musculo vivicare

socks, he/him. librarian & biologist. fandom blog. AO3 | art tag | TW2 transcript project

[war-crime-wizard]

my blog is a safe space for me. the rest of you are in danger i think

[laurelnose]

Corpora Allata (45k, machineries of empire)

Chose Not to Use Archive Warnings, Nirai Kujen & Shuos Jedao, Pre-Canon, Age Regression/De-Aging, Implied/Referenced Child Sexual Abuse, Past Slavery, Food Insecurity, Dissociation, Trauma, Warning: Kujen’s Backstory, Angst, Hurt/Kind of Comfort, Complicated Relationships, Moral Dilemmas, Parental Shuos Jedao, Torture, Public Execution, Canon-Compliant Ending

A calendrical experiment goes wrong, and thirteen-year-old Hajoret Kujen wakes up in heptarchate space with no memory of the past five centuries. Jedao expected a monster in miniature. The reality might be worse.

[laurelnose]

dark yoon ha lee give me the forbidden hajoret family backstory

[laurelnose]

my original tags:

#the thing is before he was admitted to Nirai Academy Prime he was living in a Vidona orphanage #so this had to have happened BEFORE the heptarchate annexed Erchanno #and frankly i don’t have textual support for this but i get the vibe that he was already on his own when Halash picked him up #which means he was LITTLE when they died! #what the hell does ‘responsible’ mean for a fucking. ELEVEN year old? YOUNGER?? what HAPPENED!?

@invariant-ice:

#re op's tags #also what does 'responsible' mean to an adult with a surgically removed conscience?? #safe to assume he doesn't have survivor's guilt or anything and he still considers himself responsible?? #sidenote does the vidona orphanage come from the ttrpg? #hexarchate stories timeline has him becoming halash's concubine at twelve and entering the nirai academy at fourteen #and i think in revenant gun he says he was fourteen when the kel came knocking

He must have done something that was both purposeful & directly causal to their deaths, if not straightforwardly murder, because YEAH. I feel like mutilating his own conscience might not have necessarily changed how he thinks about things that happened prior: like, I don’t think that post-surgery he wrangled himself around to thinking things he considered himself responsible for beforehand weren’t actually his fault, I think he just didn’t feel bad about any of them anymore. But if it was an accident he most likely would have updated his perception of responsibility as an adult freed of guilt. but then like, what did he do???? and why??

the orphanage thing is actually from his journals. Revenant Gun, ch. 6:

One of my classmates asked me why I don’t just call the Vidona, the hexarch said. As if I don’t remember what life was like in a Vidona orphanage. I’m not sure the girl would thank me.

This is also the chapter that we get the only other piece of information we know about his sister, which is that she was about 5-7yo when she died:

Spotted her again, the hexarch said in what looked like quickly dashed-off handwriting. And, in the margin of the next page: My sister was about her age when she died. [...] Six years old and she already knows.

(btw, this means either he and his sister had a somewhat significant age gap or he was VERY small when it happened. TOO SMALL)

He does not actually give a specific age for how old he was during the Erchanno annexation, just that he was admitted to academy at fourteen. I think he probably tested out of the orphanage and into the academy dorms within a few months. Long enough to have been miserable, short enough that it wasn’t a huge part of his childhood / he doesn’t feel he was failed bureaucratically (cf. RG chapter 23, “The Kel were good about getting us into orphanages and arranging for our educations. I tested into Nirai Academy very young.”). This could put the date of annexation either early in his fourteenth year or late in his thirteenth.

[invariant-ice]

YEAH literally what did he do and for what

one of the things that makes him interesting as a character is the abrupt shift in,, what shall we call it, his psychology? mentality? as an adult and a revenant his motivations usually boil down to ‘this is what I want and this is the most efficient/amusing way to get it’ but as a child?? ???

