#something something plot device about travis

[ellemest]

travis being like "my favorite thoughts are jackies... the slumber party makeouts? the jealousy" and jackieshuana BUT ALSO there is no fucking way travis martinez, teenage boy, could have possibly known about the slumber party makeouts (!!!) unless jackie's somehow one with the wilderness and everytime he gets high he literally hears/senses IT

[chaifootsteps]

I agree with Angel anon. Angel was much stronger in the pilot, more rough around the edges and trashier? It’s hard to explain by Michael and Ken made that character. Pilot angle moved the plot forward, he needed money to get drugs, so he has sex with Travis for money, he get into a turf war and makes the hotel look bad, he makes funny or Charlie’s hotel, but genuinely feels bad about it but he doesn’t know how to respond so he walks away. It’s not much but it’s better than series Angel.

Series Angel? I don’t even consider Angel a character, because he’s not a character, he’s a cheap plot device for artificial angst. He’s the ONLY character that is being abused and trafficked and the only one that gets the bad ending in season 2, while everyone else doesn’t? Not even Vox is punished the way Angel is, hmm i wonder why? Is this the writers’ poorly disguised fetish?

To be fair to Raph his Angel art was HIS fanfic it was personal to HIM, but viv saw it and is running with it. Raph knew how to write angel better then viv and Raph never shoved his fanwork in peoples faces and made them swallow it, viv did and she gets mad when you call her out for not caring about SA survivors (she doesn’t). Another thing I believe is all the abuse and rape that Angel goes through is all viv can think of to write Angel. With how she talks about Valentino, I wouldn’t be surprised if she prefers Valentino over Angel and why she’s softening Valentino and saying “he doesn’t know what consent is” thus absolving him from being at fault for raping and abusing angel.

Outside of being a victim, Angel doesn’t have a personality. He’s given “fun facts” but nothing concrete because it’s never explored in the show only explored in Viv’s head or in fan art and fanfic. Another thing i believe all the abuse and trauma angel goes through is because it’s the only way viv knows how to write the romance side of Angel and husk, because doesn’t know how to write romance without it. Look what happened to Stolas and blitz.

Trauma is not a personality. A character going through trauma doesn’t make them a complex, or compelling character it’s HOW its effects them and how cope with the trauma that makes them compelling. In season 1 episode 4, Angel self destructs as a response to the trauma but husk sings a song and he’s better after that episode. Season 2 Angel is hypnotized and used as a spy for Vox, after Vox is defeated he goes back to Valentino. Rinse and repeat. Angel is a static character whose only trait is just trauma, he waits until the plot needs him to be kicked like a puppy.

Nailed it. I think it bears remembering that Pilot Angel's introductory character moment saw him chewing the fuck out of a client he just had sex with because they were rude to him, then going to buy drugs from a vending machine and getting pissed off because they fell on the ground. It said something about Hell and something about Angel.

Pilot Angel had teeth, Series Angel exists solely to suffer.

[mangotangerine]

Is Travis an original character? I thought he was ethan/ papermint (voxs assistant) and you had named him Travis cause his name wasn't in season 1. But in one of your recent asks about inm demon forms you had mentioned him "staring down at his bird hands" or something like that. So I was just wondering if he was an oc or something !

WELL.

Technically there is a character named Travis in Hazbin Hotel (Valentino’s porn director). I saw him in S1 and thought, “This one. This is the one. With his stupid little heart pupil. Yes.” I do not know why my heart saw Travis and went, “I am imprinting on this stupid little owl demon with his stupid laugh,” but it did.

I wrote him into Accidental Bodyguard for Hire and made him pretty central to one of the arcs, because he is my second favorite character of all time (next to Vox). I HC him as like a film studies graduate who is stuck in Hell making porn videos instead of artsy documentaries, and that’s how I wrote him in ABFH.

So I gave him sort of a cranky attitude, a jaded little guy who wished for greater things.

Then I knew I needed a character to be Vox’s fixer in INM, and why not Travis! My second favorite and my first favorite, best friends! He was supposed to be a plot device. But then I was like, who the fuck would follow some psycho serial killer all around the country cleaning up for him? What makes someone do that?

