#i'm real and i beat myself up behind the Blockbusters

[coldwind-shiningstars]

Re: blorbo from my research, here is my favorite ever case study. I'm obsessed with it.

Summary:

- Guy presents to neurology with muscle issues, very clearly has something going on but diagnostic tests are inconclusive

- History is mostly unremarkable. Key word, mostly. He drinks four liters of plain Earl Grey tea per day. For context this is nearly twice the recommended daily fluid intake. All fluids, to be clear, not just tea. He only drinks tea tho

- Bergamot is known to be phototoxic in high doses (reacts badly on your skin with sunlight)

- APPARENTLY nobody previously has consumed enough of it for it to be widely known that it is also, apparently, mildly toxic to ingest in high doses

- Guy starts drinking plain black tea again. Only 2 liters this time (he didn't have a medical reason to drink that much tea, he just liked it) and so now he's fully recovered

#truly a case study of all time #I'm deeply charmed by this stranger #i'm real and i beat myself up behind the Blockbusters

[innuendostudios]

Thoughts on... some funny games

[no spoilers to speak of]

Thoughts on Lair of the Clockwork God

The wisdom of the gaming cognoscenti insists that comedy is hard to do in video games. Having grown up with Monkey Island and Zork, I've never found this convincing. But one true thing is this: it's hard to write about comedic games. The ineffability of humor is hard enough to describe in less-interactive media; I can't even explain to my partner why Gretchen saying "I met January Jones once!" on You're the Worst busted me up, and they were sitting right next to me when she said it. Throw in the "you had to be there" nature of the player's active participation and I lose myself in a cornfield. The thing I found hilarious might come a beat to early for you, or not at all, or not be funny in text like it is in gameplay.

Why did I like Lair of the Clockwork God? It made me laugh.

The premise and particulars are a lot of "that could go either way." Ben and Dan - stars of Ben There, Dan That and Time Gentleman, Please! - have returned. Ben is still an adventure game star, but Dan has adopted platforming mechanics in an attempt to get with the times. So playing the game involves switching back and forth between a character who can leap across canyons but can't pick up items or talk to people, and one who can combine inventory but can't climb over a 3-pixel rock.

Does that sound potentially funny? Potentially grating? Yes to both!

The plot centers around our heroes trying to save the world from several simultaneous apocalypses and having to teach human emotions to a supercomputer in order to do so. (Don't ask.) These means, rather like Ben There, Dan That, traipsing through a number of fantasy worlds (read: computer simulations) until the correct emotion is provoked. This requires cross-genre cooperation: finding ways to get Ben to areas only Dan can access, getting Dan new power ups by combining objects in Ben's inventory (an act Dan insists on calling "crafting").

The best bits are at these intersections, when Dan's platforming is the puzzliest and Ben's puzzles take advantage of Dan's skills. Periodically the game gives you a Dan-centric platforming gauntlet the controls are NOT precise nor pleasant enough for, or a Ben-only moon logic puzzle that leaves you googling the walkthrough.

But I liked it! A lot. The genre-hopping seems to have invigorated the developers, Ben Ward and Dan Marshall. I discussed my favorite joke in Ben There, Dan That (in what is probably the least popular video I've ever made that wasn't asking for money), but was also dismayed that the game was never that clever again. But this one is, several times over! Progression here involves cheating your way to a better respawn zone, goofing around in game menus, exploiting "glitches," exiting out and loading up entirely other games. There is a lot of poking and prodding at what a game of this nature can or should be.

But, honestly? The only real selling point is... it was funny. The humor is as anarchic and metatextual as in previous titles, but it feels good-natured in a way BT,DT didn't. And there are, here and there, little bits of meat on its bones - the characters wondering if, as a couple thirtysomething white guys, the world hasn't left them behind, no longer comfortable with the juvenile humor of their youth but not really understanding the youth of today, but having not yet fully escaped the mentalities they used to hold. (There's an unspoken humor to Dan's idea of "modern" gameplay being 2D platforming mechanics, especially at a time when adventure games are significantly more popular than on his last outing; this is a good joke whether or not it's intentional.)

