or incomplete. Mentioning that one because my kid and I loved Subnautica, and my kid would like to buy Subnautica 2 in early access, but I'm not sure how that'll work for the experience.
This is just me blathering, I guess. I don't know what my point is.
I'll say that, in contrast to almost every person I've seen remark on the art style, I LOVE the Paralives art style. I like it much better than InZoi. Photorealism is just a big uncanny valley to jump into IMHO. Something a bit more cartoony/line art gives way more personality to the visuals.
I'm still burned out on simming. I'll come back to it eventually. I want to try out Paralives. If I like it, I don't know how that will jive with Sims 3. It's hard to imagine ever giving up Sims 3. It has SO MUCH content, and I have it modded to my little heart's content. I can build diverse challenges with different mod sets. I'm not sure I'd ever move on except that the damn thing is 32-bit. I wish it could have hung on just long enough to get a 64-bit upgrade, and then I think I'd never be tempted to leave it.
So, my kid and I burned my wife out on Vampires SMP. I'm never going to get over it, and I'm grouchy that it was such a flash in the pan. I mean, TV fandoms I've been involved in ran for multiple seasons. This ran for less than three months. In my TV show edit, it built out into a 22-episode season, but of course those threads all aired simultaneously in a deluge.
I took a stab at asking my wife if she'd be interested in reading my fic anyway, and she refused. She's too concerned that she won't like it and won't be able to say anything nice. That makes me kind of sad. I mean, I've always wanted to read stuff she writes. But I also have spent a lot of time in artistic groups, and I think I'm decent at engaging with other people's art without expecting it to be perfect. In her defense, she has trauma related to disappointing loved ones because she didn't feel the thing they were strongly expecting her to feel.
But, objectively, she'd probably hate it. She hated my antihero when he was on the screen. He's mine now in my stories, but my Scott Goldsmith is still figuring out how to reform and is overall still an asshole.
She asked me something that I've been chewing on since, though, and maybe there's no good answer -- why am I drawn to this kind of scenario? What is it about a monster who chooses to not be a monster that is so intriguing to me?
This has fascinated me for a long time. I mentioned rahirah's Barbverse Buffy the Vampire Slayer AU for doing a deep dive into this idea, and I like that series better than I ended up liking the show. For those familiar with BtVS, Barb's AU branches at the end of Season 5 when Buffy dies. The gang resurrects her by a different method than in canon, one that destroys Spike's soul -- he can now never reclaim it, will never be able to form a conscience, and is forever a monster. The two then still fall in love, and he agrees to behave in a way she can accept in exchange for a life together. She knows this is the most he can offer -- she will forever be his Jiminy Cricket, and if he steps out of line, she will have to kill him. And then we follow what that looks like as they marry, have children, welcome eventual grandchildren, and save the world on alternate Thursdays because the world always needs saving.
Amos Burton from The Expanse is another character like this. He comes from a catastrophically abusive childhood in organized crime and also can't independently form a conscience. More than Spike or Scott, though, he fundamentally doesn't WANT to be a monster. He attaches himself to people who can make moral decisions he's incapable of making.
So what about Scott? A lot of fans really want to give him a tragic backstory, and his canon lore emerged somewhat later than some other characters (looking at you Owengejuice). Smajor intended to reprise a caricatured villain from Afterlife SMP and then had to retool the character when VSMP went a different direction. But the lore he communicated, in story and out, is that Scott Goldsmith is a self-made monster. He's a direct contrast to v!Owen's villainy, which stems from intense personal pain. Goldsmith as a human was a rich entitled asshole who learned about vampirism and paid a vampire to turn him because he wanted the power. Over time, he became extremely powerful, and he used that power to enslave a town and use it for his own comfort and hedonism. One thing that I think most folks get wrong is that he doesn't gain any particular pleasure from the pain of others. He's an exploiter, not a sadist. If he can use his charisma to persuade others that they WANT to give him what he wants, he's perfectly happy with that. The goal is what matters, and the goal is always about him.
He looks to me basically like a psychopath in the clinical sense, or at least generally Antisocial Personality Disorder. A few jobs ago, I spent five years working in software support for neuroscience research that focused on schizophrenia and psychopathy. I dunno if this has anything to do with why I find this scenario so intriguing. I actually haven't read the papers published from the research, though I'm very familiar with how the data was gathered and analyzed, and I attended talks about some of the results. Psychopaths don't have to be violent, though obviously Scott was. They're massively empathy-impaired. They can't form what we'd call a conscience, and they mostly engage with the emotions of others to manipulate them.
