she/her/hers hi this is where I put stuff I want to look at and be happy about later, mostly fandom and arty stuff, find me at schnikeys.dreamwidth.org active fandoms: Destiny, Hollow Knight, Hyper Light Drifter, Ghostrunner, Bioshock other: Starling, Shovel Knight, Homestuck, MCU Captain America, Songbirds of Valnon, Tamora Pierce, Ace Attorney, VALVe, Mystery Kids, Pacific Rim, LAIKA, Star Wars, Imperial Radch, The Locked Tomb, The Murderbot Diaries
Asking because you seem to Have Great Thoughts On Fun Media but do we ever see Ed and Izzy actually enjoying each other's company? Is your reading of their relationship a mutually beneficial teamwork thing, or are they actually friends on some level?
Oof, Anon this one is tough for me. I find Izzy fascinating as an antagonist, as a mover of the plot, and as a voice of reason. From a shipping angle (somewhat unrelated, I know) I only see Izzy/Ed as a bellwether of something having gone deeply wrong, as I think a relationship between them, at least as we see them in the show (as opposed to a flashabck to the early days which would theoretically contain a dynamic we haven’t seen), would be deeply toxic. For example, I would see a Izzy/Kraken!Ed sex scene in S2 as Ed hitting his lowest point, absolute rock bottom of despair and toxicity, in the same way that I would see Stede making a sincere attempt to be Mary’s lover and fit into his old life–had she been more receptive to also trying to “make it work” when it would kill them both spiritually to do so (ie, I would be screaming at the screen “No! God no! Oh god please no! No, no, nooo!” ala Steve Carrell in The Office).
I don’t feel I’ve actually formed a coherent opinion about whether or not Ed and Izzy are friends though. As a character functioning within the plot, I think Izzy sees himself as what would be a modern agent to a rockstar for Ed. Basically, doing all the day-to-day stuff so this creative genius can be free to do their thing. But when that creative genius won’t do the very basics of making sure the sweet deal they’ve got going continues (like say, showing up for an autograph session on time, or failing to make a plan so they survive an encounter with the Spanish) then that relationship becomes strained. As I’ve noted elsewhere, like a rockstar agent, Izzy feels possessive of the “brand” of “Blackbeard” much like a successful agent of an individual star who is also a brand (like Elvis, Elton John, Mick Jagger, etc) would but it would be a thorny sense of possessiveness because “Blackbeard” is kind of a band name for Ed but it’s also actually his identity that Izzy feels possessive about. It gets muddled with Izzy doing the work to support this brand, with Ed working to support this brand, but also with Ed being this brand. So Izzy is kind of right to feel protective of that brand but also very invasive for doing so.
Now, have Ed and Izzy ever been friends? Have they ever enjoyed each other’s company? Izzy clearly enjoys a degree of familiarity with Ed, he calls him Edward and Ed (something Calico Jack said Ed would literally murder others for doing) which IMO means he’s clearly in Ed’s close confidence. But, I don’t think Ed sees them as equals.
Ed treats Izzy as an employee, to my eyes. A very useful employee. One he literally can’t do without and that he trusts with his most important jobs. But still an employee. Think back to him sending Izzy against the man’s protests to go fetch Stede himself, Ed ignored Izzy’s protests because he wanted the job done right.
Later, Ed sarcastically mocks Izzy for complaining that his job has been hard. In the same breath, Ed indicates he feels disdain for pirates in general, even those on his own crew, as he seems to see pirates as people who have chosen a life where if they die they knew what they signed up for and don’t deserve to be mourned. Possibly as terrible people who have chosen this life, so he has even less sympathy, if my read of his emotion being disdain in that scene is correct.
By the time we see Ed, I get the distinct impression that he finds other pirates repulsive unless they’re “doing something original” like Stede. And, without much evidence other than reading between the lines, I’d hazard that Ed’s view of pirates might go back all the way to when he first became one (or before). Becoming the best at something doesn’t mean you respect your peers. If anything, his own success as a pirate, the close view it gave him of how other pirates behave, may have only deepened his disdain for pirates. After all, Ed doesn’t kill and he relies more on fuckery than on brutality (except for maiming) so to his eyes, other pirates might seem a brutish, violent lot not worthy of his time let alone his sympathy or interest.
