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Illustration commission for @commsroom π₯

@commsroom / commsroom.tumblr.com
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Illustration commission for @commsroom π₯
Eiffel and Hera commission for the lovely @commsroom I loved drawing these two, just having a movie night π½οΈπ Thank you so much for supporting me! Commissions are open at my kofi
βSometimes my heart feels too big for my body so I try to throw it away Or give it away [β¦] When I say I love you, what I mean is today my world exploded into a million shards of granite and there you were, beaming There you were refracting the sun into a perfect starβ
β William James, from β[Iβm done trying to make sense],β The Shore (no. 12,Β Winter 2021)
going to say something possibly controversial here, but a side effect of the wolf 359 writers not being star trek fans (and even being unaware that the title/choice of star might be perceived as a reference) is that we also have to infer eiffel is not that into star trek either. like if he was, thatβs not a reference he would pass up, oh, maybe a few hundred times? he would be insufferable. thereβs no way around this.
minkowski takes forever to reply to texts because she treats it like she's replying to emails, and only ever responds in full, structured sentences with proper capitalization. she was taught the already kind of outdated two-spaces-after-period formatting and she still retains the habit in everything she types. and she's slow at typing. she has a signature on her texts with her full name and contact information.
eiffel takes forever to reply to texts because he simply doesn't want to, and/or he sees it and doesn't immediately respond, so he forgets about it forever. and when you do get a text from him, it's incomprehensible. he abbreviates entire sentences and references that nobody else could possibly decode. you get a text from eiffel that says something like "Ok thx. Smbg2mds π₯€" and, while you're trying to decipher what that could possibly mean, you get an almost three-minute voice message from him telling you the 7-11 slurpee machine is broken so he's going to mcdonald's. and it's like okay well that was the least convenient way you could've done any of this.
i want eiffel and minkowski to go camping together so bad, like i know minkowski loves camping. eiffel loves the idea of saying he's going camping. eiffel loves the romanticized pop culture version of camping he imagines in his brain, where he gets to listen to music by the fire and eat smores. eiffel wants to feel like a rugged outdoorsman but, like, with access to modern comforts.
minkowski is actually outdoorsy and likes some challenge, so to her "camping" means long hikes and roughing it as off-the-grid as she can justify. eiffel cannot be taken off grid. eiffel's favorite outdoor hobby is handing someone one of his handmade walkie talkies and being like, okay, stay here, i'm going to drive in that direction and see how far i can radio you from. eiffel is out there building stuff out of their camping equipment to see if he can pick up signals. but when he's actually supposed to set up his tent, he can not do it. maybe he lost some of the parts along the way, but he keeps making it worse, and even minkowski can't salvage it. then it starts pouring rain on them, because of course it does.
eiffel sleeps in the truck and cramps his neck up so badly, and when he wakes up minkowski gives him black coffee and trail mix for breakfast and he looks at it so despondently that she's like ugh, fine, nevermind. and they give up and get breakfast at denny's and go home. and eiffel is like oh thank god, hot water, indoor plumbing, my own bed, i'll never take this for granted again <- guy who spent literally one night in the woods, and also years stranded in space.
hey abt the ask u got abt if eiffel vapes I did, to win an argument, tweet that very question at the w359 Twitter while the show was running LMAO
oh hey!! taking that as confirmation. i hope it doesn't sound too self-centered to say, like, i'm always excited to find out the writers have given similar answers that i wasn't aware of, even when it's about inconsequential stuff like 'would eiffel vape.' it reassures me i'm picking up on the right things.
making hera manage a space station is inhumane. she's supposed to be creating unmarketable art. post-canon hera makes like fifteen dollars a month off niche experimental multimedia poetry zines, eiffel is begging people to listen to his music on bandcamp (between an assortment of jobs that would be perfectly fine, if he could hold any of them for longer than two months), and they are both so, so lucky minkowski cares about them so much.
