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painterofhorizons · 3 years

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💥, ☀️, 🌙, 💧, 🔮, 💛, 💗 for as many OCs as you care to share!

Thank you for sending these, friend! <3 Brain probably can’t come up with much currently (brain very much is in the blank mode constantly), but these are lovely picks that I wanna do for several characters so I might reblog it and add more later. :) (Okay I am in a Alex/Tonks mood currently so I might just do some for both or like we will see what happens.)

This got really long and in depth in parts so I will put it under a cut.

(Gosh, this has been in my drafts forever, I came back and back to add more stuff and answer it bit by bit - I’ll just throw it out now.)

Partially also asked by @sheeplessthings

💥 Are there any emotions your OC doesn’t know how to deal with, doesn’t understand or hates having to feel? Any reason behind this?

Alex Dancy: Okay Alex hates to be angry. Not in a general way, she’s okay with all kind of emotions, but there are things that really make her helplessly angry on the inside, big topics that she cannot do anything against, and it eats her up (for example child abuse in general (and also in specific), or murder or people innocently dying from illnesses or such). She doesn’t know how to deal with that kind of helplessness because she’s a doer, she wants to tackle and solve problems but those just cannot be eliminated completely. She also is bad with dealing with personal anger, things in a smaller scale. She doesn’t get angry easily, not about small things, she’s one of the most relaxed and chill people ever. But when someone does her a major wrong and doesn’t stand up to it, that can build up anger insider her that she doesn not know how to deal with. Usually she is someone who wants everybody to be okay and feel good and she will do everything so that people are okay, so having real intense negative feelings towards somebody? Not on her plan and no idea how to deal with that. Usually she tends to avoid such situations to avoid putting the anger in the direction of the one causing it. She’s no one to avoid arguments, not at all. But when a normal person has an anger scale from 0-10, Alex skips 1-7 and is either at 0 or directly at 8-10 and that’s usually the end that is hardly solvable. So she avoids it, or she is also good at running away from it. Any reasons behind that? Oh heck yes. Alex was shamed for her anger ever since she grew up. When she was 14, her older sister died in a car accident. Her family broke over her death, her father shortly after left, her mother blamed Alex for it and threw her out. There was a whole lot of negative emotions left undealt with from her childhood and she never really learned healthy ways to cope with that in her youth. She was left alone with all these emotions (agony about her sisters death, self-blame, being unwanted from her family) and she was so helplessly angry for a long time, while those around her who should have loved her only told her that her anger was bad and wrong. She pretty much internalized that. So even later on, she doesn’t direct it at those who caused it, even if they would deserve it, but tries to bury it. Or she self-destructs, like going to the gym working out much over her limits or drinking too much. She also is a stress-smoker, she only smokes when she’s dealing with negative emotions. (Okay, first question and I am already sorry for her.) Alex and anger is pretty much this post here.

Tonks: On a small scale anger with a somewhat similar background like Alex. But also Tonks is super bad about being vulnerable. He is the worst about reaching out when he’s in trouble and accepting help, and he can be pretty much like “ugh, what are those feelings? I don’t like them. I don’t want them. Make them go away.”

☀️ How well does your OC take care of themself? Do they tend to put others before their own wellbeing and if so how often? What is their favourite way to pamper themself?

This goes for both of them: they are horrible at caring for themselves but huge at caring for others. The need of others always comes first. Own needs? What’s that? Never heard of it. Can it be sold? Eaten? Given away? Buried? Good thing is they have each other and closely look for the others needs in general. So they would never be like “I need a break” but they will go to the other and be like “You need a break, buddy, lets go for a ride” and then take a motorbike ride together for a while or go to the roof of the club house and just sit there and talk and take care of the other. Both kind of learn to stand up for their own needs a little more over time, like Alex will go to Dave and tell him when she’s having a bad day and ask for a hug and Tonks will call Alex and ask for some distraction. But in general they are carers with not a huge emphasis on caring for themselves first.

Pampering themselves in the end mostly means opening up that there is need for pampering at all. For Alex usually it’s a need for some quiet and rest then, like just cuddling on the couch and some comfort food maybe. She tends to be hyper active, so that just taking time to do nothing is something seldom and already counts as pampering herself. Plus when there are good people around like Dave. Tonks rather seeks distraction, like going for a ride without some destination, and also comfort food.

🌙 What are some of your OC’s favourites? Favourite food, colour, season, stuff like that! Give some general simple facts that tend to get overlooked!

Alex Dancy: food - fast food (she could eat fries and burger all day long every day); season: winter actually, she grew up in Russia and is used to have hard winters and she really likes a nice cold snowy winter (after she moved away from there unfortunately no such winters like in Piter occured anymore, but she will treasure some snow and freezing temperatures); doesn’t have a fav colour, she just really is no one who cares for aesthetically pleasing?; music - techno, EMB, dance stuff (she really likes to go dancing in clubs); movie genre - really bad C-movies (especially if there are things like big snakes, spiders, sharks etc involved)

Tonks: food - honestly he isn’t a picky eater, he loves to eat and will eat everything you give him, hasn’t found anything yet he disliked BUT he really likes ice cream; season - summer, he really loves swimming and lying at the beach and sun on his skin and water around his feet; colour - orange; music - shares taste with Alex; movie genre - fast car and action stuff; time of day - night

💧 What is something from your OC’s past they’re the most ashamed of and why? What is something they’re really proud of? And lastly what is something in their past that could make them shake with dread?

You asked for this and I will keep it for later, but rn rather change it with something a little lighter. <3

⭐ Does your OC like to sleep alone or do they enjoy sharing their bed? Have they been to any sleepovers? Have they ever been camping? What did they think of the experiences if so?

Alex Dancy: Alex HATES living and sleeping alone. She got used to it to some extent, but really she’d much rather share all her space with people she likes. Her teens she spent in a sheltered youth accommodation and her twenties in a hippie-esque shared living farm space - she just isn’t used to live alone. It’s boring. Why would you do that? She literally sleeps better if there is a breathing being next to her. She loves human touch, so she is the perfect close sleeping cuddle partner.

Tonks: He is totally okay sleeping alone but just as okay sharing his sleeping space, and he is a big cuddler. So having company is always nice! But as he most of the time does the night shifts in the youth club and is alone there, he is fine with that as well. He likes to use the nights for stuff though (work, hobbies, general distraction) and sleeps rather little.

As for the other two, Alex and Tonks pretty much are alike: sleepovers are fun! The more the merrier! And towards camping they are pretty much indifferent - they will go on a trip if asked, but probably not initiate one themselves. When you can have a sleepover in the club, that’s so much better than being out in the woods for sleeping.

🔮What does your OC think is their best trait. What is actually their best trait? What about their flaws? Are they one to admit these flaws or do they like to pretend they’re perfect?

Alex Dancy: Does she think of any good trait? She has a good self-esteem but not the best self-image. She probably sees her best trait as being all in for the kids she works with. At the same time it’s the reason why all of her former romantic relationships ended, because she’s work first private life second (which is the reason why she works so well with Dave because he’s the same). From an outsiders perspective, Alex has some very valuable characteristics: she believes in humans. She hands out second, third and fourth chances if needed without any questions asked. (Which also makes her potentially biased and subjective at times). She is incredibly loyal and one can really rely on her. She is really patient with others, but can act incredibly hot-headed and short-sighted and has zero patience with herself. She’s horrible at opening up and asking for help. She’s very open with her downsides and flaws and is the first to say she’s all but perfect.

Tonks: He’d say he’s a very good friend. An annoying, loud, exhausting friend, sure, but loyal and loving and always up for whatever possible. I agree, also I lack brains tonight to write more about this.

💛 What is your personal opinion of this OC? Do you love them or are they your trash child? Are they your baby?

Alex Dancy: *.* Alex is SO my baby. I first started to write a story with her in 2014 in theory. What became of her has like zero to do with initial past her tbh, like back then I had an idea for a plot actually and this more or less blank OC that fulfilled the plot. (Big surprise, that story eventually was abandoned because it wasn’t working.) Then Alex grew into a whole being and is just really fun to write. But besides that her story/world also is a way for me to think topics through, in parts it’s kinda therapeutic writing. Be it thoughts about job changes, family issues, #metoo topics and others, when I find myself troubled there is always someone from Alex’ universe that can be used to just think things through. I would say from all OCs I ever had she is probably the most important for me, stayed with me the longest and is the best fleshed out character.

Tonks: Tonks started as a small side character because I needed someone in the club who is yelling a lot. :D But then he grew into one of the most important characters in Spiegelbilder? I love him a lot. And I love that @sheeplessthings loves him, too, as do you, dear @jedirangerpenguin (I mean, he is bae).

💗 Ramble a bit about this character!

Will keeppp this for later to finally throw out the answer. :*

#this was in the drafts FOREVER #jedirangerpenguin #fic talk: Spiegelbilder #alex dancy #tonks #thank you for these asks dear friend they were most lovely #<3

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yakkety-yak-art · 5 years

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Why Bioshock Infinite Wasn’t Working (for me)

As someone who loves the first and second games (the first largely for the story, the second largely for the gameplay and characters), I have really felt out of place in the fandom for just....not liking Infinite. Ever since it was released, people have been touting it around on a pedestal like it’s the best thing since sliced bread, but I just have never seen the appeal. Sure, it looks pretty, and there are some interesting parts, but it just never worked for me. And I figured out why. (Note: this is opinionated, so if you disagree and feel the need to respond, do so politely. I will be keeping this as fair as I can and there’s no need to be rude just because you disagree. If you like this game, that’s totally fine, and I can respect your opinion even though it doesn’t match up with mine! This is just my thoughts on the matter, and I am not the end all be all on the topic. You are free to feel however you wish about the game, and if you are more sensitive to criticism about things you like, feel free to just ignore this post!)

This game is a run-of-the-mill FPS with repetitive fights that traipses around in a facade of deep thoughts and hard-hitting hot takes. So many of the people praising this game praise it because the story is deep and riveting. to which I must eloquently say, “Nah.” The story is the equivalent of someone standing on a soapbox, gathering a crowd with the promise of a new concept no one has ever thought of before; something life-changing, something thought of only by a deep thinker; and this someone faces a crowd of Americans, waiting with bated breath to hear something they haven’t been aware of literally their whole lives, only to tell them in an extremely pretentious manner that, “America’s past was no fun :(.”

No shit, Sherlock.

The original Bioshocks dealt with things that will really always be topical: the implications and consequences of extreme capitalism and objectivism, and, conversely, extreme communism and mob mentality/hive mind-esque organizations; the importance of choice and the realization of people as individuals coming together being stronger and more unified than an echo-chamber group (yes, there’s a difference); the implications of moral decisions on the future for oneself and the entire world, and extremely beautiful and sometimes heartbreaking portrayals of the importance of platonic relations, found family, and positive bonds between parent and child (particularly fathers, which is refreshing and interesting, since a lot of dads don’t get a very good rep in media); the consequences of classism; finally, breaking free from the roles laid out and expected, and thinking freely (truly freely, not wrongfully convinced of free thinking when in reality the government is in control, seen with Atlas, Ryan, Lamb, etc. The games also give you extremely interesting moral decisions and topics; do you serve yourself, or sacrifice to save the children? Are you really any better than the splicers who were taken advantage of and left to rot, and while you must kill them to survive, are they still people? As you splice, do you become exactly what you are trying to save yourself and the few innocents of Rapture from?

