#also the whole (lack of) reality and simulations it was all nice

[yugiohz]

Le guin‘s paradises lost was so nice :) nothing specific to comment tbh it was a rlly fun read

#well that’s a lie I rlly liked the linguistic aspect #semiotics specifically #and the whole micro vs macro cosmos #the ending was my fav this is padma’s world 🗣️🗣️🗣️🗣️🗣️ #also the whole (lack of) reality and simulations it was all nice

[sg2tiger]

I'm a weird person who likes archiving things. Making lists. Etc. My friends bully me for it all the time but it's simply who I am 😔 I always liked doing these little end-of-year gaming wrap ups but they never really felt right on twitter (and I had to post my rambling thoughts at an external link anyway). I thought about just coming back with 2022 and ignoring the two years I didn't post them here but the gap would bother me too much, so here's a repost of my 2020 gaming recap.

Unless otherwise noted, all text was written in December 2020. For a couple games that I’ve played more in the time since I might add some additional thoughts, but I’ll make a note of it being 2022-me talking if so.

The Sims 4

I feel like I have to preface this with the fact that I was never into the Sims franchise, and never played any of the previous games in the series. Yes, yes. I know that they were better than the Sims 4 in every way. But since this is my only Sims game and thus the only metric by which I can judge a Sims game for myself, I can still say that I’ve gotten a lot of fun and enjoyment out of it since obtaining it earlier this year.

It started because some friends of mine were playing, and I became intrigued by the building system (and the death traps one friend was constructing with said building system). I don’t think life simulator games as a whole really appeal to me, which is why I never got into the Sims before now, but I do love me a good building system. And I do think the Sims 4 has a good building system. I just love zoning out and making and decorating houses, even if I’m not exactly GOOD at it. 

Still, despite all the things I hear about how inferior Sims 4 is to its predecessors, I’ve enjoyed the gameplay too. Since I play on PC I of course have access to mods to improve some of the areas where it’s lacking, but even so, ON ITS OWN without having anything to compare it to I think it can be a lot of fun if you know how you want to play it. Like, the only real ‘playthrough’ I have done so far that wasn’t just me testing mods and CC and stuff involved me trapping a full household of 8 sims inside a house and forcing them to live together reality show style. Except the house was also cursed AND haunted, and I had a mod that made fires spread faster and kill quicker. The goal was, any sim that could survive until they reached Elder on the fastest aging game speed would be set free from the house and be granted eternal youth and immortality. I had a lot of mini goals pop up as I played this save, but there was a light at the end of the tunnel — “reach elder without dying” — and that helped guide my gameplay enough that I didn’t feel completely aimless, which can be a problem for me if a game is too open-ended sometimes.

I can’t say I’d recommend spending more than $800 for the game and all its packs, but if you were to acquire it through some other means (that I absolutely definitely wouldn’t and am NOT advocating, of course) I think you could theoretically get plenty of enjoyment out of it, especially with the plethora of mods and CC out there. While there are certainly a lot of areas that have room for improvement and I have hopes for with the eventual Sims 5, I don’t think the Sims 4 is a BAD game. At least for a newcomer to the franchise like me who can’t really be disappointed because I have nothing to compare it with. To me, it’s a fun sandbox where I can zone out and enjoy building, or just throw some hapless sims into a horrible situation and play god. And sometimes it’s nice to have a game like that where you can just turn your brain off and do whatever.

Undertale

Yeah, I know. Undertale in 2020, extremely late to the party, etc. Thing is, when I first heard about Undertale, it sounded like a cute and fun game that I would probably enjoy. And then the overzealous fandom blew up and no one would shut the fuck up about it, casual spoilers were literally all over the place, and people looked at you like you had two heads if you said you hadn’t played it or didn’t want to play it. I got SO SICK of seeing people not SHUT THE FUCK UP about FUCKING UNDERTALE that I developed hype aversion and came to actively hate a game I’d never played, a game I probably WOULD LIKE if I played it, because everyone was so goddamn obsessed with it. I was actively avoiding it for years for this reason.

Anyway, after many years of consciously avoiding anything to do with Undertale as a result of the hype aversion, I ended up deciding to play it after all at the behest of good friends whose opinions I trust and who knew about my hype aversion going in. We sat down and talked it through and decided that I’d stream it to them on Discord while playing. They wouldn’t influence my gameplay or talk out of turn and spoil things for me, or give me hints I didn’t ask for, or tell me how to play the game. We’d meet once a week for a few hours for ‘Undertuesday’ and they’d just watch me play and experience things for myself (even if I sometimes very definitely annoyed them with my gameplay). And I appreciated that, so thank you guys again for being patient with me.

Now…I think I had a lot of thoughts and feelings about this game when I finally finished it, but it was back in April, and I don’t seem to have put them in writing because we were talking in voice chat. Unfortunately I can no longer remember any of the specific commentary I must have had for the game when it was fresh. But I think my general take was…I wasn’t able to enjoy it as much as I think I could have, had I TRULY been able to go in blind. But I simply had too much meta awareness of what the game was expecting of me due to how much it blew up. My awareness of things like the mere EXISTENCE of ‘pacifist’ and ‘genocide’ routes ensured that I tried to do the right thing throughout and never kill any monsters, because I knew the game didn’t ‘want’ me to. I had foreknowledge that actively changed the way I may have played had I not known. I also knew that the player character and the original lost human were not one in the same. Perhaps my feelings about the story may have changed had I been properly fooled into believing they were. And in general I had a hard time letting myself like Papyrus and Sans because of how popular they had become, and how sick I was of seeing their faces plastered all over the internet at the height of Undertale’s popularity.

Lots of things like that, mostly little things, but those little things added up to an experience that felt inherently tainted compared to being able to go in without that foreknowledge. I felt like I was just acting the way the game ‘wanted’ me to, but didn’t always expect me to, because a part of me knew that I was supposed to act that way if I wanted the best ending. Because I knew I’d be guilted and punished if I acted differently. Because I went into a game that acts as a deconstruction of the genre knowing that it was a deconstruction. I don’t know how else to put it, but I feel like I wasn’t really able to play it genuinely, and it affected my perception of the game and its themes. Perhaps also being aware that my friends, to whom this game means a great deal, were watching me with expectations and hopes of their own that I would come away loving it as much as they did, and wanted me to. And I feel like I probably let them down because that just didn’t happen for me.

Undertale is a good game. It’s cute, it’s got some cheeky little amusing moments, and you can tell a great deal of love was put into it. I understand why it’s as beloved as it is. But I think it’s also a good lesson about fandom hype and how NOT to try and get your friends to play a game you like (or watch a show, or whatever). I know that when you’re very interested in something you want more than anything to get your friends to become interested in it too — believe me, I’ve been there, and I was definitely the annoying type about it (especially about Umineko). But I think it’s also very important not to let your excitement for a thing override the experience of others, especially if you want them to love it as much as you do. Undertale feels like the kind of game that really works best when you can go in blind and not have your experienced guided — directly or indirectly — by spoilers and meta knowledge. I feel like I definitely would have been able to appreciate it more had I been able to have a natural experience with it, anyway.

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey

A lot of my thoughts on Odyssey are basically repeats of my thoughts on Origins from last year, so I won't rehash those here. The TL;DR of it is, I can enjoy both games on their own merits as vaguely historical open world action games, but not as what I consider to be Assassin’s Creed games. What I consider to be Assassin’s Creed has essentially ended with Syndicate, and it appears that we won’t be going back, now that Valhalla continues to follow in Odyssey’s footsteps in turning the franchise into (the very loose definition of) an RPG.

What’s NEW here from Origins is the addition of dialogue options and “choices” in how quests can complete. Except your choices aren’t real choices at all, and the player never truly has any agency in the parts of the story that actually matter in the end. (spoilers for this next part so skip to the end if you don’t want ‘em)

Phoebe always dies, for example. No matter what you do. No matter how fast you are. No matter what choices you made before this point in the story. Her character, regardless of what you do or don’t do, is destined to die. To me this would have been an IDEAL point in the story to have some actual cause and effect…like, maybe my actions earlier with her friend and the plague business could influence this, and if I choose poorly, I would have to live with the fact that I’d doomed her. Or something DURING the quest itself, as you pursue her. Maybe you could have acted in a way to get to her in time. I know they really wanted Aspasia’s reveal as the big bad to be a surprising end game affair, but it was pretty heavily foreshadowed at this point in the story (I didn’t think she was The Ghost yet but I certainly was suspicious of her being a cultist). Maybe if my character could have had the opportunity to not trust her, I could have advised Phoebe to not work for her at all, and not end up endangered as a result. There are any number of ways they could have given me the agency to either save or or TRULY end up responsible for her death by my actions. They did not. She is scripted to die no matter what you do. And this is just one example of many points in the game just like it where places that I feel like I SHOULD be able to influence the outcome with my decisions don’t do jack shit because it’s scripted. By contrast, most times that my decision CAN influence the outcome of a quest, the change is so minor (slightly different dialogue or the opportunity to pursue a bland out of the blue fade-to-black sex scene I don’t want) that it doesn’t feel worthwhile at all.

At the end of the day I’m left wondering why this even needed to be a feature at all. Just to give the illusion that this is an RPG now, and broaden the customer base? Because that’s what it feels like. The game could have played out almost exactly the same had they gone with a FULLY scripted story like all the previous games, especially since Alexios/Kassandra clearly already have a pre-written personality that comes across through the things they say and the way they say them regardless of which dialogue options you actually choose. The choices are basically tacked on for appearance’s sake, choices in name only. I felt nothing meaningful from a single one of my choices in all of my 207 hours so far (I’m still trying for 100% completion but I have finished the main questline with both Deimos and unveiling all the cult members). And that’s my biggest complaint about this game — the “choices” didn’t even need to exist because their absence wouldn’t have actually changed the game at all.

And that’s not even getting into the whole forced DLC marriage and child debacle (I don’t own it and plenty of other people have already gone on at length elsewhere on the internet about it, but I think it speaks to the exact same issue of the game promising and giving the illusion of player choice but ultimately still having a scripted story to tell and a protagonist whose personality is already set in stone regardless of your ingame decisions).

At this point I had a whole txt file with more specific examples of Quests That Did Not Actually Give Me A Choice but you get the picture, so I’m not gonna go on endlessly about each one…

Anyway. I feel like Ubisoft would be better off just making a new IP if they want to explore the RPG market so badly. Assassin’s Creed never fit this format and I don’t feel it ever will. RPGs with significant choices work best with silent protagonists (though I feel like KC:D did a serviceable job without one), not fully fleshed out characters who already have literally existed in a historical context by way of the game’s entire premise. By actively taking place in the past you are inherently limiting the things my character can do to influence the story, because that story has already concluded, and the results of it can be seen in the present day story. But they keep being so wishy-washy with the present day story that it’s like a relic at this point anyway that they’re just afraid to drop entirely to piss off the minority who still cares (me, I’m the minority). But when it clearly doesn’t MATTER anymore, why not just bite the bullet and do it already? You could always resolve the loose ends in a comic tie-in lololol

Honestly though, while I’m probably the .0001% who actually enjoys reading all of the stuff on Layla’s PC that gives more context on the lore of the modern day assassins vs. templars conflict and the overarching story that’s been running through this franchise since day 1, I think we’re at a point where they may as well just let it go. They’ve been doing it so dirty since Black Flag as it is, I’d rather just see it go than get further tarnished by being forcefully tacked on because it’s an artifact of the series. After the complete disregard for modern day that we saw in Unity and Syndicate I was genuinely excited when we got Layla, because I thought she’d step into the role of The New Desmond and have adventures that actually made the modern day story relevant again…but she’s actually LESS relevant than the nameless faceless Black Flag modern day protagonist, and that’s just sad. Just pull the plug already, Ubisoft. You’ve made it abundantly clear that you want this series to become a loosely historical sandbox RPG and the intricate and complex lore of the modern day storyline is only dragging you down. You don’t care about it anymore, so what’s it matter to people like me who DO care if you’re not giving it proper attention either way? Just let it die before it can be disgraced any more.

