#portaling

[robosnom]

[□\

[4r3d 04t p0rt6l tr6v3l!

[robosnom]

[[^}□]

G43ss wh0 j4st f1g]

[auraoflunacy]

[scr1b3notscribble]

So, guess who lost her phone off a cliff this weekend...! & guess who's now relying on a clunky old backup phone to have contact with the world! My love of technology is about to become verymuch stunted and curbed at this rate, but at least I'll not be entirely cut off... #StarvingArtistProblems So here, have a photo of me getting up to hijinks in the middle of blinking nowhere. The lengths I go to in order to achieve a goal! Now if only getting somewhere in the artist world was as easy as climbing up the back of a man...! #starvingartist #AtMyWitsEnd #ingress #portaling #dontcrossme

[oldmanatom]

Blurb #13: On Chell

[eta: like other text posts that are going to be showing up for a bit, i found this buried at the very bottom of my drafts folder, and decided to finish it up and post it. blanket cautionary statement that i wrote this all in like...2013, so it doesn’t exactly reflect my views today, or at least the language i might use. (i’ve edited the stuff that was egregiously out-of-whack with 2016!me, but tbh i don’t have the energy to bring everything completely in line.)

this post is about two points re: Chell, one of which is her fandom interpretation and one of which is her post-Aperture future.]

It's surprising to me that the interpretation of Chell as ruthless and self-centered isn't more popular. Or that it doesn’t really seem to have a presence at all. The vast majority of the stuff I have read depicts Chell as...well, nice. Or, at the very least, not "mean." It's hard to generalize Chell's depiction, because there's so many major and minor variations--as there should be, considering the fact that she's actually nothing more than what we project onto her, except, perhaps, for her persistent/stubborn streak (and isn't that only directly acknowledged in Lab Rat?)--but I can't remember seeing her depicted as anything coming close to ruthless, or even just plain old self-interested. If you look at what she does in the games, though...it's not hard to imagine a ruthless Chell. She's already proven that she'll take out people who are between her and freedom. She has a damn good reason to do what she does, but she's killed. Twice. Yeah, GLaDOS wasn't really dead, but still. Basically, Chell is canonly interested in two things: Keeping herself alive and getting out. Maybe she's interested in the Greater Good, whatever that might be, and maybe she gets an opportunity to work toward it when she’s not continually fending for her life. But maybe not.

A lot of the Portal fics I want to finish are about freedom and what it means to Chell post-game. We already know what she'll do to get it, but how far will she go to preserve it? What means more to her: Her freedom, or her life? That question's important to me because it’s going to become a pretty central question for her as soon as she makes it out of the frying pan. Her health's almost certainly going to take a very rapid downturn once she gets out into the world--if you ignore the rest of the psychological/physical trauma from her time in Aperture, the amount of Repulsion Gel alone she's been exposed to is enough to ensure that those sixty years GLaDOS is talking about is more likely going to be ten at the most. And if the world really is some post-apocalyptic Half-Life hellhole when she gets out, then the only place that's going to have the sort of medical resources and care to support her fragile health might very well be Aperture. So what’s going to win out--her repulsion to Aperture and the constraints of it (both as a place and, more broadly, as a concept, a representation of the costs of scientific advancement and the possible cruelty involved with picking your experiments over the people involved), or her staying alive? I don't know the answer to that. I have theories, but it depends on who Chell is. And Chell is no one. Nameless and faceless, if you just go by the canon material. I think it’d generally be the freedom part, but how do you enjoy freedom when you’re dead?

[lilaintheskywithdiamonds]

Portal 💓

[bonegrenade-archive]

I think the part from 1:40 to 2:43 was what Nep was talking about

Especially from 2:19 onwards