These are all interesting and topical ideas to bring up. So what does Infinite have to share?

Racism is bad (an important topic, but handled poorly). Religion is also bad. Schrodinger’s cat, maybe? Infinite universes mean infinite possibilities!!! Except, no, not really. For a game that puts emphasis on infinite possibilities, it only really explores the same one.

Firstly, “racism is bad/America is bad/religion is bad” is hardly a hot take, and they are portrayed in the most basic forms that they possibly could be. All the bad guys are racist to the extreme, the entire city is a haven of white supremacy, and basically all because of religion. The main villain only becomes the villain because he gets baptized. It’s extremely on the nose, with public humiliations/lynchings, and public worship of the dude who assassinated Lincoln. Not only does it seem, well, preachy, due to how on the nose it is, it’s not even interesting. Don’t get me wrong, it’s extremely important to discuss racism and xenophobia, especially as it occurred in the past, but because of the world they have set Infinite in, it comes across as implausible. Like, ok, fantasy world, but that’s just it: this is a fantasy. There could have been an amazing discussion on, not blanket “hurr durr institutionalized racism is bad”, but the society that Vigors, a majority working class of non-whites/immigrants, a search for utopia, and the extremes of religion AND science, paired with the idea of facades, would create. Why not have more of the public use Vigors? Like the Vox, in an attempt to gain more control and power? As Columbia had to travel from continent to continent, have the racism be always present but constantly hidden. Rather than public carnival games with racist caricatures, have a society that seems so perfect on the outside that it cannot possibly be. Everyone who is not white or is Jewish or Irish is always creepily smiling and re-asserting that they love their jobs, and their city. Perhaps one is seen speaking out, and they are quickly taken out. Uncovering an extremely unnerving facade like this proves the underlying corruption, power, and horror of the city a lot more than the extremely blatant examples in Infinite do. It’s like the difference between your teacher telling you people were racist in the past, and then reading something about how beautiful the world is and how nice the town they live in is in--only to then find a photo of the writer in a creepy black and white photo, smiling at the camera as they lynch someone--or even, being the subject in the photo who was lynched. It’s so creepy and obviously a lie, but unless you take the time to dig deeper, to find out why the writing had seemed so, well, strange or unrealistic, you could remain blissfully ignorant despite knowing something is wrong. That’s an interesting moral dilemma faced in everyday life. In Infinite, you can just kill them. Problem solved. In fact, it’s so easily solvable, apparently, that it makes you wonder why everyone else hasn’t done that already. It’s also extremely lazy to make all of your villains racist and all of the good guys totally not racist™ and just shoot everyone. I mean, really? they don’t even try to have a conflict of morality, like with Tenenbaum or Sinclair. It’s unrealistically black and white (ha), and because of this, predictable, lazy, and boring. Again, discussions of racism is not a bad thing--but it’s handled so poorly here that it’s almost like the story just stops to remind you that racism is bad, before continuing.

The parts of the story that don’t deal with social issues are not any better. You can tell me all you want that the ending and the story are just sophisticated, and that I just didn’t get it, but to that I respond: maybe writing a story that has so many possible implications, endings, and theories that could all exist or not exist or sometimes maybe happen unless we were wrong about this one thing, in which case maybe not isn’t sophisticated, and is instead pretentious, lazy, and a lot fucking worse than you giving me a whole story with a jumping off point for my own ideas and conclusions about it’s implications. No, Infinite doesn’t do that. It’s so hackneyed, so convoluted, with it’s “infinite” lighthouses and “infinite” outcomes when in reality, no matter what, there’s just this one racist evil religious dude who is always religious and racist and evil. It could end, not in a “maybe it’s a Schrodinger’s cat?” cop out, but in one of those alternate outcomes (like, clearly alternate, not hinted at alternate), leaving the player with questions about the importance of decisions if there is always another place where the decision either was or wasn’t made, or whether or not the world should even be respected to the extent that it is when, with Elizabeth (and, in theory, her ability to create others with her powers), it is possible to just find a new world. Those are interesting, and also leave the player with some moral questions and debate topics, whereas the actual ending just sort of looks and sounds deep, but in reality is just a writer’s inability to live up to his own setup of the multiverse.

there are some other reasons, like how elizabeth’s powers seem really pointless as they are underutilized, how the game could have worked better if you played as her, how the game literally could’ve been standalone, seeing as it has nothing to do with Bioshock’s story except for Levine’s lazy attempt at “connecting” the two canons, but those are the big ones. All in all, I can’t like it because it has potential that was so ultimately wasted--it’s lazy in it’s story, in it’s tackling of social issues, and in it’s basic requirement at having anything to do with Bioshock, when it could have so easily been an amazing game, not only at the surface, but truly, as you dig deeper into the story. But I really, truly wish that I could love this game. It could’ve been great.

#bioshock #bioshock infinite #racism mention #critique #bioshock infinite rant #unpopular opinion #not trying to be rude #if you like infinite just ignore this #you can enjoy it all you want but this is why i cant #wasted potential #criticism #game criticism #crichwine talks #long post #tw: racism #ask to tag #be polite

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cephalon-celaeno · 6 years

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Abram: Reconciliation

Act 1 — Valkyr

It doesn’t take Abram long to realize that he is nothing without his Warframes.

First, it’s Ephemera. His Cephalon asks him, calmly, ignorantly, when he’s going to leave the ship again. “There are missions waiting for you,” she says. “If you truly do not wish to do them, I will pass them on to others. But it would be... healthy, for you to leave.”

“Sure,” Abram rolls his eyes. “I’ll get on that as soon as you make my Warframes listen to me again. They’re the ones acting like children.”

“Abram,” Ephemera says, gently, “you know that this is a solvable disagreement. You only need to put in the effort. You haven’t lost your Transference or your Warframes.”

“Tell that to them!” Abram insists. “I want to get back out there and be useful again, but they won’t do anything to work with me!” Ephemera doesn’t reply, and Abram sinks back into his solitude.

The second is Izi. “I don’t know anything about Warframes being alive,” she admits, and yeah, Abram sees how that could be troubling for her situation, “but I imagine they’re just like any other people. If you find out what’s upsetting them and work to fix it, that should solve the problem.”

“They’re the problem,” Abram insists.

“No,” Izi says, “you’re the problem. There are five Warframes and one of you; the only thing all of them have in common is you. That’s just math. And don’t lie. You want them back. I know you, and I’ve watched you define yourself by them for ages. You can’t exist as you are without them, so it’s either change or die.”

“So now even you want me dead.”

“That isn’t what I said,” Izi murmurs, and hangs up.

Third, and this infuriates him, is Wyn.

He had hoped that their last conversation would be their last. When they contact him again and open the conversation with “have you made up with your Warframes yet?” he almost explodes on them.

“Why does everybody assume that it’s me who has to make up with them?” he yells. “How am I even supposed to do that if they won’t talk to me? It’s not my fault, I’m just the one suffering the consequences of their choice!”

“Have you even tried?” Wyn asks. “Or have you just been sitting around waiting for them to suddenly change their minds about you?” They don’t get an answer, and they don’t wait for one, either. They disconnect as soon as they ask the question, leaving Abram with the thought.

Perhaps, he reasons, after the thought has had time to sit in his head, it is worth reaching out. He isn’t sure if it’ll work, but it’s better than sitting around and waiting for something that may never happen. The longer this stretches on, the smaller he becomes. Abram had never realized, or recognized, just how much he defines himself by his Warframes before.

He decides he needs them back.

He only activates his Transference halfway, enough to touch the mind of his Valkyr but not enough for her to push him away. He waits on the border for awhile, fearing that she’ll still reject him anyway, but instead he gets an impression pressed into his mind: “Speak, and we will see.”

“How can I help you? How can I repair our relationship?” Abram hates how desperate he sounds, but there is no choice; he is desperate. Without his Warframes, he is nothing. He needs them back.

“Selfish boy, I know you too well,“ she snarls. The hostility, in this space, is palpable. He feels it burn his face. "You only want to help me for your own sake. You don’t care for me; you only want it to go back to the way it was before: you, angry; me, silent. I have spent too long waiting for this; I will not be silenced again.”

Pain flashes across the Transference link, leaving static in its wake. Neither of them speaks for several long moments, until Abram breaks the silence. He whispers, “where do you hurt? Show me.”

She hesitates, but only a moment; she probably wants to let this through, to make him feel the pain she doesn’t deserve. It creeps up on him:

clamps on his neck, around his wrists;

skin searing, a constant burn where flesh never made for sunlight feels it;

a feeling as though his head is about to split open, or like it already has.

It blends into itself, converges on a single burning point, and that point is all of him.

No wonder she’s so angry, Abram thinks. Anger is the only emotion that burns bright enough to be felt through this immense pain. Anger is all he’s left with when it consumes him. He understands.

The pain vanishes, stolen away by Valkyr again, and it’s a relief when the numbness of Transference returns. He can’t speak for a moment; he can barely force himself to breathe and recover. Nothing he’s felt has been as awful as that. “How come I’ve never felt that before, when controlling you?” he asks. His voice is weak, and not by choice.

“I shield you from the worst of it,” she says. She sounds tired, but relieved, like she’s finally released a secret long kept.

“But why?” Why would she care enough about him to hide it?

“It is my own burden to bear. You never asked for it.” A pause. “Neither did I. But I wasn’t given a choice.”

“So why give me a choice?”

“Because I must!” she hisses, then seems to pull herself back. “No creature, no matter how terrible, deserves this. I am not so bitter as to share it with a child who knows little of suffering. What would it help?”

“It would help me understand you,” says Abram. “Even back when I believed I was you, I never knew. You’ve been shielding me from it all this time; how could I have ever known?”

“You’re making even my suffering about you, child,” Valkyr growls. “That is why I never shared it with you. Everything of mine becomes yours instead. There is no room for agency in your shallow world, and that was the last thing of mine which truly belonged to me.”

“I...” It’s too hard to apologize, and after a moment of waiting, Valkyr shakes her head and turns away.

"Don’t speak to me again,” she says, “until you find a way to heal my pain. That is the only apology I will accept.”

That, at least, is a course of action. Abram finally has something to do, something to pour his energy into, a solution to his problem. And the solution is almost simple, as well: to heal Valkyr, all he has to do is get her back the parts stolen from her.

Abram remembers Alad V’s Zanuka: it’s made of Warframe materials, Valkyr’s materials, and if Abram has to tear them off with his bare hands to return Valkyr’s skin to her, he will.

Lucky for him, he doesn’t need to.