Love, obviously. Obsessive love. And what forms that sort of obsessive love? Boys trauma bonding in their formative years as they developed their identities! But wait—what if they named each other? ✨

And then I started writing Chapter 44, mostly bringing in his personality that I had given him from ABFH, because I am a big believer in recycling, and then Chapter 46 happened, and I needed to give him an actual appearance, and flesh him out more, and once you get to a point where you’re taking a character who had 1 line of dialogue in Season 1 and no human form, put him in a human AU, give him a personality, an appearance, a background—at that point he was so far removed from the source material that in all but name, he is an OC.

So, yes, but he wasn’t meant to be.

I’m fully aware that when he gets characterization in Hazbin Hotel, that Travis will be nothing like the one I’ve invented.

Vassago is trending that way too, in the side thing I’m writing, but if the Hellaverse is just gonna leave mostly blank characters around, I’m gonna take them and do stuff with them.

They were supposed to be plot devices. 😭 Then they took over my brain.

[spade-riddles]

The album and the Matty Healy of it all; the Allegory and a literary breakdown for you all :)

As an english girly, I am having the most fun dissecting this album. She wrote her entire story into the album. It’s an allegory, each song has two major interpretations, one is the obvious (matty/joe/travis/PATERNITY TEST) whereas the other is her truth. This is a literary device that has been used in writing throughout history since forever. Everything about this album is so intentional, especially the Matty Healy of it all. This album has been planned so meticulously, every move she’s made with the beards has been to directly tie into the songs and the references. She needed a heavily documented example, she wants people to believe it, so when she burns it all down she can say “look at how easy is was to construct a narrative, hide an allegory within it and watch no one get it, it’s happened my whole life”, this is why this album is so much louder to all of us than the rest of them, because we have always seen the second story but now she’s making it more obvious. But they will get it, the story in this album is so strong, she’s coming out and she’s made this so she can send people to look back at her music (lookin’ backwards/might be the only way to move forward- her entire catalogue is the manuscript) screaming “I told you, I laid it all out. You didn’t believe me!” This is the post mortem, every reason why she’s ‘dead’ (the inauthentic version) is laid out in the album.

For example, i’ll break down ‘Fortnight’ since we have the MV imagery too. On the surface is about her fling with MH. If you get down to the next layer it’s about the failed coming out & Karlie. About how she almost had it all “for a fortnight” (just a metaphor for a short time), how her plans got ruined and how she’s doing it over again. She was supposed to be sent away, she was meant to go stay in the asylum (the closet).

“Now you’re in my backyard, turned into good neighbours”.

She has Karlie so close to her, but hidden in her backyard, no one can see her in her backyard.

“Your wife waters flowers, I want to kill her.” There is something that is in the way of them being together, she wants it to end (her public narrative). Could also be a reference to JK, he gets to to be with Karlie, watering flowers in her garden (betty’s garden anyone) while Taylor watches, she wants to kill the perception of him as Karlie’s husband.

The rest of the song moves into Karlie & Taylor getting closer, they’re plotting a way out.

“Now you’re at the mailbox, turned into good neighbours, my husband is cheating, I want to kill him.” Again, Taylor’s husband is her public persona, she wants to kill it.

When you add in the music video, she’s breaking out of the asylum with her twin, then she was put right back in there and her twin is performing experiments on her. I think Post Malone represents both Taylor and Karlie at different points in the MV, because both of their own choices are also part of the reason they’re still closeted, she’s acknowledging this. But then something happens, one of them can’t do it anymore so they run away. This is the release of the album, specifically 2am 04/19 (fresh out the slammer), Taylor’s on top of the box, she’s out; this the endgame for her now, but Karlie is still stuck in the phone box (the closet). But not for long! 😘

Every single song is like this, there’s a very intricate but obvious second story. They’re not all about Karlie, there’s a lot about her childhood, other muses (thank you aimee is not about Kim, it’s about a hometown love), growing up, her fans, the industry, closeting, christianity, masters heist.

I’ll touch base quickly on ‘The Albatross’.

