#cancel the apocalypse

[wuxiaphoenix]

Worldbuilding: To Zom, or Not To Zom, Be

Zpoc this, end of the world that... why can’t we just have a good old-fashioned Undead Horde arising, terrifying the living because it’s an army that can’t be normally killed, instead of an existential threat to Life As We Know It?

No, seriously, why not?

(Yes, this writer is feeling cranky and contrary.)

I have a lot of gripes with zombie apocalypse stories, especially World War Z - movie or book, take your pick. That one specifically pulled a lot of... people needlessly being idiots and cruel, in order to punch up the horror factor. Did not like.

Oddly enough the Zombie Survival Guide by the same author has a lot more optimistic outlook in its several “recorded outbreaks”, including the memorable zombies-vs-gang-war that ended decisively in the gangs’ favor. Which if you look at it logically makes sense; after all, if humans throughout history hadn’t been able to end those outbreaks before they reached zpoc status, the book couldn’t have been written in the first place!

The problem is that the author doesn’t translate the human factor in the historical bits into a viable human response in the zpoc book. Almost nobody writing a zpoc does. And this is... highly frustrating to me as a writer. I don’t write tragedies. I don’t write grimdark. I write stories where bad things may happen to good people, yes, but said good people use their heads and sheer unalloyed grit to try and find ways to come out alive. Because stories are about people. If the stories are about the zombies and life-threatening despair instead, then your story has already failed.

I grant you, there are some people who find catharsis through drenching themselves in a horror that is Not Real. I am definitely not one of them. (For one thing I know too much biology; and guess what, in real biology zombies exist. Mostly on the insect level, but still.) I do like reading about human responses to disaster, but instead of humans pulling together to survive, almost all zpocs are about horror, gore, and the dying of the light.

...Here I’m going to point to Kingdom (2019) as a known exception to that almost. There’s humans being stupid, there’s humans playing politics, there’s humans who try to use the zombies and unleash disaster, sure. But there are a fair number of people, especially the heroes, who are simply trying to make the best of the bad hands they’ve been dealt. They fear the zombies. They dread them. But they also think.

And if you think, and have a little time to prepare, zombies can be handled.

The advantage zombies have is swarming you as a horde. Control the terrain; make it so they can only come at you one or a few at a time.

Zombies only have the weapons they had in life, and human teeth are really not that effective at tearing into a person. Wear armor. Leather is good, but wear even several layers of cloth, and it might be enough. Don’t let them break the skin.

Zombies don’t feel pain. But they also don’t heal. If you can’t immediately kill them, disable them. Break bones. Break joints. Dump rocks on them, preferably from a high distance. Use a freaking boar spear - it’s designed to keep a thrashing body from punching the spear on through so it can kill you before it dies. Humans are tool-users. Find tools. Use them.

I want to see stories that give readers hope. I want to see canceled zpocs. Think about it. It can be done!

#creative writing #worldbuilding #zombies #netflix kingdom #kingdom 2019 #zombie apocalypse #cancel the apocalypse

[seeds-of-life-daily]

Day 41 Exiled from the kitchen forever

#neon genesis evangelion #rei ayanami #kaworu nagisa #Good thing campus apocalypse was cancelled cuz they would've burnt down the kitchen in 4 miliseconds #DO NOT let these kids make an omelet #gif

[bunabi]

devastating bread update: discovered sandwiches

#sweet bread with a honey glaze and salty salami and mayo inbetween uaaa the apocalypse is cancelled

[hellowyn-llewellyn]

THEY FUCKING CANCELED LEARNING WITH PIBBY

#Okay not cancelled since I guess it was never officially greenlight #but still #learning with pibby #pibby apocalypse

[short-wooloo]

The apocalypse is canceled in exactly one year

Make the most of it

#wooloo-writes #wooloo writes #pacific rim #cancel culture at it again #has it gone too far? #canceling the apocalypse #guillermo del toro #idris elba #stacker pentecost

[stainlesssteellocust]

Concept: Imperial world with absolutely huge ghastly creatures in the sea, I’m talking kaiju shit

the original Dark Age colonists have their STCs spit out Knight suits to protect themselves, as per, but these ones are specialised for water and amphibious combat, for agility and fighting in changing conditions.