Psychopathy is a severe form of antisocial personality disorder characterized by a lack of empathy and remorse, self-aggrandizement, a manipulative interpersonal style and poor behavioral controls -- Professional quote I looked up, Hare, 2003.
The layman's non-technical term that I think has the right feel is sociopath.
[I also dated a sociopath for about 4 years and spent at least 10 more recovering. Thing is, this seems like it would push me AWAY from this scenario. I'll be honest -- there is absolutely no part of me who imagines redemption for that guy. I want him as far away from me as possible forever, and I wish I could keep him far away from everyone else. But that's oversharing.]
So -- Scott Goldsmith was a sociopath who was born into enormous wealth and immunity from consequences. This, folks, is how you make real monsters. You see them peppered all over the royal families of every monarchy in history. Our monster just happens to have fangs.
But I'm also resistant to the idea that someone is irredeemable because they were born that way. Most people have a choice. And there ARE treatment plans for psychopaths that show promise, though those are concurrent with incarceration. It appears that, given a sufficiently motivated patient, many destructive behaviors and ways of thinking can be adjusted.
In stories, characters as dark as Goldsmith only get one redemptive out, and that's death. You take yourself out in one self-destructive, altruistic act, and then you can be mourned. Tying back to VSMP, this is essentially what Doctor Legundo was seeking and eventually found. Of course, his sins were so long ago, and he'd been torturing himself in the intervening time with excruciating remorse. The only person who couldn't forgive him was himself.
The high concept I give my Goldsmith stories is, "What if Darth Vader didn't die?" Luke Skywalker believed, against all evidence to the contrary, that there was a real man inside a terrifying villain with an even more terrifying kill count. (Srsly, I watched Star Wars with my kid when she was five. Most of us are too familiar with this villain to remember just how f'ing scary he is.) Vader discovered that he loved that son just in time to save said son's life, and he did so with an iconic redemptive death. Luke drags him, mortally injured, to the escape shuttle. "I'm going to save you," Luke swears. "You were right," Vader says as he dies, and Luke cries. We can feel sad for his loss. But what if Luke HAD saved him? THAT would have been a very, very messy story, and not one Star Wars was prepared to tell.
So, like Spike and Amos Burton, Scott now cares for a select group of people. He's also a survivor, he's incapable of truly feeling remorse for what he's done, and he goes on living. What does THAT look like?
The Monster and the Lunatic is more a story about how Goldsmith gets into a state where he wants to reform. In The Monster and the Demon, I treat him a bit like a recovering addict. He backslides and loses his way, and he finds uncomfortable loopholes in what he has agreed to do. He's enormously threatened by anyone else who might hold emotional sway over his three people, and that is dangerous. The people he cares for have to help him remember why he's doing this. It's ultimately a story of love winning, but it's legit to question whether love SHOULD win and even why love exists here in the first place.
Tagging @nocturnalazure, should you choose to accept it.
Also, ARGH, don't make me choose tropes! I'm always griping about tropes! 🤣
Is this stuff we like to read or like to write? Haha.
Slow burn or love at first sight?
Slow burn. I started to put a bunch of caveats on it because slow burn stories tend to end when the characters get together, and I do want to see them together for a while! But I like characters getting to know each other and falling as they learn more about each other.
But hey, what about one of each? Characters out-of-sync. I guess that's what I'm currently writing.
Fake dating or secret dating?
Secret dating. That implies some external force that the characters have to work against in order to be together. I could do fake dating, though, if it's a good justification.
Enemies to lovers or best friends to lovers?
Either, so long as it's a good slow burn 😉
Hurt/comfort or amnesia?
Hurt/comfort. Definitely. I like me some good hurt/comfort.
Generally don't like amnesia. Feels too contrived.
Fantasy AU or modern AU?
Either or both together! I'm open to lots of settings for a good story, but I gravitate toward stuff with a supernatural element. I guess I'm currently writing pseudo-historical urban fantasy?
Mutual pining or domestic bliss?
Mutual pining, but both have their place.
Smut or fluff?
Fluff? Urgh. Can I say both again?
I like some good smut. I have attempted to write some, but I've never made it available to read. It's hard to write well. But also... my current characters have an arc related to their sex lives, and I'm finding that the detail gets in the way. I ended up settling on fade-to-fireplace, dialogue-only sex. Erotica tends to take center stage, and even when it's directly related to character development, its presence tends to smother everything else.