She’s coming to take down SB, i’m not sure 100% how but I think it has to do with the coming out and exposing everything he’s done to her to keep her in the closet for so long (it’s a lot darker than people think).

She is here to destroy him.

“Now you’re persona non grata” he’s not going to be able to work anymore, he’s going to be exiled from the music industry.

There’s always been the iffiness around the masters situation, people saying she was told prior, her insisting she wasn’t. The below is a confession (and a threat).

“Wise men once read fake news

And they believed it

Jackals raised their hackles

You couldn't conceive it

You were sleeping soundly

When they dragged you from your bed

And I tried to warn you about them”

She lied, she knew about the master situation but she said she didn’t. Her fans believed it though and they crucified him, she tried to warn him how powerful they were. She’s already embedded that image of him in their minds, so when the next thing comes out (lol), they’re going to raise absolute hell, his entire career is going to be over.

“thanK you aIMee”, the entire world right now thinks it’s about Kim Kardashian, because she capitalised ‘KIM’ in the title, there’s that line about her kid singing her song (which coincidentally did happen). It’s so obviously about her right! No, it’s another “blue dress on a boat”, something she has done throughout her whole career is splice monumental images of Taylor Swift ™ into her songs, so she can sing about her real life without being questioned. Except this time, she’s trying to make you question it, that’s why it’s so OBVIOUSLY 🙄 about Kim Kardashian. A red herring if you will 😉. It’s meant to point you towards one thing, when it’s really not about that thing at all.

tldr: everything about the album is intentional, she’s layered two narratives together on purpose. one at surface level, one a bit deeper.

Images are both Taylor’s & Aaron‘s words on the album, about hidden meanings and secrets.

And if you need any further proof, at exactly 4:19 of ‘The Tortured Poets Department’ title track, she says “who’s gonna troll you?”. The entire album is the troll, for the general public, it’s not about the men at all.

[prettyboysdontlookatexplosions]

like at one point in this season of yellowjackets they were having a trial to decide if coach ben was guilty of setting the cabin on fire and it was a stalemate and then lottie switched sides because the wilderness told her to so travis and akilah switched also (even though travis later said he was basically lying about believing in the wilderness the whole time). then they went back to the toxic gas cave so akilah could have another vision and in the vision she was walking on giant ben and lottie decided this meant ben was their bridge home so they had to keep him alive so they rushed back to save him from being murdered. this happened in the SAME EPISODE. like are you tracking this? in the SAME EPISODE, twenty minutes apart IF THAT, the wilderness told lottie to save ben and then the wilderness told lottie to kill him. nobody switched sides or experienced meaningful doubt of any kind or forged an alliance or an animosity during the trial either in case you thought we needed it for character development reasons (LOL WHAT'S THAT). like i saw someone on reddit say that the girls were too scared to stand up to shauna because look how she commanded everyone to convict ben but she literally didn't. lottie did. and lottie only commanded 2 people it just happened to be enough to swing the vote. anyway then natalie mercy kills ben after he goes on hunger strike and they eat him and robbie from new girl shows up and lottie axes him in the head and then says she doesn't want to go home. like two episodes after saying the wilderness told her to save ben because he was their bridge home. do you SEEEEE what i have been DEALING WITH. and you might be thinking well could this possibly be an exploration of lottie's increasing instability and delusional thinking and to that i would say, me believing that they were doing this on purpose rather than turning her into literally just a plot device would require anyone, like literally any other character, to react to her behavior by saying something like "hey lottie what was all that ben is our bridge home stuff about if actually you don't want to go home." which no one does, like their cult leader axes a guy in the head and no one is like, should we rethink some things, because no one actually cares about the wilderness anymore, but they still have to act like they do, to protect themselves against shauna, one (1) person with a gun who literally hasn't killed anyone and is wrestled into submission by fucking melissa the JV in the finale, who wusses out of killing her for real but btw receives no repercussions, like SOME TERRIFYING DICTATOR YOU'VE GOT THERE, apparently if you come at the king and miss it's whatever, because allegedly they don't trust each other in groups large enough to accomplish anything, even though when there was a split about whether to leave or not we got a nice little tableau of three (3) people who wanted to stay and then Everybody Fucking Else, none of whom, i mean not one person among which, has even one time said something along the lines of "wow i'm torn because i'm really homesick and want to go home but lottie says the wilderness wants us to stay and i believe in the wilderness," i mean it's SOOOOO DUUUUUUUUMB AND BAD OH MY GOD