Pacific Rim: Grim Dark Future edition. Their House is called for whenever the Imperium is fucking about on some water-heavy planet or moon

#alternately when the Imperium and Mechanicum come for em they promptly Cancel The Apocalypse #warhammer #warhammer 40000 #warhammer 40k #imperial knights #mecha #pacific rim

[zitasaurusrex]

Werewolf: the Apocalypse fans should read J.F. Sambrano's account of their experiences working on Werewolf 5th Edition, and in particular how much of a miserable struggle it was to get Paradox to approve ANY of even the most basic of the extremely necessary changes that needed to be made re: Indigenous appropriation and stereotyping in WtA.

I also think their points about unpaid cultural consulting work and the way companies only care about these kind of issues if they're presented as a potential PR problem are things a lot of people need to hear.

When I first heard about what the Hunters team was working on and got to see what Sambrano in particular was saying about the project, I had hope the new edition of Werewolf would finally fix so many of this game's problems in this area and make it easier to enjoy the things that are good about it without continuing to bring along some of its worst problems.

I was really excited to see important changes like giving the Native American tribes better names, but now that I know it was a grudging concession and how poorly the person who fought the hardest for it was treated....

Well.

#so yeah I'm canceling a preorder... #werewolf: the apocalypse

[chickentunasalad566]

if you're super worried about how st is gonna treat their queer characters here's a reminder that shawn levy(an executive producer on ST) was also an executive producer for I am not okay with this and gave us these scenes in less than 3 hours :)

#watch i am not okay w this #stranger things #hoping we get something similar w robin #im still so mad this show got cancelled #i know its during an apocalypse but like if we get anything similar to this ill be so happy #robin buckley #robin x vickie #byler #will byers #mike wheeler #will x mike #st4 #text post #netflix hates lesbians but we can dream!!!!

[dailyadventureprompts]

Deity: Lysthazo, Mistress of the Unforgiving Sea

“Pray to your Gods of Shore and Tide, child of the land. These waters are not for you and they will not hold you when your little boat sinks beneath the waves.“

-Eelgrin the merrowguide

To hear the sailors tell it  Lysthazo, goddess of merfolk and those places of the ocean unsullied by the land, defies what most would come to expect of a deity by scorning those who invoke her in prayer. She is a goddess of take, not give, and the best one can hope for is to offer silent deference and hope that the seas are calm tomorrow. Still, that does not mean Lysthazo does not have a following among whalers and those others who spend too long far from friendly ports,  who settle into a love-hate relationship with the “Bitch of the Brine” as she delivers them luck with one hand and endless tribulation with the other.

Adventure Hooks:

Rumors in the harbor tell of a ship that beached itself some days up the coast, it’s crew so desperate to make land that they didn’t even try to aim for port. While exploring the hulk or questioning one of the crew, the party discovers hints that these sailors went ashore to a jungle island looking for treasure. They instead found the shrine of some terrible sea goddess which they desicrated in their search for plunder, earning the goddess’s wrath in the form of some great leviathan that’s been hunting them ever since. As it turns out, this leviathan is still on its way, and will likely raise the nearby settlement in its search for the cursed crew.

A spree of on-land drownings among the city’s importers and rare animal dealers leads the party to a mermaid cleric. Far from the sea thanks to a cleverly constructed driftwood wheelchair she has come seeking her niece who was abducted from their home and sold up river to decorate some heartless noble’s menagerie. The heroes are faced with a difficult decision: abetting a murderer in her rightious quest or siding with a kidnapper for a bounty.

Sorting through a great treasure haul, the party end up discovering a rune-carved conch shell that echos audibly with crashing waves. In attmepting to tinker with it and discover its purpose the party unleashes an unending tide of briny water that floods them out of wherever they happen to be staying and carries with it a mischievous elemental in the form of an octopus that steals the conch and scuttles off somewhere to hide. Now faced with the prospect of unchecked flooding from a source they can’t plug, the party must search the town for the shell while it’s many armed owner causes problems on purpose.

Those born beneath the waters have a very different relationship with the goddess, calling her the “artist in currents” and conceiving of her as the one who gives order to the oceans many cycles as she seeds life in those sheltered places where it can thrive. Coral shoals are her gardens, schools of fish the dabbings of her paintbrush, echoing whalesong the tune she hums while she works. Even then the merfolk, tritons, and Kou-toa who revere her do not think of her as a strictly benevolent goddess, as Lysthazo’s artistic bent is understood as one that prioritizes new work over old and though she attended to their peoples closely during the dawn age it is known she has set her interest on bigger things at present.