i think an interesting thing about change of mind is that its initial conceit could not apply in the same way for the next hephaestus crew, like, if they'd been put through their own box 953 "team building exercises." one, because hilbert and lovelace would know (though i'm sure cutter accounted for hilbert, and i'm sure he was told to just lie if it came up.) two, because eiffel is shockingly good at recognizing his gut feeling when something is off, and would immediately call half of those tricks (particularly if eris attempted to impersonate hera; that would not have worked.) and three, because hera could not be narratively sidelined the way they did with rhea, and her presence in any form would drastically alter the parameters of a test like that. you could even have her be there, really, and. i'm glad it didn't happen canonically, but i wonder especially. if hera had ever been put in a "you're not really here either" space like that with all of her crewmates, how might they have perceived her differently.
if eiffel had been put in a change of mind scenario and eris tried to pull the "you're back on the hephaestus" fakeout, it would literally take him two seconds. eris would say one sentence as "hera" and eiffel would get suspicious and start grilling her with questions (he thinks) only hera would know the answers to, and then get a twinge in his hand and complain about the twinge in his hand. and then he would be like. hey. wait a minute. and start referencing, i don't know. some dream within a dream pop culture pull. inception.
i think an interesting thing about change of mind is that its initial conceit could not apply in the same way for the next hephaestus crew, like, if they'd been put through their own box 953 "team building exercises." one, because hilbert and lovelace would know (though i'm sure cutter accounted for hilbert, and i'm sure he was told to just lie if it came up.) two, because eiffel is shockingly good at recognizing his gut feeling when something is off, and would immediately call half of those tricks (particularly if eris attempted to impersonate hera; that would not have worked.) and three, because hera could not be narratively sidelined the way they did with rhea, and her presence in any form would drastically alter the parameters of a test like that. you could even have her be there, really, and. i'm glad it didn't happen canonically, but i wonder especially. if hera had ever been put in a "you're not really here either" space like that with all of her crewmates, how might they have perceived her differently.
Hello !! Do you have thoughts on Rhea :]
yes, i do!! with the caveat that we have such limited information on lovelace's crew, what we do have is almost entirely filtered through her perspective, and we kinda... know rhea the least. as much as i find eris a fascinating character too, i wish we'd heard more of rhea.
which is kind of the first thing: rhea is the only AI character in wolf 359 who doesn't have a voice. (we don't hear hyperion's voice, which is supposedly not integrated yet, but he's not even really treated like a character in the scene he's in. and that's a whole other thing.) for hera in particular, she feels a physical disconnect from the others, but the fact that wolf 359 is audio only makes her an equal presence from the perspective of the audience. (which carries over to the live show, where the other characters may not be able to see her, but the audience can, etc.) rhea's situation is kind of the opposite, where her words can be seen by the others, but the audience can only hear or infer her words via what the others read out loud or respond to.
rhea clearly cares about her fellow crewmates, and seems to get along with lambert in particular. lovelace's log: "and communications officer lambert is... communications officer lambert. so an enormous stick in the mud. [...] i heard that, rhea. you are expressly forbidden from telling him i said that." - a sentiment it's easy to imagine early minkowski expressing about eiffel and hera, for the opposite reason. in a more direct parallel, rhea reassures lambert that he "does a great job"; in bach to the future, hera tells eiffel he's "actually very good at his job." the difference in context highlights their priorities; eiffel and hera are having a heart to heart about worthiness, while rhea really is talking about lambert's job - work is important to him, and most people around him don't respect or appreciate his work. what we can infer about rhea is that she's... well, the kind of person who would be lambert's friend. straightforward, rule-following, and professional.