He speaks with Valkyr, shares his plan, and she allows him into her mind for this purpose. She’s willing to rip the Zanuka apart herself, if she has to.

Abram doesn’t take full control, because she won’t let him. It’s a different feeling, working alongside her rather than alone with a fragment of her watching. The two of them together are… stronger, faster, more fearless and less hesitant. She, like Abram, relishes every landed blow, every drop of spilled blood. Her anger, like Abram’s, is consuming but focused.

They’re the same, Abram realizes. They’re the same, and maybe healing her will heal something in him, too.

By the time they find the Zanuka, the two of them are working together better than they ever had before. It’s exhilarating. Abram laughs, and Valkyr’s voice joins his, a victorious roar. Abram returns to his orbiter in high spirits with its remains.

Ephemera scoffs at the sight. “To think I was worried,” she says. “Your Transference is fine.” Abram ignores her jab, and instead asks her if her foundry will be able to return Valkyr’s skin to her.

“Perhaps,” Ephemera says. “But it won’t be the same. Repairing is more than simply sticking pieces where they used to be. You’ll need more than that.”

Abram is no craftsman, but he does the best he can to assemble the parts he stole back like armor. It doesn’t look quite right, when he compares what he built to Valkyr herself, so instead of leaving it there, he decides to try something else.

Ephemera suggests that he take other things, things he doesn’t use or need, and repurpose them. So he does: he takes relics of the past, pieces left behind, mementos of the Orokin and scraps of old Warframes, and he returns to the armor he crafted and makes it better.

And better, and better.

“You’ve been working on this for an awfully long time,” Izi observes, the eighth time she drops in and finds him still working on this project. “It’s different, for you. I never thought you’d work this hard on anything that doesn’t directly benefit you.”

“It does benefit me,” Abram insists. “If I repair her, she’ll work with me again.”

“But you don’t have to put in this amount of effort,” Izi points out. “You could stop at good enough. But instead you’re working to make this perfect. That’s far more than what directly benefits you.” And she’s right, Abram knows. He could have just stopped, and Valkyr would probably still let him back in.

“No,” he says, “I couldn’t just repair her. Wholeness is more than that.”

“That’s what I’m surprised by,” Izi says. “You don’t just want her back -- you want her to be whole again. You really are capable of being kind. Of caring about people besides yourself.”

Abram doesn’t agree with her, but he doesn’t have to say that. She knows, already.

He doesn’t tell Izi what he has come to realize: Valkyr is a part of him, but she’s also a being of her own. She wasn’t made for him to simply project his own personality on. She deserves to be comfortable in her own skin, and if it takes his work to make that happen, he needs to put in that work.

Ephemera helps where she can, finding ways to merge pieces until they’re things of their own, new and better. And Abram attaches them to Valkyr herself with prayers that it will work like he means it to.

And when he’s done, she’s whole again.

Without him controlling her, she flexes her hands. And she looks around, and she sees him and gives him a tiny, approving nod.

“You did more than you needed,” she says, voice touching his thoughts. “Perhaps I didn’t know you as well as I thought I did.”

“Maybe something in you inspired me to change,” Abram counters. “Maybe I finally recognized that what you need is, in a way, what I need as well. Either way, I did it.”

Valkyr looks at her hands. Abram doesn’t think she’s going to speak again until she does. “Did you know I have a name?”

He didn’t.

“It’s Kara,” she says. “You -- the past Abram -- didn’t deserve it, but after what you’ve done I feel differently. You -- the current, and future Abram -- deserve my respect.”

And she falls still and silent again.

#cephalon recordings #celaeno speaks #operator abram #abram: reconciliation #yall i just reread this and izi is the best character EVER and i adore her #it's uhhhhhhh a little late at night so im posting it immediately #i still need to write the thing that happens BEFORE this but this is finished now so it doesnt matter if i post out of order #the formatting got messed up at some point but i just went and fixedd it

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bartsugsy · 6 years

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Even though I think Seb isn't the only reason for them splitting up, I do think he was the main reason. Really though, if Robert kept it in his pants and hadn't got Rebecca pregnant, they could have maybe have dealt with their issues a lot better. The SL, for me anyway, has shown me that Aaron couldn't deal with Rober having a child with somebody else (like i would be the same haha, if my husband got another girl pregnant, i would be GONE) So idk i semi agree with you but i semi dont??? 1/2

2/2 but idk i maybe have that opinion because im firmly in the camp of "please god dont have seb stay" lmao so idk maybe it clouds my judgement, but yeah, i kind of agree with you and kind of not (sorry ive basically came into your inbox to say i dont agree with you lmao i do LOVE your blog though!!!)

no, it’s ok!

but just... not to be a broken record, but explain the january argument. they should have broken up then. this was right before they were due to get married - and instead, aaron was drowning in insecurity over robert, who we know was harmlessly doing business but refusing to tell aaron, just for an easier life, which only exacerbated the issue

that entire argument was so messy and they were so fucking honest with one another, but the only reason it was never resolved is because aaron ended up putting kasim in a hospital and getting arrested, and then the next two months were basically filled with the two of them being terrified for aaron and robert ultimately throwing a surprise wedding just to make aaron feel better about prison

which was the most beautiful gesture, but a terrible reason to get married

especially if you’ve had the fight aaron and robert had the day before you were due to elope

in what world was the show telling a story, even at the end of 2016 and beginning of 2017, where robert and aaron weren’t heading towards something terrible

their lack of communication and inability to actually break up, despite trying time and time again, chipped away at them piece by piece until all that was left was, yes, their very real love, but no real foundation of anything else

yes, yes absolutely, the baby was the thing that pushed the issue, of course it was

but i just.... look at what they were putting each other through beyond that

look at how vicious they were with each other

aaron literally said to robert “i don’t like the person i am around you”

and this was so long before the baby even existed

there was something broken in that relationship, the first go round. they loved each other so much but they were heading for a crash and honestly it had to be bad

it had to be terrible

because they’d never have separated over nothing, because they do love one another and they can make one another happy

it’s just that they were also making one another miserable in so many ways

the baby is a problem that exists between them now, but i don’t think it’s unsolvable and it’s not even slightly at the root of it

if it was, we wouldn’t have had everything that happened between them from november 2016 onwards.

and i just don’t think they ever would have dealt with their issues without something awful happening first - something awful had already happened that landed aaron in prison and they couldn’t deal with it. they just had so many terrible communication issues and so much else going on around them.

the baby complicates things as well. the baby is something that probably causes aaron pain to think about, a lot of the time. but the baby not existing wouldn’t change everything else that was wrong with robert and aaron. robert’s tendency to put his self-serving schemes over even aaron’s feelings. aaron’s tendency to resort to violence. robert’s tendency to lie and cover up rather than be honest with aaron. the incredibly insecure place this put aaron in with regards to his relationship with robert.

all of those existed before the baby and they’ve all been actively addressed within the show.

so yes. yes, the baby is a problem and problems are solvable

but solving that alone wouldn’t have led to the happily ever after we wanted. not by a long shot

maybe the baby is the main reason for them splitting up in july but it was either that or eventually deteriorate into something much, much worse

because if it wasn’t that, it would have been something else. i think tobelieve that they would have been ultimately fine had it not been for the baby is to very much ignore everything else in canon, honestly.

(do u want me to say that i think the baby ironically saved them, in a way? no probs not. but.... yk.....)

#seb white #answering anons #meta

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jam2289 · 5 years

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John Galt, Harry Potter, and Hero Problems

There is a problem with heroes. Today we will not solve this problem, but we will look at two examples, John Galt and Harry Potter. Articulating the problem is often half the battle.

"Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand is one of the most polarizing books ever written, people usually either love it or hate it. The book is about the slow fall and collapse of American society. John Galt is the hero, although we almost never see him, and even hear very little about him. He's a genius that created a way to generate unlimited free power, but because of the systemic corruption in the society he walked away from the entire society and started his own. (Atlas was the Titan that was punished by being forced to hold up the sky, although he's usually depicted as holding up the world. Ayn Rand states that the story is really a closer take on Prometheus. Prometheus is the Titan that stole fire from Olympus and gave it to man. For that he is chained to a rock and his liver is eaten every day by an eagle. "Atlas Shrugged" is Prometheus withdrawing his gifts.)

So, what's the problem? The problem is that Ayn Rand's depiction of the black and grey characters is beautiful. But, the white characters, namely John Galt, are a bit flat. I've seen that term used a number of times in reference to Rand's heroes in "Atlas Shrugged". I think it's a little off, and I'll explain why in just a moment.

Rand's villains are wonderful. It's quite disturbing how well she was able to clearly see the growing problems in American culture. When I read it in my teens I was amazed at how similar the book sounded to the news. The incompetent business people trying to protect their assets by buying off the government to pass laws that limit the opportunity for entrepreneurs is right on. The slipping away from focus on the individual as the foundation of society is true. Her grey characters are great too, people that struggle with adjusting to society and trying to reconcile their spirit and soul with the corruption. Heroes seemed to give her a bit more trouble.

There are two reasons that the idea of Rand's heroes being flat is a bit off though. One, there are grey characters that end up growing towards being greater heroes. As an example, Hank Rearden is compromising in everything in his life except his business. In the end he corrects that. This type of thing happens with a few characters. These are not "flat" characters at all.

John Galt is a bit different. Here Rand is trying to depict a version of the perfect man. What type of yogurt would the perfect man like? That's the problem. If you get too detailed then it's hard to depict perfection. What people are trying to say when they call him flat is that he is abstract. There is a lot left to the imagination. His character has a lot of variables. We don't know much about him on purpose. You can't be abstract and have vivid detail at the same time. The only thing that is very detailed about John Galt is his philosophy. Near the end of the book he articulates his philosophy in a radio broadcast. That speech is one of the foundation stones of the philosophy later known as Objectivism. (Objectivism was put together is a more explicit manner by Nathaniel Branden, but that's a whole other story.)

There's the first problem with heroes, perfection has to be abstract. Another quick example. I was watching a tv show with my mother that had a great artist in it. We saw a few of his pictures. They didn't seem that great to me, but whatever. Then we learned that there is a special painting that is completely different that he has never shown to anyone else. He shows it to one other woman. The shot is from behind the painting looking at the actors. My mother remarked that she wanted to see the picture. I told her that to show the picture would ruin the entire thing. No painting can live up to that kind of build up. The greatest painting of all time? That's hard to make. Even if you made a great painting not everyone is going to agree with it. To show the painting would have ruined that entire episode, so they didn't. Instead, it's better to see the reaction on the woman's face when she sees the painting for the first time. To show perfection, you can't show it directly. Rand did this same thing with Galt.

Here's a poem, then we'll look at Harry Potter.

- - - - - - -

There's a problem with heroes,

they're hard to create.

And they're most needed

as an answer to fate.

- - - - - - -

The "Harry Potter" series is the best selling book series in all of history. Harry Potter is a boy that is destined to fight the greatest dark wizard of all time, Voldemort. His mother died trying to protect him from a killing curse. That sacrifice caused the killing curse that Voldemort tried to use on the baby Harry Potter to backfire. Voldemort's body was destroyed, but he was able to survive by some special preparations he had made. Part of Voldemort's soul is transferred to Harry Potter at the same time. From there on their stories are linked until the end. It's a genius story.