[whovianwatchingstartrek]

A Whovian Watches Star Trek for the First Time: Part 085 - Quarantine

Star Trek: Enterprise - Season 4 Episode 11 - Observer Effect

We open with Travis and Malcolm playing chess, only they're not Travis and Malcolm. They're talking in hushed whispers about "Physical species" and how "they" (The crew) will react to a planet. Not related, I really like the minimalist designs of their chess pieces. The question is, what has happened to them, and how far has this spread. They also seem really calm about the possibility of everyone dying.

After the intro, we're with Trip and Hoshi, coming up from a Klingon dump planet, and covered in dust and junk, but then suddenly trip starts going into a coughing fit. The Duo spend some time in Decon, and Hoshi begins coughing too. Whatever is causing this doesn't show up on Phlox's medical scans however.

This seems to be whatever "Malcolm" and "Travis" were waiting to see though. Apparently whatever is possessing Malcolm has been doing this for centuries. I really like how the actors portray the possessed duo, especially Dominic Keating.

Phlox finds the pathogen. Apparently it's a Silicon based Virus, and Trip and Hoshi only have 5 hours to live. Throughout the episode we get some fun stories from Hoshi and Trip's time in training and their childhoods, and I love that. It doesn't add anything to the plot, but it's really nice character building.

These entities however, decided to transfer to Phlox and T'pol, delaying the cure's development, and visit Hoshi and Trip. However, they've started to notice something odd is happening with them. As results come in though, they transfer back to Malcolm and Travis. Apparently the virus could be weak to radiation.

However, Hoshi starts hallucinating and manages to break out quarantine and wanders around the ship talking in just about every language she knows. Trip manages to get her back to De-con, but the entire deck then needs to be locked down. Trip tranquilises both himself and Hoshi, and while they sleep the entities transfer into both of them to talk in private.

It's interesting that they seem completely unfamiliar with the concept of physical pain. Phlox however still had the cameras on and overhears their conversation, and starts recording.

I loved the interplay between Phlox and the entities once the entities realised that phlox is aware of them, and how the entities transferred to T'Pol and Archer to stop him.

Phlox manages to develop the radiation cure, but Hoshi is in a really bad state. But Phlox and Archer keep pushing. Apparently none of the other species have tried past the point of the heart stopping, so are humans the only species to invent the defibrillator? The Entities seem very confused by what the devices that are shocking Hoshi's heart back into action. The Cure fails, however the entities make themselves known to Archer, and Archer gets a chance to chew them out. One of the entities decides to defy protocol and cure the cure. Their memories are wiped though, so it appears to be a miracle.

I wish we could find out more about the entities. Apparently they'll make official first contact with humanity in 5000 years, which I know for a fact is out of the time range for any of the Star Treks, so I'm assuming these entities are only one offs? Like the Midnight entity from Doctor Who, they just go unnamed mysteries forever. I can live with that, but I certainly want to know more.

All in all, a really good episode!

Comparing my Enjoyment of this Episode with a Doctor Who Universe Story of the Same Title

Doctor Who - Short Trips: 2040 - Observer Effect

This was a short story in a collection with no visuals, so enjoy this random picture of 4 and Sarah Jane instead of anything from the actual story

Tracking down this book was not easy.

So the short trips books were Doctor Who short story collections published between 1998 and 2009, often the short stories in the books would be themed around a common concept. Observer effect is a 4th Doctor and Sarah short story in Short Trips: 2040, which was all themed around stories set in the year 2040. These books are pretty difficult to find, and there is decent chance I'm the first person on Tumblr to talk about this particular Short Story.

This short story is set in a space station in the Kuiper Belt, and does a pretty okay job at building the world around this station, and establishing what life inside it is like. The Author does a really good job at capturing the 4th Doctor's voice.