(even something like "see, rhea? i told you someone read [my reports to command]" indicates that they talk to each other a fair amount, but also serves as a mirror to eiffel's belief no one listens to his logs.)
maybe the most interesting thing to me about rhea is her defense of eris: "it's just the way they programmed her, back off." ... again, the complete opposite of how hera might respond. eiffel tries to "defend" her in a similar way in ep 7 - "you can't really hold that against her; it's just her programming" - and she finds it incredibly insulting. with all of that taken together, with how lovelace, lambert, and rhea are in many ways intentional opposites to minkowski, eiffel, and hera, it really makes me wonder how rhea identifies or perceives herself.
i think hera is functionally human, both in her singular, consistent image of herself, and in her role in the narrative. eris appears human to lovelace, but is clear that it's how she sees "a version of herself." whether that refers to that iteration of eris having multiple versions of herself, or if it refers to all of the iterations of her who exist: either way it's a reflection of the way eris exists, and her acceptance of that. by extension, the fact that we don't encounter rhea in any way other than beeping sounds and implied words on station monitors... kind of says something narratively, i think. going back to her lack of voice, even that level of distance and abstraction takes her further away from 'human' perceptions by the audience, while she's obviously still a full person with her own priorities, perspectives, and opinions. i think it's very interesting to consider she might prefer her state of (lack of physical) existence in a way hera clearly does not.
βBack before we had conceived of this special and of hearing a lot of these characters we had this sort of conceit with Rhea, where Rhea is a pre-verbal A.I. She does not have as good of a voice matrix as Hera does.
When it came time to write this script we had a real problem on our hands, which is, we need Rhea to feel like she is present as part of the story but with no way of effectively knowing what she is saying.
And it took a little bit of trial and error but we eventually arrived at a two-pronged solution where if ever Rhea is communicating important information- which is conveyed to the characters by text that pops up on the screen and you hear her text chimes under her processing beeps- if thereβs ever anything there important for the audience to know, itβs presented as one of the characters reading it to everyone else.
And then the other big part of it was at all other times you would be able to figure out what Rhea is saying by the context of the other characters responding. You donβt need to know exactly what her words were to figure out what she said.
I think possibly one of the big failings of this though is that we still donβt have a good sense of who Rhea is as a person. As an audience member you kind of have to project what you think she is onto that person, and she is the character that I think is least well-served by this special and aside from the one scene that she has with Lambert, all other times she is purely functional and then she gets taken over by an evil invading presence for 75% of the script.
She is absent from the majority of the story even if she doesnβt seem to be absent. I wish I had written just one big Rhea scene, to give her her due.β
- Gabriel Urbina, quoted from the commentary for special episode Change Of Mind
Commission of Doug Eiffel from te Wolf 359 podcast for @commsroom β¨
Commissions (open) | Patreon | Ko-fi
Hello !! Do you have thoughts on Rhea :]
yes, i do!! with the caveat that we have such limited information on lovelace's crew, what we do have is almost entirely filtered through her perspective, and we kinda... know rhea the least. as much as i find eris a fascinating character too, i wish we'd heard more of rhea.
which is kind of the first thing: rhea is the only AI character in wolf 359 who doesn't have a voice. (we don't hear hyperion's voice, which is supposedly not integrated yet, but he's not even really treated like a character in the scene he's in. and that's a whole other thing.) for hera in particular, she feels a physical disconnect from the others, but the fact that wolf 359 is audio only makes her an equal presence from the perspective of the audience. (which carries over to the live show, where the other characters may not be able to see her, but the audience can, etc.) rhea's situation is kind of the opposite, where her words can be seen by the others, but the audience can only hear or infer her words via what the others read out loud or respond to.
rhea clearly cares about her fellow crewmates, and seems to get along with lambert in particular. lovelace's log: "and communications officer lambert is... communications officer lambert. so an enormous stick in the mud. [...] i heard that, rhea. you are expressly forbidden from telling him i said that." - a sentiment it's easy to imagine early minkowski expressing about eiffel and hera, for the opposite reason. in a more direct parallel, rhea reassures lambert that he "does a great job"; in bach to the future, hera tells eiffel he's "actually very good at his job." the difference in context highlights their priorities; eiffel and hera are having a heart to heart about worthiness, while rhea really is talking about lambert's job - work is important to him, and most people around him don't respect or appreciate his work. what we can infer about rhea is that she's... well, the kind of person who would be lambert's friend. straightforward, rule-following, and professional.