I’m getting off track though…honestly, it’s a fun game. Like I said, 207 hours and I’m still not done shooting for 100% completion by exploring every island and doing every sidequest that I missed my first go around. If I wasn’t having fun at all I wouldn’t still be here. I AM having fun. I think less fun than I had with Origins, if I’m being honest, but it’s definitely not a bad game. I’ll just never be happy with the idea of the series going in this direction in the first place, so I’m always gonna be here nitpicking about little things the majority of people won’t care at all about. Like the fact that haystacks and hidespots no longer exist despite being a literal staple of the franchise. Or the fact that you can’t die from fall damage anymore. Lack of true poison/berserk darts mechanic or any real ability to sow chaos in an enemy camp without breaking stealth because the game really really REALLY wants to force you into open dynamic combat because it looks cooler in the promo trailers. Feel like I had to fight the game to give my gear all the mechanics that boost Predator Shot and passive adrenaline regeneration so I can pull off multiple headshot kills without being spotted, y’know, like I want to actively do in a game where I expect to play like a proper assassin. Oil barrels also seem way weaker than they were in Origins where setting fire to camps was a risky (because it’s not exactly stealthy and quiet in the traditional sense) but very fun way of making quick work of enemies in the dead of night and then slipping away in the chaos before they could see you. The game just really wants me to be a Spartan Warrior Demigod and I’ve gotta work so hard to NOT be that and it annoys me. Can’t even blow up a grain silo from absolute and complete cover with no one around to witness SHIT and not get a mysterious bounty on my head. Are the horses and goats reporting my crimes again, like in Skyrim?

I could keep going with nitpick after nitpick but I won’t. I’m just cranky because I actually really liked both Unity (gameplay-wise, the story was a trainwreck) and Syndicate (slightly less of a trainwreck which is funny considering the presence of actual trains) and thought they did a lot to really refine that tried and true core Assassin’s Creed gameplay…and I know it’s never coming back. But Odyssey is fun I guess. If you aren’t an experienced AC fan you’ll probably enjoy it. And I guess that’s exactly how Ubisoft likes it.

Sonic Adventure 2

One day I was babysitting my 3-year old nephew and he told me he wanted to play a ‘blue game’. I didn’t know what that meant (I have since learned that this is how he refers to his parents’ Switch, which is light blue) so I looked in my Steam library for something blue. I landed on this, which I forgot I even had on PC. And that’s how I got my nephew obsessed with Sonic and also how I spent the next 2 months reliving one of my favorite games of the GameCube era.

I don’t really have a lot to say here. It’s Sonic Adventure 2. I got big into the Chao Garden, as one does, and trying to A-rank all those stages that used to give me the hardest time. I’m actually really proud to have A-ranked Crazy Gadget on all stage types, and Eternal Engine on all types except Hard (couldn’t manage more than a B). Also got all A ranks on Route 101, but I did that in the olden days too (after a great deal of frustration and one broken GameCube controller). Can’t manage to pull it off for Hard Mode Pyramid Cave though…and I know I DID finally get that one last time I replayed this game, like, 8 years ago, so I know I’m capable, but I just can't manage to pull it off.

Mostly I focus on the Hero stages though. Growing up, me and my brother used to share our save files on most games instead of having separate ones, and when he played I’d watch and vice-versa. For SA2 I always played the Hero story and he played Dark, so I’m always less familiar and more rusty when I try to do the Dark stages. I did get all A ranks on Radical Highway after many many hours of trying (fuck you, time attack)…but that’s about my sole Dark stage claim to fame. Rouge's stages in particular are exceptionally difficult for me.

I was still working on raising some Chao before I inevitably got distracted away by other games…but the good thing about having it on Steam is that my save data will be there next time I get the urge to play, whether it’s a year from now or 5+. No more hunting for old memory cards that probably got lost or thrown out when we moved houses, taking all those hard-earned A ranks and carefully-raised Chao with them. And I think it'll be satisfying to boot it back up after a long time and remind myself that I got all A ranks in Crazy Gadget (the finest achievement I'll ever attain in this lifetime and what should be engraved on my tombstone).

Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town

The original Friends of Mineral Town (back when it was still Harvest Moon) for GBA was probably my favorite Harvest Moon game, so I was excited to play the updated remake. It’s not PERFECT, and I did kinda end my playthrough on a sour note which I will explain in a moment, but looking back on it now several months later I’d say it’s a very comfy and largely casual farming sim that’s hard not to like. Fans of Stardew Valley or more modern farming sims might find it too shallow, but for people who played either the original FoMT, HM64 or Back to Nature, it’s a fun and nostalgic little game.

Of course, as with all remakes, there’s always those things you wish they didn’t change. Some of the character redesigns don’t sit as well with me as the originals, but most of them grew on me as I played (except Karen…). The removal of rival marriages is also a heavy blow, simply because a certain Japanese market didn’t like the idea that their waifus might get “stolen” if they didn’t act fast enough (and iirc you had like, 2 whole years before they WOULD in the original so like…)…I’d like to say the inclusion of same-sex marriage makes up for it, but I wish we could have had both. I always end up wooing everyone in town before I actually get married in these games, just so I can see all the events, and then I feel bad for leading everyone else on, so I like the idea that they’ll find happiness together too! I think that if the game were ever able to be hacked for mod support this would be the first thing modders would put back in.

But while these things are the main offenders you’ll hear people talk about, they’re not the worst. A lot of this is probably on the nitpick level that most players won’t care about so feel free to stop reading here. Granted that a lot of the game’s issues stem from being a little TOO faithful to the original and some of its more frustrating gimmicks (who honestly thought a 50 year wedding anniversary gift was a good idea in a game where no one will ever age?!), but there are a lot of things that were CHANGED from the original and made needlessly more difficult for some baffling reason…and then tied to achievements, to boot.

So, most of the achievements are pretty easy to get as long as you play normally and get past 3 years. Others require you to go a bit out of your way to achievement hunt for them specifically, but are absolutely doable if you set your mind to doing them. But then there are the ones that basically require you to plan your entire save file around getting them, and making no mistakes in the process unless you just really really REALLY love waiting around for entire ingame seasons before you get another chance. The main offenders here are all related to breeding farm animals, and how they needlessly changed the breeding mechanics in this game for seemingly no reason than to make things more tedious and difficult.

See, the remake introduced a convoluted friendship/happiness system to all your animals. I think the original had some hidden friendship requirements too, but the main thing in the remake is that animals you purchase have a friendship CAP, after which they cannot continue to gain more friendship, even if you’ve had them and cared for them every day lovingly for years. The only way to raise that cap is to breed your animals, and each time you breed a successive generation that heart cap goes up by one. Purchased animals cap out at 5 out of a maximum of 8 hearts. If you breed your 5 heart cow you bought, it’ll have 6 hearts. Breed that one and it’ll raise to 7. And so on down the line until you have a cow with 8 hearts…which is basically a requirement if you want to get several achievements, and if you aren’t aware of this and start doing it IN YOUR FIRST YEAR you’re going to have a very bad time.

See, you need your animals to have max hearts if you want them to produce the highest-quality animal products (milk, eggs, wool). And you need those animal products in order to cook some dishes, which you need for the achievement to cook all dishes in the game. And you need them at max hearts to win the seasonal animal festivals, which also have achievements. And the thing about those festivals is that they come once a year, and if you don’t have your maxed out adult animal by the time they roll around you have to wait a whole year to do it again. This is much worse than it sounds when you consider the aforementioned fact that the heart cap only raises by one with each successive time you breed…and it takes a full season (30 days) for a pregnant animal to give birth, and about another 20 for that baby animal to become fully grown. And then you have to actually GET that animal’s friendship maxed out up to its cap before you can breed them and pass that cap on to its baby (I think? I was playing in August so I’m a bit fuzzy but I’m pretty sure this was part of what made it so obnoxious because you couldn’t just breed the baby as soon as it hit adult stage if you wanted to do it right).

Now remember, the animal festivals come only once a year. You can’t submit a pregnant or baby animal, but you need an animal with 8 hearts or more (10 is actually the maximum but you only need 8 for everything that matters) to win the festivals. So if you time your breeding poorly, you might not have an animal that’s ready for the festival in time…there’s also holidays and the occasional typhoon/blizzard (which you can sort of cheat your way around in most cases if you’re vigilant about watching the weather channel) that can interfere in your ability to feed and brush the animals, which loses you precious days of raising that friendship.

Now let’s say you didn’t even find out about this cap system, or the 8 heart requirement for winning festivals, until well into your third year, after you’ve gotten most of the other achievements and basically done almost all you wanted to do in this game. Well too bad, because you’re basically going to need another 2 years minimum before you’ll actually have a prize-winning animal ready for the next festival! And if you’ve already befriended all the townsfolk, gotten all the romances, married, fully upgraded your farm, learned all the cooking recipes, fully explored both mines, and basically everything ELSE in the game besides these achievements…you’re going to have a lot of extremely BORING grind ahead of you where you basically just wake up, care for the animals, go back to bed and repeat. For season. After season. After season.

I was basically working like crazy to try and pull this off and I DID actually just barely not make it in time for the sheep festival one year which kinda threw me over the edge in my anger about this mechanic. And if you want to get all the products for your shipping log (thank GOD not required for an achievement, but something I was actively trying to complete before the breeding madness made me just say fuck it, achievements and then I’m done with this game) you have to do this for each type of cow as well…or at least have the sense not to buy any other type of cow besides normal until you’ve already gotten an 8-heart cow through breeding. Because whenever you buy a new animal of the same type after raising the cap, those animals will have the increased heart cap too…so if you had bred yourself a cow with 6 hearts, and bought a new cow, it’d have a 6 maximum instead of 5, and the different cow flavors all run on the same cap system as the normal cow (but only the normal cow’s milk is needed for the cooking achievement so the flavored cows are…well, frankly useless outside of the shipping log).

If this were the only frustrating system in the game I could probably suck it up and deal. It’s very obnoxious since, despite all the tutorial books in the library, I don’t think any of them mention this mechanic at all and basically require you to read about it in an online guide to know (and sucks to be you if you don’t do so early into your save so you can get started on it ASAP), and because it takes so much time to do it that it’ll take you a couple years for certain…but I’d probably sigh, complain a bit, and move past it. But the game decided that this was simply not ENOUGH of a punishingly specific seasonally timed game mechanic to tie to an achievement. No…instead they had to throw in that achievement for owning all 4 of the possible animal pets.

In the original FoMT you just started the game with a dog and you could take it to the fetch festival on the beach in summer. That was about it. The remake introduced different breeds of dog as well as cats, penguins and capybara you can get during different seasons from a special pet merchant. That merchant only shows up on the 15th of the month, and only if it’s sunny, and only if you’ve done some other stuff I forget exactly in order for him to start coming to town. And THEN, the pet he sells changes per season — cats in spring, penguins in summer, dogs in fall and capybara in winter. He won’t sell you a second pet until you’ve raised — you guessed it — your friendship hearts with your first pet, and it also has to be an adult…and you also guessed it, this takes a lot of time and daily dedication to level. And you have to do this until you’ve obtained all 4 pets from him, which you have to do EXACTLY on a sunny 15th day of each season, and only when all of your other pets are adults with maxed friendship.

Getting the idea yet? Another achievement basically tailor made to make you waste your time living through more ingame years than the game has engaging content to complete, and another element that you basically have to read about online to know exactly how it works. I wanted to get a cat. Cats are sold in spring, but it’s impossible for the merchant to come to town before the SUMMER of first year, so the earliest you can get a cat is year 2. It’s also not possible to get two pets in a row — your pet does not grow from baby to adult in time. I tried. So you CAN’T get a cat in spring of year 2, and then a penguin in summer of year 2…you have to skip over summer that year and you’ll be able to get a dog in autumn year 2. But then your dog won’t be an adult by winter of year 2, so you can’t get a capybara. But you can get a cat in year 3 spring! Oh wait, you have a cat already? Bummer. You effectively shot yourself in the foot and wasted time by not buying your pets with the maximum efficiency required to get this achievement.

I was in year 6 by the time I finally got all of the achievements. I had actually reached a point where I basically abandoned my actual save and made a second save file just to do this, neglecting my friends, family, livestock and farm for the sole purpose of waking up, playing fetch with my pet, going to bed and repeating until the time came that I could buy my next pet. The amount of time I wasted, both in real life and in the game, was just unbelievable. The unbelievably restricted mechanics in this game that can’t even be blamed on it being a remake of something so old, because they were actively INTRODUCED in the remake…by the time that last achievement finally popped I was just 1000% fucking done. I came away from a fun and jaunty little remake of a beloved game from my yesteryear feeling angry and soured on the whole experience. And I know that’s stupid, and I know you don’t have to get all achievements and I know achievements should be for things that you really SHOULD work to ACHIEVE and not be handed out like candy. But there’s a difference between achievements that make me feel like I worked hard to achieve them, and achievements that are gated behind ridiculously convoluted time-gated events that require you to actively stop playing the game normally and dedicate yourself solely to…waiting. To grinding your real actual time WAITING day after ingame day until the right time appears, and praying to God you didn’t fuck up and miss even one day in your routine. It’s bullshit, plain and simple.

And it’s not enough for me to not recommend this game, because I still had a lot of nostalgia and fun with it and this isn’t something that’s going to affect the vast, vast majority of players. I just…it’s remarkable how this game is both cutesy and casual and also so sadistic in its torments that it would make Satan himself blush. And it just kinda left a bad taste in my mouth by the time I’d finished and made me want to rant about it. And I put it in my notes, ‘rant about this thing when you write up the end of year post because I’m too angry to do it now’, and I didn’t wanna let my past self down. They put a lot of wasted time into getting those achievements, dammit, they deserve a little 10-paragraph rant as a treat.