Basically, the plot of the story is a locked room murder mystery that the Doctor and Sarah happened to stumble into. There are six members of this stations crew, one of them has been killed by airlock decompression while alone, and the plot is trying to figure out what happened. And the mystery is built well, and towards the end touches on themes of media exploitation, it was a fun little short ride, even if the change in themes at the end kinda came out of nowhere.

I'm definitely going to say I preferred Enterprise's Observer Effect though, the nature of the mysterious entities possessing Enterprise's crew was a lot more fun than Doctor Who's Observer Effect's simple locked Room Mystery. The enterprise episode was a very good "humans are just built different" episode. I enjoyed both stories though.

[syllarinfirinne]

So, I haven’t rewatched episode 1 of campaign 3 yet (I probably will this weekend because you miss some stuff watching it with people reacting), but having slept on it and collected my thoughts a little I figured I’d put them down on a page. 

First and foremost, and the biggest reason I want to rewatch it, is the setting. Idk if it was just how tired I was, the fact that friends and I were talking a bit, but I didn’t feel like I got sucked all the way into Marquet, or the city that they’re in. From the bits I did absorb it sounded incredible and lovely, and I’d like very much to fully submerge myself in it. 

I love all the characters. Imogen’s seemingly simple goal of just getting into the dang library leaves a lot of room to play with and asks all sorts of questions about why she wants in there. Ashton, clearly by my already brand new blog name, is an early favorite. I’ve already seen people point out the similarities between Ashton and Molly, but I think those are surface level/aesthetic at most. Ashton’s whole attitude is something I vibe with much more than I ever did Molly (who I found stuck up). Laudna is mine (and Imogen’s?) goth girlfriend and anyone slandering her name will be ended. Also because she mentioned she’s from Whitestone there’s already a whole lot of theories floating around. To step on a rake again (I got Artagan isn’t the Traveler AND Werewolf Caleb dead wrong), I think this is a red herring. At this point we’re ~50-60 years since Whitestone fell to the Briarwoods, I think Laudna being from Whitestone is incidental. Finally, for brand new characters, I would take a bullet for Freshly Cut Grass and put a bullet in anyone attempting to make their day slightly worse. 

Now, for the contentious bit. As I said, I love the characters, they all seem deep and interesting and worthy of exploration, but the characters chosen, the mechanics of the game behind one, and their introduction has set me a bit unease. I’m talking, specifically of course, about the ExU crew and the return of Bertarum Bell. 

Let’s start with Bell. I love Travis’ portrayal of him, and if I’m wrong and he’s around for the long haul I’ll be pumped for it. That said, it very much feels like he’s a temporary character. His age, the fact that he was originally introduced as a level 18 character in a campaign 1 one shot but is now level 5, the fact that he’s two (important) levels ahead of the rest of the party, and his interactions with the party (acting as almost a talent scout or a head hunter) all give the distinct impression that he’s less of a long term character and more of a plot device to put the group in contact with the orc man they met at the end of the episode. 

And that leaves the ExU folks. (and for the record this is coming from somebody who hasn’t found time to watch ExU) Individually, as characters, I think they’re great. I already love Fearne’s kinda spacy weirdness. She’s the criminal stoner to Cad’s chill stoner and I love her for it. Dorian has anxiety and is a hot boi, but I didn’t really get anything else from him. Robbie has a great energy though ooc. Orym’s also a bit of a mystery. I love how Liam verbalizes his combat though. Tricky fucker is bouncing around all over the place. That said, their mission to find someone and bring them back to Tal’dorei also gives the vibe that their temporary characters. 

And the fact that exactly half the party feels like they’re stand in/temporary characters leaves me with a sense of...unease and unpredictability. And not the “I’m excited to see what happens next” kind of unpredictability, but the “I’m nervous this entire thing is going to fall apart or worse the players will try to hold it together despite there being no narrative or character purpose to do so” kind. 

