Universally Writing @universallywriting - Tumblr Blog

pansy-picnics

steven practice and some more connverse. one of these days i’ll actually color something

clustermunition

Art of Connie from early this year, I always enjoy drawing her she's my favorite character <3

minimuii

Priorities.

Bonus:

I’m well and settled on the opinion that Steven Universe had to seriously stack the deck in its own favor to prevent the narrative from ending with anyone getting guillotined. I mean, Steven conveniently having a foot in the door with the diamonds because he turned out to be related, sure, but it goes into the characterization and worldbuilding, too.

Rather than cackling dictators, first off, The Diamonds had to be emotionally-arrested overgrown children; the dynamic between them and Pink was always, with context, less of a parent-child thing and more like three twelve-year-olds lecturing an eight-year-old on adult responsibility, they’re fundamentally aping a notion of the right way to be and I think it’s a mistake to view them as fully-realized people at the point where Steven finds them. Gem society, too, is less of a society, with all its messy moving parts, and more of a sanitized dollhouse representation of a society that’s only just starting to morph into the real deal via the rebellion. There’s no genuinely complicated politics to untangle; just gems meaninglessly play-acting at politics. And, crucially, nobody is getting anything out of any of it- gems are a needless society, they expand endlessly because they…. don’t not do that, there’s no material incentive to behave the way they do, no economic reality Steven has to counter in order to make the horror stop. All he has to do is convince three emotional runts to stop being awful.

Now, where I differ in my thinking, I think, is that in contorting the worldbuilding to make sure that the diamond redemption wasn’t something patently insane, they really hit upon an incredibly compelling science-fiction set-up. Three Elder Gods playing “It’s A Good Life” with a tea-party sham of a civilization full of individuals who nonetheless feel real pain, Three Elder Gods who cause harm, and lots of it, but mainly through their lack of moral context and lack of understanding of what even constitutes harm, Three Elder Gods whom you, a puny human, actually have some pretty potent emotional leverage over but no way to overpower if it comes to a fight? A set-up where part of the horror is how easy it would be to pinpoint the source of the horror and make it stop? That’s fucking dynamite! I’d watch five whole seasons of just that! Hell, even in canon it doesn’t even stop- two years later and Steven is still kinda trying to deal with the fact that the Diamond’s good behavior is kinda-sorta dependent on his willingness to keep dealing with them and he has no real way to be sure any of it is sticking! There’s no actual end in sight! There’s no clean resolution! It’s messy and it’s harrowing and it’s specifically because culpability and morality and ethics and all of that is so goddamn sticky when you’re a consequentialist trying to play ball with super-advanced childlike Von Neuman Machines!

libraford

There is a photographer in our town that works for a local news feed just for our town (which I'm 90% sure is volunteer run) and I see him sometimes at things. He usually covers the town halls, school board meetings, he was taking photos at Juneteenth last year. Basically he's everywhere and I'm also everywhere, so we cross paths often.

But he also does a thing called 'My Final Photo,' which is just random day to day stuff happening in town that he thinks is cool enough to snap a photo of. Like... ongoing construction of the new buildings, when the crocuses come out, a bird landing on a lamppost. Stuff like that. He's a really talented photographer.

The Final Photo for yesterday was kind of awesome but I don't think he knows how much the caption contributed: