#2024 video game journal

[stevetown]

Final Fantasy IV

Playtime: 16h 54m Completed: January 3, 2024

Ah, nothing like the smell of the first completed game of the year.

Or for that matter, the dulcet tones of a re-orchestrated soundtrack that was given way too much power. My god does the Pixel Remaster of this game have a repetitive, grating soundtrack. It's unbelievable that Square-Enix would omit the option to use the much softer-on-the-ole-eardrums original OST on the Steam version of the game. The console players get the option! They can turn off random encounters too!

But I digress. An essay on Square Enix's failures when it comes to ports and game accessibility will have to wait for another day.

Final Fantasy IV is...good! It's perfectly fine! I enjoyed my time with it! It is incredibly funny hearing people talk about how good the story and characters are though. I found them charming, sure, but the game doesn't do anything particularly noteworthy on the narrative front in 2024. I suppose it does introduce the now inevitable Final Fantasy third act twist where they raise the stakes by introducing aliens.

In fact, the game is at its best when you look at it more as a historical work than a game just on its own merits. Everything it did, mechanically and narratively, are table stakes for subsequent games in the series. It's charming though. An early scene that involves a character looking out over a lake before being attacked by a monster while his dead girlfriend cheers him on during the fight must have blown minds back in the day. A game using turn based battle mechanics alongside emotional dialogue to tell you a story about a named character? It's taken so far for granted that it's hard to believe it all started with Final Fantasy IV. No wonder this game was bundled with Chrono Trigger for the PS1 release.

Also present is the deftly handled episodic story telling the series is now known for. It's impressive how the game manages to provide a rotating cast of characters that weave their way in and out of your party because of story circumstances. I suppose it was to avoid you having to actually make up a party of your own, but it provides a forward momentum to the proceedings that Final Fantasy I-III lacked. They were really stretching things with five party members at a time though. Poor Rydia sat on the floor for the entire final fight.

As a time capsule for JRPGS, Final Fantasy IV is clearly a momentous entry. The effort they put into every aspect of the game still comes through when you know to look for it (the ATB system originates here!). I can't say I particularly have a desire to play The After Years, a sequel released seventeen years after the fact, but I admire the respect this game continues to garner.

Just please, Square, please let me change the music. I'm begging you. You ruined a perfectly lovely soundtrack.

#2024 video game journal #final fantasy #final fantasy IV #retro gaming #these are getting longer aren't they

[fm-synthesizer]

Random display of precious stuff March 18 2024

#journal #video game journal #video games #vidiya gaems #bionicle #precious #3 18 2024 #misc

[bryastar]

word salad #12

oh shoot I'm back edition!

alrighty so, hi, it's been a bit. so I guess I should explain my absence a bit but I ended up getting a certain respiratory illness which included trouble breathing, headaches, nausea, fatigue, and it was so bad that it took me out for basically an entire week.....

yeah pneumonia isn't fun

anyway......

what have I been up to that hasn't been staying in bed all day while doom scrolling way too far in TikTok...

probably a tiny thing here but I reorganized my ipad icons a bit, keeping all the drawing apps on one screen (plus the battery info for the pencil), socials on the next, and games at the end. seems less overwhelming....and cuz I like the background art ^^; (art by @wavecipher)

solar eclipse! we had to drive out an hour towards the path of totality to be able to see it, but honestly this was one of the coolest experiences I've ever got to witness! pictures don't do it full justice and it's really hard to describe the mood. just being able to witness the moon slowly creeping in front of the sun slowly while experiencing this beautiful mix of daytime and nighttime vibes simultaneously....aaaa! I was really sad before I wasn't able to see much of the 2017 eclipse previously and I wanted to make certain it worked out this year, and just so happened that everything lined up perfectly (teehee) to be able to see this! (top pic taken by amber, the others by me)

butts! I ended up using a combination of pose to pose and straight ahead animation here. I wanted to try and push myself with this and experiment, and I'm discovering a bit that I enjoy doing things like water splooshes. down the line I wanna touch on more things like water ripples or fire animation too.

all of this happened before I got sick and bedridden and I was a bit worried that I would lost the drive to anima--

nope! still got it! I'm pretty happy with how this came out! I asked for a random object and a random action at home and got "apple" and "jumping" and I decided to add the bit at the end with it bonking and bruising itself. I used a mix of drawing individual frames, but also simple subtle transforms when the change was minimal anyway to streamline the work just a bit.

I originally struggled with getting the impact to look right. adding a smoke cloud and simulating a camera shake seemed to help with that (which I struggled originally because I tried to keyframe it in capcut but because it's animated of twos that came off weird and the earthquake effect didn't satisfy me either so I had to just manually move everything in toonsquid...which ended up taking less time overall anyway) I especially like the doubling/smear frame I made right before it hits the ground.

I think improvements I wanna make is planning out the facial expressions more. there is a point where the apple realizes it loses balance but I think it happens way too fast to be properly noticible at full speed. also I did abuse the transform tool juuust a bit much at the end so maybe I'll stick with reserving that for ease in and outs.

lately I've been in a bit of a Starfox kick. I ended up finding the N64 cartridge at a game shop (only $40 USD which was definitely a bit cheaper than I was expecting for a first party title) and I'm honestly really impressed with how well it looks compared to the NSO version on switch, particularly with transparency effects, colours seem bolder (the gold rings in particular stand out more), and how smooth the game runs overall (with occasional but expected slowdowns in certain areas). also the voice samples seem to sound more accurately to a radio signal. I also wanna see if I can get the 3ds version of SF64 sometime too and compare that.

alrighty so apologies for the extra word salading this time around but there was a lot to catch up on. hopefully I can keep up a bit more as I start to get back towards 100%

🦊🐦🐰🐸

#word salad #journal #starfox 64 #star fox #retro video games #retro gaming #ipad animation #animation smear #animation #toonsquid #effects animation #solar eclipse #eclipse #eclipse 2024 #path of totality #mlp #mlp oc #mlp oc art #bright star #nintendo #pneumonia #apple #Youtube

[meganthepagan1]

1•21•2024

I woke up with the full intention to finish a portrait I’m working on for M today, and halfway through the day, I knew that wasn’t going to happen. I could blame it on the weather since it was overcast and gloomy, but the truth is that I always struggle with motivation and procrastination on my days off no matter what the weather is.

Instead I escaped into playing Avatar all day. I felt guilty but I justified it by telling myself I’ll get it done on my next day off. If I tell M I’m going to get it done this week, that will hold me accountable.

But damn I had a good time just playing video games in my pj’s all day.

#journal #mental health #video games #avatar #lazy day #jan 2024

[sakurajournals]

2023 Bingo was a bit of a bust. No lines and not much chance of any of these being achieved before the new year rolls in.

So i'm planning my 2024 Bingo!

1/ Read 10 books 2/ Visit Brockhole 3/ Go to a Vintage Carshow 4/ Reach 1600 followers on Twitch 5/ Make a raid video 6/ Achieve 30 avg viewers in a single stream 7/ Play 5 new games 8/ Level up Kai to 90 (FFXIV) 9/ Pass my driving test 10/ Cook/bake something new 11/ Start a cookbook journal 12/ Make vtuber assets to sell 13/ Design an adopt character 14/ Visit a Zoo 15/ Go on a Coach trip 16/ See 1 friend IRL 17/ Make a bujo spread with colouring pencils 18/ Catch the northern lights on camera 19/ Read 5 books 20/ Post a YouTube Video 21/ Reach 200 followers on YouTube 22/ Get all Splendorous Tools (FFXIV)

Need 2 more to fill this out....

#bujo bingo #bujo journal #my bujo #bujolife #bulletjournal #bujo aesthetic #bujoideas #bujoinspo #bujolove #bullet journal #journalling

[study-with-aura]

Saturday, March 30, 2024

It felt weird doing school work on a Saturday, but I have done it before. I featured more of the yummy candy I received in the photo. I have eaten a little of it already, but I think it's going to last me several weeks, if not a couple of months. I do not eat candy much at all, which is strange because I love things that are sweet! Still, it's nice to have a treat at the end of the study day. I don't agree with giving food as a reward, but it feels that way, even though I would still eat it whether I finished all of my studying or not.

Tasks Completed:

Geometry - Reviewed simple probability, basic probability terms, and sample spaces and tree diagrams + reviewed the counting principle + practice

Lit and Comp II - Read chapter 47 of Emma by Jane Austen

Spanish 2 - Listened to Spanish speakers + answered questions in Spanish

Bible I - Read 1 Samuel 1

World History - Watched second half of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich + added to my timeline

Biology with Lab - Completed dichotomous key assignment

PE/Health I - Read a health article about lead and the body

Foundations - Read the definition of sincerity + completed the next quiz on Read Theory + looked at more advertisements

Piano - Practiced for four hours in one hour split sessions

Khan Academy - Completed High School Biology Unit 7: Lesson 3 (parts 6-7)

CLEP - Completed Module 11 reading "Europe: 1918-1945" 13.10-13.10.2 + Watched Module 11.4 lecture video

Streaming - Watched Hitler’s Circle of Evil episodes 3 and 4

Duolingo - Studied for 15 minutes (Spanish, French, Chinese) + completed daily quests

Reading - Read pages 109-157 of Beneath the Wide Silk Sky by Emily Inouye Huey

Chores - Deep cleaned refrigerator, stove and kitchen counters + put away groceries

Activities of the Day:

Personal Bible Study (1 Corinthians 12 + Week 6 reflections)

1 hour gaming

2 hours yoga/stretch (split into one hour sessions)

Journal/Mindfulness

-

What I’m Grateful for Today:

I am grateful for smoothie bowls!

Quote of the Day:

Miracles happen everyday, change your perception of what a miracle is and you'll see them all around you.

-Jon Bon Jovi

🎧SUPERWOMAN - UNIS

#study blog #study inspiration #study motivation #studyblr #studyblr community #study community #study-with-aura

[disneytva]

Disney Television Animation Leads Children Nominations On GLADD Awards 2024

The winning LGBTQ stories and artists will be honored at GLAAD’s dual 2024 ceremonies ceremonies March 14 at the Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills and May 11 at the Hilton Midtown in New York City. The 33 categories span film, TV, music, theater, podcasts, video games, comic books and journalism.

Disney Television Animation has lead the nominations on the Family and Children Nominations.

Outstanding Children’s Programming

Firebuds (Disney Junior)

Outstanding Kids & Family Programming or Film – Animated

The Ghost and Molly McGee (Disney Channel)

Hailey’s On It! (Disney Channel)

Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur (Disney Channel)

The Proud Family: Louder and Prouder (Disney+)

#The Ghost and Molly McGee #Ghost and Molly McGee #Hailey's On It! #Haileys On It #Moon Girl And Devil Dinosaur #Moon Girl & Devil Dinosaur #The Proud Family: Louder and Prouder #The Proud Family Louder and Prouder #The Proud Family #Firebuds #GLAAD Awards #GLAAD Awards 2024 #Disney Channel #Disney Junior #Disney Jr #Disney+ #Disney Plus

[megumi-fm]

tune into megumi.fm ?