Halash is described as a warlord, a violent title. I can’t help but wonder if he was involved in some way

[laurelnose]

he seems like he was a very normal and sweet/altruistic kid aside from the trauma!! and then he made himself into THAT. men will literally do brain surgery on themselves rather than go to therapy.

the (horrible) possibilities I’ve managed to come up with, vaguely in order from most to least plausible: (CW: CSA, Kujen’s backstory)

Forced to kill them by someone else. I doubt Halash specifically (beginning the relationship like this seems like it would be difficult to offset with a fridge) but possibly an act of random sadism from a soldier or other person associated with the regime. I am a bit partial to this but I fear I may just have Exordia on the brain.

After becoming a concubine he leveraged this position to get his family also taken in as slaves in Halash’s court in an attempt to provide them what he thought might be more security than the streets, & they were killed purposefully or by neglect by the people who they were given to.

Mercy kill situation. (Seems very unlikely for Kujen to decide any given scenario is Worse Than Death. Maybe possible if either of them were already dying, tho’ that makes the “responsible” part dubious.)

His sister’s death was accidental but his fault and his mother turned on him, requiring he defend himself. Kind of a reach, esp considering his age, but not impossible? He was already engaged in survival sex work before he met Halash, so either he started doing that after his family’s death or his mother was not capable of protecting or providing for him, and if the latter, possibly she was unstable in other ways??

[laurelnose]

alternate possibility: no reasonable person would have considered him responsible for their deaths at all, it’s just that Kujen conceptualizes powerlessness as a personal failing

[laurelnose]

months are an eye-patchwork of floaters and blind spots indeed. it’s sort of amazing how much of a blur everything since ... uhh ... thanksgiving? before thanksgiving? has been. just drifting between ‘completely black-out nonfunctional’ and ‘just barely alive enough to scrape together necessary life tasks.’ tell me something nice that happened to you this winter, i can’t remember fucking anything that happened to me

[laurelnose]

Sylvia Legris, Truncated: somewhere in the other room [excerpt]

[laurelnose]

the thing is. okay so technically standard time IS metric time because the second is an SI unit. a base 60 clock is metric time if you’re using metric seconds, which we are. the thing we’re talking about that France failed so badly at is actually “decimal time,” which is a 10hr day with 100 minutes per hour and 100 seconds per minute, such that you can represent time decimally (1.344 hrs is one hour, 34 minutes, and 40 seconds; 1.204 days is one day, 2 hours, 4 minutes). the hxx uses a PARTIALLY decimalized system (kill me now) with 100 minutes to an hour and 100 seconds to a minute, but the day is 30 hours long. so 1.344 hrs is still one hour, 34 minutes, and 40 seconds, but you can’t decimalize days because of that nasty little factor of three. one hour is 0.03̅ days. gross

anyways, the partially decimalized system wouldn’t have been so bad if I had 5 or 10 motifs to incorporate but i had twelve, six primary and six secondary. (fortunately only six & not seven.) (which is so much worse.) (heretical notions of democracy aside, i would have been in favor of nixing the Liozh for purely aesthetic reasons.) does 12 go into 100? no it does not! and a day is THIRTY HOURS, a number technically divisible by six but not by twelve. and thirty is an unreasonable number of segments to make a readable design out of, 24 is already pushing it. but a two-period clock would be FIFTEEN hours, which is a stupid number, like, go on, give me NOTHING! and 30 and 15 don’t go into 100 either! Where do you fit 100 minute/second ticks on the face of a 30-hour clock? FUCK IF I KNOW!!

all this to say: there’s a reason this piece is secretly just Prague’s astronomical clock. i wanted to nest the zodiac and the day/month circles concentrically like Strasbourg or Šumava or Innsbrück but i realized that none of my segments would line up ANYWHERE and had to give up on that. it doesn’t matter. spacefaring civilization with a standard calendar divorced from any real orbital period, not exactly in need of functional astronomical clocks. and everything is digital anyways. you’re not even allowed to have watches. it’s fine. IT’S FINE

