Rynling R&D

Because why write new fic when you can torture yourself by editing old fic?

After the World Was Won
This is a story about sexism in STEM fields wherein Daryl is frustrated with Setzer for achieving more recognition for doing basically the same work. Now that I am closer to the age I intended Daryl to be in the story, however, I realize that intelligent adults don't express frustration in quite the way I had her doing. I therefore made Daryl's language less blunt and her sense of ironic detachment drier. Setzer has an awkward monologue that I could have edited, but I decided that it's in character for it to remain a bit stilted.

Another Chip in the Pile
Dubious consent was a major theme in m/m fanfic when I wrote this story. I remember being bothered by that but at the same time interested in what dubious consent can do that depictions of healthy relationships cannot. For whatever reason, I still find stories of emotionally damaged people stumbling backwards into sex compelling, and I'm surprised by how fond I am of this fic, which is about Owzer attempting to fuck Setzer out of his depression. Politics aside, editing this fic taught me that the word "guttural" achieves semantic satiation very quickly, and I am hereby instating an ironclad rule that it can only be used once in any given story about buttsex.

Every King Needs His Guard
This is a very short postgame fic about Sabin assassinating Cid so that Edgar doesn't have to. I edited it to get rid of some of the more florid phrasing while making Sabin a bit scarier.

The Lure of Machinery
You can really tell I was still developing my chops when I wrote this one. Instead of fixing the numerous instances of stylistic awkwardness, I just deleted them wholesale. I should probably delete this entire story, but I am still to this day super into the idea of Setzer and Edgar being engineer husbands.

Float
I wrote this Setzer/Edgar story only five months after "The Lure of Machinery," but it is worlds better. It's not good, exactly, but it's moving in the right direction. I edited the dialog to make it tighter and crispier. I've been so tits deeps in the pretentiousness of Zelda fic that I forgot I enjoy writing banter... I should get back to that at some point.

Two Kingdoms
A year or two ago the great and noble Kashuan reblogged a post about how the OP immediately hits the back button upon realizing that a fic is written with a first-person narrative voice. I thought of this specific Peach/Bowser fic when I read that post, and now I have finally edited it to be in third person. This actually took a substantial amount of work, but I will not embarrass myself by revealing just how much. The story is still a heap of weird and pretentious garbage based on deep lore culled from the instruction manuals of the NES era Super Mario games, but at least now it's marginally less cringe-inducing.

Claws and Lace
This is not old fic, but I've been returning to it to make edits every week since I posted it. When I said that it needed a lot of editing I meant that it needed A LOT of editing; I am very serious about my crackfic and would never joke about something like this. If I am going to write a story about Peach and Bowser having awkward monster sex then it is going to be classy and well edited, so help me Crackfic Jesus.

Okay wow, making these cosmetic changes has indeed made me feel a lot better about my monumental lack of progress on more meaningful projects. Good job team!

While I was in Tokyo I hung out with a friend who I met a good ten years ago in a semi-professional context and then stayed in touch with through Livejournal and Tumblr. She lives in Central Asia, and she was in Japan partially for business but also to meet up with a fandom friend. When she told me this, I was like, You know their name? And where they live? She was like, Of course, once you become a fandom mom everyone sort of already knows who you are anyway.

I think it's kind of cool how, once you reach a certain age in fandom, you stop caring so much about whether people can connect you to your real-life identity. To me, this actually seems like a much healthier social system than community-enforced anonymity. As someone whose job responsibilities include hiring both interns and salaried positions, I can say from firsthand experience that most potential employers are already overworked and aren't going to dig that deeply into your background as it exists as the result of a Google search; and, as someone who got balls-deep into the Gamergate nonsense a few summers ago, I can also say that anonymity isn't really going to protect you from the crazies on the internet. Real world action, whether it relates to social justice or literary and artistic movements, is based on real world communities, and anonymity within fandom precludes the possibility of such action among groups of people who are primarily female and/or minorities.

On the other hand, Super Mario Odyssey is giving me intense Peach/Bowser shipping feels, and I'm overwhelmed by the compulsion to write fic in which Peach, in full bridal gear, forces Bowser to strip until he's got nothing on except the white lace panties she's made him wear under his wedding suit.

They're both such awful pieces of shit, and I love them so much, and no one who knows me in real life can ever, ever find out about this.

"I love your Zelda meta post," I say to a friend. "I'd like to draw a comic about it!" So then of course I proceed to not talk to them for a week, and when I finally sit down and put my pencil to paper this is the sort of garbage that comes out, Jesus Christ.

My problem with art is that everything takes too long. For example...
I timed myself, and this took me about five minutes to write. If I were to draw it as a comic, I'm estimating that it would take at least twenty hours.

I'm still gonna do it, though.

Why yes, I do in fact need more postapocalyptic Mad Max themed Super Mario Bros cosplay in my life.

https://www.facebook.com/supercosplaybros/

The work of these two fabulous dudebros inspires me. Writing "A Game of Castles" was a lot of fun, but the story had a tight focus on Bowser and Peach and didn't pay too much attention to Mario. Although I have other business to attend to at the moment, I think one day I'd like to write the story (such as it is) from Mario's perspective. In my head, he is more or less Hunter S. Thompson, except that instead of journalism he has a strong commitment to murder.

Some lovely and wonderful person left a comment on one of my Powser fics saying that the bickering between Peach and Bowser reminds her of the dialog on Archer. I was like, What the fuck is Archer. Five hours later, the Netflix app on my PS4 was telling me that prolonged periods of physical inactivity may be accompanied by health risks.