Lysthazo’s most infamous aspect is as the “Mother of Kaiju”, an inapt title as she does not birth the beasts herself, but instead spurs their creation in a series of deepsea trenches scattered throughout the multiverse. In these pressured depths she stokes engines of rapid mutation and accelerated darwanism, wrenching promising examples from their place in the foodchain to hurl out into the ocean at large and observe how they perform. There is vaugery in whether these monsterous emergences are truely the acts of the goddess herself or merely her most sunken and devoted followers spilling out into the wider seas.

Titles: She who is vast and vasterstill, Mother of Kaiju, The devil of the depths, “bitch of the brine” “dancer in currents”

Signs: collected water appearing unaturlaly deep such as in wells, streams, or drinking glasses. The spontaneous growth of coral or tidepool ecologies, aquatic animals developing bioluminescence or other strange

Symbols: A wide vessel overflowing with water, entangled or chimeric sea creatures,

Followers: Those who live far from land, merfolk, trion, kou-toa, and may other creatures of the deep. Biomancers of an aquatic bent, Kaiju groupies.

#we are cancelling the apocalypse #deity #divinity: water #divinity: sea #divinity: monsters #Merfolk #low level #mid level #high level #kaiju #seaside #elemental #elemental: water #mystery #rescue mission #pirates

[nnthyperfixation]

Okay but the fact that Gawain shares so many traits with Escanor and Merlin, from appearance to personality and everything else. Were it not for his death in the Demon King arc I would totally buy that she's their daughter.

More under cut (4KoTA chapter 107 spoilers ahead)

First we see her using the same magic with Escanor (or more like, Mael's grace, but you know what I mean).

Not only that, but her power has a time limit as well. Once she runs out of magic, she will turn from a muscular mature-looking woman to a small girl. Just like how Escanor is a strong hunk when it's daytime, but turn into a weak and skinny man at night. It is probable that Sunshine applies different after-effects depends on who the user is.

Does this even need saying. Her arrogant attitude. Chastising others for "ruining her romance and mood".

She also has a habit of saying coquettish and poetic things towards the woman (or women) she likes. I'm seeing parallels here.

Now onto Merlin parallels. It is obvious from the very first look that she vaguely resembles Merlin with her hair and eye. Not only that, she also possesses similar powers with Merlin, Absolute Cancel, Teleportation, and Levitation as she tends to float freely in the air in her child form.

Still, her personality is more similar to Escanor's. The other thing that resembles Merlin in her is probably her love for pudding and insisting her reward to be a whole barrel of pudding, which could be counts as some form of gluttony, I guess.

That was until chapter 107 came out.

Now we definitely see Merlin in her. We see her as a lost child who seeks answers just like Merlin's hunger for knowledge. Merlin left the sins to go with Arthur in order to find the answer of chaos and fill the void in her heart, Gawain left Arthur to go with the knights in order to find the answer of who she is. Sweet sweet parallels.

Also the fact that her outfit is a literal fusion of Escanor's and Merlin's. Like Nakaba literally copy pasted their outfits onto her

And the fact that the resemblance is recognized by Meliodas, their old comrade, too! Nakaba is definitely cooking something with her I can tell.

#i think gawain is my favourite character in 4kota #maybe im shipping escalin too much #but i really like her personality #she's pretty well written and an interesting character lore-wise #its really interesting how she has no idea who her mother is #this has something to do with merlin #i don't think merlin is her mother but was probably her master/mentor at some point #i mean how else did she learn absolute cancel #i think the identity of her mother may play a major plot point later on #4kota #four knights of the apocalypse #escanor #merlin nnt #nanatsu no taizai #seven deadly sins #7ds #4kota spoilers

[anneapocalypse]

I like your post about gray morality in video games! On the other hand I wanted to add that the gray decision-making you're talking about can have its own pitfalls (distinct from the pitfalls of centrist/apolitical "both sides are bad" apathy). I'm thinking of gritty action heroes who are presented as morally gray because they're pragmatic enough to torture and kill in the name of Truth, Justice, and the 'Murican Way, or just in the name of a macho revenge fantasy. To be clear, this isn't an indictment of gray morality, which I love when done well. Hell, the stories I'm complaining about tend not to be THAT gray in practice, as the bad guys are often SO exaggeratedly bad that there's not a real question of whether the hero is willing to Do What It Takes in the end. My point is more just that that's what people often mean when they condemn "gray morality."

