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rek1s-headband · 3 years

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hi! figured i’d drop a request for you :))! Maybe some general bf hcs for reki and langa? Just in general how they would be as a boyfriend or how they would act in a relationship?

Hi!! Thank you so much for your request, I’ve been excited to do one of these. I hope you enjoy it!

➯ random boyfriend headcannons

➯ characters: Reki Kyan and Langa Hasegawa x gn reader

➯ warnings: none! Just some fluff for these two boys:)

Reki:

-Literally the most enthusiastic person you’ve ever seen. He’d be happy to just sit in silence with you because come on, it’s YOU. There’s no one he’d rather be wasting the hours away with.

-Your biggest hype man, EVER. You post something on Instagram? Get ready for a flood of comments, all from him. You could put your phone down for two minutes after posting, and you’ll come back to 99+ notifications of just reki commenting along the lines of “woah suddenly I’m on one knee” “DAMNNNN” and many, many more.

-Never leave your phone unattended around him. He won’t snoop, but be prepared to come back to your camera roll flooded with just zoomed in pictures of his face, his mouth, his eye, ANYWHERE. Mf is spamming your whole phone with pictures of him for you to come back to.

-He has to always be touching you in some way. Whether it’s holding your hand, your waist, a casual arm around your shoulder, there has to be something. He’ll put his hand on your ass sometimes while you walk in public.

-Honestly doesn’t even think PDA is anything out of the ordinary. Like, you’re his s/o??? Yes you’re in his lap, yes you’re in the middle of the skatepark, so what? You’re his, and he’s happy he can make everyone aware of that.

-I saw a post on here that said he would peel stickers off fruit and stick them to peoples’ foreheads, and I fully stand by this. However, it doesn’t just stop at fruit stickers. Anything remotely sticky, whether it’s tags from clothes, tape from a food box, even random sequins and bits of glitter he finds around, it’s immediately being stuck to some part of your face.

-Loves casual dates. Stopping by food stalls, browsing in clothes and game stores for a few hours, and skating around with you until it’s time to go home is a dream for him. Be prepared for day-long dates, because he will clear his entire schedule just to spend the day with you.

-His family adores you. His mother is always goading him to bring you over more, complaining that she misses her "honorary son/daughter/child". His sisters love you too. Any time you come over there’s immediately three tiny bodies shooting at you, grabbing you by the waist and dragging you over to wherever they’re playing. Reki tries to drag you away, wanting to have you for himself, but you always try and stay for at least five or ten minutes. Secretly, he loves that you get along so well with his siblings, going soft at the thought of how you would act with children of your own.

-He loves playing video games with you. Sitting in his lap, the two of you could spend hours switching from game to game. One minute you could be burning down a village in Minecraft, the next complaining while Reki whoops your ass in Mario Kart. His mom brings you food for your breaks between games, and she’ll even stay for a few minutes to talk to you while Reki shifts underneath you, glowing red from embarassment.

-If you can’t skate, he would beg to teach you. If you accept, he goes all out. He’ll make you your own customised board just for practicing, making sure it’s absolutely perfert for you to learn on. But if you can skate, get ready for endless races and competitions to see who can nail a new trick the quickest.

-Adores when you come to S to support him. He loves looking into the crowd and seeing you there cheering him on before he goes into a beef. If he wins, he’ll race over to where you are in the crowd, picking you up and spinning you around, kissing you without a care in the world. However, if he loses he’s thankful you’re always there to pick him back up and make him feel better afterwards.

-Loves cleaning you up after a big fall, kissing your bruises and cuts better. He’ll carefully wrap each injury with care, telling you how brave you are, no matter how small the cut. Secretly, he loves when you baby him after he falls himself. Seeing you wipe away the blood from a new cut and place a small plaster on it with such tenderness melts his heart in a way only you could.

-Speaking of plasters, this man has one for every occasion. Princesses, pirates, aliens, cats, dogs, sparkles, stripes, you name it, he’s got it.

-The type to sneak you out at two in the morning to get a slushee with him. Honestly, he’s up so late making boards for people he just has no perception of time.

-Spams your phone with TikToks or other funny things that reminds him of you. It could be a very specific thing, or a flower or cloud. If he thinks of you when he sees it(which is fairly often), it gets sent to you.

-Talks with his hands a lot. He’s a very expressive talker, so when he’s telling you a story it feels like you’re right there in the story with him.

-Please just kiss him. His cheeks, his forehead, his hand, his shoulder, his temples, his lips. Anywhere, he’ll melt under you. Mf is touch starved to the max.

-Always knows how to make you laugh. His laugh is infectious, it could get you out of your darkest moods.

-Sleeps with his head on your chest, and one hand in your shirt little perv.

-His social media is like a SHRINE for you. His highlights, his posts, his stories, EVERYWHERE. He’s just so proud to be able to call you his that he wants the whole world to know.

-Kisses in the rain while you run home, skateboards in your hands after the weather forecast failed you once again. He’s just so happy in the moment that he can’t contain himself, so he’s pulling you into him in the pouring rain, kissing you hard while your hair gets drenched.

-You don’t need to steal his clothes, he will literally give them to you because “you just look so cute wearing them”. Occasionally, he’ll take one of your hoodies, and even if it doesn’t exactly fit him, he’ll still keep it near him while he sleeps so he can keep your scent close to him.

Langa:

-This man is so oblivious to obvious hints, but still manages to pick up on the smallest of details? It’s incredible, honestly. He could describe the exact colour of your eyes with the most insane detail, but he still won’t notice when you try and hint that you like him in the first place!

-You two have a bit more of a low-key relationship, but you’ll make your usual appearance in his Instagram posts, or on his Snapchat story with a casual caption like a simple heart, or “my love<3”

-Not very big on PDA, not because he doesn’t like it, but because he doesn’t think of it. However, when he does feel like he’s being too physically distant, he’ll link pinkies with you as you walk along, or rest his head on your shoulder while you watch a video on your phone.

-His mom adores you, which is why Langa despises bringing you to his house. You always seem to leave with seven of his baby photos from his time snowboarding in Canada, a new recipe from his mother that you complimented, another one of his hoodies, and more miscellaneous stuff that you don’t even know how it ended up in your bag. He has a little shelf in your room specifically for this random stuff, and he always adds to the collection when he comes to your house. He’ll leave a keyring, a small toy, a Polaroid, anything honestly.

-Loves dates that you can experience. The movies, aquariums, museums and the zoo are common dates for the two of you to go on, but other than that, he adores going skateboarding with you. He’s been improving, and he loves when you notice little things he’s been picking up on, whether it be a new trick or simply how he balances himself on the board.

-Adores old Disney movies. Yall will binge a ton of them in one day, having full-blown musicals in Langa’s living room. When any of the romantic songs come on, like “So this is Love” from Cinderella, Langa will stand up and offer his hand to you, as the two of you waltz around his sitting room, humming the tune of the song.

-Study dates are frequent with the two of you. If you happen to stay up late studying and fall asleep on each other, his mother will cover the two of you with a blanket, tidying some of your books and leaving with a smile, happy with the knowledge you were making her son the happiest he’s been in quite a while.

-Slow dancing in the kitchen while you cook is a regular. When a particularly sappy love song comes on while he stirs the pot, he’ll turn around and hold you close to him, twirling you around the kitchen.

-Reki constantly jokes that he is a third wheel, poking fun at the two of you, Cherry and Joe, and Shadow and “his little girlfriend back at the flower shop”. He’ll hang out of Miya, whining about them having to stick together since they’re the only two “lone wolves”. He’ll usually get a well-earned thump into the back of the head from Miya, but it’s still funny to watch the whole thing go down.

-Tends to be shy when giving you clothes, so instead of asking you to wear them he’ll leave them out in places he knows you’ll find them, or he’ll come up behind you and plop it in your lap, murmuring about how cute it would look on you.

-Please do this man’s makeup. He will sit so still for you, waiting patiently while you dab eyeshadow at his eyes, trying not to blink so you don’t mess up his mascara. He’ll sit there mesmerised for a few minutes, taking in how he looks, and simply whisper “you do this every day?”