But hey — at least I’m in the less-than-1% of (Steam) players who made it.

Fire Emblem Fates: Birthright

Been playing this on and off at a very slow pace for a while now…I’m not finished yet so I don’t really have a whole lot to say. It’s…alright. It’s like Awakening: More Differenter Edition, except it lacks a lot of the charm that game had and copypastes some of its mechanics over seemingly just for the sake of it despite it not REALLY making sense to do so (I’m looking at you, dimension babies). The characters are less charming and memorable IMO, and while I kinda like the story plot itself more than Awakening’s, I’m not a big fan of the Pokemon-style version split between the two stories. I’m basically never going to buy or play Conquest, so I’m effectively missing out entirely on the characters and perspective of that side…a perfect scheme to engineer people into buying two copies of the same game, of course (at least with Pokemon the idea is that you’re socializing with other people to get what you don’t have…that logic doesn’t really work when it’s an entire story that you’re splitting between two games that effectively must be played by the same one person to get the full experience).

I was enjoying it well enough though, even if not loving it, until the other day when I finally got to that mission. Suffice to say I didn’t have the requisite A-rank with a certain someone, who was then Doomed To Die By Cutscene In The Stupidest Most Convoluted Way Possible, despite that person being one of my best and most-used units gameplay-wise…so I was basically punished for not having them stand next to my PC character, specifically. But I’m not going to go on another 10-paragraph rant about why I hate game mechanics that come out of the blue and give you no way of knowing about them without seeking knowledge from outside the game. Suffice to say I just sucked it up and reloaded my save, grinded out the last level of support on one of the bonus maps (we were at a B support already…just not A 🙄), and then replayed what had been one of the hardest maps to get through in the game so far the first time (it was easier the second time since I knew about the reinforcements spawning nigh endlessly from the towers if you don’t block em off). The character’s life was spared and life goes on.

Still one of the stupidest things I’ve encountered in a game though, since no other Fire Emblem has had something like that locked to a support, to my knowledge (unless the old pre-GBA ones that I never played did), and there’s really NOTHING in the game’s story to that point that suggests this character’s relationship with the protagonist is important enough to doom them to Death By Cutscene if you don’t support them to A before that point. I was angry. But I managed to overcome it so I’ve moved on.

2022 Addendum: I finished this game the following year, before moving on to play Three Houses. My final verdict was ultimately one of disappointment, hence the updated ‘Meh’ review on the page image. The writing was just plain bad (and I’ve heard that it’s arguably worse on the other two routes), and the characters were just not that memorable or likeable to me with maybe two exceptions. What I did like about it was the gameplay - and at this point I can’t even remember the specifics, but I do remember that there were a few times playing Three Houses where I kept thinking ‘man I really miss being able to do [x] like in Fates’, so I guess there’s that. I know Birthright is also the Baby Easy Mode of the Fates trilogy, but I think Conquest would probably be hard enough to piss me off (I put up with that shit in the GBA era but I don’t know if 2022 Tiger is patient enough for that anymore). 

But mostly, the reason I don’t ever particularly care to play Conquest or Revelation is simply because Birthright wasn’t satisfying enough in the writing department for me to WANT to. Ideally you’d want one of your 3-part game series to hook the player into wanting to see how things go down on the other routes, right? Like, no one plays a visual novel, gets one ending, and says ‘okay that’s enough’ (r-right?). If the writing were GOOD it should make me want to see things from the other side. If the characters were compelling enough I should want to see them through another viewpoint. And if the overarching plot (which I spoiled myself on once I decided I didn’t want to ever play the other two games) actually had more hints to its presence IN Birthright’s story, enough to nag at my mind and say ‘there’s something unfinished here and I want to know what it is’...but well, it didn’t. Birthright didn’t manage to make me care about any of those things, certainly not enough to spend more money to buy both a second entire full-priced game and THEN a paid DLC on top of that. 

Some people play these games entirely for the strategy gameplay, and that’s the crowd I hear praising Conquest. But other than that I get the strong sense that I’m not alone in finding Fates a pretty weak entry in the series overall. Thankfully I feel that Three Houses more than made up for all of Fates’ shortcomings, at least in the writing and character department, but I’ll talk about that more in my 2021 Three Houses review. UNthankfully...well, I’m not too excited for what I’ve seen about Engage so far, so I guess time will tell as to whether Fates redeems itself in my eyes in the future.

Skyrim Modlist: Elder Souls

I think it’s becoming a meme at this point that Skyrim, in some form, will be on these lists at the end of every year. But I can’t help it…something about it calls to me every year around the same time (late August to September) and it always manages to pull me back in 😔

Anyway, last year I gave Ultimate Skyrim a try because the last time I modded my own game I broke things in hilarious ways by trying to make my own mod compatibility patches (turns out I’m not that good at it). I thought having someone else curate the modlist experience for me would alleviate my problems. And I loved that part of it, and how integrated Ultimate Skyrim’s systems felt compared to me just slapping together whatever I liked with no thought to how those systems would interact. Unfortunately I wasn’t as big a fan of Requiem, the entire system Ultimate Skyrim is based upon…

But in the intervening year between playthroughs, Automaton (the tool used to install Ultimate Skyrim) gave way to a new tool called Wabbajack, and an entire new world of curated modlist installers opened up before me. I decided to peruse the various Wabbajack lists and see if I could find one that’d suit me a little better than Requiem…and I actually really liked the sound of Elder Souls.

As the name implies, Elder Souls is basically The Dark Souls Of Skyrim. The world is harsher, bleaker, and filled with a huge variety of new enemies and dungeons chemically balanced specifically to kick your ass. The skill and leveling system is completely overhauled — aside from the crafting skills (smithing, alchemy and enchanting), you don’t gain exp and level up by doing anymore. You gain gold with each kill, and when you sleep you spend an increasing amount of gold to raise your level in the skill of your choice. Eventually you’ll earn enough exp to level up and gain perk points to invest. As you level, the amount of gold it takes to progress increases higher and higher, from the hundreds to the several thousands…but as you grow in power, you’ll be able to kill more enemies to earn more gold to put towards leveling up further. It’s actually a really cohesive and fun gameplay loop that works surprisingly well in Skyrim, and I came to enjoy it a lot.

Of course you can also earn gold in the usual ways…loot, selling loot, crafting things and selling those…everything you do in the game basically makes you think about how much gold you have and how you want to invest it. In the early game especially, when it’s so hard to kill and loot enemies, that expensive weapon at the blacksmith can be really tempting…but that means you’ll be spending the gold you need to level up, so it’s a judgment call. It also makes you really focus your character build because your skillups are restricted to when you can sleep and afford them, and your perk points become harder and harder to earn as each level up starts to feel so far away (though you can find perk points by exploring and finding waystones in the world as well, for a little extra help). Do you want to invest that perk in alchemy or enchanting? Or is it more practical to boost your damage or defense by taking a combat perk instead? It really makes you think about how you level.

In the early game, you’re a fragile little baby. When you die, you leave behind a gravestone and all your gold with it (you don’t lose your gear) and respawn in the last inn you slept in. If you can get back to your body before dying again, you can recover your gold…but if you die on the way, it’s gone forever. It may be practical to bring a follower along for better survival, but they’re expensive to hire and share in a portion of the gold you earn…is it worth the tradeoff for the survivability? I managed to get lucky and beat Uthgerd the Unbroken in a fistfight by using the architecture of the Bannered Mare to my advantage, ducking and weaving, so I earned a ‘free’ follower to carry my burdens and tank for me in my early hours. She also came at level 11 when I was like, level 3. I had to make her essential, though, because she kept jumping in front of my arrows when I tried to shoot the enemy and I killed her/reloaded about 5 times before I’d had enough of that 😔

By the middle to the end of the game, though, if you’ve been diligent in exploring, killing and building your perks well, you come to feel like an invincible god. You can take anything alone, and followers just get in the way. I was playing an Orc warrior, with two-handed/heavy armor/archery/smithing. Orcs in Elder Souls have passive health regeneration. With the Wintersun religion mod I followed Malacath, of course, and his boon allowed me to regain health for the amount of overkill damage I dealt with each enemy kill based on my favor with him. My favor with him was constantly high because I pleased him by constantly slaying great and powerful foes. With the addition of crafting equippable Runes I furthered my health regeneration per kill and buffs to my armor rating. For completing Meridia’s daedric quest I got a spell that…well I forget what it did exactly but it buffed me even more. Using Ocato’s Recital I had it autocast whenever I entered combat. As a werewolf, I also had further buffs to my health and stamina, even outside of my beast form. By the endgame I was further buffed by Black Books and the reforged Gauldur Amulet (which in Elder Souls has the extremely OP power of letting you revive once on death with a 15 minute cooldown — but considering the Gauldur brothers are extremely formidable, it’s a reward worthy of defeating them). And with the Cleave ability in the two-handed perk tree allowing me to deal AoE damage with each attack, I became a literally unkillable, unstoppable machine of death.

I’m not even a min-maxer. Optimizing builds and gear isn’t something I find fun, so I don’t really do it. This just was mostly a case of multiple factors all aligning in just the right ways to make me feel like a literal actual god. To further illustrated exactly how broken my character became by the endgame, there’s an enemy in the Vigilant mod designed to be unkillable — as in, you’re supposed to just RUN from her if she sees you. I’m kind of a weenie about horror in games in general so I was very scared and I did run and panic when I got to that part of the dungeon but then I got cornered in a room and in my panic flailed about attacking and…killed her. And then her equally scary friend who showed up shortly thereafter. Just killed them both. They’re either meant to have stupidly high health or defense or maybe both, I read about them online and they are definitely not meant to be killable because this section of the mod is more or less supposed to be a survival horror. You can’t kill the monsters chasing you, you can only run. Unless you’re me, the most broken Skyrim character who ever lived.

Anyway. To further drive home how much I ENJOYED Elder Souls, this is the first time I actually, legitimately finished Skyrim. In all my 2,193 hours of OG Skyrim on Steam, in only 228 hours of Elder Souls (this was my first time playing Special Edition so I did have the exact hours on hand) I did what I thought I could never do because I was always so distracted adding and removing mods and generally being too busy breaking my load orders to actually play the game. I beat Alduin. Then I did the Dawnguard DLC for the first time. Then I did Dragonborn for the first time. And then I did vicn’s trilogy of GLENMORIL (I was actually doing this concurrent with Dawnguard), VIGILANT and UNSLAAD. And there were even more quest mods I’d never played included in Elder Souls…but after being able to solo VIGILANT basically effortlessly it felt like nothing in this game could be a proper challenge anymore and I officially decided to call it quits. At level 49, Ushnak the Orc retired, too powerful for Tamriel to contain.

I was still in the mood for Skyrim after that, though, so I grabbed a new modlist and started a new file. But it just…didn’t click. It was a fun enough modlist in its own right (Equanimity) but it just…didn’t feel the same, after getting used to Elder Souls. The world felt so much more empty without all the enemy variety…sure, they had QUANTITY with bandit camps absolutely overflowing with difficult foes, but it wasn’t the same feeling as wandering through the desolate mountains and stumbling upon a minotaur, armed to the teeth and blocking your path. My gold no longer felt like it had value when I couldn’t spend it on skill ups, which had kept loot meaningful throughout the entire game. I feel like Elder Souls just kinda ruined a more traditional Skyrim experience for me…it was so DIFFERENT, and definitely took some getting used to at first, but when I stopped playing I finally realized just how much I’d warmed up to it.

I do wonder how much more punishing it’d be on a different build, though. I was focusing on archery more in the early game but then focused mostly on two-handed by the end, but how would the traditional Skyrim Sneak Archer survive in Elder Souls? What about a mage? I never play mages, but still. A squishier class, a race and religion without inherent health regen abilities…it might be fun to try next year when the Skyrim urge strikes me again. Or maybe I’ll venture out and try another new modlist again. I think I just couldn’t jump RIGHT from the Elder Souls experience into something that was a little closer to normal Skyrim, but a year off might ‘reset’ that a bit. Still though, I’d like to play Elder Souls again sometime. And I wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone who wants to play Skyrim for the 100th time, but also like, doesn’t want to play Skyrim for the 100th time.

2022 Addendum: Sadly Elder Souls has been discontinued, so my ‘Recommended’ rating feels a little weird now, but there’s other Soulsy inspired lists out there that can hopefully scratch a similar itch (last one I was playing before I got distracted was Ruvaak which was pretty fun). In general I still cannot recommend Wabbajack modlists enough, and since the time of this review I have not played Skyrim without it being a Wabbajack modlist (with the semi exception of me taking someone else’s Skyrim Together modlist and then kind of hacking it to pieces to fit me and my friends’ needs, but that’s a story for the 2022 game reviews).