Hi! Sorry this has been sitting my ask box for a while, I got busy and didn't want to just dash off a response.

(We're talking about this post, for those who haven't seen it. RIP my notifications.)

Anyway I'll just say here for the record that yeah, gray morality in fiction can be done poorly! While the line for "done poorly" is going to be different for everyone, I can certainly think of examples I've disliked.

(This got long, sorry in advance. 😩 Also, spoilers for Fallout 3 and all the Dragon Age games, if anyone cares!)

My go-to example of one I think is a real stinker is the Fallout 3 DLC "The Pitt" where the critical decision is... whether to free a bunch of people from being enslaved in horrible conditions! But! in order to free them, you have to kidnap a baby from... the enslaver. Because something something the baby's genetics are the key to curing the illness that afflict the slaves from their horrible working conditions... you don't actually have to hurt the baby, though, she'll be fine. She'll just be taken away from her parents. Who are, again, slavers. I promise I'm not making it sound any stupider than it sounds in the game itself. :P Like the whole concept of putting an infant in your video game inventory and making a break for it is just a little too wacky for me to take seriously, but it feels like you're meant to take it seriously, and apart from trying to inject some ambiguity into the decision, I'm not sure why the whole baby plot would even be there. Honestly, Fallout 3 isn't a game about moral ambiguity. (I think both New Vegas and even Fallout 4 do that kind of thing better.) Most of its major decisions boil down to "Do you want to do the Good Person Thing or the Evil Bastard thing?" That's the game. No one is trying to inject moral ambiguity into blowing up Megaton. It's just a thing you can do if you want to roleplay an Evil Character. I love Fallout 3, I'm just saying, that's what it is. And I think "The Pitt" would have been both more thematically appropriate and less stupid if it had just skipped the whole baby plot and been like "Hey! Do you want to be the Good Person who frees the slaves, or the Evil Bastard who allies with the slaver?" It's morally simple, but the thing is the baby didn't actually make that story or the decision any more interesting to me, so it might as well not have been there at all.

But Fallout 3 isn't the kind of thing I was thinking of when I made that post. I was thinking a lot more about things like the decisions in the Dragon Age games, which don't usually fall neatly into The Good Option and The Evil Option, and are more likely to ask the player to make their own judgments. And a common criticism I see of those games is that they're "centrist" and try to "both sides" in-universe issues because the game doesn't explicitly tell you which choice is The Good One, or it doesn't explicitly reward one choice and punish the other, and that's... not really an interpretation that I generally agree with? But that's a much more involved discussion, honestly. At some point, I'd like to write a post about how I feel Inquisition presents the mage rebellion, because it's such a big topic and big game (and by "I'd like to" I mean... I already have a draft started, whoops). That's just more than I have time to get into today!

But I will say this: I find the plot decisions where you're given an obvious "best option" to be the least interesting choices in the Dragon Age games. The Redcliffe decision in Origins is the most obvious one to me, where I think the option to save Connor from possession should at least have been much harder to find, because in the lore, the fact that mages even can be saved from possession and not just killed is widely unknown because it goes against the templar party line, and the fact that Ferelden's First Enchanter is just like, "Oh yeah, sure, we can totally do that, pack up the lyrium boys" just doesn't really mesh with everything else we're told about the Circles and conventional wisdom on magic. Plus, the fact that there's no consequences for leaving Redcliffe for days with Connor possessed just... makes the decision too easy, for me, because in-universe it feels like it shouldn't be that easy. There's also the werewolf decision, wherein the Lady of the Forest just tells you straight out that Zathrian can break the curse with his own death, presenting you with a "best option" that it feels both stupid and sort of comically evil to disregard (like, from a purely pragmatic standpoint why would you fight the entire pack of werewolves or an entire clan of elves when you can just make Zathrian solve the problem here and now).

The ending decision of DA2 is an example that I feel has a really stark moral contrast to it (which I've discussed before), and one that I think does place certain constraints on role-playing, but in that case I think it's appropriate to the themes of the game, so I don't mind it.