-Evem though he’s not a very openly affectionate person, he is stuck to your hip behind closed doors. He’ll lie in your lap for hours, staring up at you while you mess with his hair, pulling it into little plaits and pigtails.

-I can’t even describe how the two of you sleep. It’s simply a mass of limbs, and no one knows exactly what belongs to who. Somehow one of yall will end up upside down, and-why is Langa on the floor??

-He could talk about his time in Canada for hours, and you’d just lie on his chest and listen to him. Every once in a while he’ll look down at you to see if you’re still listening, and his heart will melt a little every time he sees you staring back up at him, eyes wide with interest.

-This man NEVER gets jealous. You’d literally have to cling to another man for it to click in his brain that Oh. He doesn’t like that.

-He’s not big on texting, but if you call him he will stay on that call with you for hours, even after the two of you fall asleep.

-Whenever he falls(which is quite often), you’ll always have plasters on hand to help fix him up. He always flushes bright red when you kiss his cuts better, and never knows just what to do with himself afterwards.

-When he skates against tough opponents, you’ll always give him a kiss for good luck. Of course, this doesn’t stop you worrying, but you know Langa wouldn’t go out of his way to get injured. And if he does, well, at least he’ll have you there to kiss his bruises better.

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blue-shaded · 3 years

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Hey Dolphin anon! While I respect your opinion, I disagree on some points. I don’t know where the popular sentiment that he doesn’t denounce his stans’ toxic behavior came from but he’s said multiple times that he denounces it (https://twitter.com/PooGnf/status/1399592255657156608/video/1 ignore the user lol :) ) and that’s just what he says on Twitter. Some of it yeah is a little more lighthearted, like when he talks about Detective Dream in some of the tweets, but I’d say that a fair amount of those tweets lack sarcasm and are said in full seriousness. In addition, he’s also said not to send hate on his behalf during multiple of his own livestreams, he said it when he went on Kaceytron’s streams, he said he didn’t condone toxic behavior during Kavos’s video, as well as multiple times throughout various drama like the speedrunning situation and the John Swan situation (for Blue and others, John Swan is a commentary youtubers who basically did a lot of weird shit, who Dream worked with in the past and had a bad experience with. man imitated Dream’s discord profile and pretended to be him while sending sexual things to a minor, and then tried to blame everything he did on his 12-year old neighbor when he got caught, saying he left his computer open and that that neighbor got on Discord and was the one who did all that weird shit. Obviously false and got proven false, but even when Dream was debunking the situation on stream, he said not to send hate). He’s said it multiple times and I agree that he should continue to say it as he continues to grow to remind both new and old fans but he’s said it multiple times and at this point, anyone who Is still sending death threats is aware that it’s wrong and that he doesn’t support it and they just don’t care. I personally think that behavior is disgusting and I know most of the people I interact with on Twitter do as well. At this point, it’s just sort of a question of to what extent do people want him to say it. The most recent time he denounced death threats was on May 31st both on Twitter and on stream, and he’s probably said it at least once a month almost every month since like December, so he says it quite a bit, so going further would be personally DMing each toxic person he sees and telling them to stop which. I just think is a little absurd. I know that others want him to post a video on his main channel about it and condoning it as well, but I sort of disagree? While death threats can be sent on any platform, the platform on which people receive it on the most is Twitter. Anyone who’s obsessed enough to send death threats is going to be following him on all socials so they’ve definitely seen him condemning it as he’s tweeted saying that he doesn’t support that type of behavior multiple times, but of course, others are allowed to disagree with me on that, I just think that it’s hard to find a good course of action past that. I agree that toxic behavior should still be called out, but I feel like a lot of people advocating for him to do it more than he is now kind of don’t understand how out of control toxic behavior is and how they rarely listen to creators themselves.

The speedrunning stuff I kind of agree on, though I’ll just go a little more in depth about the situation. basically, for those who don’t watch Dream’s videos, dream codes mod videos for Minecraft and these mod videos would consist of things like “Minecraft but everything is dark” and “Minecraft but we can only see one chunk at a time”. Now because Dream still runs the dream SMP and did speed running at the time he had to move these mods out of the mod folder in order to do everything else that he was doing when he wasn’t recording videos. This would later on lead to the problem where the speed run moderators would ask for his mods folder and he wouldn’t be able to provide a full copy because he had since moved stuff around because it had been a week after the actual speedrun streams they were inquiring about. The thing that ended up being the problem was a recording mod that Dream had asked a separate developer to create for him and the Dream Team in order to make their recordings smoother. that was sort of it there weren’t any specifics given, he just wanted recordings to be better. Now because it was just for recordings and since the mod ran well dream didn’t ask the developer for the specifics of what they coded into this recording mod at the time. In his mind this recording mod sort of just clean things up visually. And for those who have never really played Minecraft, what I mean by that is if you press F5 in Minecraft you get a whole ton of information on your screen about coordinates and computer specs. When people say that the mod cleaned things up visually, they mean that all of that irrelevant information that clogs up the screen in a video was minimized to just coordinates. he was wrong in this assumption, the Recording mud also included coding that allowed for better trades. again for anyone who doesn’t play Minecraft, Dream and the Dream Team record their videos in the 1.16 version of Minecraft. In this version of Minecraft, it’s a widely used tactic to use piglin trades to get ender pearls. Since their videos aren’t just about beating the game regularly, there’s usually more of a focus on fighting or the specific mod that they’re using for that video, the developer increased the likelihood of ender pearl trades with pigeons in order to make recordings go faster. Regardless of that and his misconception of what the mod actually did, Dream didn’t believe it mattered because there was no record of him having loaded that recording mod during the speedrunning streams in question. This is because Dream uses something that a lot of speed runners use, he uses Fabric. Fabric API is something that both allows your Minecraft to run smoother (which is why a lot of speed runners use it, it’s approved to be used by the speed run moderators) and for those who wish to do so, it also functions as a mod loader. So when I said that he had no record of him having loaded the recording mod, I mean that when he checked the logs of Fabric API, it said that the only thing loaded was Fabric itself. this was inherently a wrong way to go about it because the way Fabric API logs work is that you have to be searching for a specific mod, so you can’t just look at what the log says is loaded on because sometimes the logs don’t show a mod unless you specifically ask the program to look for it. Dream figured this out a couple months ago, he went back through the logs, talk to the developer who coded the recording mod and got confirmation that yes, he did have the recording mod on and yes, the recording mod does increase ender pearl drop rates. He recently wrote a pastebin that has since been taken down by the pastebin staff though screenshots of it are still easy to find. I do wish that he had come out about this sooner because he knew of this information for a couple months before openly sharing, but I do get the situation has sort of faded and that he wasn’t excited to re-open that discussion when he himself had gotten a lot of hate and the threats during that situation.

Obviously as outsiders looking in we will never know how genuine he’s being, if he’s telling the truth, but I choose to believe that he did feel as bad about the situation as he said he did because for a lot of people who do consume his content, it’s been very noticeable within the past couple months that he’s been a lot less active both in terms of streaming and just interacting with the community, but of course, it’s all just personal interpretation and we will never actually know.