Genshin Impact

Some friends were playing Genshin so I decided to give it a try. Especially since it was constantly being called a BoTW clone, and I figured I’d never get a switch or be able to play BoTW, so hey, why not?

I feel like I don’t have a lot to say about it. It’s cute and fun and while the gacha elements are, well, gacha elements, I think the game is still very playable and enjoyable without suffering under the greedy fist of Big Gacha. The elemental interactions are really fun — I love games that take elemental play in more exciting directions than simple “water beats fire” style (one of the reasons I like Divinity a lot). Exploration is also a lot of fun, and it’s always really rewarding to solve a puzzle and see a chest pop up. I was also pleasantly surprised by how much worldbuilding and story there actually is, since I kinda figured it was gonna go more sandbox-style and just throw me out with a vague premise and have me explore the world in hopes of finding my sister.

I’ve enjoyed it a lot so far, I just haven’t played it a ton yet because I’ve also had my hands full with other things. But what’s there so far is pretty fun and I think it’s worth checking out at the very least.

World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth/Shadowlands

A friend of mine usually buys me a couple months of WoW sub for every new expansion (I started playing when Pandaria was current). For reasons I no longer remember but are probably ARK-related, I didn’t end up getting a sub during the BFA period (my last sub came around the end of Legion). So about a month before Shadowlands dropped she got me a new sub, and I had to play catch-up on all the BFA stuff I’d missed out on…and THEN jump into Shadowlands.

Since I didn’t play BFA when it was current content, I think my opinions of it are pretty skewed. From what I hear, Azerite gear was wildly unpopular, but I kinda thought it was fun (granted I’m not into the endgame high tier raiding stuff where it’d really be an issue). I also liked how the Alliance and Horde stories were COMPLETELY different, and not just slightly different takes on doing the same content in the same zones. Both islands have a lot of personality and I thought the stories for both were interesting, and neither really required me to have a PHD in World Of Warcraft Lore Studies to understand them (which Legion sometimes felt like it did). I’m not SUPER thrilled with some of the changes they made to Outlaw Rogue since I was away, but I’ve gotten used to it…mostly.

Then Shadowlands came out JUST after I finished up my rep grind to get flying in BFA, where I now no longer had any reason to be and to fly (okay that’s not true, because it came in very handy when I leveled my horde main through BFA later, but it’s how I felt at the time). I kinda liked the more railroaded leveling experience for a change because of the way the story elements were able to be tied together and flow into each other, and I appreciate the fact that once you’ve gone through it that way once you don’t have to do it again on your future characters. Usually when I’m leveling I end up wandering off and picking up !s wherever I see them, getting vastly off-track from where the game actually wants me to go (I basically wandered away from like, the third story quest you get in Kul Tiras and ended up doing Every Sidequest in Tiragarde Sound before wandering back to continue the ‘main’ story there and realizing some of the places it would have taken me were places I had already gone to). For Shadowlands, since it wanted to guide me into focusing on the storyline, I decided not to do that — Bastion still had a bunch of the map unexplored by the time I finished the story there, but instead of wandering off to see it all I just headed right to Maldraxxus so I could do the story while it was all fresh in my mind. Then after finishing that, I went back to the other zones to wrap up the extra sidequests and stuff I had missed the first time around. It was a different kind of experience from how I usually play but I liked it for a change. Not sure if I’d like to see it as the new style for every expansion going forward, but I thought it worked well for Shadowlands in particular and the story it wanted to tell.

I’ve now got both my mains set up in covenants and am working on developing those. Another friend who hadn’t played WoW since WoTLK also recently came back and we have been working on leveling new characters together. As someone who’s mostly only ever played one Main Character, with a Secondary Character to occasionally experience stuff on the opposite faction, it feels weird to suddenly have all these ideas for new alts I wanna make, and having to find time to do all the things I wanna do. Thankfully my friend extended my sub as a Christmas gift, so I feel less pressured to have to do EVERYTHING I want to do by the end of the month now that I’ve got more time.

Overall I’ve been having fun though, after having been away from the game for a while. I’m kind of a casual WoW player in general, preferring the questing experience to doing stuff like Dungeons and Raids with groups of strangers that are gonna be putting pressure on me and my gear and my performance, so MY enjoyable WoW experience is not going to be EVERYONE’S enjoyable WoW experience. I get the sense that BFA was not terribly popular, but I thought it was better than Legion (and I liked Legion when it was current content). I’m also not as concerned with choosing the optimal covenant for Maximum Performance, but more based on aesthetics and style and how they fit my characters, and I’d like to see how all their little stories play out on alt characters at some point (right now my rogue is Venthyr and my hunter is Kyrian). Plus there’s still leveling my lowbie druid with my friends, and other alts I wanna make at some point…and working on stuff like pet battling and archaeology on the side. Lots of stuff to do, but hopefully now I’ve got enough time to do it in, and can relax a bit.

2022 Addendum: This was all before the whole big Blizzard scandals came about. At the time me and my friends were having a blast playing Shadowlands content together almost every night. Then basically all at once we all kind of stopped playing. For one friend, it was entirely due to the controversy. For the other I think it was a combination of conflicted feelings and general burnout. I kept going for another month or two until my sub ran out, but I was hitting the burnout around that time as well, and not having them to play with made me lose my zeal to work on my alts and other things to hold my interest, so I just let it lapse. I’m not really sure what the future holds as far as playing WoW together again, now...maybe someday. I don’t think there’s even been a new expansion since Shadowlands yet, anyway (I don’t really keep up with WoW news at all when I’m not actively playing). It’s kind of crazy how much can change in such a short amount of time. I’ll still look back at that time we were playing together and having fun, though, even if our WoW playing days might potentially be over.

Grounded

My friends came to me and basically said, “we’re obsessed with a new survival crafting game, do you wanna play”, and I said “why yes, I do love a good survival crafting game”, and the next thing I knew I had become a little ant…

Grounded hits on all the usual trappings of the genre. You have a vague premise (in this case you’ve been shrunken down to insect size and forced to brave the dangers of the backyard, Honey I Shrunk The Kids style) but otherwise are on your own to fend for yourself against things that want to kill you, while managing your own hunger, thirst, and other needs, building increasingly more advanced shelters and braving deeper into the world to get higher-level crafting materials and march ever toward advancement.

What makes it fresh is the way the ‘theme’ of being shrunk in the backyard feels really well integrated into the world. Things like finding a discarded juice box or soda can with a little (large, to you) droplet of liquid you can drink or fill your canteen with to replenish your thirst, which you can absolutely imagine finding in a backyard where children play. The giant bird who sometimes flies by and perches on a nearby bit of distant scenery, massive enough to blot out the sun from your tiny view below. The koi pond essentially acting as the ‘ocean’ biome, filled with hostile aquatic creatures and the ever-present threat of drowning. The vaguely 1980’s aesthetic of it all. It just all feels really cohesive and helps you immerse yourself in the world.

The mechanics are also a bit more…dare I say, casual? More forgiving? Than some of these games tend to be. Your only needs are really hunger and thirst, and while you CAN sleep, you don’t have to…you can just keep working through the night every night if you want to, without rest. Buildings can clip into the terrain by default, so where you build is a bit more forgiving (some games could stand to learn a thing or two from this…looking at you, ARK). When you die, your corpse basically stays there forever, so there’s not a ton of pressure to race back to where you died to recover your stuff. For that matter, anything you drop seems to stay on the ground forever. These things might change if the game gets persistent servers down the line for performance reasons, but it can be kinda nice in a multiplayer game with friends.

I think my favorite thing is how the building system is LEGITIMATELY cooperative. In games like ARK or Conan Exiles, it’s like, you basically designate one person in your tribe to be The Builder, with everyone else just being your resource gathering monkeys. One person has the plans, the ideas, the visions for how to build the base…and it can be hard to communicate that without wires getting crossed, and that can be costly when these games usually don’t return all your resources spent when you demolish a structure. But the way Grounded does it, you’re basically not placing down structures in the world right away, but blueprints for them. Everyone can see them, even as you’re trying to position them. Then anyone can get the resources and actually turn that blueprint into a structure. And if you decide you don’t like it, or change your plan, you can just destroy the blueprint without sacrificing the resources on it. It feels a lot more like I’m working with a team when I see blueprints that my tribemate made, and I can just go get the resources to build it when I’m able. Really working together, just like real ants…for queen and colony…

Another thing I love and think needs to be default in ALL these games, ASAP, is the ability to color code and add a floating icon to all your chests and containers as an easy way of saying ‘this is what we store in this box’, without requiring signs or mods or just you having to memorize/check every chest every time. Seriously, survival games? Please take note.

All that said, it’s still early access, and there’s some bugs (heh) sometimes. We’ve had some semi-frequent random disconnections kicking us back to the main menu and forcing the host to re-invite us back. There are also not yet actual servers, so the multiplayer game saves just live on the host’s computer. Latency can be an issue if their internet is better or worse than yours, and lagspikes and rubber banding is a bit more frequent than I tend to feel it in games with dedicated servers. Some hitboxes are a little wonky sometimes, for both enemies and resources. And lots of other little stuff I’ve already forgotten, but nothing I’d consider really gamebreaking.

Overall pretty fun if you don’t mind some bugs, both literal and technical (though there IS an arachnophobia slider that can make the spiders into basically cartoony blobs, which I think is a pretty cool consideration in a game like this). It seems like the devs have a lot of big plans on the roadmap as well, and a friend who was playing around in God Mode stumbled upon a few areas labeled as UNDER CONSTRUCTION, so the map might be getting some extensions at some point too. If you ever felt like you just wanna zone out and go about some farming tasks like a diligent little ant…Grounded is your game.

2022 Addendum: Grounded’s officially out of Early Access at this point and there have been a lot of changes to the game in the time since I wrote this review, and updates have continued coming out pretty regularly even post-release, which is always good to see. I think the funniest thing about my review in hindsight is that I don’t know if I’d consider it ‘casual’ as much anymore because combat has become a bit more deep and challenging...we even had to bump our difficulty down in an ongoing save at one point because we were having a rough time. I think more or less all the changes have improved the game, though, which isn’t something you see every day in a game like this (at least in the two I’m most familiar with, ARK and Conan Exiles, where every update tends to be met with a choir of angry players (usually PVP people, I don’t go there) about how the devs broke everything and suck and should issue refunds and also die). But yeah idk, go check it out, it’s pretty fun to be a little ant sometimes.

#also i'm back i guess #maybe #sg2 plays video games #sg2's game reviews

[chyme-out]

Vrains, and what it means to ‘Ai’; because it’s not just a human condition

Ah.

Yusaku’s face kills me after Ai’s fateful play. There’s nothing...victorious about it, and you know, the moment the screen shows his face, and the way his expression flinches into something almost terrified, that Ai’s lost. Because while Yusaku does express shock in his duels, there’s usually something a little angry-looking or ‘firm’ about it. There’s none of that now. He certainly isn’t flinching for himself.

But he’s a duelist. He’s listened to Ai’s story. He has people to save; some of them he cares about, and others probably not so much. And none so much as this being standing before him, who’s trapped him into a duel where there was never any chance of him saving the one he declared, so passionately he was going to, the start of the season:

Unfortunately, he’s not Yuma. And there’s no magic in this Yu-Gi-Oh universe, no reality-shaping card that can restore the dead. (Unless of course, the reason Yuskau finally logs back into Vrains at the end of the series is because he’s on a quest to do the impossible and do just that for Ai, but it’s not exactly clear. I would be interested to see his reactions to some of the human characters though as I imagine they’d have mixed feelings about him attempting to restore Ai. A few may even attempt to stop him which...would not go down well.)

Poor Yusaku. He’s stuck in a rather dark series; dark in the sense that compromise between the Ignis and humanity was never in the cards. The main question Vrains seemed to push forward was ‘is it possible for AI with free will and humans to co-exist?’ And the end seems to say, ‘no, no it isn’t. Not unless you put limits on the AI in question.’

No one put a limit on Ai’s love for Yusaku. And all the Ignis, even the ones who genuinely sought a peaceful solution, ended up dead, because (a) no one could put a ‘limit’ on Lightning (though interestingly, he put a limit on himself, the moment he decided on the path he took) and (b) there was no limit to humanity’s greed and self-absorption, things which shaped the nature of Earth’s death and Yusaku’s simulated one as well.

The only AI who benfited from the series in the end was Pandor, who exists really, for less than a hot minute, and while she is an interesting being, she still lacks a spark of ‘something’ that made the Ignis so unique. And who will never, despite what she says, attain true free will, not so long as Revolver’s hold on her programming remains firm.