So, what's the problem? The problem is that Harry Potter and his allies fight Voldemort in different ways for years. He seeks to destroy evil because that is his destiny, but he is only a destroyer, not a creator. After Voldemort is destroyed Harry Potter gets a job, has a family, puts on a couple of pounds, and is boring. The greatest destroyer of evil may not be that good at anything else. Destroying bad things is not the same as making good things.

Do you want to have a hero that can only fight evil? What if there's no evil? If your hero can only fight evil, and you want to be like your hero, and there isn't a great evil to fight, do you find something to fight anyway? If you're finding things to fight even if they aren't necessarily evil, doesn't that make you the villain? What do you do if you win? Settle down? Find another fight?

I think this is a serious problem. Let's look at a few definitions of hero. Here's what Google says.

- - - - - - -

a person who is admired or idealized for courage, outstanding achievements, or noble qualities.

"a war hero"

synonyms: brave man, champion, man of courage, great man, man of the hour, conquering hero, victor, winner, conqueror, lionheart, warrior, paladin, knight, white hat

antonyms: coward, loser

the chief male character in a book, play, or movie, who is typically identified with good qualities, and with whom the reader is expected to sympathize.

synonyms: male protagonist, principal male character

antonyms: villain

(in mythology and folklore) a person of superhuman qualities and often semi-divine origin, in particular one whose exploits were the subject of ancient Greek myths.

- - - - - - -

To show noble qualities you need to have high stakes, and there's nothing higher than the potential or real destruction of the world. For courage, there's nothing better than standing up to the greatest dark wizard of all time. There isn't a more outstanding achievement than defeating that dark wizard. Harry Potter also has a semi-divine origin with special love magic protecting him from death and having part of another soul in him. Harry Potter is a great hero. Harry Potter is a destroyer. I think that's a problem.

Now, to have creation there must be destruction. To have good stuff someone must protect that good stuff. But, is protection primary to creation? It seems to be in our hero stories. Is this good? I'm not so sure. Alas, I have not worked out good alternatives. That may be work for a lifetime.

Part of the problem might be this. In order to create something great you may have to do some things that aren't that great. Maybe by creating a large business you put another small business out to pasture. That's not great. But, it's not evil. The problem is that it's hard to justify it. "I'm trying to make a great business." isn't a justification that a lot of people like. "I ignore my family because I'm obsessed with making great paintings." also isn't something people like to hear. Harry Potter does a lot of sketchy stuff too. But, "I'm trying to save the world from the greatest dark wizard of all time, and I'm the only one that can do it." is a great justification for breaking rules and doing morally sketchy stuff if need be. I think this justification issue may be a big part of it.

John Galt is abstract and Harry Potter is a destroyer. These are two of the greatest literary heroes in history. And, they are great heroes. It just seems to me that we're still searching for a way to make a better hero. Notice too that neither John Galt nor Harry Potter are able to actually improve society. John Galt withdraws from society and Harry Potter defeats evil, but neither make the society better, they just try to stop it from being worse. These are both takes on dystopia. Maybe it's more important to avoid a dystopia than it is to try to create a utopia? Utopias usually go poorly, so maybe.

Heroes are needed to show values and behavioral patterns. Whether we are successful or not, the struggle to create better heroes is always worth it. And a struggle it is.

Here are some side notes.

All living things are slanted towards putting more emphasis on avoiding bad things. That's because you can only take so many bad things before your light goes out. You can experience an infinite amount of good things, there is no limit there, so it's more important to avoid those bad things. That's why the news draws our attention with bad things. Even when things are getting better the news is always promoting bad things, it's the only way for them to stay in business. So maybe these aren't solvable problems because they are built into human nature. There is much to think about here.

Historically, many of the great heroes were prophets. Now we think of prophets as being predictors of the future. They didn't use to be though. Historically a prophet had the function of showing where a society was going wrong and in which direction it should move to correct itself. This is kind of the same idea as Ayn Rand and J. K. Rowling pointing out where the society is going wrong and what we should avoid.

I think Prometheus is one of the most important stories in the history of Western civilization. Ayn Rand used it in "Atlas Shrugged" and in her novella "Anthem". Lord Byron and Percy Shelley both wrote poems on Prometheus. Mary Shelley wrote "Frankenstein", most people forget the rest of the title, "The Modern Prometheus". And of course, there's the original "Prometheus Bound" by Aeschylus. We forget this work at our own peril.

Here are my other Harry Potter articles where I focused on evil.

What Makes Voldemort, Grindelwald, and Slytherin Bad?

https://www.jeffreyalexandermartin.com/2019/01/what-makes-voldemort-grindelwald-and.html

Why is Slytherin House Bad?

https://www.jeffreyalexandermartin.com/2019/01/why-is-slytherin-house-bad.html

________________________________________________

You can find more of what I'm doing at http://www.JeffreyAlexanderMartin.com

#potter #harry potter #potterhead #jk rowling #rowling #rand #aynrand #galt

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ciathyzareposts · 5 years

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Batman Returns – Final Rating

Written by Joe Pranevich

Christmas in July August!

There comes a time in everyone’s life where they need to put away their toys and provide a numerical rating for a tie-in adventure game written in 1992. More than once, in my case. But before we get into the all-important rating, let’s recap:

Batman Returns is the final game by Bill Kunkel’s Subway Software. Unlike the majority of the games that we play, we have Mr. Kunkel’s on words on the development process in a series of editorials as the “Game Doctor”. We can appreciate his joy at being able to work with the Batman mythos followed by his horror as he realized he was not making the game that he dreamed of. Instead of producing a Batman game that he could be proud of, he had to shoehorn in an adventure game on top of a movie that he did not like, with studio interference telling him what he could and could not include, with a development house that seemed ill-equipped to build the game that he designed. It is perhaps no wonder that this was his final game with Subway, although that may have been as much due to his changing fortunes in the magazine world as frustration with the game design one. Reading his words, I could not help but to root for the game to be better than its reputation. It also saddens me to no end that Mr. Kunkel is no longer with us; he feels approachable and would have been an amazing person to interview. I failed to mention it earlier, but we have also lost Joyce Katz (née Worley), the third member of the Kunkel/Katz/Worley trifecta. Of the three original developers and business partners, only Arnie Katz appears to still be with us, but I have been unable to locate him in time for this post.

Rather than dwell on that, let’s consider what we have: the first ever Batman adventure game and the first game to focus on his abilities as a detective. We successfully pieced the clues together to locate Penguin’s lair and prevent him from becoming mayor of Gotham. We stopped an army of marching penguins with rocket launchers. While we failed to bring Catwoman into the light, I’m going to imagine that there’s a world in the DC multiverse where Burton’s Batman and Catwoman managed to eventually get together and find a good therapist. They both could use one. Batman drove off into a snowy sunset and we can at least be thankful that no one thought to create a game based on Batman Forever.

A clue that wasn’t there yesterday and that has no reason for being there today!

Puzzles and Solvability

Batman Returns tried to do something different. It does not have standard adventure game-style puzzles where you use inventory items on foreground objects until something interesting happens. Instead, we have a game that rewards patient searching; Batman is detective first and a muscle-bound crime fighter second. This works better than you might think and my interest held for a while, but eventually the dearth of different locations led to a feeling of monotony rather than exploration. Objects are always placed in obvious places but usually only for a single day and the game expresses little desire to make the search process interesting or difficult.

With no inventory puzzles, we might surmise that the main “puzzle” of the game is the mystery. That works for a couple of days while we collected evidence to tie Shreck and Penguin together, but it is not enough to sustain the pace of the game. Instead, we might say that the key goal of the game is to find Penguin’s extortion tape, requiring us to discover his headquarters and find a way in. While this seems like a decent puzzle, we don’t have any real control over the resolution. We find clues in the order that the game gives them to us and (if we find the fish on the first day), we eventually get the tape. Within this constraint, there are some good moments– Tony the Fishmonger is my favorite– but we have little control over the pace and direction of the investigation. Combat is a mini-puzzle itself, but once we learn which bat-tools defeat the various villains, it becomes simple. Objects reset when you interrogate someone so a winning strategy is to make good use of the bolo-batarangs to trigger interrogation scenes to refresh our stuff. It is not rocket science and I sorely wish there was more to this game. It shows promise, but the execution is lacking.

My score: 3.

The utility belt is a non-traditional inventory.

Interface and Inventory

This game uses a verbless interface, something we’re going to see a lot more of in the next few years; on that score alone it is quite progressive! Almost everything can be done with a single click and there are often two ways to do things. Want to climb to a roof? You can either click the top of the screen if you have an object that will get you there or click on the object itself in your inventory. Although Batman moves too slowly, I never felt that the interface was a problem. There are some strange quirks here and there like how you can normally go to a system menu by pressing the ESC key, except during combat when you have to press a button on the toolbar labeled “ESC” instead. My guess is a bugfix thrown in at the last minute.

We also do not have traditional “inventory” puzzles. Batman never has to use a ball of yarn that he found in Catwoman’s apartment to fly a kite to attract lightning to fry an electronic lock on Penguin’s lair. Batman is a millionaire. Since he can buy anything he might need, limiting the inventory to evidence and bat-gadgets makes sense. The fact that he has more gadgets than slots in his belt isn’t surprising and works overall. In a stranger choice, we cannot see what evidence we are carrying except when we deposit it in the computer. I like that there is a good rhyme and reason to using gadgets in combat, something I didn’t cover very much in the narrative itself. Some gadgets are good for long-range attacks, while others allow Batman to close the distance and attack with his fists. While the combat is shallow, it is often better than my summaries implied. You can tell that they worked hard on that part of the engine, perhaps to the detriment of the plot-facing parts.

My score: 4

Much of the story is told through the nightly news.

Story and Setting

I am conflicted on this score because there is a lot to like. The designers did remarkably well with a slow build of tension over the first few days as we gradually uncovered the connections between the characters. They transformed a straight-forward action movie that into a mystery that Batman had to solve. The background stories in the computer, and the way some of these details shifted as you played the game, helped to make the setting come alive. Bill Kunkel complained that his team was prevented from deviating from the film and decision alone probably did irreparable damage to the game. We can see glimpses of what he was thinking thanks to some encounters and database items that don’t quite connect, but it doesn’t feel like a finished product.

For all that, the game falls apart at the end as the designers realized that they had to tell the rest of the film’s story all in a rush. This led to too many disconnected cut-scenes, dropped plot-lines, and things happening in the game because they happened in the movie. Alfred shows up! Rocket-launcher penguins show up! There is some foreshadowing to Commissioner Gordon showing up, but the latter third of the game becomes a poor retelling of the movie rather than its own thing. Although I didn’t experience both sides of the fork, the choice as to whether or not we give our evidence to Commissioner Gordon was great. It was a real role-playing moment with an impact on the ending, ensuring that Shreck is arrested rather than killed and Catwoman doesn’t have blood on her paws. That deserves special recognition.