Just wanted to explain the situation fully because people who may not play Minecraft and understand it the developing behind it may not understand how he could’ve possibly not seen the mod or not have a copy of the mod folder. I would disagree with you on the point that the controversy around Dream’s speed runs has delegitimized the rest of the speed running community. As someone who still watches well-known speed runners like Bennex and Illumina (TapL and Punz if they count as well), I don’t think any of them have really argued that they think that situation has delegitimize them, though I guess you could argue that they simply haven’t spoken up because they’re a little too afraid to speak up against a big Youtuber, which is fair. But as someone who has spoken to a lot of people who have sort of slightly read up on the situation without actually caring about Minecraft or Dream, none of them have said that they think that the speed running community is not legitimate because of it. Not to sound flippant because I do like watching speedrunners (albeit the already more popular ones) or anything, but the Minecraft speedrunning community isn’t exactly very mainstream, not very many people care enough to actively oppose it or say that they’re not legitimate, from what I’ve seen it’s either just you support the community or you don’t care. Even people who actively thought that dream cheated from the beginning, never used that to discredit the rest of the community (at least from what I saw). They simply didn’t care. anyone making that argument is sort of ridiculous, before the 1.16 speed runs that got investigated, Dream already had a couple official speed runs on his YouTube channel. At the time they were posted, they were approved and legitimate (though I believe one’s been taken down now), so it’s not like even Dream’s entire time in speedrunning was completely falsified, so anyone using one situation to delegitimize a whole community is being a little ridiculous. In addition, anyone who actually knows and cares enough about the speedrunning community to try to claim that all of them aren’t credible, would know that a lot of the speedrunning community didn’t even like dream all that much, even before the cheating out allegations, and they didn’t really associate with him, so they would know the Dream’s actions don’t define the entire community. If you’re talking about Dream’s more general fans, like those who watch his YouTube who may now be skewed against the speedrunning community, you can look at comments in his community tab on his channel and see that people aren’t actively against the speedrunning community, they just say they don’t care and they want it behind them which is very different from thinking that they are all illegitimate. Though if you have substantial proof of multiple cases of multiple people being biased against speedrunning community and believing that they’re all cheaters after Dream’s situation, I’d be open to see them.

I also disagree with your point over Dream being a “professional speed runner”. He says this in responses to claims that speedrunning is a huge part of his career. And he’s correct when people talk about dreams achievements, none of them really talk about speed running that much it’s always about the SMP, his manhunt videos, and his coding videos. He’s not a professional speed runner in the way Illumina and Couriway and Bennex are. His career isn’t based on professional speedrunning. Citing the Minecraft manhunt series as proof that he’s a “professional speed runner“ is definitely a little skewed and ultimately wrong. If you tried to claim those as official speedruns, the moderating team would likely have a little laugh and then reject it. Yes, he has speed runner in the title and yes in a way, it is a speedrun because he is trying to beat the game as fast as possible, but more so he’s trying to avoid being killed by his friends in the game so it’s about both speed and being smart. Everyone within the speed run community and a lot of those outside of it would know that being chased down by your friends during the game isn’t a real category in Minecraft speedrunning and therefore the Minecraft Manhunt videos aren’t official speed runs. So people claiming that dream is an official speed runner and that that’s his career is ultimately false, which is what he was saying. His official speed runs were all done for fun and have never been the main focus of his content.

When you say that the legitimacy of the speedrunning community was called into question, I will admit, I’m unsure if you’re talking about the community itself and the people with in it, like the actual speedrunners, or if you’re talking about the moderator team or both. I will admit, even as someone who hyperfixates on Dream, his initial reaction to the moderators video saying that he cheated was godawful. for Blue and others who aren’t as into this and don’t know, basically the gist was he was lashing out and saying it was total bullshit and calling them idiots. He has since deleted that tweet and apologized for it and admitted that it was incredibly childish and impulsive. While I do get why he was so mad since the video had blindsided him after weeks of radio silence from the moderators and as a kid who didn’t finish high school he didn’t really understand the statistics that were being said in the video and since at the time he genuinely didn’t think that he cheated (a lot of people have said that all this combined led to heavy RSD which is why he lashed out like that), I still think that he could’ve handled the situation a lot better. on the other hand I think the moderators could’ve handled this situation a lot better as well. I don’t want to talk about the whole moderator team but I do want to talk about specifically Geosquare, who is probably the most talked about moderator when it comes to the situation. Dolphin anon, if you’re talking about the legitimacy of the moderator team being called into question, I’m assuming the situation surrounding Geosquare is likely what you’re talking about, which is a slightly different situation from just the speedrunning. So for Blue and others, before the video talking about Dream cheating was released, Dream had been told that there were people on the moderating team who didn’t like him. Knowledge of this bias is also a part of what caused Dream to lash out more in his initial reaction (though again it doesn’t excuse it). The biased moderator in question turned out to be Geosquare. This was heavily proven later on in about March of this year, where Geosquare played a large role in spreading the video of fake ‘dream’ saying the n-word. Geosquare was a speedrun moderator, he Has investigative skills and he got called out for spreading that video without doing any sort of investigating because it was clear to a lot of people that the person in the video wasn’t Dream. There were multiple things that made this video seem not credible, all of which easily could’ve been found by Geosquare.

Firstly, antis of Dream had been saying since January that they were going to try to find a way to accuse Dream of saying the N-word whether that just be through spreading rumors or faking a video or whatever else. Secondly, the video really sounds nothing like dream. Now I will say this video that the clip of someone saying the n-word was from 2016-2017. I’m not saying the video was fake, I’m not saying that someone somehow predicted that Dream was going to become a big creator or time traveled and went back in time to set him up for that. but the most common theory is that and he simply did go looking back through old Minecraft videos in order to find something incriminating. Both the creator of this video and a friend of the person who was saying the N-word in the video have since explained this. so basically for blue and others, Dream has not always on the Minecraft username Dream. He got it from someone else. And so the person in this video is called Dream. Since it was a while ago the timeline’s a little fuzzy for everyone and it’s unsure if this video occurred before Dream got the username or if it occurred after Dream got the username and the people within the video simply still called the person in the video Dream because that was what they were used to calling them. The clip’s a little too grainy to see the usernames and the video has since been taken down by the original poster. Either way, two different people. Geosquare has since admitted that this was bias on his end and that he apologized to Dream and that they’re all good and has given an apology to the black community for using the n-word as a weapon for his own bias and he has since stepped from the speedrun moderating team. so dolphin anon, when you’re talking about the legitimacy of the community being called into question if you’re talking about the moderating team, yes, you’d be correct, it was called into question, but I would say for valid and good reasons because it ultimately was biased (though again, doesn’t change that Dream was the one in the wrong in the speedrunning situation w how he initially reacted). I don’t want to fully blame Geosquare and say that it was completely obvious it wasn’t Dream or make it seem completely obvious to you guys, because things like mic changes and puberty do exist, so I’ll give the clips and allow you all to decide for yourselves.

The clip of someone, accused to be Dream, saying the N-word: https://twitter.com/Tommathyinnit/status/1375395156791336964/video/1 (I am not entirely sure which speaker is being accused to be Dream, which was sort of the first indicated to me that it probably wasn’t him because I don’t think peoples voices change That much, but I think he was being accused to be the person who was saying “well you can bring your friend...”) Again, this video is from 2016-2017.

A clip of Dream talking, also from 2016-2017: https://twitter.com/Onciescumbucket/status/1357440678909923335/video/1 (okay so. again ignore the user 😭 but it’s confirmed to be Dream by the fact it does sound like him and his long-time friends Sapnap, who used to go by PandascanPvP, and BadBoyHalo being in the video. I believe the video has captions so even for those who don’t know Dream or what he sounds like, it’ll tell you which one’s him and you can compare that voice to the one in the other clip)

But yeah. aaaaa I’m sorry for such a long submission, I’m hyperfixated on Dream and the Dream Team, though I do understand that there are legitimate criticisms on all of them and that no one’s required to like them, and people don’t need real reasons to dislike them because people are allowed to dislike whomever they want. Definitely not any hate towards you dolphin anon, I think that you do have points, I just wanted to express my disagreement with some of them and it’s nice that you do acknowledge that the toxicity goes both ways for both stans and antis. I think a big problem is that a lot of the creators who condemn or speak against Dream (people like Slasher and Noah Hugbox and Kavos) don’t openly condemn the toxic behavior of their own fans as much as Dream does, so it becomes a very hypocritical cycle where they’re making videos about the toxicity of Dream stans and yet their own fans send death threats to Dream and his community. And since the death threats towards Dream come from multiple different fanbase rather than one centralized fanbase the way it is if toxic people from Dream’s community are attacking someone, he can’t really pin it on one person and ask them to denounce their fans so it just becomes a thing where he’s both receiving a ton of death threats while being asked to denounce death threats towards others when there’s no one really denouncing death threats towards him, which is just discouraging for his community to see, but that’s just how the Internet is, I suppose. Again, no hate to you dolphin anon and I’m sorry if any part of this came off as such, and again Blue, I’m sorry for such a long submission

MY GOODNESS WHAT A SCROLL Not gonna read all of it cuz its clearly dedicated to my dolphin anon.

#long post

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necrowriter · 4 years

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monday thing: may eighteenth (on hidden obstacles)

lately I've been thinking about video games.

I've played quite a bit of Animal Crossing since New Horizons came out. so, as you just might have noticed, have a lot of other people. by pure coincidence it happened to come out at a time when a great many people needed exactly the kind of escapism Animal Crossing offers. it's peaceful and soothing and soft, an imaginary getaway to a distant island where the neighbors are all friendly, the waves lap gently against clean bright sand, and there is never anything much to worry about it.

but New Horizons was eagerly anticipated long before anyone had any inkling what the circumstances around its release were going to be. it's the fifth game in a very successful series. Animal Crossing has had something appealing to offer for a long time. in the wake of the success of New Horizons I've seen a number of people wondering--many jokingly, some not--about why, exactly, the series is so appealing. is it really that much fun to pay off a home loan? to pull weeds and water flowers? are people really so invested in the thought of buying furniture or catching bugs to sell?

the usual sort of answer--again, often a joking one, sometimes not--is that the appeal is that you can pay off your home loan, without stress or fear, without interest accumulating, without any consequences if you don't. you can earn all the money you need by doing simple, easy tasks, and in the meantime your tanuki landlord will happily wait on you for years if he has to. well ain't that an impossible dream, amirite? we might as well enjoy doing it in a video game because we have no hope of doing it in real life.

and that answer is true, I think, but it only scratches the surface of something that extends well beyond Animal Crossing.

Animal Crossing is perhaps the most extreme example, but many--maybe even most--video games offer the chance to pursue relatively normal, everyday sort of tasks even when the main focus of the game is something very grand and exciting. massive, open-world adventures and RPGs with epic, sweeping stories very often also allow you the opportunity to customize the living space or wardrobe of your main character, play minigames to earn money and prizes, or pursue smaller sidequests to build relationships with friends or lovers or just to help someone out. start a business! care for pets! grow flowers! hell, just take a nice walk if you want.

and if you listen to people talk about playing these games, you will often hear that they spent a great deal of time and energy on such tasks, sometimes much more than they ever spent on the main story or the bigger quests. given the choice, it seems, people are just as often drawn to the smaller things, even in games that also offer the sort of thing that seems like much more conventional wish-fulfillment. certainly I can attest to this. in Minecraft, a game where you can build enormous castles or terraform entire continents, I have spent many enjoyable hours instead building a small farm or a lakeside cottage. Breath of the Wild is a game where you play as a legendary hero reawoken to battle an ancient and terrible foe that has devastated your entire kingdom and sure, I took on that quest, but I did it in-between spending a lot more time gathering ingredients for cooking, feeding apples to my beloved horse, or taking pictures of birds. as soon as Pokemon offered the chance to take a break from becoming a master trainer of cool, powerful creatures to give those creatures head scritches and feed them cupcakes, you can bet I grabbed that opportunity with both hands.

why do we so often choose to do smaller, even ordinary, things, in these situations where it is just as easy, if not easier, to do great, big, awe-inspiring, impressive ones? when given the chance to be a hero of great renown wielding a sword of legends to save the entire world, why do I so often put doing that off to instead enjoy riding my horse through a sunny meadow? would you not expect the thing that I could never do in real life to hold more appeal and draw than something entirely possible, even ordinary?

well, that's obviously a hell of a deep psychological rabbit hole to go down, but I think part of it is this: games have a way of removing hidden obstacles. alright, and not-so-hidden obstacles, sure. if we look back at the Animal Crossing example, some of the obstacles the game removes are very. obvious. your loans have no interest or deadline, no consequence for failure. making money requires no resume, no qualifications, no applications, no stress, no fuss, nothing more than a butterfly net or fishing rod and some time to spare, at most. there are no taxes, no global warming, no troubling political news.

but there are smaller obstacles shaved off here and there as well. in the world of Animal Crossing it is not just big things that become more accessible, but also day to day things which in real life are often rendered accessible to achieve, but not to enjoy, because of the difficulties attached to them.

let's take gardening. a few posts back I talked about my own personal troubles with gardening: that it was something I did find enjoyment in, but also struggled with a great deal because ADHD presented so many challenges to doing it that I came to believe it was something I was simply inherently and permanently bad at. in Animal Crossing, on the other hand, most of those challenges don't exist. when you go to buy a plant, you always know exactly what it is. its needs are simple and straight-forward, and if the game doesn't tell you them then you can surely find them laid out clearly and easily with a quick visit to any of dozens of wikis and game info sites. there are clear signals included to help you carry out what you need to do. you can tell if you've watered a flower because it will sparkle. you can tell if a tree won't grow where you're trying to plant it, because the game will tell you so.

the gardening in Animal Crossing specifically is very simplistic. but it offers to you, and keeps, a promise which even games with more complicated requirements keep: here are the steps, here is the list of what you need to do, and if you do it right, something will grow, and grow well.

of course this also takes away some of the things that make the whole pastime worthwhile in real life. there is no sensation of digging your fingers into rich dirt, no fresh crop to pick and eat right off the stem. and seeing a pixel plant sprout and grow in stages will never quite compare to watching something very real and alive grow from a seed that you planted yourself. yet still I find distinct enjoyment in walking between the plots of my virtual garden in Animal Crossing, in raising virtual flowers and watching them bloom.

with some video games, I find the wish fulfillment to be as straight-forward as that: the emulation of an activity I want to do in real life, but find to be more difficult than enjoyable because of the obstacles associated with it. sometimes it's less direct. I have always enjoyed simulation and management games, games about building, cultivating, growing, raising, developing. but I've found myself particularly drawn to them over the past few years. building cities or kingdoms, running a large farm, managing a theme park or a zoo--there's great appeal there for me, even though I've never longed to pursue city planning or business management in the real world. but when things have felt at their most stagnant and hopeless, when I have felt unable to find any sign of progression or improvement in my own life, I have found comfort in being able to watch something grow, to put work in and see the results clear and apparent before me, however ephemeral those results are.

for me, I find that most often, the obstacles removed by doing something in a game mostly relate to the same thing: the struggle of planning, organizing and carrying out tasks, which is so often made so much easier when laid out for me as it is in a video game. it's a common criticism about some video games--sometimes, about the entire concept of video gaming--that playing them is essentially a matter of watching numbers go up. and, well, you've got me. it's true. I do like seeing numbers go up. I like seeing progress bars fill and skills unlock and quest objectives with check marks next to them. I like it because it's not something I get to experience much in real life: that sense of concrete progression, of knowing what I need to do and in what order I need to do it, of some acknowledgment and achievement for completing a task--yes, even if it is only a number going up! even if it is only a small cosmetic change, a new coat for my character, a section of map filling out, a pixel flower blooming on a pixel stem. better that than no sense of progress. better that than never really feeling sure if I've accomplished anything at all.

this is not something I always knew about myself. I've always liked video games, certainly, but thinking about the enjoyment I get out of them has gone hand in hand with learning more about how my own brain works. it's not only that video games can remove obstacles; by doing so, they can reveal to you that there were obstacles in places you never before realized. and there's value in that, I think. because sometimes it can show you that a problem you thought was in one place was actually in another place altogether. if something you think of as being boring, mundane, dull and exhausting becomes something you are willing and able to spend a lot of time and energy on, and get enjoyment out of, when it is framed in a different way--it may follow that the problem was not, as you thought, with the thing itself. the problem was in the obstacles around it.

of course, that's not always the case. the act of doing something in a game is often so thoroughly divorced from any semblance of doing it in real life that enjoying one has no bearing on enjoying the other. we play lots of games centered around doing things that most of us would never have any desire to do in real life. but sometimes it can lead you to discover that you enjoy things you didn't think you enjoyed, or are capable of doing things you didn't think you could do.

if nothing else, I think every single Animal Crossing island currently being developed, being visited, being joyfully and proudly shared online is evidence in the case against the idea that people fundamentally don't want to work and won't work if they don't have to. as is every painstakingly constructed Minecraft world, every Stardew Valley farm, every virtual city intricately planned, every virtual business budget carefully managed, every kingdom saved and map fully explored and character fully leveled and kitted out. because you don't do those things without putting time and concentration and effort into it. you just can't. it's not possible.

