Which Locked Tomb character combo do YOU think is featured in the new Locked Tomb short story coming this fall (in the paperback of Nona)?
Teacher & John
Ianthe & Palimedes
Gideon & Gideon
Mercymorn & Camilla
This might be egotistical of me but if anyone wants to give the staff feedback but isn't sure what to write that's more productive than just "it looks like twitter and we all hate it," here's what I wrote. Feel free to riff on my points o/
The new dashboard layout is feels counter-intuitive to your established users and has some serious UX issues. There's no reason for a blogging platform to go out of its way to look like fast-paced social media, so the twitter-reminiscent layout just feels cramped and overly busy. The new left-hand menu is especially frustrating, not only does it contribute the most to the visual clutter, it doesn't feel streamlined to give access to the things people are likely to look for most often--most notably, opening the "activity" panel now covers up the dashboard instead of being offset to the right, and navigating to my own sideblogs now requires clicking and scrolling past information that I don't need to regularly access from the dashboard.
If you're not going to reinstate the original layout, or allow users to toggle between them, then at the very least it would be nice to be able to collapse the left-hand menu to only icons, and to have "Blogs" separated out into its own dropdown instead of being hidden inside the "Account" menu. I also think the right-hand column could simply be used more efficiently by partitioning some of the menu content out, since once you scroll past the radar it's just dead space.
Ultimately, I think it would be valuable to remember that you have an established userbase who specifically chose tumblr because it's NOT twitter, instagram, facebook, etc. You're never going to be able to "tweak" tumblr enough to be a 1:1 competitor to those sites, and presumably that isn't your goal in the first place, so trying to mimic them on a purely aesthetic level isn't going to draw in the people who are already comfortable on those sites, but it will alienate the people who were trying to avoid them. If my favorite burger place starts trying to compete with the sushi place across the street by putting raw fish on all their burgers, I'm going to stop going there for burgers OR sushi, and I'm not going to recommend it to anyone else either.
It’s kind of wild how everyone sells Robert Chambers’ The King in Yellow as, well
But then it’s mostly just
In the Repairer of Reputations, it’s clear that Hildred Castaigne was delusional before he encountered the work, and he even says somethings that are outright contradicted by the facts on the ground. It’s also, contrary to the popular idea that the whole book is Parisian decadence, set in a near future 1920 USA, and the play’s lore is mostly there to set up the Last King- Castaigne’s delusion that he is the rightful heir of an extraterrestrial American monarchy. It’s so different from what follows it in the mythos.
The yellow sign is something completely different than some great old one repellent/summoning aigil. It’s this Poe-adjacent gothic fascination story.
But as for the second life of the King in the Mythos, it’s so much more interesting and creepy if the King in Yellow isn’t real (a god), but the eldritch abomination is the King in Yellow, the play. Like, the phenomenon is the temporal-spatial rote of performing the play, to the point that even staging it in your imagination can cause problems. I also like the blurring of location and entity, as Hastur originated as a shepherd god in Bierce’s Haïta the Shepherd but is probably meant to be a place in Chambers, and the blurring of artifice and nonexistence, as with the mask in the except from the play that serves as an epigraph to the Mask.
Also, I like the idea that the play doesn’t cause the generic babbling insanity of the lesser Mythos entries. What the King in Yellow does is destroy your ability to distinguish fact from fiction, causing bleed into the themes and motifs of the play as the play colonizes your (now semiliteral) headspace.
Yes, Castaigne, you are descended from the alien royalty, you are obviously the last king of America, no notes
you want to help stop tumblr from murdering itself? here's how!
i encourage you to reblog this so we can get as many people leaving feedback as humanly possible. we need to let staff know this is an utterly terrible idea
by the way, tumblr has turned off asks on all of their staff blogs, so this is the only way to tell tumblr how you feel
here it is again because uh. seems relevant.
If there is ever a live action adaptation of Gideon the Ninth, the ONLY acceptable way to do it would be in the style of a competitive reality TV show. Each of them has a one line introduction like *from beneath the deep veil of a goth nun habit* “I am the Reverend Daughter Harrowhark Nonagesimus, the greatest necromancer of my generation, and I did not come here to make friends. I came here to win.” And then we cut to the creepy Eighth guy in an interview segment and he’s saying “those heretical shadow cultists? I can’t even eat with them around. Whether I win or loose, I KNOW I’m not letting that creepy bitch ascend to Lyctorhood.” And then Teacher starts narrating “it’s only day one, and the competition is already heating up, but we still have a long way to go to find who the Next Top Lyctor will be. Now let us pray.” There’s those dramatic zoom ins and those drum sound effect and someone gasping whenever a body is found. Whenever someone storms off it’s filmed like when a cameraman follows someone storming off the sound stage after a particularly bad fight going “I’m done, I’m fucking done.” Harrow keeps telling the cameras to stop following her. After Ianthe says something deeply fucked up at the worst time, it cuts to her in a confessional segment going “Listen, I just tell it like it is, and I’m not afraid to stir the pot.” Do you see my vision?
It slowly shifts style, following the darkening tone of the book, until eventually it's basically a found footage horror movie interrupted by the occasional increasingly fucked up confessional from Ianthe, culminating in the big fight at the end which is all cloverfield style. The cameraman dies right before Gideon, with just her legs in frame when she jumps on the fence. The conversation between Harrow and John at the end is like the award ceremony at the end of the season, where she visibly goes off script to beg for Gideon's life. John says no, and we cut to one last confessional which is just Harrow staring at the camera in silence for an uncomfortable amount of time while her eyes grow ever tearier, until Ianthe throws open the door behind her with a scalpel or a bonesaw or something and says some shit like "oh, there you are, Harry. Shall I get inside you now?"
Every so often it cuts to a commercial break that's just propaganda for the armies of the nine houses, which feature rousing drum & fife music, plucky commentary, and arresting footage of teenagers getting bravely blown up in the name of their emperor. It cuts back to the competition without comment.