And Izzy is a pirate. A smarter pirate than the average and able to help Ed’s enterprise function, but one who also lacks originality and creativity. Izzy IMO is not spared from being in the group that contains Ed’s low view of “[no one] doing anything original out here.” Even when asked to do basic creative interpretation like describe the shape of clouds, Izzy is too mission-focused and pragmatic to do anything but bore Ed. And before we say that Izzy is right and Ed is wrong at that moment to be so mission-focused, Izzy didn’t do fuck-all to save them from the Spanish that night. It was Stede and Ed’s (and Stede’s crew’s) combined creativity and skill that saved them with the lighthouse fuckery. Izzy appears to have vanished. At the very least, he didn’t contribute to the actual saving of the ship that he kept giving Ed so much shit about.
Tragically, I do think Izzy thinks he and Ed are close. I think being the top employee of a creative rockstar like Ed has given him the false impression that he’s Ed’s friend, rather than that he’s friendly with Ed as an employee. (Remember, kids, your company doesn’t give a shit about you and will fire you whenever convenient to them, no matter how loyal you are. In this instance, Izzy is the employee and Ed is the company that creates “Blackbeard”.)
Ed has let Izzy into his confidence, but as an underling. Izzy thinks he’s earned more than that, that he is more than that to Ed. I don’t think Ed agrees. Izzy thinks they’re partners and Stede is stealing Ed away. Ed sees Izzy as a useful assistant.
Izzy’s ability to force “Ed” back into being Blackbeard, or rather the Kraken version of Blackbeard that might be more than Izzy bargained for, is not a result of Ed respecting Izzy. I vehemently disagree with interpretations where Ed’s reversion to the Kraken is as a result of Ed being afraid of Izzy. He’s never shown any fear of Izzy. Rather, I think Izzy is the annoying alarm clock. He’s the harried assistant who has been calling the rockstar every day while he’s on vacation and finally shows up to the beach with a clipboard to say time’s up, you’ve got to come back to the real world now. Ed resents Izzy. He resents Izzy’s presumed familiarity that he could threaten Ed or assert any kind of power over him and therefore Ed maims Izzy to reestablish the hierarchy.
Were they ever friends? At most, I think they were friendly. I think Ed had a point where he was pleased to discover a fellow pirate who could get shit done, who could function, and worked well with him anticipating his needs and taking care of the grubby parts of the job (including managing the pirates that Ed disdains) so Ed doesn’t have to. I could see him being warm to Izzy, charming as he often is, in those early days. I can see that warmth and charm coupled with Blackbeard’s terrifying competence, become that heady combination that can only be described as charisma making Izzy feel fortunate that he’s allowed so close to the star of the show. I can see that excitement fading into the humdrum of everyday life where he’s less awed by Ed and more frustrated when Izzy is called upon again and again to be the voice of reason, to do the grubby job.
I can see Izzy not understanding that no matter how hard he works, he will never be seen as Ed’s equal because the way he functions is as a subordinate. He would have to break out of his old habits and become a rockstar in his own way to win any respect or interest from Ed.
Ed respects fellow rockstars: Calico Jack, the Gentleman Pirate, Jim - all self-assured people with their own brand who don’t care what the world thinks. Izzy doesn’t function that way. Izzy is an assistant, an enforcer, an employee that Ed would desperately like to have some fucking creativity and personality of his own but because he doesn’t, he will never rise to be more in Ed’s eyes.
The fun thing about speedrunning is that you can respond to literally any piece of information about a video game in any context whatsoever with “implications for the speedrun?” and there’s a non-zero chance that’s actually a cogent question.
A couple of personal favourite examples of extremely silly things affecting the speedrun route:
The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess low% route where a one-frame synchronisation error in Link’s idle animation allows an additional eight items to be skipped compared to the any% route by spending 17 hours standing motionless while staring at a rupee.