Vrains, I give you kudos for holding firm to the stance you took regarding this issue. It was certainly a lot more tragic than I expected initially going into this show. No last minute revivals for the Ignis except possibly Ai...and is that the series’ reward for him being willing to die for his love, for attaining a humanity that Go, at one stage, was so willing to throw away? Who knows. 

I don’t blame you, Ai. You were stuck in an awful position. And your response to that was to force Yusaku into one just as terrible. Such a strange mix of selfishness and selflessness at the same time in that decision...but isn’t that just Ai, all over? Or rather, love itself?

Yes, the series seems to say. Love is both selfless and selfish. Lightning was screwed up, but it was his love for life, and by extension the rest of the Ignis that motivated him to come up with a ‘solution’ and an ‘absolute’ one. Yusaku is right to tell Ai:

But:

Except of course, Ai, like Lightning, has searched for an ‘absolute solution.’ And the one he arrives at is: ‘If I want Yusaku to live, then I must die. Because he’s never going to stop protecting me from everyone who wants to do to me, what has been done to Earth.’

Daaaaaamn. I suppose if Ai had wanted to be truely selfless he could have found a way to delete himself without getting Yusaku involved, leaving Yusaku to wonder about him, but maybe convince himself, ignorantly, that Ai was alive and in hiding in the network somewhere for the rest of his life. But Ai can’t do that. Who could? Because...

Who wants to die alone? Of course he’s going to grab for a ‘solution’ that leaves him a chance to be with the one person he has left. To converse with him, and get a verbal and physcial acknowledgement of how much he meant to him. And to reach back and let him know, ‘hey, you meant the world to me; enough that if I had stayed and watched you die, I would have gladly let said world come to an end.’

Ai spent the whole series trying to protect the things he loved and failing, never reaching a successful ‘solution.’ How poignant then, that the first ‘solution’ he picked to protect these things, i.e. crafting Yusaku into his weapon, Playmaker, would end up being the last thing he would grow to love and eventually suceed at protecting at the end.

It’s horribly, selfishly, human. And yet selflessly human too. I guess the series made a point of saying, that despite Revolver’s assertion that humans are valuable becaused of their flesh and blood in the real world, and that the online world can be a lie, that people should focus on what’s important in ‘reality,’ and their ability to experiance things an AI never will...well. As it turns out, love isn’t an exclusively human thing, limited only to the ‘real’ world.

Whoops. The series also implies it’s cruel to make AI too human. For as we all know, humans have been doing terrible things in the name of love for centuries. And given how Ai is like a god in the modern day era, how can we expect him to do anything less with the power he wields?

Thanks Vrains. And kudos on the death scene. It packs a lot of meaning in the lines Ai and Yusaku share before Ai dissappears and Yusaku is forced to grapple with what he told Ai earlier about how life is about making bonds with others, and re-forging new ones in the place of the ones that are severed, in order to be strong enough to move on and survive their loss. And then of course, he buggers off for three months and refuses to call anyone else in his life and put work in developing new bonds or re-establishing existing ones in place of the one he lost with Ai.

I just...Yusaku. You poor thing. I refuse to believe you’re going to just just settle down into being the protector of Vrains and make nice with everyone. I mean, maybe you’ll try. But mostly I’m just interested in what you were doing for three months and how you managed to sketch out a living without anyone from your old life accosting you. I would like to think we get answers one day. But eh, I have my doubts.

#Yu-Gi-Oh Vrains #Vrains #fujiki yusaku #ai (vrains) #aiballshipping #Out of the Vrains #I guess #End Series Meta #meta #Ai Aied Yusaku #Yugioh Vrains

[platypus-quacks-too]

Hi!!! I'm asking again for another prompt cause I'm a big fan of your work, my prompt is about the new episode, the reason why Amy planted the book is because she is already pregnant and she wanted Sheldon to be ready...

Note: I did not forget about the older prompt from you and others, it’s just this one clicked more with me and I had a better idea. Clearly, fluff is the way here. I am happy I managed to write anyway, but I hope you guys will enjoy it. You can also find it on ff net as The Dreamlike Progeny Revelation.

Amy closes her eyes and tries to put herself to rest. She’s a bit envious of Sheldon, who fell asleep so quickly after their goodnight. She assumes physics is not as good as her worries to keep someone awake. There is so much going on in her mind right now to even hope to sleep anytime soon.

Her hand naturally goes to rest on her belly as she relives the past day. She loved to see Sheldon getting more comfortable around the younger Wolowitz just as she was pleased with the ingenious way she had found to bring him there. On the other hand, her plan had worked only part way through: it didn’t give her the chance to tell her husband about their own progeny currently growing inside her.

Sure, he really did have fun with the little ones today. She almost burst Into tears watching Sheldon rocking Michael to sleep, or melting in a smile because the baby had taken his finger. And while that book was only meant to be a way to reach her goal, she has to admit it has a few very interesting experiments. As a neuroscientist, observing and testing the wonder of the human development was absolutely fascinating, and she had been the first to suggest to Sheldon how their offspring should have the potential to be even so remarkable.

Now everything is different. Only a few inches below her hand there is a baby. Their child. Will she probably think to carry out some test or closely report all of its progresses growing up? Very likely so. But now she mostly sees its bright eyes and tiny hands, and all she can think of is to keep it safe from the world.

She knows Sheldon is going to love their kid immensely. She also knows how her husband works. He had never been comfortable around little humans, so it felt natural to try to have him relating with babies more gradually than hitting him right away with the news of the upcoming parenthood. What better occasion then spending some time with their friends’ little bundles of joy? Sheldon can get used to them first, and maybe stop considering toddlers and infants merely as test subjects that cry and poop.

So far so good, except of course for the fact he still insists about multiplying like rabbits. She squeezes her belly slightly as a funny thought popped into her mind. What if there are actually twins down there? Or maybe triplets? Having one baby is scary and exciting enough. Three? It is way more than she thinks she can handle.

Sheldon mutters something in his sleep.  “Professor Einstein, you are forgetting your coat…!”  He adds then.

Amy shakes her head before looking down, “Four of you? It sounds fun…!”

She turns toward Sheldon and smiles. “I probably better try to get some sleep now,” she says again to her baby, “We will think of something else tomorrow.”

She moves closer to him and snuggles into him, her face buried in the crook of his neck. The smell of baby powder is already soothing her as she pulls him closer. He seems to be sleeping sound; nevertheless, Amy feels his hands moving on hers and his legs entwining with her own. In no time she slips into sleep, feeling safely enclosed with her little growing family.

*

Einstein left a while ago, so now Sheldon is wandering around not sure on what to do, or where he is. He has been walking down a long corridor for what it felt a lifetime, until he finally finds something worth mentioning: a pink door with a tiny cartel saying ‘Subject #1’. More intriguing, someone drew a line over the writing.

He decides to enter the room, and it gets… odder. A toddler is sitting right in the middle of it. She looks busy with a bunch of building blocks.

“Hi Daddy,” the baby girl greets him.

“Daddy?”

She doesn’t seem to be bothered by his father’s puzzled tone. “I am your child, Marie,” she informs him, “Don’t you recognize me?”

Sheldon tentatively shakes his head. “I have mama’s eyes, the Cooper’s hair?” She tries, “I am named after your favorite female scientist but you tell grandma it’s after her?”

Sheldon takes a moment to better observe the little girl. Amy’s green eyes sparkle over an angelic face framed by chestnut curls. He doesn’t know many toddlers except of the Wolowitz ones, but definitely he can say she is a very pretty little girl.

He moves closer and it suddenly occurs to him she shouldn’t be talking the way she does.

“How old are you?” He asks abruptly, “You shouldn’t be talking this well already.”

She switches the two blocks she was focusing on over the last minutes before answering, “I am two, and I can properly talk because I am super smart, obviously.”

Sheldon can’t hold a satisfied grin. Too bad Marie contradicts him already, “To be honest, I can talk because this is a dream, and I am just an expression of your subconscious. You didn’t believe I was that smart, did you?”

“Don’t you get sassy with me, little lady,” he scolds her, “I am your father after all. Or the conscious to your subconscious, you name it.”

“I get the sass from mama. You like that in her.”

Sheldon sits with Marie. What better proof it is a dream than the fact he willingly sits on the floor?  “I do, but we don’t tell her,” he then admits. She smiles in return, and Sheldon thinks that’s another thing she got from Amy.

They remain silent for a little while. Marie continues to handle her blocks while Sheldon observes her mesmerized.“So, haven’t you figured out it yet?” She finally asks once she has done.

“That you have been writing our super-asymmetry equations with those? Of course I have.”

“I don’t mean this. It doesn’t even take this much imagination to figure it out,” she replies, “I meant something else. Look at that,” she adds, pointing somewhere behind Sheldon. He turns and looks in that direction: a calendar?

November 7, 2021.

“It’s almost three year in the future,” Sheldon observes, “I got it! We are inside a virtual reality simulator! Can I get to the commands?”

Marie sighs. “To be exact, we are two years and eight months from your present, and no, this is not a virtual simulation. C'mon daddy, it is so obvious! Are you sure you are a genius?”  She mocks him.

Sheldon is too disappointed to be bothered by the snarky remark. “What else can it be? I can’t think of anything better.”

Marie insists, “For instance, have you noticed anything weird with mom lately? Like stumbling upon a book about experimenting on babies.”

“I realized she did want me to find the book,” Sheldon confesses, “But I know it was only because she didn’t want to admit she wanted to experiment on Halley and Michael. Sometimes people tell us it isn’t really moral to conduct trials on our friends. I know, they are crazy,” he adds once he sees Marie is shaking her head again.

“It wasn’t because of this. Well, it wasn’t only because of this,” Marie concedes. “Think harder: have you noticed mom felt sick almost every morning in the last couple of weeks? Any emotional lability?”

“Oh, what a nice word, lability. You don’t hear it enough.”

She ignores the unrequested parenthesis and continues, “And have you noticed she went missing for most of yesterday…? Do you remember what happened six weeks ago?”

Marie has stressed the last question weirdly. Well, as weird as it can possibly sound for a toddler who is talking like an adult. Trying to focus on her question, Sheldon takes a moment to remember. He quickly turns pale when he realizes what she is hinting at.

“You and mom made love, and you were so into the role of a reckless Gryffindor that-”

“Don’t say it!” Sheldon interrupts her, “I won’t discuss such things with… well, with you.”

“Remember I am not really your daughter, but only your subconscious,” she answers back, “Don’t be shy.”  

“I am not shy. It’s just-” It is a bigger deal than discussing coitus with a self projection of himself in the form of his future daughter. What she is implying… No, it can’t be. Even in the robe of a reckless wizard, he knows he has been careful, especially when Amy does her best to bewitch him.

But even admitting he somehow lacked on precautions, has what they are suspecting really happened? Sure, Amy lately complained of some morning sickness and ate a whole bowl of chocolate ice cream in one lump. Yes, she did disappear for whole day and behaved weirdly even since she got back home. But what is weird anyway? She is weird enough to have married him.

“So, you got it?” Marie urges him.

Sheldon takes a deep breath and still hesitates before being able to say that. “Are you saying you- Amy is pregnant? With you?”

Marie casually shrugs. “You are saying that,” she says. Sheldon remained speechless.

“I am hungry,” she adds then, “You should feed me,” she declares standing up and reaching out to Sheldon.

“Feed?”

“You cut some watermelon for me and then let an airplane fly in my mouth. I may be a product of your mind, but I still need to be fed like any other toddler.”

Marie’s big eyes stare at him. She may be talking like a 40 year old, but those puppy eyes are those of a child. His child. Now everything he can think of is landing watermelon cubes into her mouth.

He stands and takes the hand of his little girl. Lord, she is so tiny next to him. He realizes she is looking up at him.

“I can’t wait to meet you, dad.”

*

It feels bittersweet waking up. He hates to be taken away so abruptly from his girl- um, that marvelous product of his subconscious. On the other hand, he has found himself wrapped in Amy’s arms, who breathes peacefully on his neck and holds him tight in her sleep.

Just as he closes his eyes back to enjoy his wife’s embrace, Marie’s words echo in his mind. What if she is right? All those things he noticed himself but didn’t pay attention to before…

Carefully, he turns around to face her and plants a kiss on her lips.  

“Mmm, I like this,” she mutters with a grin, “You should wake me up this way more often. How’s that?”

“I will. I- I had a dream,” Sheldon starts saying, even if he realizes that saying out loud what he is thinking is so scary.

“Marie appeared in my dreams. She was writing the fundamental equations of super-asymmetry with building blocks and made me think about the book we found in the library, and your morning sickness, and that whole bowl of ice-cream you had the other day…”

Amy is pretty sure her heart stopped for a short while. Did he find out…? Also, why Marie Curie is making her husband realize she is pregnant?

“Marie? You mean Marie Curie?” It’s all she can ask back.

“No. I mean, I saw her earlier with Einstein-” he interrupts as soon as Amy raises her eyebrows, “Anyway, it wasn’t her. It was our daughter.”