But my favorite plot decisions in Dragon Age are things like the Landsmeet, the Winter Palace, and even the Orzammar quest line. Not just because I love fantasy politics, but because you have to work with what you're given in a way that feels realistic to the setting and the story. No matter how much of a hero you are, you can't waltz into Orzammar or Denerim or Halamshiral and brute-force a perfect solution. Unless you're a dwarf yourself, you're an outsider who doesn't know anything about dwarven politics and no one is particularly forthcoming about the situation because everyone has an agenda! and yet you have to solve this conflict in order to get aid against the Blight. You have to make a decision based on very little information and almost none of it concrete. At the Landsmeet, you may want justice, but it's your word against Loghain's with no proof of what really happened at Ostagar, and if you want to win you need provable charges, you need to show the nobles that you support their interests and not just your own, and no matter which butt you put on the throne, you're faced with the very real possibility of another succession crisis a few decades on so congratulations, you've just kicked the can down the road.

And oh, the Winter Palace, my beloved. You cannot make Briala the Empress, no matter how much you might want to! You cannot abolish the monarchy. You cannot force Orlais to relinquish the Dales and re-establish the Elven state. Your options are: keep the empress whose reign overall has been sympathetic to elves and commoners and relatively diplomatic toward her neighbors, but who also may have just done a good old fashioned massacre to crush a rebellion and maintain her power; let her be killed and put the militant expansionist on the throne; get Briala and Celene back together (maybe with the hope that Briala will continue to influence her); help Briala do a blackmail which surely will work out totally fine and not backfire in anyway; or force them all to shut up and play ball for now, basically just kicking the can down the road. None of these options are perfect by any means! There are interesting and believable in-character reasons you might choose to role-play any of them. And every one has the possibility of unforeseen consequences later on, positive or negative.

I made the original post, in part, in response to condemnations of the kind of decisions I enjoy in these games. And at the end of the day, it's okay not to like those decisions, to prefer more unambiguous choices or more room to indulge in the fantasy of fixing everything. But that's not always the kind of story a game is trying to tell, and I think that's fine, and personally I enjoy the complicated decisions more. And I feel like sometimes those complicated or ambiguous choices are read as if they're either presenting all options as morally equivalent when they're not, or that they're "punishing" the player for a choice if it has any kind of negative outcome, and I don't think that's the case! I think it's fine and good in fiction to explore the ways in which trying to change things for the better can be difficult and how a choice with some negative consequences may still be the best one available, and so on and so forth.

Anyway, I hope I didn't get too far afield here, and thanks if you read this far!

#gray morality #this is so long i'm sorry #anne apocalypse making you sorry you asked since 2011 #blunders of thedas #fallout 3 critical #prewar parkstrolling #ask anne #who cancelled roger rabbit

[fujihelexicon]

Since Idris Elba is DJing at Coachella this weekend, I'd just like to say that I personally think at least one of his songs should sample

before the absolute sickest bass drop. god id lose my absolute mind.

#idris elba #coachella #pacific rim #stacker pentecost #today we are cancelling the apocalypse #arthur be quiet

[damnedrainbows]

the sky was green and now it’s a blinding white

and now it’s hailing?

and I think I might die

#it called for rain NOT THE APOCALYPSE #thank god for noise canceling headphones but honestly? #can’t see outside #(ooc)

[mel-ander]

I love how Blood of Eden names work, but Jod willing if having a literature quote as a name was socially acceptable here I would misuse it so badly. It would take me like 9 seconds to be like “Actually Pacific Rim IS classic literature and you WILL refer to me as Today We Are Canceling The Apocalypse.”

#tlt #the locked tomb #boe #pacific rim #how much do you have to tip for it to be okay to give your name as Today We Are Canceling The Apocalypse at Starbucks?

[odekirk]

we have distinguishable clouds i repeat we have distinguishable clouds

#today we are CANCELING THE APOCALYPSE!

[eulangelo]

i dont think theres ever been any major historical event that i cared less about than the actors strike. thats literally the most uneventful irrelevant shit that could happen

#txt #im sorry u expect me to give a shit abt millionaires or abt cancelled tv shows or movies that suck ass when theres war and inflation #and climate apocalypse #literally any and everyone involved in this strike could die right now i would not give a fuck #hollywood could explode under a fucking meteorite i would be happy i dont need any more movies or shows ever in my life #plus celebrities lives just dont matter to me