I think video games have a lot to tell us: about obstacles, and about effort, and about ourselves. some obstacles are incontrovertible, certainly. there are things built into the world which we can circumvent in video games but cannot, with all the best will in the world, change in our real lives. some things are always going to be more appealing virtually. my difficulties with gardening, for example, are always going to exist in some fashion because I cannot change the nature of how plants work. but knowing that something is an obstacle for you, and identifying why it is, can go a long way toward helping you figure out how to navigate around that obstacle, even if you can't remove it.

and sometimes when you realize that something is an obstacle, you realize that it doesn't need to be. that doesn't always translate to being able to do anything about it, of course. I doubt anyone needed Animal Crossing to tell them that home loans would be easier to repay without interest, and yet here we are. but I think there are a lot of things which we just sort of assume have to be difficult and boring and tiring and just thoroughly unenjoyable, because it is simply the nature of that thing, or the nature of us as people. nothing to do about it, just the way the world works.

sometimes that may be true. but surely not always.

I don't know.

but I will tell you this: by god, be proud of your virtual gardens.

they have worth.

#nonfiction #monday thing #monday thing may eighteenth

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the-jennnster · 5 years

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“Breaking the Cycle”

Here’s the thing.

I’ve mentioned this before and I’ll undoubtedly mention this again, but emotional abuse is a hell of a drug. I follow the tag here, which is funny because you’d think I’d want to avoid it, but I use it as a reminder. I use it so that every time I’m scrolling through my dash and I see a post that talks about what it’s like to live as an emotional abuse victim, or people talking about what they went through in emotionally abusive situations, I’m reminded that it is abuse. That there are no excuses, that it is not normal, that it is not love.

A post that has come up for me a few times is one on “breaking the cycle”, which is something you hear often when you’re talking about abuse. “Break the cycle” is referring to the idea that abusers were often abused themselves, which normalizes the behavior in their mind and makes it hard to recognize that what they’re doing is abusive.

The post I’m referring to is a rant about people need to stop telling abuse victims to “break the cycle”, because it assumes that they will inevitably become their abuser, even though many abuse victims are horrified by the thought of inflicting that sort of pain onto someone else (I know I am, it’s the number one reason I don’t want to have kids). The post talks about how, when abusers say they were abused, they’re lying, they’re getting into your head, they’re manipulating you into a victim.

But the thing is... Sometimes they’re not. There may be cases where they are, but there are also cases where they’re not.

My mother, for instance.

I never met her father, but from what I’ve heard of him, he was generally a nice man. He could be harsh at times, but he was also caring.

He also hit my grandmother. Nobody talks about that, because it was the sixties and seventies and every husband was beating his wife with their three kids watching.

He was also emotionally abusive to my mom, aunt, and uncle, though these stories were gathered from my dad’s side of the family, so... Who knows how much truth is in them.

It wasn’t an uncommon situation for the time, but that hardly excuses his behavior.

It also doesn’t excuse my mother’s or my uncle’s.

Because both of them do the same thing.

My mother’s never hit me, and my uncle has never hit my cousin, but there’s an unspoken rule in the family that you don’t talk about what goes on at home while we’re all together. We laugh, we play video games, we have campfires, but nobody talks about how they snap unexpectedly and yell because one little thing wasn’t done just so (I suspect there might be a family history of bipolar disorder, but there’s a pretty big stigma against mental illness on both sides of my family, with my cousin and I being the only ones to ever be diagnosed, and only because it was effecting our schoolwork).

So, my mother is emotionally abusive because her father was emotionally abusive, and she doesn’t recognize the behavior as abusive because “she’s seen abuse”.

And even though my sister and I are young and neither of us have kids of our own, I can already see those same behaviors in each of us.

I have anger issues. I’ve had them since I was in elementary school, I was suspended for three days because of them, and it shows up suddenly and irrationally. I’ll get pissed off at simple things and storm off, throwing and making a scene until I break down crying (usually because I realize how similar my fits are to my mother’s, whenever I don’t do something right).

My sister, on the other hand, follows our mother’s behavior a bit more closely. Despite being two years younger than me, she automatically assumes “responsibility” (I say that in quotation marks because she’s the most irresponsible person I’ve ever met. She spends all day watching TikToks and Minecraft videos.) for me and my “laziness” (My ADHD and depression make things incredibly difficult for me to start and stay focused on, but once I am focused, I tend to get them done easily and quickly) and yells at me with the same rhetoric our mother uses whenever I “mess up” (usually referring to a miscommunication, like being told to do something and then being told not to do it).

I’ve broken down crying multiple times simply because my brain sees her acting like that and reacts how it would if that was my mother-- by shutting down, by going on defense, by hiding, by doing what I was told (even though I’m older and frequently have to pick up after her and take care of her chores).

So that would mean:

Because my late grandfather abused my mother (and grandmother), my mother abuses my sister and I, which has normalized abusive behavior for my sister to the point where she doesn’t realize that she’s doing it herself.

Funny how things work, huh?

But here’s the thing: She’s not the only one.

I’ve been numbed to it too. Behavior like yelling and hitting people with very little prompting (though... Some more than others) has been so normalized in my life that when I do it, it’s at least ten minutes after-the-fact that I realize what I was doing (hence the crying).

The difference is, the thing with this whole “breaking the cycle” argument, is that it only works if you’re aware of the abuse, if you make yourself aware.

Because especially in familial situations, and especially when there might be a tie to mental illness, it can feel like you’re becoming your abuser, which (in my case especially) can lead to overwhelming guilt and worsening depression.

So there will be people who don’t feel like they need to be told to “break the cycle”, because while the abuse was there, it wasn’t ingrained into them in the same way as it was for people who were raised in abusive situations.

For people like that, people like me, people who took a long time to realize that they were being abused, there is a cycle, and it needs to be broken, and it can take a lot of fucking effort.

It’s gonna take accountability and the ability to step back from, not only your actions, but your thoughts, and ask yourself “What would this do to me if I was on the receiving end?”

Because if it was me being yelled at, having things thrown around the bathroom, having doors slammed at, I would’ve been crying a lot sooner that I was.

And it’s hard. It’s hard and it’s painful and it’s a lot of telling yourself “Yes, you picked up behaviors from your abuser that could hurt someone, but it’s up to you to control them and unlearn them”.

And that’s what breaking the cycle is.

#emotional abuse #breaking the cycle #anger issues #depression #mental illness

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breadknight-likes-things · 5 years

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Gaming's Biggest Disappointments of 2018, And Their Silver Linings.

Video games were absolutely incredible in 2018, from bombastic AAA games like God of War to smaller, intimate looks serious subjects like Night In The Woods. We’ve had an incredible year of games, but with all incredible years come some downsides, and even though this post is about the biggest foibles of the year overall, I think most of them are also indications of improvements big and small that we can look forward to. So these posts are going to be fairly negative, a thing I try not to do on this blog, but hopefully I can interlace enough positive information in there to keep my usual tone up, so without further ado here they are.

The Telltale Closure:

So I’m going to open with an event from this year that, frankly despite my title, has no silver lining. The closure of Telltale games was a gigantic bummer in all respects, hundreds of people lost their jobs suddenly, were given no severance and told their health insurance was only going to last to the end of the month. All future projects were cancelled and the even their currently running Walking Dead season was left half finished in limbo. Some employees reported having moved across the country for a job at this well known dev less than a week before, only to more or less immediately lose it. The higher ups running Telltale kept all of their financial issues so close to the chest that nobody below even knew anything was wrong, so when a new round of funding didn’t pull through at the last minute the only thing they could do was fire nearly every worker. In the end this left only a skeleton crew to finish the contract on Netflix Minecraft, and even they got laid off a couple weeks later! Telltales death is a cautionary tale, and though we now see that The Walking Dead The Final season will be finished that isn’t what we should be concerned about, if it’s this easy for people in the gaming industry to be mislead about how their company is doing, something is seriously wrong.