What I've been trying to capture in the Peach/Bowser dynamic is a theme I'm going to call "adults being shitty to one another." I'm not into sexy kidnapping or any sort of Beauty and the Beast redemption nonsense; I'm into the idea that both characters have terrible personalities. Bowser is thoughtlessly obnoxious, Peach is cloyingly passive-aggressive, and they're both extremely narcissistic.

I thought I'd made good progress in how I write the characters, but watching Archer has taught me just how much of a novice I am at adults being shitty to one another. I need to step up my game, and I want to get started by writing flashfic. Here are some scenarios I came up with:

* Peach shits on Bowser for buying ridiculous things
* Bowser taunts Peach for not having children
* Peach cuts Bowser down for complaining about villainy and double standards
* Bowser mocks Peach for being obsessed with beauty products
* Peach gets up in Bowser's business for eating nothing but garbage
* Bowser tries to bully Peach into admitting she has a problem with alcohol
* Peach and Bowser bring on the snark as they speculate about who Mario and Luigi are dating
* Peach and Bowser accuse each other of being an unpopular character in Super Smash Bros
* Peach and Bowser get nasty and jealous about Zelda and Ganondorf
* Bowser gets sloppy drunk and calls Peach
* Peach watches Bridget Jones and calls Bowser

The romance, such as it is, needs to come from the sense that these two garbage people have somehow managed to find an equally garbage partner; and that, underneath their spiteful pettiness, they care about one another because of their flaws, not in spite of them. A lot of shipfic I read tries to normalize characters with difficult personalities through romance, but honestly bros, that sort of thing stopped being interesting to me a long time ago.

So this is a thing that I might be responsible for...



...and I never thought the world could be such a strange and beautiful place.

The artist is the incomparable Fungii, who I suspect is probably a legendary pokémon in real life.

This game is just too much fun. I can only play a few levels every night, though, because I can only maintain the requisite intensity of concentration for so long before I start dying every few seconds.

The pixelated graphics on my huge tv are gorgeous. I want to play more SNES games, but for some reason the stupid Nintendo eShop took down most of them. I especially want to replay Secret of Mana, but it's no longer on the Virtual Console. I've been side-eyeing A Link to the Past, but I keep telling myself NO BITCH DON'T DO IT. I need to finish Wind Waker first, but... there's just so much... sailing.

I finished the Bowser/Peach fic, and I'm currently in the hardcore editing phase. If it weren't staring me right in the face, I might have trouble believing that I wrote a 20,000 word story loosely based on Super Mario World. Meanwhile I've been hearing Super Mario Western Show more or less on permanent loop in my head since I started playing the game.

Some people are afraid that playing too many video games makes people violent, but they're wrong - I am what happens when you play too many video games.

I decided that the B plot to the Peach/Bowser fic I'm working on is going to involve Luigi chasing after Mario and despairing over what his life has become.

To get myself in the mood, I started re-reading Le Mythe de Sisyphe, but it's not as bleak as I remember it being.

I therefore asked Google "what is the bleakest existentialist shit," and the search returned a bizarre piece of absurdist writing titled 5 of The Worst Possible Things That Could Ever Happen To You. It's kind of brilliant:

And so I, ever the concerned teacher and human being, placed a figurative bookmark in my rousing lesson and asked this child what was wrong. After many agonizing seconds of waiting, me silently praying he wasn't going to bring up, say, existentialism or war or a pervading fog of meaninglessness, all of these Important Questions to which I could provide no comforting answer—and praying too that he wasn't going to vomit on/cry on/otherwise soil these handouts, as I really needed them for the next class—this poor, innocent child finally worked up the courage, despite an obvious fear of what the truth may be, to ask me if shrimp were made of milk.

For what it's worth, I think the bleakest existentialist shit is probably T.S. Eliot, but not even for the sake of a giant turtle monster banging a mushroom princess will I read The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock again.

* Beat the game
* Finished all the extra levels
* Got all the upgrades
* Found all the puzzle pieces

It's a gorgeous afternoon in Paris, where it already feels like fall. I got out of Israel just in time for Rosh Hashanah, thank god. Too many teenagers walking around with rifles. Anyway, in between going through three hours of security so I could get on a plane and actually flying, I finished Super Princess Peach. The Nintendo DS battery lasts approximately forever, true story.

Some people might consider this game to be "easy," but I'd rather label it as "low stress." There are two reasons for this. First, the levels are more like interactive mazes than obstacle courses, and there's no timer, so the player is free to take her time to explore them. Second, Peach starts off as powerful and gradually becomes even more powerful, so the obstacles the game does throw at the player can be overcome by creative problem solving instead of by platforming prowess. Of course you can treat the game like a platformer if you want to challenge yourself, and it's really fun to do speed runs.

The main thing about this game is that it's adorable. Three examples:

When Peach invokes her anger powers, she goes balls-out batshit; but, when she un-invokes them, she does this cute little animation where she shrugs her shoulders and brushes herself off before returning to normal. It is so badass.

When Peach beats a level boss, she frees a Toad, and she and the Toad clasp hands and spin around before doing a victory pose. At the end of the seventh level, Peach frees Luigi. When she tries to spin with him, he fucks it up and goes flying before falling to the ground. Peach looks at him to make sure he's okay before doing the victory pose by herself.

Bowser is just, I can't even. Words cannot. He is such an absolute dork and he is so clearly in ridiculous puppy love with Peach. The final boss fight is enormously fun and very silly.

I love these characters so much. There's no helping it; I just love them.