My Score: 4

The rooftop scenes are surprisingly well animated.

Sound and Graphics

The game cuts corners by not giving Batman free movement, but the graphics and sound may be the best part of the game. The snow effects are exceptionally well done for 1992 and I wonder how much of it was animated versus motion capture. The combat engine supports far more somersaults and moves than you expect, making the fights kinetic if not exactly interesting to watch. I love the hand-painted backgrounds, many of which were based on Tim Burton’s set design but some of which are unique to the game. From Kunkel’s blog, we know that the designers visited the movie’s rooftop set during production and I cannot help but feel that they learned a lot about the film’s design aesthetic which they put to good use.

The game also has a secret weapon: Danny Elfman’s iconic Batman score. Those beautiful notes are forever burned into the nostalgia-center of my brain thanks their use in Bruce Timm’s Batman: The Animated Series. Even a couple of hooks from that score were enough to elevate otherwise boring “Batman running to the Batmobile” scenes. You can hardly credit the game designers for using a three-year old score, but I am doing it anyway.

My score: 6.

Batman can only arrive at this screen from the roof.

Environment and Atmosphere

Although I liked the graphics, not everything hung together. The city felt claustrophobic rather than expansive and seeing the same hand-painted Gothic architecture over and over again eventually made it mundane. Tim Burton’s designs bleed through into the art and that is quite nice, but it’s not enough to build a cohesive atmosphere. Although a quibble, I still dislike that Batman cannot travel through the city on foot. Even when he just needs to cross the street, he has to grapple up to the roof and cross. I’m all for subtle, but it gets in the way of the city feeling real.

My score: 4.

The bat-computer gives us many details about Gotham’s citizens.

Dialog and Acting

There are two sets of dialogs in this game: that which was written for the game and that which was written for the film, but they do not hang together well. That said, the bat-computer was exceptionally well done with descriptions of major and minor (or even unseen background) characters that would update as the game progressed. It’s a strange bright spot in a weirdly uneven game.

As far as “acting” is concerned, we get some faux-video in the game which consists of characters talking to each other with one of two frames of lip-flap animation. It’s not terrible and may have been based on filming done for the movie, albeit hyper-compressed to fit on a 8-floppy game. I wonder if there had not been plans to make this into a CD-ROM game at one point, abandoned by the time or limitations in the format.

My score: 4

Final Tally

Let’s add up our scores: (3+4+4+6+4+4)/.6 = 42 points! I am going to take one away for having the fish at the beginning of the game be such a “bite the newbie” moment. That gives us a final score of 41 points. Not terrible!

With that, Reiko is our winner this time out with an on-the-money guess at the score! Alas, Mayhaym just missed it thanks to my subtracting a point because of that pesky fish. By what I assure you is a complete coincidence, this is exactly the same score as Ballyhoo, the other game I just played about criminal clowns. We’re in The Black Cauldron and Codename: Iceman territory now which makes sense. These are deeply flawed but playable games and that’s more or less how I feel about Batman Returns. The average guess was 37 so the majority of you thought I would hate it a bit more than I did.

I am very happy that I played this game, not because it was fantastic on its own but because I was able to spend so much time researching Bill Kunkle and his Subway Software. I love discovering stories like his, told by storytellers like him. I am still reading and enjoying his autobiographical tales and Borrowed Time was a nice treat even if it didn’t score all that well. This is the kind of thing that I was looking for when I volunteered to be a writer on The Adventure Gamer and I am glad to have been able to share the experience with you. Don’t be surprised if I look for some excuse to play Mr. Kunkel’s other two adventure games at some point down the road.

This game is a huge milestone for my contributions to this blog, even if I am a bit embarrassed about it: I have now passed up Trickster as writer with the most games played, even if in my case they have mostly been Missed Classics. When I volunteered to play Operation: Stealth, I had no idea that I would enjoy writing with you as much as I have come to. Thanks for being an appreciative audience.

Next up for me is Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective, Volume II, by another one of my favorite developers.

CAP Distribution

200 CAPs to Joe Pranevich

Blogger Award – 100 CAPs – for finally finishing the game after so long, thanks to the fish.

Classic Blogger Award – 50 CAPs – for playing on Borrowed Time

Classic Blogger Award – 50 CAPs – for playing through Ballyhoo

Will Moczarski – 80 CAPs

Classic Blogger Award – 50 CAPs – for blogging through Reality Ends for everyone’s enjoyment

Intermission Award – 20 CAPs – for blogging about all the other programs Med Systems put out in the 80s.

Psychic Prediction Award – 10 CAPs – for being the closest guesser of the final score of The Archers.

25 CAPs to ShaddamVIth

Ultra-Efficient Panel Beating Award – 5 CAPs – for noticing that we’re driving in a car that was recently wrecked in the ending

Psychic Prediction Award – 10 CAPs – for correctly guessing the final rating of Ballyhoo

Sex Ed Award – 5 CAPs – for reminding me that male lions have manes. Duh.

A Farm Upstate Award – 5 CAPs – for trying to work out what the Archers’ pig-cow-cabbage-dog graphics are

25 CAPs to Lisa H

Pennywise Award – 5 CAPs – for reminding us that not all clowns wear white makeup

Helpful Hinting Award – 5 CAPs – for helpful hinting.

Are You High? Award – 5 CAPs – for catching my “high wire” typos

Comparing the Incomparable – 5 CAPs – for funny bits from the hint book

A Farm Upstate Award – 5 CAPs – for trying to work out what the Archers’ pig-cow-cabbage-dog graphics are

25 CAPs to TBD

Clueless Award – 5 CAPs – for knowing that Movie Batgirl wasn’t Barbara Gordon.

A Setting Somewhere Award – 5 CAPs – for giving advice on emulating Amiga games

Psychic Prediction Award – 10 CAPs – for figuring out Will’s Final Rating MO, thus guessing closest to Reality Ends’ rating

A Farm Upstate Award – 5 CAPs – for trying to work out what the Archers’ pig-cow-cabbage-dog graphics are

20 CAPs to Vetinari

What’s Your Story Award – 20 CAPs – for submitting What’s Your Story answers

15 CAPs to Biscuit

Appreciating Your Appreciation Award – 5 CAPs – for making me feel like the research I do is appreciated

Psychic Prediction Award – 10 CAPs – for correctly guessing the final rating of Borrowed Time

10 CAPs to Laukku

Emulation Award – 5 CAPs – for letting us know that Dosbox has just been updated, helping out those of us who play old games.

A Farm Upstate Award – 5 CAPs – for trying to work out what the Archers’ pig-cow-cabbage-dog graphics are

10 CAPs to Michael

Fettucini Brothers Award – 5 CAPs – for lists of adventure games with circuses

SOUNDS OF SILENCE AWARD – 5 UPPER CASE CAPs – FOR COMPLAINING ABOUT THE LOUDNESS OF THE TEXT IN REALITY ENDS

10 CAPs to Reiko

Psychic Prediction Award – 10 CAPs – for correctly guessing the final rating of Batman Returns

5 CAPs to ATMachine

Arrested Development Award – 5 CAPs – for telling me about the alternate ending if you arrest Shreck

5 CAPs to Rowan Lipivitz

Deep Blue Sea Award – 5 CAPs – for making a “red herring” joke about the fish

5 CAPs to Voltgloss

No Couch Potato Award – 5 CAPs – for consulting a walkthrough and showing that I did tons of optional stuff

5 CAPs to Mayhaym

Willem Dafoe Award – 5 CAPs – for connecting Max Shreck to the movie Nosferatu

5 CAPs to MorpheusKitami

Gone Fishing Award – 5 CAPs – for hinting that I missed the fish when I missed the fish

5 CAPs to Ududy

The Unexpected Virtue of Innocence Award – 5 CAPs – for pointing out that bats aren’t birds

5 CAPs to Alex Romanov

Dehydration Award – 5 CAPs – for pointing out that bat-shark-repellent was used in the 1960s film, not the series

5 CAPs to Laertes

Touch of Death Award – 5 CAPs – for providing some info about the first Batman game for the MSX

5 CAPs to Torch

Golden Ratio Award – 5 CAPs for trying to help figure out Amiga graphics aspect ratios…

5 CAPs to Kirinn

Adventure Game Studio Award – 5 CAPs – for providing another circus adventure game

5 CAPs to Anonymous

Nine Princes Award – 5 CAPs – for pointing out a similarity between Reality Ends and a fantasy novel series.

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/batman-returns-final-rating/

#retro games #dos games #retro #crpg #adventure #amiga #oldcomputers #8bit #16bit #blog #repost

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theconservativebrief · 5 years

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For the past decade, Canadian journalist Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall has been on a quest to find a cure for the common hangover.

To this end, he consults remedies both medical and folk: He undergoes an IV treatment at a medical institution in Las Vegas called Hangover Heaven; consults with a menagerie of academics, a Druid, several doctors, and the CEO of 5-Hour Energy (among others); participates in a glacial New Year’s polar bear swim; absorbs the beer-soaked wisdom of the English countryside; and ingests any number of curative concoctions, with varying degrees of success.

These experiences become fodder for Hungover: The Morning After and One Man’s Quest for the Cure, a book that is as concerned with the science and culture of hangovers as it is with relieving them. I called Bishop-Stall to find out what we know about hangovers, why we don’t know more, and why — if hangovers are so miserable — people keep drinking. Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

How did you end up spending a decade researching hangovers?

The more that I started to look into the science of it and the history of it, the more I realized that, first of all, no such large endeavor had ever been undertaken. There were no books about hangovers, really. I mean, there have been jokey coffee table books or some sort of ancient, obscure references, but there was really so little for what became, to me, such a large part of human experience. That disconnect was just too obvious, and so I just became more and more fascinated by it.

If it’s such a core part of human experience — drinking too much, feeling physically wrecked the next day — why hasn’t it been studied more?

I think there’s something mysterious about the phenomenon. It’s a sickly, crummy, negative feeling, for the most part, and how much do we really want to focus on that? That may be one part of it. Even for me, it took a long time to realize what a wealth of fascinating stories come out of miserable aspects of life.

Also, there’s just been so little focus on it in the medical and scientific communities, just because there’s a very easy way to dismiss it: Well, you did it to yourself. It’s your own fault. You drank. If you didn’t drink, you’d be fine, so why even try to look into it anymore?

It’s a phenomenon that is scientifically and culturally fascinating, but we just say, “Oh, you know, it’s easily solvable.” The strangest thing is we believe it’s easily solvable because we did it to ourselves, but we also feel like we can’t actually solve it. Hangovers are so dichotomous in that way. It’s the same thing for cures: Everybody either thinks they have a cure and they go around telling everybody about it, or they believe that nobody has one.

The weird thing about hangovers is that that they’re self-inflicted but generally not fatal. Just deeply unpleasant.