I also like characters to have a chance to just be happy together for a while.
Reincarnation or character death?
Not wild about either. In theory, I'd say character death. But the truth is that I'm more interested in stories right now where the characters DON'T die and have to figure our their messy selves.
@nocturnalazure and I were chatting recently about how to do good character death. I like stories to have risk to them -- i.e. a character COULD die. But I'm kind of allergic to a lot of ways character death is used as a plot device. I can identify stories where I think it is done well.
OTOH, reincarnation usually annoys me.
One-shot or multi-chapter?
Multi-chapter! I search on AO3 with a minimum word count of 20k. If I'm going to get invested in a story, I want it to hang around for a while.
I also write long-form.
Kid fic or road trip fic?
Kid fic? I don't read or write either. 😅
Arranged marriage or accidental marriage?
Like @treason-and-plot, I had to Google the accidental marriage trope. For stories with no supernatural elements, I'd say arranged marriage because the accidental marriage justifications are bonkers.
When you add supernatural stuff, then accidental gets more interesting. Google says that soulmate bonding, where two people meet and are instantly bonded for some supernatural reason neither one understands, is considered a variant of accidental marriage. That can be fun.
So maybe accidental marriage, but only in supernatural stories?
High school romance or middle-age romance?
I actually dig middle-aged romance, though I almost never see it. I am really into the idea that people's lives don't end when they turn 20. A middle aged protagonist attracts my attention.
Time travel or isolated together?
Time travel usually annoys me. It's hard to do well, and it's done SO MUCH at least in fanfic. So isolated together.
Neighbours or roommates?
These don't feel all that different to me.
Sci-fi AU or magic AU?
Both!
Body swap or genderbent?
Neither.
Angst or crack?
Angst. But crack can be a lot of fun. So both.
Apocalyptic or mundane?
Either or both? So long as apocalyptic has exactly ZERO ZOMBIES.
Ok, so this sort of *is* the question of Autopilot AU to me, and I think it deserves its own post. Thanks to @blockcat-safari for the tags, and @vampostingtime for the inspiration.
How do you crack Owen’s blind faith in Louis?
Some ideas:
1. Louis doesn’t just harm the humans (which Owen is more capable of dismissing). He somehow causes harm to vampires. Vampires that Owen cares about. Vampires like Shelby, perhaps.
2. Louis agrees with people that Owen dislikes. He gets along famously with Scott, and the two bond over stories that sound… well. Not like something Owen would have expected from *Louis*, that’s all. Louis also finds Avid amusing and coddles him like a favorite nephew. Perhaps he even “adopts” Avid (thus hurting Shelby).
3. Louis uses his powers of mental manipulation on *Owen*, to get him to “play nice” with Louis’ other toys. Only this time, Owen is a vampire— the effects are more obvious to him because he has a stronger internal sense of self. (Why the *hell* is he friends with *Avid* now?) Perhaps Louis even casually admits to adding just a *teeny* bit of pressure to Owen’s decision to become a vampire in the first place. It’s fine though! Louis only did that because he loves Owen so much! Right? (Right?)
4. The Doc himself. If Legs cracks first — if he wants *out* — who is with Louis 24/7 and able to witness all of the little resulting “fits”?
Like the time that Owen finds Legs Louis with tears streaming down his face and no idea that it’s happening?
Or the time that he watches Louis writing notes, only to spasm and then violently rip a page from his journal and toss it over his shoulder? (Owen retrieves the crumpled ball later, when Louis has gone. It reads: “HELP”).
Or the time when Legs Louis turns to him, looks him dead in the eyes and says, in the Doctor’s voice: “Owen, please.” (Louis is quick to laugh it off. To assure Owen that Legs is happy. But those two words haunt Owen’s quiet moments afterwards.)
……..
I think that Owen’s faith in Louis can erode — can crack — if Louis keeps failing to live up to that perfect shining paragon of goodness that he’s supposed to be. It can be subtle. It can even be explained away many, many times. But like a bit of sand stuck between the teeth, it will *bother* Owen.
Couple that with giving Owen one or two other people he cares about now (remember: Louis used to be the *only* person Owen had!), and make those people leery of Louis (or harmed by him). Shelby. Abolish? Idk.
The point is, this can absolutely be done!
(In maybe 20k words? xD)
But those are just my ideas. How would you guys do it?