Fallout 76, Like, In General:

Alright, Fallout 76 is a mess, and I’ve written before about how I can still enjoy it despite it’s innumerable problems, but almost all events surrounding this games release and it’s bizarre descent from “Buggy but fun” to “just not fun” after it’s patches is something that still needs to be talked about. I think the most obvious thing to be said about Fallout 76 is that this game simply wasn’t done, I have a feeling it was rushed out to give Bethesda a product for this fall and to match up with the release of the masses of tie-in merchandise, but even so the game just isn’t finished. As a release, the game is chock full of bugs, some visual like your characters power armor not loading right and you just being rendered spindly and nude and some gameplay affecting like enemies re-spawning in a location seemingly at random, leaving you immediately overwhelmed and dead within seconds.

Thing is though, that isn’t where it stops, outside the game Bethesda Game Studios has shown an alarmingly tone deaf reaction to the player bases complaints. I’m not talking about the nylon bag thing(never buy $200 collectors editions everyone, it’s never worth it), I’m talking about leaking peoples personal info and acting like it’s not a big deal or trying to placate anger by giving away paltry amounts of in game currency or collections of old games they didn’t even make. Despite all this however, if you were to ask me my positive feelings on the thing, at the very least I’d tell you Fallout 76 is a promising blueprint for parts of the franchises future. Even if this game is deeply flawed, imagine this being reworked more as a co-op mode in a more traditional Fallout or even Elder Scrolls game. We could be looking at a wonderful future of exploring these big Bethesda worlds with our friends and even if the first attempt is rough as hell, it is ultimately still a first attempt, and hopefully one that portends a potentially great future.

Metal Gear Survive:

Okay honestly, I don’t have a lot to say about Metal Gear Survive because I didn’t actually play it. Why I’m bringing it up though is my general feeling that Konami is getting more hatred than even they deserve, based mostly around the ugly mysterious breakup between them and Kojima(though reports of how their employees are mistreated are pretty grim). Survive is an awful game, and a cynical attempt to cash in on both the Metal Gear name and the boost in notoriety Survival Games have been having in recent times. What the silver lining in this is however, is that Konami is very clearly not afraid to use their IP’s as some feared after that Kojima breakup. Castlevania is enjoying success as a much loved Netflix show, two Belmonts and Snake both showed up and were well received in Smash Bros and even Zone of the Enders, which even the biggest Kojima fans seem to forget existed, got a full re-release for PS4. Though we may need to worry about new attempts at these franchises if Survive is any indication, the scary idea that all those IP’s would just vanish seems to have just been conjecture, so instead of those video game things we all love, lets just watch TV!...Hey at least it’s a good show okay!

The Response to Diablo Immortal:

This section is not about Diablo Immortal being a bad game, because we don’t know if it is, the thing isn’t even out! This is about the, in my eyes, stupid, childish and cynical response to the games announcement. What’s the issue with a mobile Diablo game? I honestly have to ask myself this question every time I see the horrible response so many people continue to have to this benign spin-off to a much beloved franchise. People tried so hard to be mad about this game they’ve never even played, acting like an innocent nervous joke, one made by a dev after being greeted by a round of disrespectful boos, killed their dog. Making wild claims that Blizzard no longer cares about their fans or IP’s or that they’re doing this as some kind of bizarre intentional slight against players. Gaming has a real issue with reactionary anger, and we seem to see it happen for both valid and completely invalid reasons multiple times a year.

People being angry at being nickled and dimed to death isn’t strange, we can so easily see this in Battlefront 2 from a couple years ago, who wants to grind out 40 hours of an online shooter to unlock one character? Stuff like that is clearly an absurdly bad choice and the anger it engenders should probably be expected, but Diablo hasn’t actually done anything yet and people are already acting like it’s the biggest affront to video games they’ve ever seen. What’s the silver lining in this nerd fury you ask? It’s the game itself. To be honest even if the game is mediocre having a Diablo game on my phone is an enticing idea, and good or bad I can’t wait to find out how it’s going to play.

We can find the good, we can find the bad, but video games remain a unique medium for stories and entertainment, and I for one can’t wait to find out what 2019 has in store for us!(I mean besides hopefully getting some answers on that batshit twist at the end of Gears of War 4 I still haven’t actually written about, i’ll get to it!)

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iamanoneyemouse · 3 years

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Marlon

I’m a little late to the party on posting this, but I wanted to write my experience before it totally fades away now that I’m over what I believe was mild shock and trauma!

On Friday February 19th 2021 our son came into the world (specifically the sofa bed) after a 20 hour labour that my wife made look almost enjoyable. I am blown away by the beauty of nature, the strength of the female body, and the unbelievable combined power of body and mind demonstrated so brilliantly by my wife.

Our son was due February 16th 2021. When that day came and went we joked that he was going to make us wait until the end of the following week. On Wednesday 17th my wife showed me what I can only describe as a “bit of jelly” so I decided that I needed to start getting earlier nights to be well rested for whenever he decided to arrive (I’d been staying up late recently after getting back into Minecraft with one of my friends), so that night I stayed true to my word and went to sleep early. The morning of Thursday 18th February I woke up naturally, wondering if I’d once again failed to set an alarm. I checked my phone to see what the time was and was immediately alarmed at the notification I saw from my wife via WhatsApp “I don’t think you’re going to be working for the next few weeks now“. Oh shite.

I immediately felt like I was sweating as I rushed downstairs to find my wife in the kitchen, leaning over the kitchen island in the midst of a surge (contraction if you’re not a hypnobirthing nob like us). I asked her when they began and she showed me when she started tracking them “4.57am! Why didn’t you wake me?” I exclaimed. One thing was clear at that moment; she was in control and relaxed and I had been caught off guard. I was so confident in how late he was going to be that I’d left a couple of finishing touches at work until that morning. Suddenly I felt life flashing before my eyes, sadly for all the mundane shit I’d been putting off that under the surface I was in a real panic. However, my wife was in such control, and the surges were around 5-7 minutes apart, that we knew we had plenty of time. We’d also been practicing different massage techniques for in preparation for labour, so one of the first jobs was to apply pressure and play around with which techniques worked best. I quickly set about notifying work colleagues what was going on whilst finishing off the handover document I’d pulled together and kept live each day. I did this in between stopping to support my wife during each surge; it turns out that in spite of the the 3 or 4 techniques we’d practiced, the key one was simply applying pressure to her lower back, or occasionally holding the bump at the front to release the weight. Once I’d shut down from work the surges were still every 5-7 minutes, so we decided to carry on with our day by enjoying some lunch, watching Friends and getting my wife a couple of naps in. We also used the opportunity to try out the TENS device, which involves sticking 4 pads (2 to the upper back, 2 to the lower back) and pulsing electricity that can be intensified during surges to alleviate pain by applying counter pressure to that area (it seems like it was pain distraction). This seemed to work alright, but as the surges progressed I was also holding her stomach at points to alleviate the weight from her front. As the day progressed, the surges were still inconsistent (it’d go from 5 minutes to 9 minutes to 4 minutes to 8 minutes etc.) so we planned an early night so my wife could rest, assuming that this would continue well into Friday afternoon/evening. At around 9.15pm my wife went to the bathroom to brush her teeth etc. and then shouted out that her waters had released. With the waters broken, perhaps it wouldn’t be an early night after all.

After resisting the phone number all day quite calmly, we made the call to the Midwife, who wanted to know how consistent the surges were. At this point they were still not consistent, or happening 3 times within 10 minutes, so they asked us to call back in an hour. There was a little bit of blood in my wife’s maternity pad, but nothing concerning to the Midwife, so we carried on monitoring surges. I asked my wife if we should begin filling up the birth pool, to which she paused to think, before replying “no, not yet”.