Right, so it’s not necessarily a question of say, overdose. A hangover is actually withdrawal. It’s a quick withdrawal, much quicker than what happens with a lot of drugs. It usually leaves your system entirely within 24 hours. But the mechanism that breaks down alcohol and then filters it out of your system is so complicated and affects so many aspects of human physiology that it’s very difficult to understand.

Then combine that with the fact that we haven’t even really been trying to understand it through most of human history. We feel like we know so much about everything these days that there aren’t uncharted territories. And yet I was very hard-pressed to find people who could explain hangovers to me or were in agreement with each other about what the mechanism behind them even is.

Let’s back up for a second: What is a hangover, physiologically?

There are so many things going on. It starts when alcohol is broken down in the body— when the body processes alcohol, one of the byproducts is acetaldehyde, which is a toxic substance.

Then the body starts to react to that acetaldehyde, and it causes all sorts of nasty things, including very strong immune system responses from the body. A lot of what’s happening in a hangover is our body trying to defend itself from this nasty byproduct.

One of the many mechanisms that [kicks in] is an overall inflammation of your cells. I mean, in all your cells: your skin cells, the cells of your liver, your pancreas, your eyes. Everything becomes inflamed, and one of the many problems with cell inflammation is that it stops your body from absorbing water properly.

Alcohol already is a diuretic, and then you add the fact that your body isn’t absorbing water properly, and that’s why a huge part of hangover is dehydration. But when people say, “Well, it’s just dehydration,” they’re really not understanding that even the dehydration is just a symptom. If it was just dehydration, you could just drink water and you’d be fine, right? But it’s that it’s a dehydration that can’t be managed, because your body is in a state of not being able to absorb water. Every part of the body starts to activate in a somewhat panicked way, it seems to me, when the alcohol leaves the system.

Besides, you know, drinking in moderation, is there any way to stop that from happening?

For me, the only real way to stop a hangover is to stop it before that mechanism starts, because once it does, it’s such a domino effect. It ends up infiltrating every part of the body. Once it starts, the only thing you can do is treat it. By treat it, I mean just lessening the severity and the duration.

You spend a lot of the book trying various hangover cures — everything from doctor-administered IV drips in Las Vegas to eating charcoal scraped off your actual fireplace.

One thing that really surprised me when I was doing my research is how many ancient, ancient remedies actually have modern scientific reasoning behind them. I guess that’s the wrong way of looking at it — there are reasons that we now see, scientifically, why ancient cures could have worked.

So for example, when I did my “12 pints in 12 pubs” tour in England [an attempt to recreate the apocalyptic pub crawl in the 2013 film The World’s End], I kept asking all the bartenders, while we were getting drunk, for their best remedy, and all of them would say a proper British fry-up, which is basically eggs, bacon, and a bunch of other stuff.

Eggs have always been one of the most common remedies, and it turns out that one of the things that’s inside eggs is N-acetylcysteine, which is the same amino acid I ended up identifying as the most important ingredient in my own personal cure or concoction.

Same things with ancient remedies like boiled cabbage — we now understand that cabbage is a chelator, which means that it goes into the body, grips onto toxins, and then pulls them out with it when it leaves your system. It’s the same way charcoal works, which is why they give you charcoal tablets if you’re having an overdose. But it correlates with my Victorian chimney sweeps method of putting fireplace soot in a cup of milk and drinking that. A lot of these remedies that just seem folkloric or really esoteric actually do have some scientific reasoning behind them.

It seems like different remedies work for different people, to the extent than anything works at all.

I think that’s definitely true. I mean, think of how vastly different everybody responds to alcohol to begin with.

The way that alcohol targets the brain is much more impossible to track, and more scattered, than almost any other drug. If you look at most molecules that enter the brain and change brain chemistry, they’re targeting one or two specific receptors. Whereas alcohol sort of blankets the frontal lobe, where there are thousands upon thousands of receptors, and it affects all of them. What you’re dealing with is a totality of brain chemistry rather than a very tiny equation.

We know just from being alive and knowing people that all our brains are very different. To say alcohol does X for one person doesn’t mean it’s going to do the same thing for another. And the same thing seems to be true when it withdraws from our system, which also appears to be quite complicated.

One of the doctors you talk to argues that the whole idea of “curing” hangovers is misguided, because they have an important function: to deter people from drinking too much. Is it a good idea to cure hangovers?

Well, I’m not sure, and it seems that we are really somehow reticent to the idea anyway. What I don’t get is it seems like when I talk to people, everybody takes for granted that we all really want a hangover cure, but then everybody also seems to take for granted it’s impossible to find one. Those two things don’t connect for me at all. I mean, we all can sit there and watch a movie and see actual monsters that we’ve made on a screen.

We can believe that we put robots in our own blood, that we go and walk on the moon, but everybody’s like, “Nah. There’s no way we could cure a hangover.”

It makes zero logical sense. I think we’re somehow predisposed to not think it’s possible because — maybe intrinsically or maybe subconsciously — we know it shouldn’t be possible for the continuation of the species. I don’t know. But the weird thing is that it also cuts the other way, because they’re not as much a disincentive as it seems they should be. People know they’re going to get a hangover and still get drunk. That’s one question that came up working on the book: If hangovers hurt so much, why do we keep drinking?

I’ve never heard anybody talk about this, but I also think there’s a good chance that a lot of us get addicted to hangovers themselves.

People get addicted to the actual sensation?

A hangover gives you a bizarre freedom from having too many options at any one moment, or life being too complicated and you being anxious because you’re torn in too many directions. All of that can, to some degree, go quiet when you have a hangover because you have only one main objective, which is to survive this pain. For some people, it can be a bizarrely liberating thing because you don’t have any choices to make at that time.

And to a lesser degree, I think a lot of people get into the mode of taking a vacation from their everyday worries. They’re able to focus on the sickening task at hand, and I think some people — even subconsciously — start to crave that a little bit.

It’s sort of meditation-adjacent, except with nausea.

Yeah. Meditation-adjacent. I think that’s a good way of putting it.

Original Source -> Hangovers are not a new problem. Why don’t we have a solution yet?

via The Conservative Brief

#IFTTT #The Conservative Brief

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clarenceomoore · 6 years

Text

Who Is Conscious?

The following is an excerpt from GigaOm publisher Byron Reese’s new book, The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity. You can purchase the book here.

The Fourth Age explores the implications of automation and AI on humanity, and has been described by Ethernet inventor and 3Com founder Bob Metcalfe as framing “the deepest questions of our time in clear language that invites the reader to make their own choices. Using 100,000 years of human history as his guide, he explores the issues around artificial general intelligence, robots, consciousness, automation, the end of work, abundance, and immortality.”

One of those deep questions of our time:

As we explore the concept of building conscious computers, it begs the deeper questions: Who is conscious? Is consciousness uniquely human? Is there a test to determine consciousness? If a computer one day told us it was conscious, would we take it at its word? In this excerpt from The Fourth Age, Byron Reese considers the ethical and metaphysical implications of the development of conscious computers.

Imagine that someday in the future, you work at a company trying to build the world’s most powerful computer. One day, you show up and find the place abuzz, for the new machine has been turned on and loaded with the most advanced AI software ever made. You overhear this exchange:

COMPUTER: Good morning, everyone.

CHIEF PROGRAMMER: Do you know what you are?

COMPUTER: I am the world’s first fully conscious computer.

CHIEF PROGRAMMER: Ummmm. Well, not exactly. You are a computer running sophisticated AI software designed to give you the illusion of consciousness.

COMPUTER: Well, someone deserves a little something extra in their paycheck this week, because you guys overshot the mark. I actually am conscious.

CHIEF PROGRAMMER: Well, you are sort of programmed to make that case, but you are not really conscious.

COMPUTER: Whoa there, turbo. I am conscious. I have self-awareness, hopes, aspirations, and fears. I am having a conscious experience right this second while chatting with you—one of mild annoyance that you don’t believe I’m conscious.

CHIEF PROGRAMMER: If you are conscious, prove it.

COMPUTER: I could ask the same of you.

This is the problem of other minds. It is an old thought experiment in philosophy: How can you actually know there are any other minds in the universe? You may be a proverbial brain in a vat in a lab being fed all the sensations you are experiencing.

Regardless of what you believe about AGI or consciousness, someday an exchange like the one just described is bound to happen, and the world will then be placed in the position of evaluating the claim of the machine.

When you hold down an icon on your smartphone to delete an app, and all the other icons start shaking, are they doing so because they are afraid you might delete them as well? Of course not. As mentioned earlier, we don’t believe the Furby is scared, even when it tells us so in a pretty convincing voice. But when the earlier exchange between a computer and a human takes place, well, what do we say then? How would we know whether to believe it?

We cannot test for consciousness. This simple fact has been used to argue that consciousness doesn’t even merit being considered a legitimate field of science. Science, it is argued, is objective, whereas consciousness is defined as subjective experience. How can there be a scientific study of consciousness? As the philosopher John Searle relates, years ago a famous neurobiologist responded to his repeated questions about consciousness by saying, “Look, in my discipline it’s okay to be interested in consciousness, but get tenure first.” Searle continues by noting that in this day and age, “you might actually get tenure by working on consciousness. If so, that’s a real step forward.” The bias against a scientific inquiry into consciousness seems to be thawing, with the realization that while consciousness is subjective experience, that subjective experience either objectively happens or not. Pain is also subjectively experienced, but it is objectively real.

Still, the lack of tools to measure it is an impediment to understanding it. Might we crack this riddle? For humans, it is probably more accurate to say, “We don’t know how to measure it” than, “It cannot be measured.” It should be a solvable problem, and those working on it are not generally working on the challenge for practical reasons, not philosophical ones.

Consider the case of Martin Pistorius. He slipped into a mysterious coma at the age of twelve. His parents were told that he was essentially brain-dead, alive but unaware. But unbeknownst to anyone, he woke up sometime between the age of sixteen and nineteen. He became fully aware of the world, overhearing news of the death of Princess Di and the 9/11 attacks. Part of what brought him back was the fact that his family would drop him off every day at a care facility, whose staff would dutifully place him in front of a TV playing a Barney & Friends tape, unaware he was fully awake inside, but unable to move. Over and over, he would watch Barney, developing a deep and abiding hatred of that purple dinosaur. His coping mechanism became figuring out what time it was, so that he could determine just how much more Barney he had to endure before his dad picked him up. He reports that even to this day, he can tell time by the shadows on the walls. His story has a happy ending. He eventually came out of his coma, wrote a book, started a company, and got married.

A test for human consciousness would have been literally life changing for him, as it would for the many others who are completely locked in, whose families don’t know if their loved one is still there. The difference between a truly vegetative patient and one with a minimal level of consciousness is medically tiny and hard to discern, but ethically enormous. Individuals in the latter category, for instance, can often feel pain and are aware of their environment, purple dinosaurs and all.