💗 about me

name: meg/megumi age: 20+ pronouns: he/she/they currently: studying b.engg biotechnology languages: english, hindi, korean (beginner)

🌙 interests

subjects (academic): structural biology, network theory, programming (mainly python, a little bit of R), organic chemistry, genomics subjects (non-academic): mythology, etymology, literature, film studies and screenplay, animation hobbies: reading, singing, dancing, listening to music, watching video essays on youtube other interests: kdramas, jdramas, anime, kpop, indian classical music, indie games

📚 academic goals

short term - getting through my undergrad degree - completing my internship project - preparing for my masters - writing GRE long term - getting a PhD (hopefully)

🦋 personal goals

- tracking my finances and learning to spend less - learning to cook healthy food that I personally enjoy eating - movement! learning lots of kpop dances - reading lots of books, and exploring new genres - developing a mini game

📍 navigation:

- 2024 weekly tracker - Ongoing Daily Challenge - Academic progress trackers (+liveblogging) - Internship progress trackers - Misc to-dos - Resources - Adventures in journalling - Interactions with besties archived - Apr'24 Habit Tracker - 2023 daily tracker

#abt me <3 #get to know me #digital journaling #introductory post #studyblr #study blog #bookblr #codeblr #desi studyblr #desi academia #stemblr #stem kid #megumi.fm #studyspo #studyblr intro post #studyblr introduction

[bracketsoffear]

Next Tournament

The last redemption poll, as events currently stand, will take place around mid-November, after which I intend to take a nice long break from this blog and come back around February. However, I'm also a believer in planning ahead.

So it is with great pleasure that I announce the 2024 Leitner Round! The Battle of the Books, the Textual Tourney! I encourage all of you to start thinking ahead about what books you would like to submit.

Rules

Must have been published. I love fanfic a lot, but for the sake of simplicity and not getting hundreds of ABO fics for the Hunt poll, I'm going to have to veto it for this one.

Must be a book. I'm willing to be somewhat lenient on this front; comic books, magazines, short stories, pamphlets and academic journal articles are acceptable, provided they adhere to the other guidelines. Non-text-based media, such as films, music, or video games, are not.

Fiction or nonfiction are acceptable. Following on from the 'no real people' rule, I'm going to disallow biographies, autobiographies, diaries, journals, and memoirs.

Because I want to keep things fresh and avoid having the same people win every time, you may NOT submit the source material of a winning character for the Entity that they won -- e.g., Moby Dick would be an invalid Hunt submission, but would be permitted for the Vast. House of Leaves, being an overall tournament winner, is retired from all future tournaments.

The rules for all polls still apply

Tentative Schedule

Stranger: Submissions open 3/07, polls open 3/09

Desolation: Submissions open 3/14, polls open 3/16

Spiral: Submissions open 3/21, polls open 3/23

Hunt: Submissions open 3/28, polls open 3/30

Vast: Submissions open 4/04, polls open 4/06

Dark: Submissions open 4/11, polls open 4/13

Web: Submissions open 4/18, polls open 4/20 (nice)*

Corruption: Submissions open 4/25, polls open 4/27

Flesh: Submissions open 5/02, polls open 5/04

Slaughter: Submissions open 5/09, polls open 5/11

Lonely: Submissions open 5/16, polls open 5/18

Buried: Submissions open 5/23, polls open 5/25

End: Submissions open 5/30, polls open 6/01

Eye: Submissions open 6/06, polls open 6/08

Extinction: Submissions open 6/13, polls open 6/15

Other**: Submissions open 6/20, polls open 6/22

*(Unreality cw ahead) I legitimately did not plan that out. I think this might actually be the Web fucking with me. It already made Annabelle Cane's statement episode 69, so this seems like its sense of humor.

**Unlike the Avatar tournament, I can't think of a way for a book to not belong to any fear without just being a normal book. Therefore, this will be the space for submitting any books that, while not conforming neatly to any one fear, are nevertheless super fucked up. Did I choose to go this route because there's a super fucked up book that I couldn't make neatly fit elsewhere? Perhaps. But that's the way it's going to be.

#leitner tournament #rules #tma #the magnus archives

[posttexasstressdisorder]

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Why has America tolerated 6 illegitimate Republican presidents?

Thom Hartmann

April 15, 2024 9:11AM ET

"Ronald and Nancy Reagan, 1964” image showing The Reagans aboard an unidentified boat in this 1964 photo released on June 1, 2016. Courtesy The Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation/Handout via REUTERS

As we watch the Trump campaign prepare to replace 50,000 civil servants with fascist toadies if he wins the White House, it’s important to remember that Dwight Eisenhower was the last Republican president who believed in democracy, the rule of law, and that government should prioritize what the people want.

From 1960 to today a series of leaders within the Republican Party have abandoned the democracy that American soldiers fought the Revolutionary War to secure, the Civil War to defend here at home, and World War II in Europe and the Pacific to defend around the world.

This has brought us a series of criminal Republican presidents and corrupt Republican Supreme Court justices, who’ve legalized political bribery while devastating voting and civil rights.

None of this was a mistake or an accident, because none of these people truly believed in democracy.

This rejection of democracy and turn toward criminality and it’s logical end-point, fascism, started in the modern GOP with Richard Nixon.

He took millions in now-well-documented bribes both while Vice President to Eisenhower and as President (his VP, Spiro Agnew, resigned rather than go to prison for taking bribes). Nixon saw public service as a way to bathe himself in money, power, and adulation.

He didn’t care a bit about democracy.

As Lamar Waldron and I point out in detail in Legacy of Secrecy: The Long Shadow of the JFK Assassination, then-President Eisenhower’s then-Vice President, Richard Nixon, was getting beat up badly in the 1960 election by his opponent, Senator John F. Kennedy.

Most of it had to do with Cuba, where mobsters affiliated with Nixon for decades had just lost fortunes, millions and millions of dollars in annual revenue.

After the Cuban revolution of 1959, Castro came to the US to seek military and economic aid for his island nation; Eisenhower left town, forcing Castro to meet instead with VP Nixon.

Given that Castro had just overthrown the dictator Batista, a friend of both Nixon and Nixon’s mafia patrons, the Vice President essentially blew off Castro, sending him into the welcoming arms of Nikita Khrushchev’s Soviet Union.

Thus, throughout the 1960 presidential race, Senator Kennedy pounded on Vice President Nixon for having “let Cuba go communist” on his watch. In response, Vice President Nixon put together a series of CIA and Mafia plots to assassinate Castro, timed to happen before the November 1960 election.