I actually think it would be incredibly easy for Owen's blind faith in Louis to break. What Owen has in his memory is not a person. It's a saint, to overuse the word. They had some unknown amount of time together before Owen turned, but there was a huge power differential -- both in Louis's position with the town and, more importantly, Owen's position as an outcast due to his illness. Owen never saw through his astonishment and gratitude that this one person could care for him to actually see a persona underneath.
Put the two of them together as equals, and Louis is not going to be able to live up to Owen's belief in him. The dissonance would start small, but it would build.
Setting aside Autopilot AU and even Legs, Owen would have to change and adjust to a real Louis. If he's reunited with Louis after becoming the man we met in VSMP, that's going to be a huge lift. Could Owen end up feeling that even Louis was a betrayal? I think that's highly likely. Even deeper under his idealization of Louis was his intense hatred of himself. If Louis didn't turn out to be who Owen wanted him to be, that's just the biggest proof in what Owen knew all along -- he cannot be loved.
This is a 22-episode TV series built from the 14 points of view of Vampires SMP. The first episode "premier" is 1.5 hours long, and the others are an hour. I've been working on this since shortly after the SMP concluded as a way to explore building narrative through video editing.
I have finally made episodes 1-4 public. Since YouTube doesn't allow me to make edits to a video after releasing it, I've struggled to figure out when they're "done" enough to make public. I'm probably going to keep coming back to this stuff and massaging it for myself for years as I have new ideas and build more skills.
The rough cuts are complete for the whole thing, however. I'll release the rest as I'm ready to let them be set in stone.
Episodes from the original are broken out in to increasingly more TV episodes as time goes on and the action gets more dense. Starting with episode 4, each episode from the original is takes two passes through the timeline in this series: once for the town and once for the castle. This is to keep the sense of the two groups being separate communities that each develop their own sense of what is happening. Still, watch them in the order I numbered. The non-linear storytelling tricks are designed for that view order.
Thanks so much to @pufferishofpeace15 and @cinturon-cadena for beta-watching some of the episodes and providing valuable feedback. If they or anyone else is interested in doing this for unreleased videos, I do have Episodes 5-6 on an unpublished playlist and could provide links. I'm currently doing a second pass on Episode 7 (OMG this was such a challenge).
It’s almost like when you lose someone so dear to you, the grief doesn’t just disappear with time. If it’s left to sit untouched, unspoken, unhealed, it starts changing shape inside you. The memories that once felt warm and comforting begin to ache instead. Little things that used to make you smile suddenly feel sharp enough to wound. Their laugh becomes a reminder of silence. Their favorite places feel emptier than before.
Normally, grief changes with time. The pain never fully disappears, but eventually the memories stop cutting quite so deep. They become softer around the edges, reminders of love instead of reminders of loss.
But Owen never got to have that kind of grief. Because the last time he ever saw Louis, after Owen was turned, was: firelight, smoke, agony, Louis being taken from him.
Maybe there was never a clean separation between Louis the person and Louis’s death. The two fused together into something inseparable.
So after two hundred years, Owen can still remember Louis’s smile, his voice, the way he laughed, but all of it is stained by the pyre. Every memory eventually loops back to that ending. Like his mind refuses to let Louis exist without also remembering how horribly he died. And because Owen never let himself process that grief, it didn’t heal. It fermented.
The sadness turned bitter. Then possessive. Then cruel to himself.
And that’s why Legundo is such a contradiction for him. Because being around the doctor makes Owen feel something dangerously close to happiness again. Comfort. Warmth. Want.
Even if part of it comes from how painfully Legundo reminds him of Louis, it’s still real. And Owen hates himself for it.
Every soft moment feels like betrayal. Every laugh catches in his throat afterward. Because how dare he feel happy when Louis died screaming? How dare he reach for someone else after spending centuries convincing himself that his suffering was the only thing he had left of him?
At some point, Louis stopped being just a memory and became something woven directly into Owen’s guilt. A ghost haunting every good thing before Owen can fully enjoy it. Almost like Louis is poisoning his happiness from the inside out, not intentionally, not cruelly, but simply because Owen never allowed himself to remember Louis with love instead of pain.
Yessss. Also, side stepping onto the topic of grief - Owen cycles visibly through the stages of grief. The first confirmed one we see is anger - the massacre of Oakhurst - and then depression - his 200 years buried.
And then we see bargaining - this doctor could be another Louis, perhaps Louis didn't have to be gone - which swings back hard into anger when it becomes clear that Legs is his own person, with his own faults, his own sins (because Louis could never be anything less than perfect) - doubled up with denial - Owen was wrong to ever compare them, they had nothing in common...