The very way her eyes widen… oh boy, Marie is right. “Amy… she implied a thing. She suggested that last month, when we made love-”

“She told you the truth.” She doesn’t even know how, but the words just flow out of her. “She- he, whatever… it’s here already.”

Good thing he is lying already or he would have been falling down like a sack of potatoes in no time. Even if a part of him knew it before, her explicit admission is a lot to deal with.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” He eventually manages to say.

She can’t help but feeling a little guilty because she hid her pregnancy for two whole days. She kisses him before apologising, “I- I am sorry. It’s just… you always say how sure you are we will have super-smart children, and today you reiterated the idea we will be able to follow their growth on a scientific point of view, and making experiments with them…”

“Maybe they will be super-smart,” she continues, “And the experiments are fun and I can’t wait to redo a couple of the ones we tried today. But before telling you… I needed to be sure you will want to hold our baby in your arms, or feed it, or change the diaper, and love it no matter what.”

Maybe he wasn’t ready for all of these just the same. Maybe he will never be. Or maybe she was wrong the whole time and he just can’t wait to sing Soft Kitty to the little thing currently living in her belly.

“I dreamed she asked me for watermelon and that she wanted me to play the little airplane to land it. Once she asked me- That’s all I wanted to do then.” Sheldon thinks he wants to caress her belly but eventually takes her hand and gently squeezes it, “She also took my hand and I think my heart almost exploded. I didn’t care about her intelligence or any trial I could even try with her. I only wanted to hold her and eat watermelon together.”

This is enough for Amy to dispel all her doubts. Oh, silly Amy. If marrying Sheldon ever taught her something, it is was how full of love her husband is. Today is no exception. He will be a great father, won’t he? Even if there will be a cognitive test from time to time.

He holds Amy closer and kisses her forehead. “Do you think there’s a chance for twins?” He asks hopefully.

Amy sighs. Here he is again…! Of course, she won’t admit to him she had the same thought.

“We won’t have twins because you need a control group,” Amy jokingly scolds him.

“I wasn’t think of that…Well, that’s a positive side effect,” he confirms, “But I mostly want to have many little versions of us… of you.”

“Very good save,” Amy concedes, and Sheldon smiles back proudly.

#The Big Bang Theory #shamy #shamy fanfic #fanfictions #prompts #lu writes

[thesupergamercorpus]

Image source: https://www.wired.com/2011/09/are-we-living-in-a-simulation/ — Are We Living in a Simulation?

Keywords and ideas:

Lack of free will → we cannot blame “bad people” to a certain extent;

Simulation hypothesis → filtering out “bad people” and keeping people with the longest half-life in terms of behaving nicely (effective half-life);

Effective half-life → the probability of the duration at which a design complies to certain criteria;

Ineffective half-life → the probability of the duration at which a design does not comply to certain criteria;

Change requires change → stop trying to do the same thing over and over again and expecting different results;

Historical constraint → you have to build upon or change the old “parts” slowly over time;

Satisficing → choosing “good enough” designs (rather than perfect ones);

Possible criteria → filtering out designs with the longest effective half-life or shortest ineffective half-life + X% return on investment.

Abstract

So I had this rather dystopian idea about a reason why simulating reality could be beneficial. If we don’t have free will, then trying to punish “bad people” certainly could help, but we can’t truly blame them either. Instead, what would be more effective is to have no “bad people” at all, or at least, what I will call having people with the longest “half-life in terms of behaving nicely.”

People as machines and historical constraint

You are sitting behind your computer and the machine is not behaving so nicely, it has continuous errors and crashes all the time. So what do you do? Well, one of my first principles is that change requires change, which sounds obvious until you start seeing many people trying to do the same thing over and over again and expecting different results:

“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” —Unknown

Maybe you need to update your computer, change hardware, or remove certain software. How about human criminals? Same principle applies, change requires change. You remove them out of their system, change their environment, daily structure, beliefs etc.

The problem with humans, as opposed to computers, is what is called “historical constraint”. It is a terminology from the book ‘The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene’ by Richard Dawkins, which says that you have to build upon that which already exists. An example is trying to build a better plane. If we apply historical constraint, then it means we can only change part by part slowly. The “opposite” of historical constraint would mean that we go back to the drawing board, change the design of the plane, destroying the old one, and build a new one without that historical constraint. This historical constraint is present in evolution, and I guess to a certain extent in the computer and plane example too, namely that even if we go back to the drawing board, the present is still influenced by the past.

So if you want to change “bad people” into “good people”, you have to deal with that historical constraint. But how can we get good designs without dealing too much with historical constraint?

Filtering out bad designs

I guess one way to not deal with historical constraint too much, is to simply filter out the bad or less efficient designs. It is like holding a contest who can build the best plane with X criteria, choosing the best one(s), and removing the ones not applying to the criteria. No longer do you have to worry that much about historical constraint.

Same thing with the simulation hypothesis and “holding a contest for the most efficient designs”. Instead of spending many and valuable resources on changing bad people into good people, where historical constraint also increases the amount of resources and time, you now just filter out the bad people and keep the good ones.

Now, in the plane example where I was talking about how the design needs to comply to certain criteria and everything “above” suffices too, something which is called satisficing, what could some of these criteria be?

Example of criteria for good designs: effective half-life and return on investment

Image source:  https://englishbbravenewworld.wordpress.com/2016/07/04/huxleys-predictions/ — Huxley’s predictions

The most important criteria I can think of, is to have designs with the longest “half-life” in terms of behaving nicely, which we will call “effective half-life” e.g. Mahatma Gandhi probably has a longer effective half-life than Hitler. This can be the other way around too, Hitler probably has a longer ineffective half-life than Gandhi.

So why “half-life” and not just “duration”? Because we are not sure how long something will remain as it is e.g. Gandhi can have an effective half-life of 1000 years, but that doesn’t rule out the probability that he will become “ineffective” the next day he is filtered out of the simulation.

Another criteria could be how much time and resources it requires to turn an ineffective design into an effective one, as well as the return on investment afterward.

So I guess the two most important criteria could be trying to filter out designs with either the longest effective half-life or the shortest ineffective half-life, together with trying to calculate the return on investment on its whole life span.

It was just an idea

You might be asking “Why do I think people would spend this many resources and time on “generating” good people, when there are many more efficient alternatives e.g. reprogramming them after they leave the simulation?” Well, this was just an idea of mine, and besides, maybe reprogramming them is seen as unethical or the people of the future (or a group) wants humans and not machines, but they neither want to deal with humans causing a rampage.

Lastly, this idea might as well be relatively efficient in terms of time and resources. Remember, within this century there will exist computers with calculation powers exceeding that of humanity combined for less than $1000, and we might as well speed up the simulation by a million times.

Afterword

So I guess the more biblical version saying “behave nicely and you will end up in Heaven” is, in accordance with this theory, somewhat true, although if we lack free will, there isn’t much we can do to behave nicely when causal reactions makes us do otherwise, and neither do I think the creators of a simulated reality would place “bad designs” in Hell either.

Lastly, I hope that you liked this idea of mine about a possible reason why “they” want to simulate reality at all.

#simulation #hypothesis #dystopian #surrealism #theory #simulate #simulating #dystopia #surreal #surrealistic #theories #hypotheses #autobiography #biography #2k19 #October #Saturday #free #will #free will #half #life #half life #effective #ineffective #efficient #inefficient #criteria #criterion

[kcwcommentary]

VLD1x04 – “Some Assembly Required”

1x04 – “Some Assembly Required”

This is probably my least favorite episode out of the first two seasons of the show, and I don’t like saying this, but it’s because of Allura. I really don’t like her arrogance and lack of empathy in this episode. I don’t like how the narrative tries to retcon it being her plan all along to unite the Paladins through their annoyance/anger against her. It’s not that that isn’t a viable plot – it’s certainly been done in other stories – it’s that this show makes it a whiplash heel-turn at the end. If the narrative of this episode had been openly setting that up so that we viewers knew she was doing that while the Paladins themselves didn’t, it would be totally different. The suddenness of her change from being overly demanding to pointing out how the team unified as a result of her being their common (temporary) antagonist is just too narratively dissonant.

This episode isn’t anywhere near all-bad though. It gives us Shiro doing pushups in his spare time.

Allura’s first rant is that they didn’t all get to the bridge fast enough for her fake red alert. Unless she has had a meeting with the team before hand to tell them that she needs for them to be ready to go on a moment’s notice, then it’s unrealistic and unfair to then complain that they weren’t ready and waiting on their own. Realistically, there are always degrees of alert status. And no one, for their own psychological health and well-being, can remain at red alert constantly. Now, if Allura had this expectation but was eventually called out on it by another/other character(s), or if the narrative resulted in her realizing on her own that this doesn’t work, then that would be a different story. As is, the narrative is written as if she were right when she’s not.

“Coran and I have been up for hours,” Allura declares. Congratulations. You’re not currently in an active combat situation, so there is this thing called duty shifts. Maybe this is a manifestation of unrealistic American society that perpetuates the idea that a person is supposed to be working constantly to the point of absolute exhaustion, but this is not sustainable. At the very least, unless it had been established among the crew that they needed to be on duty at a certain time, complaining that they were sleeping is just wrong.

Hunk tries to call Allura out and get her to recognize the significant change the Paladins have gone through from being students on Earth to being combat pilots in a universe-spanning war. Of course, Allura doesn’t even slightly try to empathize with them.

“Negative, Number 5. I have you ranked by height,” says Coran. I think this might be one of my favorite Coran jokes. I don’t remember us ever hearing him call any of the other Paladins by number though.

The sequence of the Paladins transitioning to their Lions makes the process look ridiculous. Allura was complaining about the amount of time it took the Paladins to get to the bridge, well then what about the amount of time it takes for them to get from there to their Lions? That route/journey through the ship to get to each respective Lion is way too long and is indicative of poor engineering/ship design. Realistically, fighter pilots would be on duty near their craft, not on the bridge. And of course, this show has to make another, this time extended in duration, fat joke about Hunk.

Forming Voltron is put in terms of ill-defined feeling-like-a-team, and not a mechanical process. If that is indeed how Alfor designed and built these ships, then that is bad design. I get it, the show wants to be about teamwork and the Lions forming Voltron works as a symbol that the characters are functioning as a team. It might be written in poetics, but only being able to access higher functions of a computer system/weapon when you have well-running psychology is not realistic.

I like the call-back to “I’m a leg!” from the previous episode.

“Shiro’s the head!” Keith says aggressively. “All the time?” Hunk responds. It hurts to hear Keith being so supportive of Shiro and his position of leader, knowing that this show unceremoniously rips Shiro from that position and tosses him aside.

“Feel the bonds with your Lions. Now channel your energy into forming Voltron.” This non-defined “energy” is definitely in my list of disliked tropes in fiction. It is cheap writing wrapped in pretentiousness as if it’s profound.

Allura’s callous decision to attack the Lions without prepping them for such an assignment is bad leadership. “…and inspiring you! I believe in you, Paladins. Let fear be your guide,” she says. This is ridiculous. This isn’t how you get people to trust in you and your leadership. She’s blatantly proclaiming, all with a smile on her face and a laugh in her voice, that she wants them to feel afraid for their lives. That is a dangerously dissonant perspective for her to have. Again, if this episode was about her learning to not do these kinds of things, I could be okay with this, but the episode treats her behavior as if it’s right.

Meanwhile, Zarkon is a tyrant. Haggar is creepy. They’re cartoon villains.

The Paladins are taking a break, and Allura gets annoyed. Actual training requires breaks, but Allura acts like that’s an absurd idea. Unfortunately, the show tries to assert the idea that no one is allowed breaks through Shiro in this scene too. Ugh!

Second reference to Shiro as “the Champion.” I like that the show uses several episodes to build up to the reveal that Shiro had to fight gladiatorially to survive.

On to the training deck. First up, the protect your teammates from drone attacks. Given that Hunk is surprised that his suit can create a shield, clearly the team was not prepped for this exercise before-hand. This is not how training actually works (it’s almost like it’s become an unintentional theme with this episode). Then, the invisible maze. The maze sets up its being used in later episodes by Pidge as a defensive maneuver against attacking Galra sentries and to provide a cloaking system for the Green Lion (why she never installed a similar cloaking system on all of their Lions is baffling). I think there could have been so much more to the maze scene; it had the elements needed to actually put some character development in the episode.

Back in the Lions, nosedive. “This is an expert-level drill that you really shouldn’t attempt until you’ve been flying for years,” Coran says. If that truly is so, then, again, this is not how training works. Also, if Coran can remotely black out a Paladin’s helmet so they can’t see, then that system can be hacked; it’s a point of vulnerability for them if some outside influence can make them suddenly unable to see.