His hope was that if the Eisenhower/Nixon administration could be seen as having successfully overthrown Castro in 1960 it would de-fang JFK’s attacks and make Nixon — who Eisenhower had put in charge of Cuba policy — a national hero just in time for the election.

Nixon figured that would be enough to help him beat JFK at the polls. It was going to be his “October Surprise.” (The remnant of this scheme was the failed Bay of Pigs invasion.)

For Nixon democracy was just an inconvenience, an obstacle to be conquered. He never really believed in it.

You can imagine Nixon’s frustration when plot after plot was bungled or foiled and, by election day, Castro was still happily ensconced in the Havana presidential palace. This appears to be the moment Nixon decided that, if he had a chance to run for president again, he’d not just consider a CIA-Mafia plot but would embrace far more extreme measures.

Thus began the first Republican plot to commit full-out treason to win a presidential election.

It started in the summer of 1968, when President Lyndon Johnson was desperately trying to end the Vietnam war. It had turned into both a personal and political nightmare for him, and his vice president, Hubert Humphrey, was running for President in the election that year against a “reinvented” Richard Nixon.

Johnson spent most of late 1967 and early 1968 working back-channels to North and South Vietnam, and by the summer of 1968 had a tentative agreement from both for what promised to be a lasting peace deal they’d both sign that fall.

But Richard Nixon knew that if he could block that peace deal, it would kill VP Hubert Humphrey’s chances of winning the 1968 election. So, Nixon sent envoys from his campaign to talk to South Vietnamese leaders to encourage them not to attend upcoming peace talks in Paris.

The bribe was straightforward: Nixon promised South Vietnam’s corrupt politicians that he’d give them a richer deal when he was President than LBJ could give them then.

The FBI had been wiretapping these international communications and told LBJ about Nixon’s effort to prolong the Vietnam War. Thus, just three days before the 1968 election, President Johnson phoned the Republican Senate leader, Everett Dirksen, (you can listen to the entire conversation here):

President Johnson: “Some of our folks, including some of the old China lobby, are going to the Vietnamese embassy and saying please notify the [South Vietnamese] president that if he’ll hold out ’til November 2nd they could get a better deal. Now, I’m reading their hand. I don’t want to get this in the campaign. And they oughtn’t to be doin’ this, Everett. This is treason.” Sen. Dirksen: “I know.”

Those tapes were only released by the LBJ library in the past decade, and that’s Richard Nixon who Lyndon Johnson was accusing of treason.

At that point, for President Johnson, it was no longer about getting Humphrey elected. By then Nixon’s plan had already worked and Humphrey was way down in the polls because the war was ongoing.

Instead, Johnson was desperately trying to salvage the peace talks to stop the death and carnage as soon as possible. He literally couldn’t sleep.

In a phone call to Nixon himself just before the election, LBJ begged him to stop sabotaging the peace process, noting that he was almost certainly going to win the election and inherit the war anyway. Instead, Nixon publicly announced that LBJ’s efforts were “in shambles.”

But South Vietnam had taken Nixon’s deal and boycotted the peace talks, the war continued, and Nixon won the White House thanks to it.

An additional twenty-two thousand American soldiers, and an additional million-plus Vietnamese died because of Nixon’s 1968 treason, and he left it to Jerry Ford to end the war and evacuate the American soldiers.

Nixon appointed Harry Blackmun, Lewis Powell, and William Rehnquist to the Supreme Court, pushing it hard to the right and setting up the predecessors of Citizens United.

Rehnquist, we later learned, didn’t believe any more in democracy than did Nixon. He’d made his chops in the GOP with Operation Eagle Eye, standing outside polling places in Hispanic and Native American precincts in Arizona challenging every voter who showed up there’s right to cast a ballot.

Nixon was never held to account for that treason, and when the LBJ library released the tapes and documentation long after his and LBJ’s deaths it was barely noticed by the American press.

Gerald Ford, who succeeded Nixon, was never elected to the White House (he was appointed to replace VP Spiro Agnew, after Agnew was indicted for decades of taking bribes), and thus would never have been President had it not been for Richard Nixon’s treason.

Ford pardoned Nixon and appointed John Paul Stevens to the Supreme Court.

Next up was Ronald Reagan. He not only didn’t believe in democracy, he didn’t even believe in the American government.

Like Trump, he ridiculed public service like joining the military or getting a job with a government agency; he joked that there were no smart or competent people in government because if there had been, private industry would have already hired them away.

So, if you don’t believe in democracy and you think the US government is a joke, it’s not a big deal to betray your country to get the wealth, power, and fame that goes with the presidency.

During the Carter/Reagan election battle of 1980, then-President Carter had reached a deal with newly-elected Iranian President Abdolhassan Bani-Sadr to release the fifty-two hostages held by students at the American Embassy in Tehran.

Bani-Sadr was a moderate and, as he explained in an editorial for The Christian Science Monitor, successfully ran for President that summer on the popular position of releasing the hostages:

“I openly opposed the hostage-taking throughout the election campaign…. I won the election with over 76 percent of the vote…. Other candidates also were openly against hostage-taking, and overall, 96 percent of votes in that election were given to candidates who were against it [hostage-taking].”

Carter was confident that with Bani-Sadr’s help, he could end the embarrassing hostage crisis that had been a thorn in his political side ever since it began in November of 1979.

But, like Nixon, behind Carter’s back the Reagan campaign worked out a deal with the head of Iran’s radical faction — Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini — to keep the hostages in captivity until after the 1980 Presidential election. Khomeini needed spare parts for American weapons systems the Shah had purchased for Iran, and the Reagan campaign was happy to promise them.

This was the second act of treason by a Republican wanting to become president.