[laurelnose]

the only people who really benefit from decimal time are programmers, and as we all know, programmers don’t really know how time works anyways

[laurelnose]

the thing is. okay so technically standard time IS metric time because the second is an SI unit. a base 60 clock is metric time if you’re using metric seconds, which we are. the thing we’re talking about that France failed so badly at is actually “decimal time,” which is a 10hr day with 100 minutes per hour and 100 seconds per minute, such that you can represent time decimally (1.344 hrs is one hour, 34 minutes, and 40 seconds; 1.204 days is one day, 2 hours, 4 minutes). the hxx uses a PARTIALLY decimalized system (kill me now) with 100 minutes to an hour and 100 seconds to a minute, but the day is 30 hours long. so 1.344 hrs is still one hour, 34 minutes, and 40 seconds, but you can’t decimalize days because of that nasty little factor of three. one hour is 0.03̅ days. gross

anyways, the partially decimalized system wouldn’t have been so bad if I had 5 or 10 motifs to incorporate but i had twelve, six primary and six secondary. (fortunately only six & not seven.) (which is so much worse.) (heretical notions of democracy aside, i would have been in favor of nixing the Liozh for purely aesthetic reasons.) does 12 go into 100? no it does not! and a day is THIRTY HOURS, a number technically divisible by six but not by twelve. and thirty is an unreasonable number of segments to make a readable design out of, 24 is already pushing it. but a two-period clock would be FIFTEEN hours, which is a stupid number, like, go on, give me NOTHING! and 30 and 15 don’t go into 100 either! Where do you fit 100 minute/second ticks on the face of a 30-hour clock? FUCK IF I KNOW!!

all this to say: there’s a reason this piece is secretly just Prague’s astronomical clock. i wanted to nest the zodiac and the day/month circles concentrically like Strasbourg or Šumava or Innsbrück but i realized that none of my segments would line up ANYWHERE and had to give up on that. it doesn’t matter. spacefaring civilization with a standard calendar divorced from any real orbital period, not exactly in need of functional astronomical clocks. and everything is digital anyways. you’re not even allowed to have watches. it’s fine. IT’S FINE

[prokopetz]

"Why does the metric system still use base sixty for units of time rather than base ten" look: implementing metricated time units has in fact been attempted, and it ended up being one of the contributing factors to the fall of the French Republic. Metricated weights and measures are whatever, but it turns out people really don't like it when the government tries to fuck with how long a minute is.

[deuceofgears-deactivated2025121]

A glorious fanbinding/adaptation by @laurelnose, who also did the spectacular illustrations! Many thanks. <3

Presented by my lovely and TOTALLY TRUSTWORTHY assistant Foxglove the kitsune plush, who is 90% tails by volume. /o\

[laurelnose]

fanbinding: turnabout’s fair prey by yoon ha lee

hokay so. a while back I was thinking about how Turnabout’s Fair Prey is basically only still accessible because us sickos just keep passing around the direct link. and then I thought, I wonder if I could archive it physically? and then things, uh, got away from me.

This is an 84-page quarto letter (4¼" × 5½", trimmed to 4⅛" × 5¼") sewn boards binding. The cover is cut from cardstock & backed with silver lokta paper. I used spray adhesive because I was afraid to brush glue over all my fiddly little lines. The backing process worked great but the cut is a bit rough. I wouldn’t use a plotter to cut something this small and detailed from cardstock again, even with a 60° carbide blade. Next time: laser.

I adapted the Twine game format to the Choose Your Own Adventure format by just tagging all the links with page numbers. Links with expandable text moved to footnotes (sometimes nested footnotes). The body typeface is Warnock Caption and the display / superscript typeface is Titillium Web.

it is illustrated, because all good CYOAs are illustrated, and I did end up doing five even though I said I was going to stop at three. The full set can be seen here (not safe for work or tumblr).

98% of my involvement in the book arts is the sawbones rebinding I do for work, which mostly involves cursing the names of several major publishing imprints. it’s nice to do something where I have control over the structure for once!