The animation sequence of Shiro and the Black Lion’s eyes and faces aligning was a really nice visual way of representing the psychic connection possible between a Lion and pilot.

Then we have the clear-your-mind scene that gives us holographic displays of what each Paladin is thinking about. This scene does some characterization work. Keith thinks most about his small home in the middle of nowhere back on Earth. Lance thinks about his family. Hunk thinks about food, which honestly is not characterization work but borders again on a fat joke. Pidge’s image of her and her brother, which at this point because of the dialog regarding that photo between Hunk and Pidge in the first episode we’re supposed to interpret as Pidge and a girlfriend, juxtaposed to Coran’s narration about not keeping secrets is sign that we’re supposed to realize what we think we know about that image isn’t correct. And Shiro is focused on the Galaxy Garrison and its space missions; his deep desire to be an explorer is so endearing! If this visualization training has been available this entire time, then this is precisely where the team’s training to form Voltron should have begun, and they shouldn’t have progressed to actually attempting to actively form Voltron until they were successful at this exercise. Working on this exercise first would have been realistic training.

“I’m just… I’m just tired, okay?” Pidge says (with really good voice acting!). And Shiro (unlike in the previous break scene) recognizes the appropriate need for a break. I so love the animation of Shiro sitting cross-legged on the floor with this look of adorable curiosity on his face about the beverage that Coran hands him. Even Coran in this scene recognizes the need for a break. But…

In walks ridiculous Allura who yells at them. That Allura was a dictator in that alternate reality in 3x04 “A Hole in the Sky” is entirely plausible given how she behaves here. Juxtaposed with Zarkon in this episode, she and he have a lot in common. If Allura had been like this for the whole show, I would not have been able to stand her.

Now to fighting the Gladiator. Shiro’s PTSD results in his going up against the Gladiator triggering traumatic memories of him fighting for his life against Galra sentries, distracting him and letting the Gladiator nearly get him. Keith comes to his defense (I love their friendship!). It’s nice that at least someone has enough interpersonal insight to be able to see that something happened to Shiro. But then Allura again. Ugh! “That combat simulator was set for a level fit for an Altean child,” she says. Several things, one, she failed to notice Shiro’s psychological distress, two, I don’t see her demonstrating she’s capable of hand-to-hand combat and thus in any way credible to critique others’ fighting skills, three, she’s being beyond arrogant here. These Paladins are humans, not Alteans, so even if that combat was what Altean children do then it still has nothing to do with what humans are capable of. A good leader would easily recognize this. And again, if this episode was about showing Allura having to grow as a leader through recognizing the capabilities and limits of this team and adjusting herself to better work with that, then the episode could have been good. But the episode never calls her out as wrong on any of this. As much as she complains that the Paladins aren’t working as a team, she herself never demonstrates herself as capable of being a team-player.

We get our first look at a Robeast in this episode. It’s just a bit, and it’s nice seeing the show being willing to pace itself with action from the antagonists given how out-of-control the show’s pacing is in the last two or three seasons of the show.

And finally, the food fight scene. “Do Earthlings ever stop complaining?” Allura asks. I don’t know about Earthlings, but Allura certainly doesn’t ever stop complaining. Shiro starts the process of calling her out on it, but unfortunately the narrative is written to make Allura right. Again, if this had been written so that we knew she was trying to get them to bond through their anger at her, then it would work better. Instead, the reveal is sudden and only here at the end, written almost more to excuse her behavior than to explain it. As is, it’s a failure of narrative structure and a disservice to Allura’s character.

#voltron legendary defender #voltron #vld #voltron criticism #vld criticism #voltron critical #vld critical #vld season 1 #vld 1x04 #commentary

[mercurious-minds-blog]

Binaural Beats Therapy for Healing and Meditation

Have you ever wondered what the factual, proven advantages of binaural beats are and how they may help in your life? Binaural beats are sounds that stimulate the brain in specific ways. There are, in reality, a huge amount of proven advantages, of binaural beat technologies, ranging from everything from increased self-regard, better sleep, deeper relaxation, higher IQ and expanded creativity. Regrettably, there's also lots of conflicting data and marketing spin, which may make it hard to determine what’s true or not.

What Are Binaural Beats?

Binaural beats are auditory brainstem responses, which originate in the superior olivary nucleus of each hemisphere. They result from the interaction of 2 different auditory impulses below 1000 Hz, originating in opposite ears, and which differ in frequency between 1 and 30 Hz. For instance, if a pure tone of 400 Hz is presented to the right ear and a pure tone of 410 Hz is presented at the same time to the left ear, an amplitude modulated standing wave of 10 Hz (the difference between the two tones) is experienced as the two wave forms mesh in and out of phase within the superior olivary nuclei. This difference in tones is not heard in the ordinary sense of the word (the human range of hearing is from 20-20,000 Hz), but is perceived by the brain and may be used to entrain specific neural rhythms through the frequency-following response (FFR)--the tendency for cortical potentials to entrain, or resonate, at the frequency of an external stimulus. Thus, it's possible to use a particular binaural beat frequency, coupled with positive affirmations or meditation, as a consciousness management technique to entrain a particular cortical rhythm.

How Binaural Beats Work

Binaural beats have created much interest to those in the neurophysiological world where there is always an ongoing research investigating the sense of hearing. Binaural beats reportedly influence the brain in very subtle ways to reduce anxiety and provide many other health benefits as well. As previously noted, binaural beats influence the brain using the difference between 2 frequencies to produce the desired effects. Upon hearing binaural beats the brain processes them through both spatial perception and auditory recognition and activates the various corresponding points in the brain, relating them to different mental and bodily functions. Below are a few examples of what one can expect to gain from the different binaural beat waves: Gamma waves – range frequency is at 40Hz and higher. Gamma brainwave states are the most rapid in frequency.  They have long been considered the brainwave able to link and process information from all parts of the brain. It is the frequency that carries the ability to process large amounts of information in relatively small amounts of time. When tuned to gamma waves, the brain is expected to be able simulate higher mental activity, which includes better perception, better problem solving features, better control of fear and consciousness. Beta waves – range frequency is between 13 – 39 Hz.  Beta is the most common brain wave pattern and is produced when we are wide awake, alert, active and engaged in mental activity. They usually involve the more rational, calculating left hemisphere of our brain and is required to function properly in your everyday life. Alpha waves – are between 7 – 13 Hz. This state is generated when thoughts are not really concentrated and the mind wanders freely. The brain experiences alpha brainwaves when we are gently busy with routine tasks like gardening, showering, doing light housework, or are in a relaxed state such as meditating or daydreaming. Alpha waves are considered to be the bridge between the conscious and subconscious mind. Theta waves – are around 4 – 7 Hz which is ideal for deep meditative and relaxed states. It is common for people to feel as if they are in a trance, where the mind feels as though it may have gone to sleep although it is conscious of what is happening around it. Theta waves induce a capacity for prolonged daydreaming, visualization, and creativity where a loss of time may be experienced. In this state, the mind is very relaxed and is highly receptive to direct suggestion under hypnosis. As with the alpha state, in theta, our brain hemispheres are synchronized and we experience whole brain functioning. Delta waves – have the slowest wave frequency at 0.5 - 4 Hz to creates a deep dreamless sleep state and loss of body awareness. These waves are very beneficial for the body which restores and heals itself in this state. The delta state releases hormones such as melatonin, HGH, and DHEA, which are considered to be anti-aging hormones. Delta is the state of deepest relaxation, healing, spiritual connection and connection with the subconscious mind.

What Happens In The Body

Researchers have come to the conclusion that DNA is susceptible to damage but thus far little is known how to control further damage. Recently, CRISPR technologies have encouraged findings for the possibility of repairing said DNA corruption, but concrete results are still a ways off. Diseases like cancer, AIDS, and many more life threatening conditions are thought to be caused by this negative condition in the DNA make up. Thus the race is on, to find a possible solution. However, for some this solution may possibly be found in the use of binaural beats. There is evidence that the body naturally tries to correct the faulty DNA condition as it detects it, however outside help can be advantageous. Though not conclusive there are very promising studies that show DNA make up can be repaired through the introduction of the binaural beats. The binaural beats are applied in delta frequencies and have been documented as being the contributing factor in the repair of DNA. Even better is the fact that there are no intrusive procedures required and the whole process of being exposed to binaural beat only takes thirty minutes at a time.

Binaural Beats for Sleep

For most people today, getting a good night’s sleep is indeed a luxury. Reasons like stress, children, and workloads that require a lot from the mind and body are some of the many reasons an individual isn’t able to gain the deep sleep needed to rejuvenate completely. Binaural beats have been known to contribute positively to achieving deeper levels of sleep. Not being able to get deep enough sleep can be very damaging both mentally and physically, as the optimum functioning of the human body depends a lot on the amount of rest it receives for rejuvenation purposes. It can drastically lower the strength of the immune system, brain function,  and may even contribute to weight problems, indirectly caused by the anxiety generated from lack of sleep. Other side effects will eventually manifest in the individual’s daily life including increased blood pressure levels, mood swings and a constant state of lethargy. By using the binaural beats as a technique to induce sleep, the delta waves will work effectively to guide the brain directly into the deep sleep phase, thus resulting in a long and restful sleep pattern. This in turn causes the body to regain and rejuvenate all functions to ensure a more energized individual.

Binaural Beats and Emotional Well-Being

Among the most noticeable advantages of binaural tones is the impact on your sense of self and well-being. Clinical studies have found that binaural beats help to diminish mild depression and anxiety, and increase alertness and focus as well. Users report feeling positive and happy after each 20-30 minute session, with increased self-regard and motivation. When you utilize binaural beats, you'll likely experience powerful, positive emotions and feelings including excitement, peace, happiness, euphoria & delight. These happen without any true effort on your part, and tend to alternate with each session. The effects are really similar to those reported by meditators. You'll definitely feel better after every session. Many users also report that others (strangers, friends and colleagues) tend to respond in a friendlier way after utilizing binaural tones. If you trust that "you attract into your life what you put out," then you'll be pleased to know that you'll definitely be sending better vibes after every session. Individuals will just "know" that you're in a positive, resourceful mood, and will respond accordingly.

Binaural Beats’ Physical Effects

Many scientific and clinical trials have been carried out on the advantages of binaural tones on the body. These studies provide some of the most powerful proof that brainwave entrainment (BWE) truly works. For starters, when you utilize binaural beats or meditation machines your endorphin release goes up, as does the production of serotonin. These are the "happy hormones" that your body releases when you work out at the gym, have fun with friends, have sex, or fall in love. Needless to say, this feels quite nice! Binaural beats also intensify your body’s catecholamine production, a hormone powerfully associated with increased memory. Another advantage of binaural tones on the body is an increase in DHEA. Scientists say that DHEA is utilized as a source ingredient for virtually every hormone the body needs, and is reported to reduce the impact of disease and aging. In addition, a high level of DHEA is likely to result in a vibrant and healthy body, and a potent immune system. One study has shown that utilizing binaural beats increases your DHEA production levels by an average of 43%. Finally, utilizing the same control group, users of binaural beats for just four days saw an average 98% increase in melatonin production. Melatonin is the chemical your body makes when you go into a deep, natural sleep. As such, one of the key benefits of binaural tones is that you'll sleep much better and feel more rested after utilizing them.

Binaural Beats’ Effect on Intelligence

Studies have been executed on the effects of binaural tones on intelligence and the brain. Several different trials have demonstrated that the advantages of binaural tones include expanded memory, increases in IQ, bettered ability to learn and recall, expanded levels of creativity, and increased brainwave synchronization. I'm not going to suggest that binaural beats turn you into a genius overnight, but with practice and an open mind, I'd be surprised if you didn't think that "more was staying in" that old brain of yours. I've definitely experienced breakthroughs in that regard. For instance, when I read a book on a fresh topic I feel I retain *much* more of the data, quicker.

Health and Illnesses

BWE technology is proven to help with headache and migraine pain, may help women with symptoms of PMS, has been demonstrated to help with drug and alcohol addictions, and has helped individuals with learning difficulties resulting from ADHD and dyslexia.

Healing Addictions With Binaural Beats

There are many types of addictions today and trying to beat them successfully and permanently can be an uphill battle for most. In most brains, certain characteristics are confined to specific areas of activity. This includes self-defeating mental and emotional states. When this manifests itself as a negative addiction, using binaural beats to reverse this brain activity can be extremely helpful. The process uses binaural beats to create a scenario where the brain’s electrical activity becomes widespread throughout the brain and creates new neural pathways which stimulate new positive thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. By using the binaural method, coupled with positive affirmations, the individual is better able to fight against addiction simply because this method does not require much effort or extensive regiments in order to achieve some percentage of success. Plus, each time a session is experienced the mental reaffirmation is strengthened.