The Reagan campaign’s secret negotiations with Khomeini — the so-called 1980 “Iran/Contra Scandal” — sabotaged President Carter’s and Iranian President Bani-Sadr’s attempts to free the hostages. As President Bani-Sadr told The Christian Science Monitor in March of 2013:

“After arriving in France [in 1981], I told a BBC reporter that I had left Iran to expose the symbiotic relationship between Khomeinism and Reaganism.

“Ayatollah Khomeini and Ronald Reagan had organized a clandestine negotiation, later known as the ‘October Surprise,’ which prevented the attempts by myself and then-US President Jimmy Carter to free the hostages before the 1980 US presidential election took place. The fact that they were not released tipped the results of the election in favor of Reagan.”

And Reagan’s treason — just like Nixon’s treason — worked perfectly, putting a third Republican president in office after Nixon and Ford. Neither Nixon nor Reagan believed in or held up democracy and the rule of law that underpins it as a value.

The Iran hostage crisis continued and torpedoed Jimmy Carter’s re-election hopes. And the same day Reagan took the oath of office — to the minute, as Reagan put his hand on the bible, by way of Iran’s acknowledging the deal — the American hostages in Iran were released.

Keeping his side of the deal, Reagan began selling the Iranians weapons and spare parts in 1981 (and using the money to illegally fund rightwing neofascist death squad “Contras” in Nicaragua) and continued until he was busted for it in 1986, producing the so-called “Iran Contra” scandal.

Reagan appointed Sandra Day O’Connor, Antonin Scalia, and Anthony Kennedy to the Supreme Court, solidifying its rightwing tilt. We’d learn, in the Bush v Gore case in 2000 when they awarded the White House to the son of Reagan’s VP, that none of the three of them valued democracy.

And, like Nixon, Reagan was never held to account for the criminal and treasonous actions that brought him to office.

After Reagan, Bush senior was elected but, like Jerry Ford, Bush was only President because he’d served as Vice President under Reagan. And, of course, the naked racism of his Willie Horton ads helped keep him in office.

The criminal investigation into Iran/Contra came to a head with independent prosecutor Lawrence Walsh subpoenaing President George HW Bush after having already obtained convictions for Weinberger, Ollie North and others.

For the first time in history, the President of the United States could go to jail for criminal conspiracy. Bush was sweating.

George HW Bush’s attorney general, Bill Barr (yes, the same guy Trump hired), suggested he pardon all six co-conspirators — who could point a finger at Bush — to kill the investigation. Bush did it on Christmas Eve, hoping to avoid the news cycle because of the holiday.

Nonetheless, the screaming headline across the New York Times front page on December 25, 1992, said it all: “THE PARDONS: BUSH PARDONS 6 IN IRAN AFFAIR, ABORTING A WEINBERGER TRIAL; PROSECUTOR ASSAILS 'COVER-UP’”

If the October Surprise hadn’t hoodwinked voters in 1980, you can bet Bush senior would never have been elected in 1988.

That’s four illegitimate Republican presidents.

President GHW Bush appointed Clarence Thomas and David Souter to the Supreme Court. We learned quickly that Thomas doesn’t value democracy. We now know his wife actively worked to subvert it, in fact.

Which brings us to George W. Bush, the man who was given the White House by five Republican-appointed justices on the Supreme Court.

In the Bush v. Gore Supreme Court decision in 2000 that stopped the Florida recount and thus handed George W. Bush the presidency, Justice Antonin Scalia (appointed by Bush’s father’s boss) wrote in his opinion:

“The counting of votes … does in my view threaten irreparable harm to petitioner [George W. Bush], and to the country, by casting a cloud upon what he [Bush] claims to be the legitimacy of his election.”

Apparently, denying the presidency to Al Gore, the guy who actually won the most votes in Florida and won the popular vote nationwide by over a half-million, did not constitute “irreparable harm” to Scalia or the media.

And apparently it wasn’t important that Scalia’s son worked for a law firm that was defending George W. Bush before the high court (with no Scalia recusal).

Just like it wasn’t important that Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife worked on the Bush transition team — before the Supreme Court shut down the recount in Florida — and was busy accepting resumes from people who would serve in the Bush White House if her husband stopped the recount in Florida…which he did. There was no Thomas recusal, either.

None of them believed in democracy.

More than a year after the election a consortium of newspapers including The Washington Post, The New York Times, and USA Today did their own recount of the vote in Florida — manually counting every vote in a process that took almost a year — and concluded that Al Gore did indeed win the presidency in 2000.

As the November 12th, 2001 article in The New York Times read:

“If all the ballots had been reviewed under any of seven single standards and combined with the results of an examination of overvotes, Mr. Gore would have won.”

That little bit of info was slipped into the seventeenth paragraph of the Times story so that it would attract as little attention as possible, because the 9/11 attacks had happened just weeks earlier and the publishers of the big newspapers feared that burdening Americans with the plain truth that George W. Bush lost the election would further hurt a nation already in crisis.

To compound the crime, Bush could only have gotten as close to Gore in the election as he did because his brother, Florida Governor Jeb Bush, had ordered his Secretary of State, Kathrine Harris, to purge at least 57,000 mostly-Black voters from the state’s voter rolls just before the election.

Tens of thousands of African Americans showed up to vote and were turned away from the polls in that election in Florida. BBC covered it extensively, although the American media didn’t seem interested.

So, for the third time in 4 decades, Republicans took the White House under illegitimate electoral circumstances. Even President Carter was shocked by the brazenness of that one. And Jeb Bush and the GOP were never held to account for that crime against democracy.*

President George W. Bush appointed Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court. Alito not only doesn’t believe in democracy, he also doesn’t believe in a woman’s right to get an abortion. He’d put a judge like himself between a woman and her doctor, with a police officer and a prison to enforce his decree.

Most recently, in 2016, Trump ally Kris Kobach and Republican Secretaries of State across the nation used Interstate Crosscheck to purge millions of legitimate voters — most people of color — from the voting rolls just in time for the Clinton/Trump election.

Meanwhile, Russian oligarchs and the Russian state, and possibly pro-Trump groups or nations in the Middle East, funded a widespread program to flood social media with pro-Trump, anti-Clinton messages from accounts posing as Americans, as documented by Robert Mueller’s investigation.

And on top of that, we learned in 2020 that Republican campaign data on the 2016 election, including which states needed a little help via phony influencers on Facebook and other social media, was not only given to Russian spy and oligarch Konstantin Kilimnik by Trump’s campaign manager Paul Manafort, but Kilimnik transferred it to Russian intelligence.

Even with all that treasonous help from Russia, Donald Trump still lost the national vote by nearly 3 million votes but came to power in 2016 through the electoral college, an artifact of the Founding era designed to keep slavery safe in colonial America.**

And then, in 2021, after losing to Joe Biden by 7 million votes, Trump mounted a seditious effort to overturn the election he’d just lost.

Trump didn’t believe in democracy in the least; he openly fawned over autocratic and fascistic states and their leaders.

After Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans blocked President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court, President Donald Trump filled Garland’s spot with Neil Gorsuch, the son of Reagan’s disgraced former EPA administrator, Anne Gorsuch.

For reasons that are still unclear, shortly after Trump mentioned Kennedy’s son to him publicly at the Gorsuch ceremony, Justice Kennedy decided to resign. Whether it had anything to do with young Justin Kennedy — then working at Deutsche Bank and having signed off on over a billion dollars in corrupt loans to Trump — is still unknown, and Kennedy, still in good health, isn’t talking.

Kennedy was replaced by “Blackout” Brett Kavanaugh, who had previously worked in the Bush White House. Republicans refused to turn over 95 percent of Kavanaugh’s papers to the Senate Judiciary Committee and jammed through his nomination after an epic meltdown on live television.

When Ruth Bader Ginsberg died just before the 2020 election, McConnell decided his “Garland Rule” was irrelevant and jammed through Trump’s nomination of Amy Coney Barrett in about six weeks; she was sworn in on October 27, 2020. When Democrats raised questions about Barrett’s role as a “Handmaid” (what she called herself) in a bizarre Catholic cult they were brushed aside.

Trump appointed Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanuagh, and Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. We now know none of the three of them believe in democracy, either.

Fifty-four years of Republican presidents using treason to achieve the White House (or inheriting it from one who did) has transformed America and dramatically weakened our democracy.

Those presidents have contributed their own damages to the rule of law and democracy in America, but their cynical Supreme Court appointments have arguably done the most lasting damage.

Republican appointees on the Court during this time have gutted the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, union rights, the Affordable Care Act, and legalized Republican voter purges. They legalized the bribery of politicians by billionaires and corporations.

In short, they’ve done everything they can to weaken democracy and enforce minority rule in America.

One of their wives appears to have been involved in the January 6th attempted overthrow of our electoral process and thus our republic. Republican justices and judges openly flaunt the judicial code of ethics and routinely hand decisions to the GOP’s largest donors.

Today’s fascistic behavior by elected Republicans and their appointees on the courts has a long history, deeply rooted in multiple acts of treachery and treason. “Power at any cost” has been their slogan ever since Nixon’s attempts to assassinate Castro in 1960 to beat JFK in that year’s election.

Democracy? They laugh.

Which is why it’s time to call the Republican Party what it is: a criminal enterprise embracing fascism to hang onto power, a threat to our republic, and a danger to all life on Earth.

*For more detail, this is extensively documented and footnoted in my book The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America.

**This is covered in depth in my book The Hidden History of the War On Voting.

[stevetown]

Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth

Playtime: 59h 29m Completed: April 17, 2024

I put off writing this entry because I didn't want to admit to myself that I really did not care for Rebirth. Remake was my favorite game of the last decade, and I rarely get hyped for new titles nowadays, so to swallow the bitter pill and admit the last four years of hype were wasted...hurts.

It happened sometime around Costa Del Sol. After a lengthy chapter involving a card tournament, which itself was followed by a chapter whose climax hinges on a rhythm game parade segment, here was another chapter where you had to complete multiple required mini-games to get tickets to dress our favorite cast of destiny defiers for the beach. On its face, Rebirth should have been exactly what I was looking for. I love these characters so much that just hanging out at the game's equivalent of Atlantic City should have been an easy slam dunk for me. And there are good, if fleeting, character moments to be found here!

But at this point in the game, it became apparent there's no pathos and no forward momentum pulling the party forward other than "I guess we'll bumble around looking for black robed figures." It's a confusing approach to the middle chapter considering even the original was so clear about the stakes for each character and what they were after once they left Midgar. Remake was also so keen on engaging with our knowledge of the original's plot. "You can't fall in love with me" sent me reeling. Rebirth offers no such assurance that it knows nor cares about what's coming.

Emotional catharsis is nowhere to be found. Character moments like Barrett and Dyne's reunion and Red XIII's Cosmo Canyon homecoming are offensively brief, having little to no lead up and no follow through indicating those events had a lasting impact on anyone. The few beats where the game does take swings and add new material are almost never talked about amongst the cast, leading to narratively clashing moments that left us scratching our heads and screaming at the screen for anyone to talk about anything of importance. Whenever the game begins to build any kind of emotional crest, you can count on it falling short of a satisfying conversational resolution if it wasn't interrupted by Yuffie screaming about materia for the thousandth time this chapter.

It's not all bad. There's good stuff here with Cloud and Tifa's relationship. Vincent and Cid's character introductions are highlights that got some good belly laugh's and felt like old school Remake character magic. The second visit to the Gold Saucer got the waterworks going. The combat is more of the same, which is to say fairly good, but it's hard to keep all of the character play styles straight in your head and the Folio system is the worst character upgrade system since Final Fantasy II.