Also: this game contains the most poignant urinating-on-a-grave puzzle in gaming history, and you may quote me on that.

Having finished it months ago, I can't even remember what all the gags were that tickled me at the time. Comedy fades from memory faster than drama or frustration. Mostly I just remember having a good time.

Thoughts on The Darkside Detective

Here's a hook: sometime after the mayhem ends in Ghostbusters, The Exorcist, Evil Dead 2, or some other paranormal blockbuster that you watched over and over in the 90's until the VHS wore out, some overworked detective has to come into your town and piece together what the hell happened.

This is his story.

It's a good gag, and the devs wring every drop from it. Existing in a world where these things are commonplace and you have to fit them into some notion of "police procedure" is just funny. Like, it's one thing to have a running gag where you keep observing the moon in outdoor scenes, commenting, with increasing hostility, that its behavior is suspicious (it has been present at multiple crime scenes); it's a slightly different thing when, given the things you've encountered, the moon being the Big Bad is actually somewhat possible.

The game is divided into six main cases and three bonus DLC missions (which come included in the base game now, and the third of which is the proper ending/setup for the sequel). You are the cop tasked to deal with The Other Side - and, when The Other Side bleeds into our own world, its cops have to deal with you. You have a sidekick with a mental maturity of about 6, which I guess makes you the straight man. (You have to grade on a curve to find a straight man in this game.) And you solve tasks like rounding up escaped gremlins or finding an AWOL lake monster all juxtaposed with mundane problems like inter-office squabbles and having not bought your Christmas presents early enough. It's (pleasantly) lo-res and sparsely isolated, so the dialogue and premise do most of the work, but they are ably up to the task.

The gameplay... not so much. I'm an adventure game lifer, so I can put up with a lot of nonsense. It's mostly straightforward inventory puzzles and occasional minigames. Most of the puzzles are fine enough. As the cases progress, things get more involved, and the DLCs especially involve some awful moon logic. And the minigames are not above using that same jumping peg puzzle you've solved in a dozen other games already. So gameplay ranges from serviceable to irritating, but it mostly exists to string together funny lines and silly images. (Christmas mall elves being secretly in service to Krampus - that's the kind of thing we're talking about here.) You won't feel much guilt for opening up a walkthrough; the puzzles aren't why you're here.

The sequel has just been released, and both games are cheap, so check them out if you feel like smiling.

Thoughts on The Procession to Calvary

It's rare for a game to be hilarious to look at.

The Procession to Calvary takes its name from the Bruegel painting. It also takes all it's graphics from Renaissance oil paintings, and the designer delights in making famously rendered heroes and religious icons steal, stab, fart, and swear.

A strong Terry-Gilliam-with-After-Effects vibe is what we're describing.

You play as a lady knight from a war that's just ended, which sucks for you because, in this age of peace, you're no longer authorized to kill. And killing's, like, you're whole thing. But the one person your new, pacifist king wouldn't stop you from killing is the warlord you just deposed, who fled to the South. So you embark on a nonsensical journey to seek out the one human on Earth you are authorized to kill, because killing is just The. Best. Ever.

Of the three games we're discussing, this is the most overtly cheeky, and, at times, the most scatological. I could've done with a bit less scatology, if I'm being honest, but the cheekiness is very winning. As with Lair of the Clockwork God, a lot of jokes could go either way - a field of people being tortured and a woman on a blanket selling commemorative torture merch could be painfully try-hard. But something about the victims being seemingly everyone ever crucified or broken on the wheel in a famous painting, and having them writhe on their crosses in a way that is both gruesome and goofy, and having a cacophonous soundtrack of their screams and moans that you will now imagine every time you look at one of those elegantly elegiac paintings from now on... it works. That the music score is being played by an extremely jaunty piper who dances behind you just out of sword's reach as you traverse the field pushes it over the top.