There are probably other moments that fit into other stages, but Owen is constantly stuck in his grief. The five stages are not a requirement - often, we will jump between stages, repeat stages, do them 'out of order' - but Owen isn't really interested in moving out of grief, because giving up the grief would be leaving Louis behind - would be forgetting him.
And, as you said above: How dare he feel happy when Louis died screaming?
And that’s why Legundo is such a contradiction for him. Because being around the doctor makes Owen feel something dangerously close to happiness again. Comfort. Warmth. Want.
Even if part of it comes from how painfully Legundo reminds him of Louis, it’s still real. And Owen hates himself for it.
This is how I see all of Owen's relationships in VSMP -- not just Bloodletting but the entire core coven.
Owen saw himself as someone who could only be loved by Louis. He was reviled as an outcast, and then he became a literal monster (defined either by vampirism or by behavior, you pick). He was unlovable, and Louis loved him. But that means that any time he felt someone care about him, heaven forbid he actually be comforted or feel included, Louis was threatened. And Louis in very real ways has never died for Owen.
Owen could only entertain the thought of caring for and being cared for by Doc when he saw Doc as becoming an extension of Louis.
But also, Owen's whole arc about vampirism and the coven in Ep 5 really grips me. All through Ep 4, he's felt pulled into a community. He calls it out specifically at the beginning of the episode to Shelby and Pyro. At the beginning of Ep 5, when he sees Avid's most recent peace offering in the chest marked, "Shelby Come Home," he sabotages it and says that he doesn't want to lose this new family he's found. Then ALL THROUGH THE EPISODE he moves the goalposts. He keeps positioning himself as an aggressor to get the worst possible reactions from other vampires, then feeling progressively betrayed until he snaps and decides they are also his enemies. It was so methodical.
Being loved was wrapped up so much in his loss. It was an insult to Louis. It was dissonant to the very way he defined himself. He had to destroy it.
I doubt I could take on writing an Owen fic, but I badly want to explore that theme in him.
Woo. I learned today that my job will likely end in September.
I've spent the last 8 years working on a small team that builds and supports free educational software. The environment that funds us has essentially collapsed, but I was unprepared for just how fast that would take us down. We're not completely dead, and we have a lot of dedicated people working very hard to throw us a lifeline. But as of now payroll ends in September for the entire development team.
The tech job market is the worst it has ever been since there was a tech job market, or at least it is in the US. Relatedly, we're going down in fascist flames with a leader who is explicitly trying to destroy the educational institutions that were funding my team.
(And to the French simmer who I unfollowed over a big rant about how Americans can't keep their problems in their own country, a great big flashing FUCK YOU.)
Oh yeah, and large language models + vibe coding is in the middle of destroying everything.
Tech has never been kind to people over 40, and it's become increasingly hostile to women over the course of my storied career. As a woman over 40 in the worst tech job market ever, my prospects aren't exactly rosy.
I'm actually okay with trying to retool and make some kind of career change. I don't love programming any less, and I genuinely do love it. It's just that it's not the only thing I could imagine doing and enjoying.
I've become a passionate amateur in film editing. In fact, the "film editing project" I comment about on Vampires SMP threads is rebuilding the 14 POVs of VSMP into a 22-episode TV series format. I did it largely to play with film editing, but most of it is actually up on an unlisted YouTube playlist. I never actually made it public because I was paranoid about the fact that I can't really fix anything and upload it without deleting and replacing the video. It's a labor of love, which means I keep wanting to tinker it, and it feels like making the playlist public sets the whole thing in stone.
Anyone want to hire a professional video game modder? Haha. I have extensive experience in Sims 3 and little bit in Minecraft and Vintage Story 🤔.
There's actually money in editing Minecraft videos. I've looked into how that marketplace works. I would friggin' LOVE to convince creators in roleplay SMPs that it would be worthwhile to go in together in a TV-style edit of some of their scenes. I suppose my unreleased VSMP stuff would serve as a proof-of-concept as well as a portfolio of sorts. But I really suck at marketing myself.
I don't know. I'm mostly just journaling this out here because it's the place I can write something to collect my thoughts.
I have an employed wife. We're looking at our finances, but I think we're going to be okay with me taking some time to figure my shit out if my job does in fact end in September.
I kind of want to just start doing that now. The bomb has dropped, but it's wrapped in just a bit of uncertainty, and so long as there's a chance to save this precious project, I should be working my butt off for the summer. It's hard to hold both of these things at the same time.