The Paper Mario unrestricted any% route where a seemingly trivial memory management oversight in the Nintendo 64 hardware permits a route that saves 75 minutes over the normal any% route, dropping the overall time from 101 minutes to 26, but requires you to spend the first nine of those 26 minutes playing Ocarina of Time.
the “first 9 minutes” intrigues me. What does playing OoT do to affect Paper Mario?
The TL;DR version probably isn’t going to make any sense unless you’re a computer programmer, but in brief:
The Nintendo 64 has a plug-in accessory called the Expansion Pak that adds 4MB of extra RAM to the system. Most N64 games don’t use it; a small number require it.
Paper Mario suffers from several bugs related to menu loading that, in combination, can cause the execution pointer to go shooting off to gods-know-where. One of the places the it can go shooting off to is a normally nonexistent memory address that happens to correspond to a particular block of RAM on the Expansion Pak, if it’s installed.
By itself, this isn’t helpful. Jumping the execution pointer to weird places often allows for arbitrary code execution, but Paper Mario is one of the games that doesn’t use the Expansion Pak, so there’s no way to write data to it during normal play.
However, because it doesn’t use the Expansion Pak, it also doesn’t initialise the Expansion Pak’s memory on boot. This is important because the Expansion Pak consists of a relatively high-persistence type of RAM that can retain its contents for several seconds without power.
If you know what an execution pointer is, you’ve probably already figured out where this is going: we need to deposit a useful payload on the Expansion Pak using a different game, then quickly swap cartridges to Paper Mario and do the menu glitch that jumps the execution pointer to the Expansion Pak’s address.
It turns out that the quickest game to set this up with is Ocarina of Time. By doing some very stupid tricks involving stale reference manipulation of a linked list structure containing data about fairy sparkles, you can drop a few bytes of arbitrary code on the Expansion Pak. It’s not much, but it’s enough for the next step.
Swap cartridges to Paper Mario and do the menu thing. When that crafted payload is carried out, it causes the execution pointer to jump again, this time to the memory address containing the name of your save file.
The name of the save file in turn contains a series of nonsense characters corresponding to instructions to update your story progress flags to right before the end credits cutscene, autosave, then crash the console.
Restart console, load doctored save file, watch credits.
Or, to TL;DR the TL;DR: you use a glitch in Ocarina of Time to deposit a logic bomb made of fairy dust on the N64 Expansion Pak, then boot up Paper Mario and do stupid tricks with the menus to ricochet the execution pointer off that payload and start executing your save file’s name as code, thereby enabling arbitrary code execution.
Clear as mud?
For what it’s worth, they decided that the Ocarina of Time-enhanced version doesn’t count as an any% run. But now they’ve gotten a similar glitch to work using just the PM64 cartridge, and that record is under 45 minutes. (Edit: sorry, it’s a 48:30)
It does involve plugging a controller into the third slot and holding down the analog stick with a rubber band, though.
From the comments on the Twilight Princess video:
I used to really wonder how bread was ever invented. The process of making bread always seemed like so many weird steps that are each meaningless to try without the final result already in view: why would people even try to grow wheat, then grind it, then make dough, then put it into the oven unless they already knew what would happen from the start, especially when there were other crops they could grow instead? But now that I have seen this video (and others on the speedrunning community at large) I am not puzzled by this at all. The speedrunning community is living proof that humans will literally just keep trying the most random shit, at tremendous cost of time and energy, just to see what happens, and then record the results with hair-splitting precision, and then build off of each others findings with no conceivable reward in sight. And to me, that’s actually kind of inspiring.