(even something like "see, rhea? i told you someone read [my reports to command]" indicates that they talk to each other a fair amount, but also serves as a mirror to eiffel's belief no one listens to his logs.)
maybe the most interesting thing to me about rhea is her defense of eris: "it's just the way they programmed her, back off." ... again, the complete opposite of how hera might respond. eiffel tries to "defend" her in a similar way in ep 7 - "you can't really hold that against her; it's just her programming" - and she finds it incredibly insulting. with all of that taken together, with how lovelace, lambert, and rhea are in many ways intentional opposites to minkowski, eiffel, and hera, it really makes me wonder how rhea identifies or perceives herself.
i think hera is functionally human, both in her singular, consistent image of herself, and in her role in the narrative. eris appears human to lovelace, but is clear that it's how she sees "a version of herself." whether that refers to that iteration of eris having multiple versions of herself, or if it refers to all of the iterations of her who exist: either way it's a reflection of the way eris exists, and her acceptance of that. by extension, the fact that we don't encounter rhea in any way other than beeping sounds and implied words on station monitors... kind of says something narratively, i think. going back to her lack of voice, even that level of distance and abstraction takes her further away from 'human' perceptions by the audience, while she's obviously still a full person with her own priorities, perspectives, and opinions. i think it's very interesting to consider she might prefer her state of (lack of physical) existence in a way hera clearly does not.
I just started listening to Midnight Burger and the only thing I can think about is this space-time defying diner just landing smack dab next to the Hephaestus and what utter tomfoolery would ensue when the crews met
i have to be honest, i have never heard this podcast, or basically any podcast anyone has ever recommended to me, and that will probably not change. i have One Show. i've heard good things, though!!
ep 17 "some brainiac decided it'd be a good idea to put an element of randomization into our personality cores" vs. ep 61 "humanity has done... okay on its own. we just think it's time to take some of the randomness out of the equation"... hera describing the people lobotomized by pryce as "human dummy programs"... there's so much you could say about how all the ways hera has been made to feel different are deconstructed over the course of the show. how the dear listeners' duplicates could be described in the same terms as goddard's AIs - and how that's paralleled between eris and lovelace in change of mind (the reminder that "you can be more [than what you were made to be]" applies as much to lovelace's relationship to the dear listeners as it does her trauma re: goddard), and then hera and lovelace from that point on (especially in terms of how they're dehumanized)...
another consideration about hera's autonomy is how, the way she exists, she is always at risk of being surveilled and being used as an unwilling surveillance tool. her thoughts are never fully private - the others are at risk of that from pryce, but there are additional steps required to gain access to their minds. anyone with above a certain level of competency with AI could gain access to hera's thoughts. maxwell does this all the time, with or without hera's permission: reading directly from her thought stream, going into her head and looking through her memories, etc. and those are the things that are comparatively benign and under more justifiable circumstances.
it's implied that hera can focus more of her attention in certain areas if she chooses to, but she also doesn't really have a say in being everywhere, all the time - she can't turn it off without someone externally disconnecting parts of her sensory system. she cannot give the others privacy, and that's a violation on both parts. basically every antagonist in the show, in varying ways, takes advantage of hera for information via her constant, involuntary surveillance of the people she cares about - to the point they have no choice but to exclude her from some of their plans. even lovelace kind of did this, at one point, and it ends up being something they have in common: lovelace is used as an unwilling surveillance tool for the dear listeners, and that's used to dehumanize her and make her seem dangerous.
i believe with all my heart that doug eiffel is a very hairy guy, and that's wonderful to me, but there is a special kind of horror about it when you consider all of the hair on his body did fall off and would have grown back in at the same time, while he had no fingernails.