From this point onward the surges became more consistent at around 6 minutes continuously for the next hour. Then they gradually started to average toward 5 minutes, with some more frequently at 3 or even 2 minute intervals, but it still wasn’t consistent. We rang back at 10.30pm and told the Midwife team they were averaging around 5 minutes, but with some at shorter intervals. It wasn’t consistent enough but they offered to get someone out if we wanted. We didn’t want to waste anyone’s time so we declined and carried on monitoring.

The inconsistency in surges continued until 11.15pm, which is when everything really kicked up a gear; we decided it might be a good idea to start filling the birthing pool, and we also placed the TENS device back on my wife, which we had taken off during the evening because the mixture of my wife’s breathing and me applying pressure to her lower back appeared to be working quite nicely. Looking back at the monitoring, we actually registered 5 surges within 10 minutes, which In hindsight was a fairly clear sign, but my wife’s superbly controlled handling of the surges, and the inconsistency of time in between, gave us a false sense of what was going on. Between 11.30pm and midnight my wife was having surges in waves of 2 surges every 2 minutes, with a third every 5 minutes (2, 2, 5, 2, 2, 5). It was at midnight that she went to the toilet and then called me in to show her underwear pad to me. I was horrified to see a lot of blood, but I didn’t want to show her how much this had panicked me. In an effort to remain calm I suggested we call the midwife, so at midnight the call was made and they said someone would contact us very shortly to arrange a visit. My wife and I were in the bathroom as she was wiping more and more blood out from herself, as we were clearly both locked in internal battles to keep calm “maybe the placenta has come away” my wife stated, steadily, trying to make sense of the alarming amount of blood we were staring at. A sinking feeling entered my stomach... what if our little boy was in trouble? What had been a relaxed and controlled journey upto this point suddenly felt very lonely, and we were unequipped to deal with what was round the corner if our little boy needed emergency help. In spite of this inner battle I tried not to let my wife see I was struggling, so we bagged up the pad ready to show the midwife and continued monitoring and helping to deal with the surges as they came. The atmosphere had changed though, and it felt like the control was slipping through our fingers, whilst now also waiting on an imminent call back from a Midwife who would be assigned to help us.

Almost ten minutes had passed without a call; earlier in the evening they’d asked what the best contact number was, so I had given them my number in case my wife was otherwise engaged (and she has a tendency to leave her phone somewhere for long periods of time - in today’s society of being glued to phones that’s not necessarily a bad thing). Nothing was on my phone and the surges were becoming more intense and frequent. I suggested checking my wife’s phone, which she told me was on charge in the bedroom. As I walked in it was ringing, so I answered quickly and a lady called Alexia introduced herself. I was panicked, it had been 10 minutes and it felt like we were getting to more established labour. She was extremely calm and assured me she only lived down the road in the next village, so would be with us in around 15 minutes. I tried to explain to her that there was quite a lot of blood in my wife’s last pad, but she was more interested in getting directions (again, seems sensible in hindsight rather than ignoring my panicked statements of what we’d seen in the pad). After trying to frantically explain which takeaway restaurants we were in between, and which side of the road we lived on, she calmly said she’d see us soon, and we were on our own again.

By 12.15am the time in between surges was getting down as low as 1 minute, followed by a 4 or 5 minute gap. The inconsistency was confusing, but my wife was finding them more intense. The wait for the Midwife was agonising as we both tried to remain calm and positive, but I could still feel that bubble we’d held together all day beginning to bulge ready for bursting. I then spotted headlights pulling onto our driveway, the Midwife was here, which filled me with both hope and relief. As I walked to the door my wife mentioned that she could feel pressure in her bum; not thinking too much of it and being fixated on getting the midwife in and showing her the bloodied pads we’d bagged up, I went to the door to let in the Midwife. She was collecting her belongings and bringing them to the door in a very relaxed manner. i stood with the door open trying to look inviting whilst hiding my impatience and worry. That’s when I heard an almighty scream and alarm ripped through me.

I’ve never heard my wife make a noise quite like it, it was filled with horror and pain. Alexia, the Midwife, was asking me questions as we both hurried into the room where my wife was. I was trying to calmly get across my concern about the blood in the pad “it sounds like the baby is coming” she remarked, as she calmly went about putting her gloves on and light heartedly remarking that she usually would like a bit more time to get equipment. Her calm presence was as frustrating as it was oddly relaxing. Another almighty scream from my wife had us both reaching to comfort her as she was clearly distressed and exclaiming that she wanted to get in the birth pool “it’s half full” I said to the Midwife as I hurriedly removed the TENS device and pads that my wife was trying to rip off herself. Suddenly everything felt frantic and out of control; my wife was acting on instinct and it was clear that the baby was now coming.

My wife was trying to talk but not making much sense; she was panicked in her tone and mentioned about pressure in her bum again. She wanted to get in the pool and was clearly distressed, so I yanked down her underwear and leggings and she put one of her legs up as if she was kneeling on one knee leant over the sofa bed. As I did this I looked up and to my horror and amazement, facing me was our son’s head, his eyes completely closed and looking peaceful. He looked purple and lifeless; it was joyous to see him, and heartbreaking in the moment because I thought he was stillborn (looking back with a clear mind it makes sense that he was purple because he doesn’t receive as much oxygen through the umbilical chord as he would through his own lungs). So there was our son, with goodness knows what other fluid gushing out from around him, almost in slow motion. My eyes welled up; I didn’t know what to feel, but instinctually I continued trying to remove the leggings from her ankle “no, no, leave that, this is a really good position” remarked Alexia calmly “OK, one more push and he’ll be here, ready? Big push” and with an almighty scream from my wife, our son was released into the world, along with fuck knows what else with him, directly onto the towels we’d put around the sofa bed. Alexia then picked him up and began to blow on him, gently rocking him “come on now little boy” she said as he rocked there in between her hands, still lifeless. After a few seconds he then took a big gasp and began to cry - he was here, he was alive and he was perfect.

It was an incredible moment - with three pushes my wife had brought our little boy into the world without us even having filled the birth pool (just about half full at this point). The midwife placed down some pads for my wife to sit on, and I was prompted by her to collect some cushions so my wife could sit up to enjoy immediate skin to skin, whilst we waited for the placenta-releasing injection to kick in and the umbilical cord finished pulsing. After a few minutes the placenta was pulled out by the umbilical cord, and like a grand opening of a supermarket, I cut the cord to signal our son’s start as an independently functioning human being. The midwife had a lot of paperwork to do, which gave us time to focus on our little boy and start to process what had taken place “do you have a name?” Alexia asked. We both looked at each other; we hadn’t agreed a name as we were waiting to see what our son looked like. We were also potentially in different places with which name we should give him “errm... not yet” remarked my wife, so for now he assumed her surname whilst we decided.

He was fascinating to look at - a piece of sperm and egg had forged to make this little chap, and he was more beautiful to me than I was ready for. I’d secretly believed that my wife would have an easy labour because of how focused and disciplined she’d been in her preparation, I just never voiced it too much so I didn’t put any pressure on her. She absolutely exceeded any expectation of what I thought the birth would be like, to the point she made it look (dare I say) quite relaxing and an enjoyable experience. After a few minutes of holding our creation, my wife looked at me and said “I think he looks like a Marlon”, which was one of the names we had shortlisted. I smiled as the moment seemed absolutely perfect. We then agreed on his full name, and that was it, he was a fully registered boy and newest member of our family.

Our midwife, Alexia, stayed with us for a few hours and was extremely helpful, even changing his first nappy full of meconium and weighing the boy in at 5 pounds 10 ounces. My wife sat upright with him for quite some time, even getting Marlon his first breastfeed as I paced around, possibly still traumatised from what I’d witnessed come out of my wife. We had some photos, Alexia cleaned up and then left us to it, noting that someone would be round the next day to check in. That night felt euphoric; my wife and I stayed up watching our son, listening to his noises and discussing our experiences of the event. I was blown away by how well my wife had coped and taken it all in her stride, but as I mentioned earlier, deep down I knew she would be this way because of the way she fully applies herself to everything she does, and does it brilliantly. What a birth day it was for us, and what an easy birth it was for our son.