“izzy wants to control blackbeard” is such a shallow reading of the text when like. half the time when we see them together izzy is literally trying to gently coax ed into doing his job
izzy DOESN’T want to control ed. he’s BEEN the one making pretty much all the decisions, seemingly for some time, perhaps even years, as ed has declined and become more erratic
he doesn’t want to control ed, but like. he doesn’t want stede to control Ed either - he thinks that Stede will get Ed and everyone else killed
what Izzy wants is basically for Ed to not be mentally ill and to be in charge again, he wants Ed to have his own internal motivation that’s also roughly connected to common sense and self-preservation - he misses the Ed to whom those things were intrinsic (or at least, thats how Izzy remembers it)
i don’t think izzy is a good person, and he’s absolutely jealous, possessive, cold, and nasty, but like. he isn’t actually that cunning or intelligent. he’s not creative like Ed is.
like, do all the people who despise Izzy not see how and why Ed keeps Izzy so close? why he trusts him so entirely even when Izzy is being a massive bitch?
when he pats Izzy on the lower back and says “need you here”, that’s not just some shallow, meaningless line, and it’s not a manipulation either
when izzy snaps and resigns, Ed’s SURPRISED
like. from Ed’s perspective, Izzy is this unshakably loyal pillar in his life. Izzy comes to him and doesn’t try to order him about, but suggests stuff kind of desperately until Ed says “fine” and they do something
for years, Izzy has acted as Edward’s executive function, an external motivator - he still gets Ed to choose and make decisions wherever possible, but he needles and pushes at Ed to make the decisions in the first place, because otherwise Ed would just obsess over some little thing, or sink into one of his depressions
like. Izzy brings him his tea. Izzy. Look at Izzy. look what a dick he is. is that a man you imagine making tea for you and gently handing you the cup? setting the cup by your bedside and saying, “Edward, come on, it’s been three days. just walk out on the deck and you’ll feel better.”
izzy couldn’t survive without Ed, I don’t think. he’s unlikeable, he’s a bitch, I think he makes a great boatswain or quartermaster, and he cares about a ship being in good repair, he actually cares if they lose crew (unlike Ed), he’s efficient
but Ed wouldn’t have survived as long as he has without Izzy. not because Ed isn’t a genius, not because Ed isn’t smart or intelligent, but because Ed is fundamentally disabled by the immensity of his mental illness
like, Ed and Izzy have this codependent fuck-up going on where Ed is a creative genius who’s constantly depressed and wants to die, whether it’s because he’s bipolar, ADHD, just prone to depressions, whatever
Izzy has rage issues, but imo like. he’s so obsessive, he’s so incapable of remaining calm, and I think he’s probably got some kind of anxiety issues on top of his evident self-loathing and masochism
and so they rely on each other. Izzy coaxes Ed out of bed while also bullshitting to everyone how well Blackbeard is doing, safeguarding his reputation - and Ed keeps Izzy on because Izzy is the only man he can trust to be a complete mess in front of and not risk his life…
until Stede. until Stede’s crew. until Stede says, actually, its okay to not be okay sometimes. thats alright, isn’t it? we all have bad days. I’ve had millions of bad days. but together, I think we can have some nice ones. shall we?
and they do.
and Ed is suddenly loved and supported by a huge group of people who see that he’s messy and sad and dramatic and don’t make a big deal of it but also don’t make him hide it, they SUPPORT him very casually and easily, and also, there’s ofc Stede
whereas Izzy spirals. because everyone’s treating him like he’s the way he is for no reason, but also like, acting as if he does what he does to hurt Ed, when from his POV like… he’s been keeping Ed alive, and now Ed is throwing him away for these nice shiny people who are encouraging him to be weak and who will get him killed
this is why Izzy being in the wrong genre is such a thing, bc like. he cannot see this as anything but dangerous to all of them, but especially Ed
The reason the work you’ve done on how you feel doesn’t seem like it’s working is because you need to do it until it works. It’s never been “this strategy will pull you up” it’s always been “here’s something you can do that will END with you getting out of that hole” the climbing still hurts and the being underground still hurts but that doesn’t mean it’s not working
*doing laundry* “this doesn’t feel better
*cooking meals* this doesn’t feel better
*exercising* this doesn’t feel better
*making art* this doesn’t feel better
*cleaning the apartment* this doesn’t feel better
*somewhere months or years down the line*
holy shit
tl;dr
Look at a stone cutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred-and-first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not the last blow that did it, but all that had gone before.
the userbase when tumblr attempts literally any contemporary method to profit from us that has been highly effective on every other website:
the userbase when tumblr implements the most deranged and masochistic series of features imaginable immediately after covering our dashes in thousands of crabs:
