Happy Malevolversary!

It’s been a few months since Empires s2 came to an end and I wanted to make a piece reflecting on the time we spent with these characters 🥰✨ When season 1 ended I did a series of paintings set to the End Poem, and so I decided to revisit the concept once again, making sure to switch up which line corresponded to which person. This series means a lot to me—in fact, this is one of two big Empires s2 projects I’ve been working on! There’s another one still in the works :D

Commissions for @chrisis-averted for the fic "Rewind. Reset. Rewrite." Thank you for the support!

A little food web for the Star Wars planet I’m creating. I was trying to figure out what the keystone species would be and this was the easiest way I could think of.

Silvogitan is the major river of the planet, and the Briloskes are the glowing forests that make up the majority of the terrain.

Note: not all creatures (including the freshwater lake ecosystem) are included here

a chance encounter 🚏👁

Reverse Engineering the OIAR Tagging System

I'm not the first to theorise that the tagging system is important - this post is inspired by the person who noticed that Needles and Bonzo share both a CAT and an R tag.

This is an incomplete attempt to decode the entire system for theorising purposes. Unfortunately, I was not able to figure it out as thoroughly as I hoped but I'm sharing it here in hope others can make observations. Here is the table:

For those who want a better look, or cannot see the image due to screen-reader use, here is a google document with the same table: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Wc4COCMHdwKz6N-KawvMOs4Y3k3W6Kq-NDhZ7brcRLg/edit?usp=sharing

So, my observations thus far:

CAT (probably short for categories)

There are four categories so far- 1, 2, 3 and 23.

Needles, both Bonzo statements and the very first statement are the only CAT 1s so far.

Needles and Bonzo are likely to be major recurring characters, so this could suggest the creature in the first statement (which to me gives distortion vibes) may also be.

Alternatively, CAT could suggest danger. Needles and Bonzo are serial killers, while the CAT 3 statements tend to refer to very old or contained objects, so perhaps these are less dangerous? The only gap in this theory is InkSoul being CAT 3, which makes little sense given their livestreaming. Unless... could InkSoul be dead?

Generally, but not absolutely, newer statements tend to be closer to CAT 1, and older statements closer to CAT 3. Bonzo and Needles both referred to statements taken days before the episode dropped. Again, this isn't an absolute rule and the first statement is again the odd one out.

What I absolutely cannot figure out is CAT 23. I thought it was a typo until I encountered it again for Ep 11. It clearly means something special. Unlike for the R system, I don't think it means between categories 2 and 3, because the statements we get are both quite important. We'll probably have to wait for more episodes to figure this one out.

R (probably short for rank)

This is the one I'm more sure about. I believe it indicates 'grades' of some measure, like school grades. A is best, B is after that, and so on.

I think AB and BC are borderline grades.

Ep 3 and 4 (plant boy and violin man) do not have an R tag. My working theory is that this indicates the statements are below a grade C.

So what does R actually grade? Again, it could be importance (assuming that isn't what CAT means), or usefulness to the institute, but then why is our known external Mr Bonzo only a B?

So far we have no rank As and only one rank AB - the Red Canary statement.

If there's one thing I'm certain of, it's that the first rank A statement is going to be very big indeed.

Conclusion

I believe category and rank indicates any two out of the following: importance, danger, level of OIAR control, level of usefulness to OIAR, certainty of being true, amount of evidence. Ultimately, we need more statements to be sure.

For whatever two measures these systems represent, I am fairly certain that a category closer to one and a rank closer to A represents a better grade on that measure, with the exception of CAT 23 which I think is its own thing. The ultimate purpose of this post is to encourage people to pay attention to these tags more as I am certain they contain clues, and if anyone smarter than me can spot them as more episodes come out, then great.

PS: As I was just about to post this I had a sudden idea as to what CAT 23 *might* be. It could be dimensional cracks. This is clearly what's going on in the magnus institute (with the dice statement being exempt because it was taken before the institute burnt down) and it's possible the graveyard in Ep 11 also serves this function. This is pure speculation however.

Walking around campus to the Night in the Woods soundtrack is actually top tier I’m literally an NPC rn

sandman comic about Heely’s™️

Guess who made a QSMP AU about Martyn being on the Island?!

This is just some barfing I did while dealing with Carpal Tunnel, so if you see some of them and think, "Why is the lineart so bad here?" That's why. I developed Carpal Tunnel and refused to stop and/or remove my brace.

Anyway, I still have no idea how Martyn would have gotten to the island within the logic on the island, like I'm sure Doc sent him there, but I have no idea if he would have being already there or was sent on a boat by the island or what. I do know that they will probably contact him because of his experience dealing with Watchers as someone who seemed to break out of their grasp, and the Federation thinks what they have on their hand is a Watcher since, you know, tricked a bunch of people into a secluded area and forcing to kill each other for its entrainment is all very Watcher-y behavior.

What they didn't know is that he seems close to the notorious Federation hater and anarchist Philza, like, sure, they look similar, but you can't blame them! All white men look the same!

Found poem based on the first two chapters of The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston, with a bit of decoration in the background.

(project for my English class - I’m not a poet don’t come for me)

i think they should be friends