The next day we received a call. The midwife had checked his weight against the threshold requiring follow up checks by the paediatrician, and Marlon fell within that threshold. We were asked to bring him in that afternoon as a precaution, so without any more than 30 minutes of sleep, we hurriedly packed some bits together, including the pram, and went to the hospital. It turned out that my wife and son would have to be monitored for 24 hours, so what we thought would be an afternoon trip ended up becoming an overnight event. Unfortunately due to COVID I was not allowed in the ward, so I could not visit, which was difficult for my wife and I, so I did the best I could by dropping off some favourite takeaway food and snacks that I knew she would love. Soon enough, our son had completed all his tests and the results were fine, so at around 11pm on 20th February we all arrived back home as a new family. My wife hadn’t slept for over 33 hours by this point, so I stayed up with our son for about 3 hours whilst she napped to recoup some energy. He must have been tired because he has not slept that long since, but I wanted to do whatever I could to ensure she had enough energy to carry on a little longer.

We’re now entering our fourth day of Marlon’s life, and I can’t be any prouder as a parent or husband. My son and I are lucky to have such a powerful woman in our life, and I want to remind her of that as often as I can. There are so many hopes I have for my son, but one of the most important ones I want to continually remind myself of is the hope that he grows up with an open, free mind. This will allow him to remain genuinely content, empathetic and curious of the truth (whilst being flexible with having his mind changed by truth), which will most likely lead a very fulfilling life. I aim to leave the world a little better than I found it, whilst helping others on the way, I hope I can inspire Marlon to do the same, but I think because of who he has as a mother, and I a wife, he will exceed that.

Marlon, I can’t wait to help you take in the world, make sense of it, reason with it and grow within it. I look forward to the conversations, the laughs, the cries, the lessons and the connections. You have made my life complete; the rest of time with you is now a bonus.

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oranjemaan-blog · 6 years

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Analysis - Unforgotten Realms

I intend for there to be little talking about video games on this blog other than what I make and what influences me in game design. However, I do want to talk about this game at the moment and analyse it. Sure, I may be a very small blog right now, and that anything I say here will probably never impact the game development or its popularity. Yet, I feel that it is worth discussing the good, bad, and ugly of some games to learn from them. Thereby, I want to talk about URealms for analysis.

I've been viewing the creator, Robert Moran (A.K.A. BruceWillakers or OldManWillakers on youtube), for a long time, back to when he was making Youtube videos of minigames in Minecraft. He made some interesting stuff in Minecraft, such as an assault-type game called Dwarves Vs. Zombies. As the title implies a group of players as Dwarves must defend against players that are zombies. He had himself (as OldManWillakers) be a playable character in the game for a single Dwarf player each game. The game ended when all the Dwarves were dead.

Now, of course, he didn't make this game himself, I need to give as much credit to his friend Nisovin. The two, along with a bunch of other major minecraft youtubers of a while ago, helped to make it a good, popular game. While the Minecraft server it was on was never as popular as the mega-servers around that time, it showed how great a minigame can be in Minecraft.

A while later, he and the group Buffalo Wizards formed another Minecraft server called Lords of Minecraft. This was a server to accompany a youtube series of them roleplaying on the server as rulers of certain districts within the server. It did not get as much popularity as his previous game (though it attracted much of the people from that game), but he made an interesting series from it.

Yet, neither of those things, as great as they are (I may make an analysis of those later), are what I want to talk about today. I want to talk about his roleplaying game: Unforgotten Realms (Urealms for short).

The concept of the game was created many years ago by Rob over 11 years ago. URealms started off as a series of animations on Newgrounds. It later got remade on the Escapist in 2009. Unfortunately, I have seen little of that besides the first few episodes. Yet, again, I'm talking about the game loosely based of these animations.

What originally started as a campaign with friends to help fund a kickstarter in 2015 quickly became a tabletop roleplaying game that was played live every now and then. Rob usually played as the dungeon master with his friends Coestar, Roamin, Justin, and Deadbones as players in the stories. Sometimes other people would come along such as Nisovin or his friend Milbee. This livestream event quickly took over as much of the content of Rob's channel.

Originally, there was no public version. People made mods in Tabletop Simulator with all the cards, tiles, and maps they could find. Finding people to play it with was hard. However, over this summer, the group released an official and free mod for Tabletop Simulator along with a forum. This gave many fans, including myself, access to the game. I've played many campaigns now, and understand the game in a way different from when I was simply watching people play it. I've also seen people on sites unrelated to URealms starting to play the game. Sure some things, such as the puppet program used by the group, have not much good public equvivelints. Yet, I say that anyone can play URealms. It's the only tabletop game I've been able to understand.

Now let's talk about this game rather than its history. One of the most interesting parts is its character creation. What's interesting is that there is not much to it. When making a D&D or Pathfinder character, I constantly have to check the guides to see what affects what and what I should write down. Sure, it let for much depth, but as much complexity as well. Meanwhile, mostly everything in URealms is on a card instead of a book. While I do think that a guide would help dungeon masters by having all information of the game in one place, the cards help the starting player out by showing all the information about what that card is for.

In URealms, character creation is simple: One picks a cards for their race, class, cornerstone, and atrributes. One then picks up your abilities and items from the amount of money one has (which is determined by a dice roll and the prior cards). It may not exactly be that simple, as some cards can affect character creation, but that's the basics of it. With that, you got a character. The only stats you really need to deal with is your stamina (which is basically a health stat), and the amount of money you have. I find this to be better than the complex system of multiple stats that come with things such as D&D. However, this lets for less definitives, so dungeon masters will have to do more judging of actions and events. Yet, I find that to be a good trade off.

I find this simplification to also help bring back what people want to experience in the tabletop rpg, being the character. Now, I do like the world of D&D and other games like the World of Warcraft, they're really good fantasie. Yet, I find that my immersion in these is halted if I have to make sure that I am keeping my stats up to date or if what I'm doing is technically the best option. With few stats and simple character creation, the immersion of the game is less interrupted. I can focus more on the story of the campaign.

I now want to move onto the combat section. Unlike the character creation, there is not much simplification done here. I am pretty much always checking my abilities cards to see what I can each turn. I am not saying that as a complaint though, as I do think that I should always be checking what I can do. Then again, usually I find myself doing the same few abilites or actions over and over in combat, unless there is some special rule or addition made before combat. I've even seen this sometimes on the livestreams, though I will say that Rob and his friends have made a good way of avoiding those points by having events triggered by donations. While that can't be done over a private game done at 11:00 pm on a Saturday, I think that preventing the combat from getting repetitive is something that the dungeon masters have to resolve with instead of Rob and his friends.

I now want to move on to the live streams, and how their impact. I'm going to talk about how the livestreams affect gameplay instead of the lore of the game, which they do a lot. In many of the streams, I am finding gameplay that is made to be somewhat appealling to people simply watching the game instead of playing it. That's probably why nearly everything in the game is on a card instead of a guide and why there are few stats, so the audience can keep up. I find that to be interesting and somewhat true. I find it easier to evaulate actions in URealms than in D&D. Then again, Rob's campaigns are the only ones I've seen on a livestream.

I am a little worried if one day Rob may implement a mechanic or feature that would work well on the livestream, but poorly in a regular game. There are already some cards that are only for the show. Yet, I don't think that will happen anytime soon or have much impact, as dungeon masters can modify the additions to make them better for their campaigns. Also, due to the somewhat ease of adding cards to Tabletop Simulator, anyone can modify the game by adding cards to make their experience better.

In conclusion, I find that URealms brings simplification to tabletop roleplaying. I find this to be a good move for the genre, as I've seen many who want to play D&D or pathfinder, and give up because they can't understand it. Perhaps we'll see more tabletop roleplaying games like URealms later on. I am interested to see what Coestar, Roamin, Nisovin, Justin, Deadbones, Rob (as I probably gave him too much credit over this), along with artist such as Sixelona and Meganzoor. come up with with their URealms livestreams and later developements.

This is probably one of the only analysis of a game I will be doing for a few post. If I ever do another, it will probably be about some small flash game or steam game I found. I will continue with game development in the next post.

#urealms #unforgotten realms live #analysis #tabletop roleplaying #tabletop simulator

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