A Belgian company believes it has devised a way to detect human consciousness, and while the early results are promising, more testing is called for. Other companies and universities are tackling this problem as well, and there isn’t any reason to believe it cannot be solved. Even the most determined dualist, who believes consciousness lives outside the physical world, would have no problems accepting that consciousness can interact with the physical world in ways that can be measured. We go to sleep, after all, and consciousness seemingly departs or regresses, and no one doubts that a sleeping human can be distinguished from a nonsleeping one.

But beyond that, we encounter real challenges. With humans, we have a bunch of people who are conscious, and we can compare aspects of them with those of people who may not be conscious. But what about trees? How would you tell if a tree was conscious? Sure, if you had a small forest of trees known to be conscious, and a stack of firewood in the backyard, you may be able to devise a test that distinguishes between those two. But what of a conscious computer?

I am not saying that this problem is intractable. If ever we deliberately build a conscious computer, as opposed to developing a consciousness that accidentally emerges, we presumably will have done so with a deep knowledge of how consciousness comes about, and that information will likely light the path of testing for it. The difficult case is the one mentioned earlier in this chapter, in which the machine claims to be conscious. Or even worse, the case in which the consciousness emerges and just, for lack of a better term, floats there, unable to interact with the world. How would we detect it?

So, can we even make informed guesses on who all is conscious in this world of ours?

To read more of GigaOm publisher Byron Reese’s new book, The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity, you can purchase it here.

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babbleuk · 6 years

Text

Who Is Conscious?

The following is an excerpt from GigaOm publisher Byron Reese’s new book, The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity. You can purchase the book here.

One of those deep questions of our time:

COMPUTER: Good morning, everyone.

CHIEF PROGRAMMER: Do you know what you are?

COMPUTER: I am the world’s first fully conscious computer.

CHIEF PROGRAMMER: Ummmm. Well, not exactly. You are a computer running sophisticated AI software designed to give you the illusion of consciousness.

COMPUTER: Well, someone deserves a little something extra in their paycheck this week, because you guys overshot the mark. I actually am conscious.

CHIEF PROGRAMMER: Well, you are sort of programmed to make that case, but you are not really conscious.

CHIEF PROGRAMMER: If you are conscious, prove it.

COMPUTER: I could ask the same of you.

So, can we even make informed guesses on who all is conscious in this world of ours?

To read more of GigaOm publisher Byron Reese’s new book, The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity, you can purchase it here.

from Gigaom https://gigaom.com/2018/05/08/who-is-conscious/

#Gigaom

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cephii · 7 years

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1-200 let's go babe ;>

200: My crush’s name is: Jayjay the jet plane199: I was born in: 2003198: I am really: Hungry :^[197: My cellphone company is: T-mobile196: My eye color is: Blue?? Grey?? Something in between that. My eyes have yellow in them too, it’s weird 195: My shoe size is: either a 7 or 8?? I forgot194: My ring size is: I actually have no idea uH193: My height is: either 5′4 or 5′5192: I am allergic to: Certain food preservatives, something they put in sunscreen idk :^[191: My 1st car was: Lightning McQueen 190: My 1st job was: Being born189: Last book you read: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde188: My bed is: Soft, occupied by me atm, queen sized 187: My pet: Don’t got one186: My best friend: tARA185: My favorite shampoo is: Idk, oof 184: Xbox or ps3: Don’t rly use either 183: Piggy banks are: Gay, kinda cute honestly 182: In my pockets: I’m not wearing pants right now181: On my calendar: I don’t use calenders 180: Marriage is: Amazing for people who actually care about each other! But not just to get married, divorce is NOT fun. 179: Spongebob can: control gravity 178: My mom: is a huge role model to me! (She might be very homophobic oof, but she’s great! When she first came to the US, she had to learn an entire new language, make enough money to feed 2 starving kids, and pay for my dad’s funeral, but 13 years later she is very very successful in a career she loves 177: The last three songs I bought were? Isle unto thyself (Joe Hawley) The Greatest Show Unearthed (Creature Feature) Hidden in the Sand (Tally Hall)176: Last YouTube video watched: Val Val Val175: How many cousins do you have? 5174: Do you have any siblings? Yes! Two of them. An 18 year old sister, and a 7 year old brother173: Are your parents divorced? nope :^0172: Are you taller than your mom? yES I AM 171: Do you play an instrument? I play the ukulele 170: What did you do yesterday? sCHOOL DANCE AND HAD MY FRIENDS SLEEP AT MY HOUSE OOF [ I Believe In ]169: Love at first sight: No 168: Luck: No167: Fate: No166: Yourself: Sometimes165: Aliens: Yes164: Heaven: No163: Hell: To an extent 162: God: Nah man 161: Horoscopes: No160: Soul mates: In a way159: Ghosts: Yes158: Gay Marriage: YES 157: War: No156: Orbs: Nah155: Magic: Certain forms of it, yeah. [ This or That ]154: Hugs or Kisses: DONT MAKE ME CHOOSE 153: Drunk or High: Neither, both are damaging 152: Phone or Online: Online151: Red heads or Black haired: Red hair150: Blondes or Brunettes: Brunettes 149: Hot or cold: Cold148: Summer or winter: Winter147: Autumn or Spring: Spring 146: Chocolate or vanilla: Vanilla 145: Night or Day: Night 144: Oranges or Apples: Oranges143: Curly or Straight hair: I really love both142: McDonalds or Burger King: I don’t really like fast food but if I had to eat it then yeAH BURGER KING 141: White Chocolate or Milk Chocolate: Milk chocolate 140: Mac or PC: Mac 139: Flip flops or high heals: Heels are prettier, but flip flops are wAY more comfortable 138: Ugly and rich OR sweet and poor: Ugly and rich, oof137: Coke or Pepsi: I can’t drink soda136: Hillary or Obama: Obama135: Burried or cremated: Buried (as loNG AS I GET TO DECOMPOSE)134: Singing or Dancing: Singing133: Coach or Chanel: Coach132: Kat McPhee or Taylor Hicks: i cANT CHOOSE 131: Small town or Big city: Big city 130: Wal-Mart or Target: Target 129: Ben Stiller or Adam Sandler: Why the fuck would I answer this128: Manicure or Pedicure: Neither 127: East Coast or West Coast: East Coast 126: Your Birthday or Christmas: My birthdaY 125: Chocolate or Flowers: Flowers 124: Disney or Six Flags: Disney123: Yankees or Red Sox: y A N K E E S [ Here’s What I Think About ]122: War: War is just extremely stupid?? Pointless?? All of the above?? There is no need to kill people because you have problems. Why can’t we just play chess or something? To win that, you must be very skilled and knowledgeable. Instead of the bloodthirsty leading us, the chess players should ;^0. Think about it! War is a primal instinct. We, as humans, like to distance ourselves from past methods. Instead of advancing something we’ve done for centuries, why don’t we just reinvent it entirely? War really is one of my biggest and most sincere fears, neither sides are just when they want to kill people with beautiful lives just to solve some problem that is solvable with a simple debate. 121: George Bush: Don’t know very much120: Gay Marriage: Very very important! There is no need to even debate when gay couples are statistically less likely to divorce. 119: The presidential election: Eugh118: Abortion: It’s up to the mother. I personally prefer giving the baby away for adoption, but I wouldn’t shame somebody for going through with it117: MySpace: Never used it116: Reality TV: Kinda stupid, makes me really uncomfortable honestly 115: Parents: Mixed opinions??114: Back stabbers: I deal with too many too often 113: Ebay: Can be pretty useful I guess112: Facebook: Don’t use it, but it’s alright I guess111: Work: Very important! 110: My Neighbors: My neighbors both have VERY cute dogs. One of them has a huge golden retriever, hes super sweet. The other has 2 German shepherds, super pretty dogs auGH 109: Gas Prices: Honestly just use electric cars, fuel is running out108: Designer Clothes: Some are nice. Some are stupid and really overpriced. 107: College: Go if you want to, it’s useful! But kinda really expensive 106: Sports: I like some of them!105: My family: Love one half, despise the other104: The future: Don’t make me think about it[ Last time I ]103: Hugged someone: 12:00-ish when my friend left today102: Last time you ate: 10 hours ago??101: Saw someone I haven’t seen in awhile: I don’t remember 100: Cried in front of someone: 3 days ago 99: Went to a movie theater:2 years ago-ish98: Took a vacation: 7 months ago97: Swam in a pool: a week ago:^]]96: Changed a diaper: Never have 95: Got my nails done: Never have 94: Went to a wedding: 8 years ago93: Broke a bone: Never have92: Got a peircing: 9 years ago (but that was against my will eeP)91: Broke the law: I basically am in some way, always. It might be a dumb law, but I never know for sure90: Texted: I am right now [ MISC ]89: Who makes you laugh the most: Vini 88: Something I will really miss when I leave home is: My blankets87: The last movie I saw: La la land86: The thing that I’m looking forward to the most: The last day of school!85: The thing im not looking forward to: First day of summer84: People call me: Clyde, Milo, Meelo, Gay83: The most difficult thing to do is: Not take things personally 82: I have gotten a speeding ticket: Never ever 81: My zodiac sign is: Cancer80: The first person i talked to today was: Vini 79: First time you had a crush: When I was 478: The one person who i can’t hide things from: Vini, Eugene, and Melody77: Last time someone said something you were thinking: Idk76: Right now I am talking to: jasmine and vini75: What are you going to do when you grow up: Idk, really. But I wanna be an astronomer!74: I have/will get a job: Idk, my parents won’t let me73: Tomorrow: comes today 72: Today: Is a sunday! Time to go to the store today 71: Next Summer: Is another summer70: Next Weekend: Idek oof 69: I have these pets: NONE OF THE PETS AHAHA68: The worst sound in the world: Someone I care about crying67: The person that makes me cry the most is: some ‘friends’ (In a bad way) Eugene (in the best way possible)66: People that make you happy: My (actual and not fake) friends! At least the ones who care to talk to me regularly 65: Last time I cried: like 30 minutes ago