...I made seven of them.

obviously i can’t keep a heretical number of books on hand, so if you want a hard copy of the paracanonical dubcon bodyswap CYOA, and you’re comfortable giving me a (USA) address, shoot me a message here on [tumblr]. I will mail one to you. Please be legally an adult and not deathly allergic to cats (mine got into the bookcloth).

[laurelnose]

typesetting!!

@a-voltage files for u and anyone else who wants to print and bind your own

you can work up a text block for any construction, but for anyone newer to the handbinding game, these are the resources I find most helpful for the particular construction I used:

Sewn Boards Tutorial by lowmountain

Variations on the Drum Leaf and Sewn Boards Bindings by Karen Hanmer

The Sewn Boards Binding by Gary Frost

Sewn Board Binding Part 1 (Part 2, Part 3) by DAS Bookbinding

Flexible Made Sewn-on Endpaper by DAS Bookbinding

[laurelnose]

> survive conference

> survive days-long retaliatory migraine

> branch apparently fucking fell apart while i was gone

sorry everyone i got way busier and more incapacitated than anticipated lol. will respond to all my dms today

[laurelnose]

fanbinding: turnabout’s fair prey by yoon ha lee

hokay so. a while back I was thinking about how Turnabout’s Fair Prey is basically only still accessible because us sickos just keep passing around the direct link. and then I thought, I wonder if I could archive it physically? and then things, uh, got away from me.

This is an 84-page quarto letter (4¼" × 5½", trimmed to 4⅛" × 5¼") sewn boards binding. The cover is cut from cardstock & backed with silver lokta paper. I used spray adhesive because I was afraid to brush glue over all my fiddly little lines. The backing process worked great but the cut is a bit rough. I wouldn’t use a plotter to cut something this small and detailed from cardstock again, even with a 60° carbide blade. Next time: laser.

I adapted the Twine game format to the Choose Your Own Adventure format by just tagging all the links with page numbers. Links with expandable text moved to footnotes (sometimes nested footnotes). The body typeface is Warnock Caption and the display / superscript typeface is Titillium Web.

it is illustrated, because all good CYOAs are illustrated, and I did end up doing five even though I said I was going to stop at three. The full set can be seen here (not safe for work or tumblr).

98% of my involvement in the book arts is the sawbones rebinding I do for work, which mostly involves cursing the names of several major publishing imprints. it’s nice to do something where I have control over the structure for once!

...I made seven of them.

obviously i can’t keep a heretical number of books on hand, so if you want a hard copy of the paracanonical dubcon bodyswap CYOA, and you’re comfortable giving me a (USA) address, shoot me a message here on [tumblr]. I will mail one to you. Please be legally an adult and not deathly allergic to cats (mine got into the bookcloth).

[laurelnose]

somebody remind me next year not to sign up for conferences happening this close to system-wide outreach events 😵‍💫 i have been! very busy! with a lot of logistics! mostly work logistics. but i have also hammered out some fandom logistics. i will show you things very very soon. hope you all had a nice halloween! ok leaving again i have to go look at salmon for 10 more hours

[laurelnose]

reading between the lines of that poll... did you draw kujen/jedao nsfw and didn’t show us!?

yes lol

[transformativeworks]

Updates to "No Fandom" Additional Tags, October 2025

AO3 tag wranglers have canonized some new "No Fandom" additional tags. Check out the latest news post for details: https://otw-news.org/3p8cnfe8

[laurelnose]

is it weird to email an author and be like “hey, you know that explicit fan work you haven’t technically deleted from the Internet but which you don’t link to directly anywhere anymore? i have drawn additional pornography based on it and also bound the whole thing into a little book. do you want a copy” or is that like. fine

yay democracy

it’s weird

that’s just how fandom works

Voting ended onOct 22, 2025

[unusualshrimp]

couples tshirts that say "god won't let me die" and "I'm god"