There’s also something just...odd about only one player character being confirmed as from Marquet, and that one character having spent a large and recent chunk of time away from there. I know they stressed that story is only ‘beginning’ in Marquet, but it really does feel like a large chunk of the party would leave Marquet tomorrow if, say Imogen and Laudna learn about the Cobalt Soul libraries and Ashton heard he could get work in Emon. 

Also, and this is just a personal grumpy note, I would really like to know the player’s subclasses please. Combat is much more engaging and easier to enjoy if you’re not spending most of it asking the person you’re watching with or yourself “wait, what are they doing? How are they doing it?” Obviously some surprises are nice, but part of my enjoyment of combat is like watching a sport or a super hero movie, I like to know what the guys I’m rooting for are capable of. 

That said, overall I am excited. I’m not going to stop watching because of my dislikes and initial reactions to the ExU crew and Bell’s seeming temporary status. I’m pumped to see what stories Matt’s going to tell, and to the party’s credit, one episode in, they seem to be far more willing to engage in Plot than the Nein did early on.

Anyway, I’d love to hear anyone’s opinions, either in agreement or dissenting. 

[andmaybegayer]

Last Monday of the Week: 2021-03-01

First Monday of the Month. My boss just quit at work which means I'm now the only formally trained engineer left who has any particular specialization in embedded systems. This week is going to be a doozy.

I also wrote a Very Long set of media updates because I’ve been consuming some stuff that makes me think a lot. Never a good sign.

Listening: I spent all of Saturday playing Minecraft after talking with some friends about it during the week on IRC. Practicing what I preach with regards to my Large Biome Supermacy policy, which does involve a lot of walking. Hence, I started catching up on The Adventure Zone: Graduation again, I'm like ten episodes behind.

https://maximumfun.org/episodes/adventure-zone/the-adventure-zone-graduation-ep-32-by-a-haircut/

I don't really enjoy Travis' DM'ing style. It's very loose and he has a tendency to let players run wild without much structure which is a tricky thing to handle. He does a lot of worldbuilding and character design but doesn't seem to plan much in the way of arcs. That pays off sometimes (returning to the school to realize they broke a promise they made a few sessions earlier and had to deal with consequences, for example) and when it does, it’s really good, but it's finnicky. I know DM's who can do that, but, well, actually I know One Single DM who can do that well and she's absurdly smart.

Reading: Still on Worm, I just got past chapter 8 or so now. It lives in my phone browser so I've mostly been reading it whenever I get some spare time, which is a good sign. If a book doesn't grab me I need to really settle down in a quiet space to avoid getting distracted, but I can read Worm while someone else is on the phone in the same room.

It is a story with a lot of very well-conveyed feelings and events. It's very easy to imagine yourself in it. Characters actually act like they care about what they're doing, I feel like writing this took a lot of care to keep everyone on model.

There's also a certain care given to the superpowers that you'd usually only see in forum posts arguing about an actual superhero story. Everyone always likes to argue about how far you can push a superpower: can you use teleporting to fly? What prevents a speedster from catching fire in the air? Where does the energy for a  pyrokinetic ability come from? Worm takes these and runs with them as a way to make absolutely any fight become a series of gambits relying on whether a power can or cannot be used to perform some high-stakes trick.

The world certainly has some underpinning contrivances to explain why no one gets killed very often but I've always considered nitpicking the base contrivances of a setting silly, because that's precisely what they are: contrived, in order to allow the rest of the story to flow from there. Like arguing about Omega’s abilities in the famous thought experi-*I am dragged off stage by the ratblr police for making a by now extremely stale joke*

Watching: I came and edited this section in like an hour before this posts because I keep on forgetting to put it in. I don’t really like watching TV and with my parents stuck at home in Pandemic Times it’s how they pass the time.

I did finish S3 of the Good Place. It’s very funny. I’m glad I’m watching it and I’m going to have to go find S4 because ZA Netflix doesn’t have it for whatever reason. It feels a little like it was written by Phillip Pullman if Phillip Pullman was a comedy TV writer.

I also really enjoyed the PBS Spacetime video about how time causes gravity. Love when an explanation of concepts is good enough that you drawn the conclusion on your own.

Playing: Visual Novel Hell plus Minecraft.