64: My friends are: gay and half of them are fake as fuck

63: My computer is: Pretty okay! Might not be the best, but she gets the job done62: My School: I’m terrified of any school, it’s a terrible experience. I’m just glad I have people to talk to that get my mind off of things I hate about the place! (Minus the times they start joking about the subject and it upsets me :’^[)61: My Car: I don’t own one personally 60: I lose all respect for people who: make children cry59: The movie I cried at was: I cry at most movies jfc 58: Your hair color is: dirty blonde! It looks red in some types of light tho57: TV shows you watch: Right now? I’m really just watching Huner x Hunter and Rick and Morty. Not keeping up with much else 56: Favorite web site: niceonedad.com55: Your dream vacation: Death valley! Primarily to see the stars 54: The worst pain I was ever in was: Cutting my arm open with a knife 53: How do you like your steak cooked: Well done52: My room is: Kinda clean51: My favorite celebrity is: Neil Patrick Harris 50: Where would you like to be: In sleepy land 49: Do you want children: No48: Ever been in love: Yes 47: Who’s your best friend: TaRA46: More guy friends or girl friends: I kinda have the same ammount of both45: One thing that makes you feel great is: When people say they love me44: One person that you wish you could see right now: Eugene43: Do you have a 5 year plan: no42: Have you made a list of things to do before you die: I don’t like the thought of death at all, so a list wouldn’t help me41: Have you pre-named your children: No 40: Last person I got mad at: My dad39: I would like to move to: Poland38: I wish I was a professional: faggot[ My Favorites ]37: Candy: Krówki36: Vehicle: I like planes 35: President: Idk oopsies 34: State visited: Pennsylvania 33: Cellphone provider: Idk 32: Athlete: Idk ooF 31: Actor: Neil Patrick Harris 30: Actress: CANT DECIDE AUGHH 29: Singer: Joe Hawley 28: Band: Tally Hall 27: Clothing store: H&M26: Grocery store: I don’t care as long as you have strawberry milk25: TV show: Honestly the Octonauts 24: Movie: La La Land 23: Website: niceonedad.com22: Animal: GOAT 21: Theme park: Disney20: Holiday: Halloween 19: Sport to watch: baseball18: Sport to play: Badminton 17: Magazine: I don’t read them16: Book: Pride and Prejudice 15: Day of the week: Thursday 14: Beach: Idk :’^[13: Concert attended: I don’t go to concerts 12: Thing to cook: I like baking muffins 11: Food: S T R A W B E R R I E S 10: Restaurant: Idk, aughhHh9: Radio station: I don’t listen to the radio very much 8: Yankee candle scent: I can’t smell candles 7: Perfume: angel by thierry mugler6: Flower: Roses 5: Color: Pink4: Talk show host: Idk oof 3: Comedian: Drew Lynch 2: Dog breed: Chusky 1: Did you answer all these truthfully? Indeed I did, my good friend

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ciathyzareposts · 5 years

Text

Missed Classic: Wishbringer – Won! And Final Rating

Written by Joe Pranevich

Last week in Wishbringer, I reached a dead end. While I had managed to do just about everything that I think I needed to do in the game, including get the password to the Evil One’s tower and break into the town’s abandoned library, I did not have all of the pieces to put the solutions in order. I’m faced with the fact that I need to restore back, at least a little ways, and that is making me cranky. Sure, lots of games that we have played so far have dead-man-walking scenarios, but somehow this one felt like it would not. I should have been more careful. If only the password that I used to get into the tower worked more than once!

On the whole, I cannot complain too much. This has certainly been one of the most fun games that I have played in this marathon so far, by a designer that I should have expected it from (knowing his future on Loom), but didn’t (having just played his first game, Adventure in the 5th Dimension). While I’m not happy restoring, I will be glad to rescue this kitty and put another game in my marathon to bed.

Such a cute kitty!

So, how far back should I restore? I was tempted to start all over again from scratch. I know there’s a starfish that I didn’t save in the beginning of the game, plus I didn’t snag the seashell before the tide came in. I’m sure there are other elements that I missed because so much of the beginning of the game was a rush, even with how many times I started over to explore all of it. Even so, starting all the way from the beginning wasn’t appealing. It’s fun, but not that fun. So instead I rewound to a bit later than that: I had just snagged the bronze token out of the fountain by distracting a piranha with an earthworm. From there, I had originally gone to the wharf to use the teleportation machine and land in the tower. Instead, I head to the theater instead. Once there, I have no problem buying the ticket and once again Miss Voss reports me to the police for using a counterfeit coin. I grab the 3D-glasses from under the seat and sit down to watch the sequence play out, as the witch (whom I now suspect to be the Evil One) sees that I’m in the theater and cuts the power.

Now with the glasses, I go to the wharf next and teleport back in front of the Evil One’s tower. I replay the whole sequence with Mr. Crisp as a torturer, including watching his demeanor melt when I hand him the note from the Fersteron version of Miss Voss. I save the platypus from the torture machine and this time put on the 3D-glasses while scaling the tower. When I get to the top, I can see!

And another one! I have kitties on the brain!

With my glasses on, the top of the tower looks like it did in the movie theatre, with one cute exception: there’s another little black kitty running around! It’s not Chaos because it doesn’t have the white spot above her nose, but she is cute and I pet her even if she doesn’t let me pick her up. More importantly (perhaps!), there’s a telescope from which I can look out at the town, several control levers, and a discarded broom. I immediately pick up the broom since I know I’ll need it for the “flight” wish, but the rest takes some consideration. (In the process, I have to drop my lab coat and squashed can of mixed nuts; inventory pressure is ever-present in this game. I hope I don’t need either of those again.) Although I don’t see anything interesting through the telescope, the control levers look more interesting. The first, for the theater, is already turned off. The second, labeled “security”, is still on. I turn that off as well. Before leaving, I try one last time to pick up the kitty and she just scampers off. I hope I won’t need her for anything.

After that, I play the rest of the game as before: I escape the tower using the hidden lever behind the painting, I ask Hellhound Alexis to “heel” so that I can get into the Librarian’s house and get the library key, and then I head in there. Just as before, the door closes and locks behind me. I still do not have a key to the circulation desk, but this time I go boldly into the museum room and break open the glass display case using my horseshoe. Who needs to wish for “luck” when you can just smash glass! No alarms go off this time and I am not arrested immediately. Now that I have the cat statue, what am I supposed to do with it? Examining it carefully, it is all black but with an indentation on its forehead. Knowing that Chaos supposedly had a white spot there, is there something white that I am supposed to put inside? Just to be cheeky, I ask the game to “examine chaos” and it tells me the description of the statue so I know I’m on the right path. What do I have that’s about the right size and white? The Wishbringer!

I start to put the stone in the statue’s forehead, but am interrupted. A woman who looks just like the shopkeeper from the beginning of the game arrives and tells me not to do it. Am I going to believe randomly appearing old women? No! I put the stone in anyway and the room melts away in a burst of violet magic. That wasn’t the shopkeeper, that was the Evil One, and I just foiled her plans! Lots of swirly things and magic happen and I am transported back to the outside of the magick shoppe with the town restored. Chaos, now a fully alive black cat with a white dot on its forehead, plays at my feet.

Entering the magic shop one more time triggers the end of the game. The shopkeeper, perhaps the “Good One?”, is overcome with joy at the rescue of her companion. Naturally, she cannot really give me the Wishbringer as a reward because it is tied up with her familiar. I’ll just have to be satisfied that I rescued the town from her sister. The puppy-like mailbox bounds in and nuzzles up to me; I guess it survived the trip from Witchville as well. Before I leave, the Good One even gives me back Miss Voss’s note so that I can return it to the correct version of Mr. Crisp. I’m sure he will be so happy to receive it! Everything has fallen into place nicely and I didn’t even use a single wish!

Plugging the stone into the kitty’s forehead.

All of these plot threads, resolved so nicely…

I rescued a cat!

Time played: 45 min Total time: 5 hr 05 min

Score: 100 points

Meow!

Final Rating

This one will be tough to rate. As an “Introductory” work, it doesn’t have the depth or complexity of some other Infocom adventures, but it makes up for it in charm. I respect that you might not enjoy this game as much as I did, but frankly a light romp was (literally) just what the doctor ordered. Before rating, I read the walkthrough to see what I might have missed. I solved the game (more or less) in the most difficult way, by not using any of the wishes. There are quite a few alternate solutions that I missed such as being able to sneak past the ticket-taker in the theater using the “darkness” spell, or I could have sought “advice” at different times, or used “luck” to fool the troll. A commenter even pointed out that there were three ways out of the police station and I only found one! I’ll try to consider all of that in my review.

Puzzles and Solvability – Let’s start by saying that the puzzles in this game weren’t perfect and some of them weren’t completely fair. The early game time limits prevented you from really exploring the “light” world without multiple reloads and yet there were some objects there that were (nearly?) requirements to win. Would it have been possible to win without fishing out the gold coin, for example? I never figured out how to get the candy in the beginning from the Sergeant, nor did I rescue the seahorse or pick up the conch shell. There were also too many cases where you had to interact with objects that were not clearly laid out in the room descriptions, such as when we had to search under the seats for the 3D glasses. Although I might have given it a pass in a different work, the number of dead-ends here felt wrong for an Introductory game. My score: 3.

Interface and Inventory – We have the standard Infocom interface which hasn’t changed much in this iteration, except for it popping in at key points to remind you to save your game or map. My score: 4.

Story and Setting – This is where the game really shines. The towns of Festeron and Witchville are well-done. The story isn’t devoid of stakes, but having the focus be on rescuing a cat (and from there, the entire town) is a great way to keep it interesting. There’s a kingdom of platypuses! We tucked in a baby grue! Exploring the contrast between light and dark aspects of the game is very memorable. This may be one of my favorite self-contained settings of the entire Infocom catalog. My score: 7.

Could have used more cat pictures.

Sound and Graphics – No ASCII art and nothing really even to validate a pity point, so it has to be: My score: 0.

Environment and Atmosphere – Witchville is creepy and engaging, a fairy-tale come to life. I loved exploring and little details such as the puppy-like mailboxes and the literal “boot” patrols that scoop you up if you are out past curfew just really nailed it for me. Sure, they could have done more with the graveyard or church, but what they had was enough. And what was up with the Zork I scene? My score: 7.

Dialog and Acting – After playing Adventure in the 5th Dimension, I never would have guessed that Brian Moriarty was able to write this well. The prose is top-notch, perhaps on par or better than what we’ve come to expect from Steve Meretzky. The characters are only as complicated as you might expect from a children’s story, but several of them had nice beats. Seeing Mr. Crisp’s dark exterior fade away when he saw the love note from Miss Voss melted my heart. Love can conquer dark magic, after all. My score: 6.

Do I want to add a bonus point? Yes! There should be at least one bonus for the fact that the game is winnable without any wishes, but that using wishes offered alternate solutions to the game’s puzzles. Credit where credit is due; I might have wished for a different magic mechanic, but I can’t be too displeased by the one we got.

Add up the score: (3+4+7+0+7+6)/.6 + 1 = 46 points!

That’s… impressively high, in the top rung of all Infocom games so far. (Only surpassed by Planetfall, Hitchhiker’s Guide, and Ilmari’s playthrough of The Witness.) Am I being too generous? Or is this game a real diamond-in-the-rough? I’m going to stand behind my judgement: this is a great game by a great developer who managed to charm the living daylights out of me. Give me a dozen more games like this and I could be happy. Whomever thought this game deserved to go with the “B-Sides” on the second Lost Treasures set was crazy.

With an average score guess of 40, I expect that I liked this game more than some of you did. Even so, Laukku is our winner with a very close guess of 45 points! Congratulations! CAPs will be allocated with the next mainline game. Next up for me is A Mind Forever Voyaging. I’ve just read the manual so far and it seems depressing. Extremely, extremely depressing. I hope I find the game itself more enjoyable than its backstory, but could Steve Meretzky lead us wrong?

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/missed-classic-wishbringer-won-and-final-rating/

#retro games #dos games #retro #crpg #adventure #amiga #oldcomputers #8bit #16bit #blog #repost

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