Oh, and the puzzles, while never hair-pullingly obtuse, will leave you stumped at times. Push past that to get the proper ending, but, if you're sick of trying, you can, at any point, just start stabbing your way through problems. Which, again: it takes a very deft touch to make "protagonist resorts to violence" actually funny rather than lazy and obvious. And maybe, in another game, the perfect timing of every animation, the clever quips, the careful contrast of cathedrals and high-society music halls with gleeful sword-swinging wouldn't be enough. But something about it being frickin' Renaissance paintings carries it the last mile.

This is probably the basest game of the three, but it's also the one that made me giggle the most. Having a BFA that required several art history classes may have something to do with it. But check this thing out.

#capsule review #darkside detective #lair of the clockwork god #procession to calvary

[coldwind-shiningstars]

ALT

VERY important photograph

#i'm real and i beat myself up behind the Blockbusters #HIS chair #jasper the cat

[coldwind-shiningstars]

ID in alt

Had a GREAT day!!!

#i'm real and i beat myself up behind the blockbusters

[coldwind-shiningstars]

i always feel the impulse to apologize for my periodic blatantly horny spam reblogs of evil woman du jour but im not. listen it's just a part of following me at this point you're all gonna have to accept it

#i'm real and i beat myself up behind the blockbusters

[coldwind-shiningstars]

if i was a kamihama magical girl I would give alina a copy of the sims. i think she needs something like that. I'd be like hey I know you have a lot of stuff to work through but maybe tormenting real people is not the solution. drop 20-30 simulated little guys into a digital swimming pool and watch them drown and maybe THEN we will revisit your new art project of making a torment nexus

#i'm real and i beat myself up behind the blockbusters

[coldwind-shiningstars]

It's my fourth year in a row top 0.1% <3

#I'm real and i beat myself up behind the blockbusters

[coldwind-shiningstars]

#hyperspecific poll #listen some of these polls are NOT hyperspecific. you all need to get weirder with them. imo #I'm real and I beat myself up behind the Blockbusters #lrb was a good one. hyperspecific indeed and wonderful. it inspired me #realizing a) I can't edit and b) I shouldn't have made it multiple times #these HAVE all happened to me multiple times but that's a bit too strict

[coldwind-shiningstars]

I had a brief but fun ~volunteer job as a sex educator (required for public health degree) which was fun but I did mostly focus on things like dental dams and PeP/PreP, because I worked for my college. so I'm going to ignore all of that to tell you all the most bizzare sex-related thing I've learned recently, which in retrospect makes perfect sense but boggled me:

your fallopian tube can pick up an egg from the opposite side ovary, and in fact this happens nearly a third of the time in people who have had monolateral salpingectomy

#I'm real and I beat myself up behind the Blockbusters #pregnancy cw #? for filtering

[coldwind-shiningstars]

There's an app change that I haven't seen anyone talking about but is making me very upset: it no longer suggests your custom or commonly used tags!!! How am I supposed to tag things consistently if it doesn't suggest the tags I use all the time anymore! I can't spell well enough for this

#i'm real and i beat myself up behind the blockbusters #see i had to type that whole thing out and idk if the apostrophes are correct

[coldwind-shiningstars]

Cleo's learned to expect the unexpected when on a Life Games server. Sometimes, though, things are really unexpected, like... a potion effect turning her teammates into babies?

Or, fandom tropes exchange, "age regression/de-aging" version!

(Limited Life, gen, G)

A discord server I'm in did a fic exchange riffing on popular fandom tropes, and I rolled age regression, so I wrote a fairly experimental fic that's half cute kidfic half an exploration of fandom misogyny and the terrible way we treat creators on the internet. I'm genuinely really proud of it. It's also archive locked. So it goes.