Then there's the climax, which I'm honestly too exhausted to get into. It's not that I hate the idea of what they're going for here, but during the moment where the game needed clarity the most it decided to muddle the message and leave us shrugging more than salivating for part III. It's clear this Final Fantasy VII remake experiment wants to have its cake and eat it too, offer titillating change and remain faithful to the original, but instead offers neither. I'm not left with confidence that Hamaguchi, Nomura and co. know how to wrap this up and deliver a satisfying conclusion to what they kicked off with aplomb and intrigue in Remake.

I did have fun with Rebirth! I put a lot of hours into it, despite the game's incessant efforts to make me hate it at almost every turn (I never want to hold down triangle for three seconds every time I need to do anything in the environment, thanks). There are good nuggets buried deep within the expansive nothingness that is the game's take on Ubisoft map design. But this is a game that is impressively all fat with little meat to chew on. Golden moments are spread too thin, not explored to satisfaction, and at worst become utterly confusing. I know in a year I'll still be pining for the last installment, which is more of a testament to how enduring these characters are than anything Rebrith itself did. I might as well see this through, but I'm left feeling disappointed that Square has shown this experiment to be what I wasn't looking for after all.

#ffvii rebirth #2024 game journal #final fantasy #video game review #ffvii #I got Tifa for the gold saucer date btw. They knocked that scene out of the park.

[thegildedcentury]

Hey, I did a thing!

Greetings. I really should be proud to announce that a short story I've written has been accepted and published in the Spring 2024 issue of the BlazeVOX literary journal and not currently fixating on everything that could possibly be wrong with it, yet here we are. As one last, desperate act of token rebellion against my overwhelming self-doubt, I am forcing myself to be pleased to present it here to you, my dear followers, and by proxy any of your own followers you opt to share this post with.

I offer you my solemn assurance that BlazeVOX is an actual, legitimate publishing entity that's been around since the year 2000 and has its own Wikipedia page and everything. BlazeVOX is not some fly-by-night literary organization that will take your deeply personal poem about your first intimate sexual experience and sell it for fentanyl; not even the good kind of fentanyl, rather some stuff that's been stepped on so many times it won't even kill you no matter how much you take.

No! BlazeVOX is the real deal, an organization run by passionate lovers of all kinds of literature ranging from non-fiction to poetry to short fiction such as my own story, which I am just now realizing I should probably tell you the name of.

My story is The Balcony Over The Sea. It is a short (Only 5,837 words! That's shorter than the average tweet thread about how giving Princess Peach her own video game is destroying Western Civilization!) retelling of the events of Homer's Odyssey from the perspective of Odysseys' son Telemachus but despite that I swear it is actually good, full of sex and violence and romance and conflict, not to mention tantalizingly graphic depictions of both thoughts and feelings in all their lewd glory. Please take a look at it if you are interested in melancholy romantic fantasy or acting out of pity, both are acceptable. The name I write under is E.W.H. Thornton, which is just my real name but dramatically shortened in order to save the reader precious seconds that could be better spent viewing pornography. Please consider reblogging this post if you like the story, or are darkly amused by clogging up your followers' feeds with random crap. Thank you, and good night.

#add tags to help people find your post #add another tag #Am I doing it right?

[graff1980]

I’m contemplating eradicating any good ideas that I was saving, throwing out my old journals, and going back to the video games that I was playing.

-2024

#poetry #poem #poets on tumblr #writerscreed #poets corner #spilled ink

[julietpricee]

Day 15 - Sharpuary (Ashwinder)

This one's a little dark so please take note of the trigger warnings! Also fancied doing something a little different with the format, so I hope you enjoy a peak into Aesop's journal 👀

TW - Torture, murder, death of a child.

Journal Entry #104

Today, our family grew by one… Let me explain.

“Evening dear,” Aesop called out as he closed the door to your quaint cottage behind him. 

“Evening.” You called out as you continued stirring a pot of gravy in the kitchen. 

Aesop removed his coat and made his way towards you, noticing the abundance of gardening tools laid out on the dining room table. He wrapped his arms around your waist from behind, nuzzling his face into your neck to inhale your scent. 

“Someone’s been busy,” he whispers into your neck.

“Hmm?” You replied, turning to face him.

Aesop loosened his grip to gesture to the garden tools before turning to look out of the window towards your… still overgrown garden…

I should explain that neither of us typically enjoy gardening. It’s impossible for me to kneel down to tend to the plants for a prolonged amount of time, and as for my wife, she kills plants just by looking at them.

“Oh…” Aesop continued with confusion clear on his face as he continued staring out into the garden. He suddenly felt your hand crawl into his, pulling his attention back towards you.

“I need to tell you something,” you begin but get rudely interrupted by some muffled cries coming from the basement. Aesop’s head snaps towards the basement door.

“What did you do this time?” He questions you nervously.

I’ve only ever wanted a simple, normal life. I’m not sure why my wife is insistent on making that an impossibility.

“I got him.” You simply state, tears building up in your eyes alongside a wide grin. 

“Him?” He repeats, clearly not following. “Sweetheart, we’ve been over this, you can’t just kidnap people.”

After turning the heat down on your gravy, you head over to the dresser in the lounge and pull out a small black book. You rub your thumb over the leather and let out a nervous breath before passing it over to Aesop hesitantly. 

It felt like an eternity passed as you watched Aesop perch on the edge of the dining room table, flicking through the book. Eventually, he closed it, placed it next to him and looked at you with an impossible to read expression spread across his face. 

I would never admit it to her but she would almost definitely make a better Auror than I. There must have been months, maybe even years of work crammed into that tiny black book. I knew she was persistent and never gave in but I honestly thought we had both learned to live with it after such a long time. I felt so guilty flicking through that book, knowing I was clueless as to how much she was still hurting. 

“Are you sure it’s him?” He eventually asked.

You replied with an assured nod. “The evidence is all there. He’s the leader of those Ashwinders.”

Aesop pauses for a moment, gathering his thoughts as he contemplates the gardening tools that were spread out beside him. “What are the tools for if you didn’t do any gardening today?” Aesop was nervous to hear your response, and the silence that lingered between you only heightened his nerves.