I spent approximately seven hours in Minecraft over two days. I tend to hop in and out of games for 1-2 hours at a time but there's a handful that can suck me in for an entire day. Minecraft, Warframe, Horizon Zero Dawn, Night in the Woods. Bastion, to a lesser extent. I end up avoiding them because I don't like loosing entire days, but I wasn't really planning on doing anything this weekend anyways.

Minecraft was mostly a long-ass trek to find a saddle, because as previously mentioned, I enjoy playing it with Large Biomes for the sense of scale.

I also completed Act 3 of Psycholonials and Eliza.

Psycholonials is odd. It is doing the thing that Hussie does where it dances around what's ostensibly the story to carry out the actual story. You get used to the trope after your first encounter but it still makes you wonder when the other shoe will drop, and of course, there's no reason it ever has to. The story may remain in suspended animation behind the every growing mess of narrative red tape tying the B-plot together.

Stories about Social Media have no well established norms. I think I might pick up Feed by M. T. Anderson and also perhaps Hank Green's books sometime. See what context they set that in.

Eliza is frustrating to me. It's a game for programmers, by programmers, about programmers. I'm friends with a lot of Capital P Programmers, the types who go to university and get sniped for developer positions at Seattle or Silicon Valley tech companies and who make great and terrible things and then warn you about the deep problems that underpin the slowly rolling ball of venture capital and bloated technology that is the tech industry. But at the same time, it makes me feel like I've burnt out on that conceptually before I even went in. It’s a whole other world that I’m familiar with but very distant from. In fact, that’s kinda how I feel about Psycholonials too. I’m familiar with the social media rat race but I also don’t go there. Parallels!

My cousins (who are halfway to Capital P Programmers, only so much you can do halfway around the world from silicon valley) warned me not to go into CS, because it would bore me, and that's a non-trivial part of why I'm in Engineering. They gave the same advice about Biology and Physics, without that I may have ended up in Microbiology. it’s not my domain, but because of how Engineering is going, you end up a lot closer to programmers than you think. I found out the other day that most of the software developers on my team have no formal tertiary qualifications, which is accepted in CS but of course, right out when it comes to engineering. It’s a whole other world that I kinda expected to skip around. I might go into this another time, since this post is already getting long.

Making: I haven’t done any engineering scicomm posts on here in a while so I started a few blank drafts and finally got one off the ground. With some luck I’ll have that ready this week. What’s it about? Not saying! It might change!

I’ve been doing layout for a custom keyboard, I need to call a laser cutting place and find out what their kerf requirements are so I can adjust the path accordingly. Wouldn’t do to burn a couple hundred rand on an oversized part, I’m paying for this, not my employer like the other times I’ve done laser cutting, so I’m probably not going to spring for getting one of their designers to check my design. At some point I should CAD up a chassis, but at the same time I might just buy some wood and go ham with a router once I get the plates cut.

Computers Slot: I got WeeChat set up properly on my desktop, which technically was just a matter of getting my SSH keys moved over. It’s taking me forever to move in to Cinnabar, in part because Stibnite lost her boot partition and I haven’t bothered to fix it.

So here’s a pitch for WeeChat as a good quality Terminal UI IRC Client. Many of my closest friends live there and it has a good set of tools to help me keep in touch.

WeeChat is very configurable but with perfectly sane defaults, I didn’t configure it for years. The UI is smarter and less arcane than something like irssi, and if you enable mouse support it can be downright modern. Running it remotely like this limits some features but as long as you don’t mind jumping through a few hoops to do filesharing, IRC is really great like this.

One of the big ones is the ability to do that double-pane thing, I can keep an eye on two channels at once (really as many as I can cram on my screen, but usually two) which is great when you want to browse channels while talking in your home channel.

It also has a good array of remote access tools, from what I’m running up there, just weechat running on my server inside tmux connected over mosh for low-latency SSH, to weechat-relay, a relay protocol built in to weechat. At the moment relay only supports android phones and the glowingbear web client, but I’ve never really looked around since both of those cover all my needs. Easily one of the best ways to get IRC on a modern mobile device, barring maybe IRCCloud.