#my writing #i'm real and i beat myself up behind the blockbusters #i don't THINK you need much context to understand it #series context that is #it does kind of require being Very Online

[coldwind-shiningstars]

I tend to get very anxious people will think I'm lying and Hate Me, so if possible I will cite, like, news articles, but small weird things that happen in my personal life can be much harder to "prove" and some of them are Wild

anyway all that is to say I have thrice been mistaken for a mannequin and one time someone actually took my hat off my head because they wanted to buy it. I have been convinced that every time I tell this story people will think it's Telling Tall Tales, until today when I saw this screenshot of a tweet from someone on the other side of a similar incident

ALT

I don't know how this happens (I, uh, have never seen a mannequin in a bright purple wheelchair) but at least I rest easy knowing that I am probably less embarrassed than the other person involved :P. At least they like my clothes?

#i'm real and i beat myself up behind the Blockbusters

[coldwind-shiningstars]

(ngl the "people will think I'm lying about aspects of my life and then Hate Me" is partially the Tumblr trend of calling very reasonable stories about weird interactions clearly fake, but it's also significantly medical trauma 😔 so it goes. I intentionally don't Cite Sources whenever I can convince myself not to, but it's pretty entrenched. so it goes!)

#i'm real and i beat myself up behind the blockbusters

[coldwind-shiningstars]

@negatistic-nocturnities and I are watching the clone wars, and yesterday we were introduced to my new absolute favorite star wars character: Professor Huyang. The Professor is the robot who teaches young Jedi to make light sabers. He is full of incredibly valuable data. He hasn't lost a fight in 100 years. He tells the kids they aren't going to fight and then, when a fight happens anyway, he is at one point decapitated and still kicks everyone's ass. He's perfect and I want him in every future episode

#I'm real and I beat myself up behind the Blockbusters

[coldwind-shiningstars]

Gnome raves. btw. AMBROSIUS! YOU SIT ON THE GROUND!

#I'm real and I beat myself up behind the Blockbusters #Youtube

[coldwind-shiningstars]

it's thinking about Ui hours again! magireco consistently surprised/surprises me with how good of a story it is about severe chronic physical illness, even if Disabled Villain Trope is ~problematic. it comes across less in the main story but the little side event stories are so concerned with their interiority and how Being Dying and constantly hospitalized affects them.

the fact that there's only one episode of the anime where Ui appears as herself, and crucially it's where her best friend (another terminally ill preteen) is thinking about her? the way that when it's from Iroha's perspective ui is glitched. or only repeats two or three words. or has no face. or is a shade of her old self, a ghost trapped in a vessel. or is represented by a teddy bear in a pink dress. I would read less into this if it wasn't specifically brought up -- Yachiyo is disturbed by the teddy bear, not just because Iroha is treating it as a person and That's Creepy, but because "Was your sister just someone who was cute and sweet to you?"

Magia Record is really concerned with "ordinary" magical girls. What if you didn't have much magic? What if you were bad at fighting? What if you couldn't be noble and self sacrificing and ethical because you were terrified and always one mistake away from dying? What if you had magic but only a little and it wasn't enough to keep you alive?

And we meet Ui's genius friends and they are alive and she is not. And the whole show is telling you that maybe she was one of those weak girls who just couldn't make it because she Wasn't Special Enough. and that is a little bit it, she used up all her "karmic destiny" or whatever in one go. but also... But Ui died not because she couldn't use her magic. She died because her magic was so strong and so instinctual that she couldn't *stop,* when she needed to let other people's emotions go she couldn't stop

what if you were really really good at making yourself small and taking other people's emotions into yourself and you died for it. you spent your whole life in the hospital, managing everyone's feelings about your death and your friends' feelings about their deaths. and then when you die they worship your corpse and they don't know that it once belonged to you. and then when you're revived the scattered pieces of all that emotion that has become yours is something people kill each other over to possess. and you are twelve years old.

#I'm real and I beat myself up behind the Blockbusters