Aesop opened his mouth to speak again but you interrupted him. “I just wanted to scare him… I haven’t touched him…” You insist. “Yet anyway.”

Merlin knows why she always opts for the dramatic approach to things. She could just threaten him with her wand, but no, she just had to get the torture equipment out didn’t she? I think she watches too many movies…

Aesop pinched the bridge of his nose, trying to stay calm. “You… We could get into a lot of trouble for this,” He grumbled, feeling the pressure of the situation in front of him. 

“You used to be an Auror. I know you can cover this up,” you respond dryly. 

“I’m not a dirty cop,” he bit back. “I made an oath.”

“Oh fuck the oath!” You shout at him. “He’s a murderer! We can’t let him get away with what he did to our son, Aesop.” 

The room falls bitterly silent as another loud cry comes from the basement. 

“Hurting that man, won’t bring him back,” Aesop eventually states rather defeatedly. 

“But it will feel good right?” You retorted. 

She was right. It did feel good. It felt like I was back in the force but this time I wasn’t just capturing an Ashwinder, I was torturing one. Not that it mattered how much information he gave me, nothing he could have said would have made me stop. 

At first, I felt bad but his screams spurred me on. No matter how unnecessarily painful that Ashwinder’s death was, he deserved it. He should have known better than to mess with me and my wife.

AO3: https://archiveofourown.org/works/53448181/chapters/136199746

#hogwarts legacy #hogwarts legacy fandom #professor sharp #aesop sharp #professor aesop sharp #daddy sharp #aesop sharp x mc #hogwarts #aesop sharp x reader #professor sharp x mc #professor sharp x oc #professor sharp x reader #aesop sharp x oc #sharpuary #sharpuary 2024

[annes-room]

❄️ Jan 8, 2024

new year, new blog intro! I've had this online journal for a year now and I love what I've curated it to be. it is still largely used as a studyblr, but I'd like to use it a bit more as a journal going forward. everything I reblog is like a sticker in a diary or something to decorate my room 💖

more about me below, feel free to visit anytime 🧸

I'm anne (they/she), and I'm in my third year of uni, studying stats and compsci, but I did have a brief stint in physics. I have a broad range of interests, many of which will be shared on this blog, organized using the tags detailed below.

📖 my bookshelf: updates on what I’m reading and reviews

✒️ my desk: studies and schoolwork (studyblr rbs get tagged as study inspo)

🎵 my record player: songs, music, and playlists

👗 my wardrobe: my favourite outfits and inspriation

🌙 my bed: cozy things and aesthetics I like

🖼️ my walls: art and how I would actually decorate my space

📺 my tv: shows, movies, and video games

📝 my journal: journaling and any other bits of writing I want to do on here

specific interests for posts will be tagged as well

#annes room #my bookshelf #my desk #my record player #my wardrobe #my bed #my walls #my tv #my journal #studyblr #university #stemblr #statsblr #compsci #study inspo #study with me

[flolife]

InZOI and The LGBTQIA+ Community

Disclaimer: This is not an attack on anyone involved here, and I really hope nobody else attacks them. Madi was nothing but helpful, and I’m sure the creators of inZOI aren’t being deliberate here. A summary of this article is at the bottom of it.

Background

Sims 4 and Expression

The Sims 4 may not be the favourite game in a long-running franchise, but it’s clearly got one thing right; Gender Expression and Sexuality. Although the game was originally built on a binary system, you could marry same-sex couples, and now with a recent patch, you can express a diverse gender range. They are actively working on being inclusive, and that’s great!

The Competition

A long list of coming-up competitors to the Sims features Paralives, Life by You, and now inZOI. It jumped up very recently, yet it is planned to release in late 2024, although it seems near finished now. It looks, and I don’t say this lightly, amazing. The graphics are stunning. The gameplay seems fun. It is one of the best competitors in a long time. But, in their own trailers, one thing seemed missing.

LGBTQIA+ People and inZOI

The inZOI marketing campaign is HEAVY. It’s almost unavoidable. One user now has access to an early copy, acottonsock is their username on YouTube. Madi’s been making videos for 3 years, something surprisingly impressive. They are a unique breed of Sims YouTuber now, as they do not appear to make ANY Sims 4 content, instead focusing on 2 and 3. Sims 2 and 3 do allow same sex relationships, however they do not allow any diverse gender options. 

This is a bit of an odd choice in terms of inZOI’s marketing team as, although Madi is honestly a great creator, and I do actually plan on watching some of her non-inZOI content, they’re not the most popular Sims YouTuber. There are an expansive number, but I am being honest when I say that inZOI could’ve reached a much greater audience by catering to someone like Plumbella, Vixella, or lilsimsie, who definitely would’ve been down to do it. 

I must admit, I’m glad they didn’t choose one of them. InZOI has made a deliberate move here, and it has calculated risks and benefits. One of the benefits of choosing Madi is the mutual benefit. Madi gains more followers, and inZOI gets to showcase their game. 

I posed 2 questions in my email to Madi, “Can ZOIs engage in same-sex relationships, or any LGBTQIA+ relationships?” and “Can ZOIs be anything other than Cisgender Male and Females?”

Madi responded openly and willingly, and I must admit that not watching the four hour livestream was partial bad journalism, but I didn’t have the time to do anything but a skim. This is wonderful, as Same-Sex Relationships appear to be receiving love in inZOI, but I fear that the gender expression beyond a binary system is sorely lacking, and unless they add it soon I don’t think they will ever be featured in inZOI.

Summary

InZOI is a notable competitor the Sims franchise, and it does feature same-sex relationships, but unfortunately the ability to have beyond the binary system of Gender is sorely lacking. I really hope that something can be done to combat this, before the games release in late 2024. I fear that if it's not, it will be too late.

#inzoi #sims 4 #the sims 3 #I really hope someone reads this #acottonsock #Madi is a wonderful person