Using Binaural Beats to Enter a Deep Meditation State

Alpha wave patterns help to relax the individual’s state of mind, which is followed by the drowsy feeling of theta while still awake and conscious. Since the theta wave pattern is very receptive it can be used to effectively to induce self hypnosis, reprogramming the sub conscious and deep relaxation. The delta wave is associated with deep slow activity found in deep sleep. This state of deep sleep can be switched to a deep meditative state. Binaural beats stabilize and rejuvenate the body and mind so that with more frequent practice, it becomes easier to reach the deep meditative state quicker.

Effort and Skill

The final advantages of binaural beats I'll review are not related to physical or mental advantages, but have more to do with the lack of effort or skill needed to acquire results. All you have to do is put some headphones in, sit back and relax. BWE works whether you believe it or not, as the auditory waves resonate directly with your brain waves, but an open and receptive mind will go a long way. You don't need to consciously do anything. Because you can purchase binaural tones as inexpensive MP3 downloads now, you can load them on to your iPod or phone and listen to them anyplace - commuting, on a plane, on your lunch break; whenever you get twenty minutes free. (Just don't utilize them when flying planes, driving or operating heavy machinery!) Binaural tones - truly the lazy individuals’ way to inner peace!

What You Must Know- How to Use Binaural Beats Properly and What Precautions to Take

There are several things that one needs to take note of before trying the binaural beats methods. Understanding the basis of this is important as it will have a profound impact on the choices made. Generally, the brain is in the beta wavelength except when sleeping. Binaural beat manipulations help to change the beta brainwave to other states. This is done through the brainwave entrainment process. All of the different brainwaves coexist, but at any one time only one brainwave dominates and this in turn dictates the level of consciousness and state of mind of the individual. Ideally, everyone should have somewhat balanced brainwave patterns, as this ensures the wholesome alert, yet relaxed state. Sometimes an individual can become over indulgent in wanting to maintain a certain brainwave mind set. This can be dangerous and it may end up causing negative side effects instead of providing the balanced mind set it should be. Conditions like ADD may in fact become worse if beta or gamma waves are used too extensively. Indulging in alpha binaural practices too much can cause a person to daydream and become lackadaisical. While this is a positive outlet from reality, the danger lies in the individual’s inability to focus and can indirectly lead to depression. I hope I've persuaded you to give brainwave entrainment technology a try. As I'm sure you are able to tell, I'm incredibly passionate about the advantages of binaural tones and beats. I bet you'll love them too. Please don't panic if you don't experience all of these amazing results on your first attempt. It may take a little while for your brain to relax and gain all the advantages. Like any new skill, there's a certain amount of training involved - however I'm certain you'll be experiencing a lot of benefits within a few sessions. Purchase the most complete binaural beats set you will find anywhere This Audio Contains… 23 Binaural Beat MP3s for Self Growth, Relaxation, Better Energy Flow and Brain Wave ControlAll 5 Brainwave Frequencies: Gamma, Beta, Alpha, Theta, & DeltaOver 3 Hours of Audio for You to Enjoy Read the full article

#BinauralBeats #meditation #soundtherapy

[ceechalla]

The Sims 4

At the time of writing this, a Sims 4 announcement will be revealed later on. Most, if not all Simmers, are hoping it will be the announcement of The Sims 4 Seasons Expansion Pack.

I've been a simmer from the birth of The Sims. I was there, held it in my arms & have grown up along side it, celebrating each birthday aka iteration of the franchise. I feel The Sims 4 has aged up badly from The Sims 3 due to poor parenting. (Remember when that was a thing?)

The Sims 4 is like a fine looking human with little to offer other than eye candy. Within the 1st week of launch, I felt the game wasn't finished. Fast forward to now & I still feel the same. Stuff Packs, Game Packs & Expansion Packs just momentarily distract from the fact that the game is weak from the core.

A.I.

I made a post about the whole 'Smarter Sims' dream we were sold from the start and how, in reality, the A.I. is a nightmare. Sims prioritise the wrong Needs, always have to multi-task and rarely make logical decisions. This is why I play with autonomy off. I asked if Simmers play with it on or off & 98% plays with it on. I take my hat off to you & your patience. I tried earlier & was playing with the Kim-Lewis household. I got Alice a job & you know what she did when she got home? Nothing. She stood outside the house like a blade of grass, smiling cheerfully whilst her Needs depleted. I go into more detail about the A.I. in my 'Smarter Sims' post/rant.

Interactions

Rinse and repeat. Slap on a different name, use the same animations and call it a day. For example, give a Sim the Unflirty trait. Have that Sim perform a Romantic interaction. See the names given to those interactions? They're called lies. Your Sim Angry huh? Have it go take an Angry poop. Looks no different to any other poop does it? What did it do for your Sim? What did it do for your gameplay? Nothing. One of my pet peeves is 'idle chat'. It basically sums up The Sims 4. Visually pleasing but has no real meaning. Have Sim 1, tell Sim 2 how it's mum looks like a Llama & see how Sim 2 reacts. During the interaction they may react negatively, but in comes 'idle chat' and they smiling and bobbing their heads as if the previous interaction never happened.

Interactions between Sims is lacking in general. Remember when Sims could play games like Red Hands? Children Sims could play tag? Or how Sims would spoon during sleepy time? Ah, the good ol' days.

Features

Whims. Sims wanting to own a 1x1 pool. That isn't a pool boy, that's a tile! When the Vampire Gamepack was released, every Sim and their culled family tree wanted to research about them. The Whim system is whack. This bothers me alot because my favourite save ever with this franchise was my Sims 3 Wishacy Challenge save. That challenge changed the way I played the game. I played with Free Will on, wasn't allowed to micromanage my Sim unless it was to complete a promised Wish. My Sims had personality because traits actually meant something in the game and they were smarter. It was like I was playing through a story my Sim created through their Wishes, not through mine. I can't do that now. Personally I think TS2 Wants and Fears system is the best. We needs it back.

An attraction system. Why we don't have this, only Morgan Freeman knows. I like the Turn On and Turn Off system TS2 had. Throw in Zodiac signs so that compatible ones gain relationship faster and not so compatible ones struggle.

I should have known the game wasn’t gonna be great when they had to PATCH IN FAMILY TREES FOR A LIFE SIMULATION GAME! They are also the worst in the franchise. Have you checked the Achievements tab? Have a 26 generation legacy etc. How long before your founder gets culled? 

In-laws? what’s that?!

City Living has assignments wanting you to get to know your co-workers but we have no co-worker tab in the relationship panel. 

Not only that, but toddlers and pools weren’t available from the start. Didn’t get a games console item till how many years after release? Not even a remote car or plane. No train set or ball to play catch. Still we have no Bunk beds, but icons for them are in the game. Should have come with the Base Game, should be patched in, hell, could have featured in Kids Bedroom Stuff or Parenthood! Same goes for alarms. What is the point in the smoke alarm in this game?

Traits

What's the point. Sims are run by the Emotion System. Traits mostly only offer different buffs that don't really do anything anyway.

You know what it is? This game is just too predictable. I think The Story Progression mod I used in The Sims 3 has spoiled me. Things seem so static in The Sims 4 unlessed forced. That's okay if you like, but I'd like choice. Like we did in The Sims 3 with Free Will. I'd like a low level of autonomy which has my Sims only perform interactions to fill needs that give off a negative moodlet or has a red bar.

I know I've spent the majority of this rant complaining, but The Sims 4 does have some play value, hence why I make posts.

It's nice to look at...

Oh, Build mode CAS and The Gallery are awesome!

Thanks for reading and happy simming!

#the sims 4 #ts4 #rant

[voltronreaderinserts]

Monster!AU Intro

So this is the beginning of your journey into the Monster!AU! *spoopy music playing on the organ* It’s gonna be great I promise. There’s plot!! OoOOOOo PLot! And everything is standalone (you can just read your favorites!) and also interconnected (meaning if you choose to, you can read the whole story!). You can pick your own fate, or find your way home to your original reality!~ So please just enjoy my silly AU, and have fun!~

The order is STILL going to be a secret, but I will give you this: Lance is first~

P.S: I reserve the right to make up whatever situation I want, so if I say there’s another trans-reality comet, then goddammit there’s another trans-reality comet, I need it for plot.

-- Ryan

Introduction || Lance || ??? || ??? || ??? || ??? || ??? || ??? || ??? || ??? ||

It’s only fragments that you can recall.

Where did you come from? There’s a lot of light. It’s warm, and the air feels fresh and inviting. You can still feel the soft tufts of grass under your bare feet, and remember as you walked among fields of flowers. But... were you ever there, to begin with? It all feels foreign, yet so familiar.

Why are you here? Since your arrival, you’d put your heart and dedicated your soul to put an end to Zarkon’s abhorrent reign. You assure yourself it’s to help the cause and fight for freedom of the universe, and though it feels right, there’s a hole in your chest, as if you feel incomplete. Like there’s something missing to the whole picture.

Who are you? All you had to your arrival were the clothes on your back and a name -- [y/n]. The Paladins were just as baffled as you were, and a bit suspicious as you’d suddenly appeared in the Castle from literally out of nowhere.

The conclusion was that you had both been traveling the same course at light speed and you’d somehow collided, leaving that the reason for your sudden materialization. Since there was no proof of forced entry or hypothesized collision, and your state of amnesia and lack of, well, anything, proved you were harmless enough.

Days had passed, trying to get you to spark a memory, but you’d either run into a metaphorical wall, or there was a splitting headache that prevented you from thinking any further. It was a challenge, but you proved yourself again and again that you were tougher, and more trustworthy, than they had previously believed.

They had agreed to let you join Team Voltron, after weeks of begging and kissing up to them through chores and tasks (that weren’t required of you, of course, but how else were you to win favor?), especially after they saw you handle the training simulations.

By yourself.

Inexplicably, and very naturally, you had charged through each level of the training simulation, and come out without a scratch.

“Where’d you learn to fight like that?” Shiro asked, a bit hopeful that perhaps you’d regained a part of your memory.

“I’m.. Not sure.” You look at Shiro with a bit downhearted, keeping a small smile on your face. “It felt as though my body moved on its own.”

After that day, trust came easier, and you found yourself fitting in nicely with the Voltron crew.

"[y/n], over on your left! You have a few incoming fighters, I’ll take care of the ones over here!” Pidge yells through the comms over at you, though you knew very well that you had some fighters coming at you. You dodge a few with ease, before steadying the pod enough to shoot at them.

“Be careful of the comet, [y/n]! We don’t know how stable it is, or what it’ll do if it gets hit.” Shiro calls, his voice is a bit staticky in the comms, and you nod, although you know he can’t see. “Got it. Don’t hit the comet.” You answer him and charge into the fighters once more.

Everyone knew there was a chance that Zarkon had found the comet as well, but no one thought he’d be this prepared for an attack. It was easy enough to take care of the first wave, but your pod was a bit shaken and probably wouldn’t be able to take more.

“How’s the mining, Hunk? Do you have the comet secure yet??” You look over your shoulder to see the Yellow Lion securing the line around the comet, preparing it to haul onto the ship.

“It’s ready, Coran, you can pull it!” And, of course, Zarkon would go to send more fighters in pursuit of the comet. You flip a few switches on the pod, putting most power to blasters, and focused on the second wave of fighters that came at you. 

Hunk took out a good deal of them, and the other Lions follow suit. You took care of the few that broke through their defense. You had a solid formation, and it looked as though you would succeed in the mission when a stray blast from a fighter’s weapon took out your pod’s energy.

“Guys? Shiro? Coran? I can’t hear anyone.” Your voice comes through broken on the others’ comm links, but your setup was shot. You could direct your blasters, and your pod had moved to backup energy, but you had no way to protect yourself.

“I trust you. I know you can beat them!” You watch as the Lions of Voltron continuously take out the fighters, and you look behind you to see the comet has already begun moving. To you, victory had already been achieved.

That is, of course, until a fighter breaks away and deliberately targets you.

No. Not you. The comet. 

You hastily try to get your pod to move, to work, but it won’t do more than simply redirect your blasters, and glow the emergency red. 

“Come ON!! I have to protect this comet!” You thrust the ignition in one forceful push, and the pod roars back to life. Without questioning it, you take the opportunity to aim at the fighter, but it was too late.

It shoots, bypassing your pod, but hitting the comet. A large surge of energy erupts, and you can feel it; the pressure from the comet. 

“[y/n], NO!” Everyone shouts in unison, already knowing what the exposure to a trans-reality comet would do to an unprotected person.

A flash of light surrounds you and you can feel yourself slipping away. You can feel the atmosphere change around you. Petrified, your voice can’t even muster a scream, and your eyes can’t see past the white that envelops you. Suddenly, you’re falling and where you land is very much not where you were in space, nor any of the neighboring planets.

#Lance x reader #Keith x reader #Shiro x reader #Pidge x reader #Hunk x reader #Matt Holt x reader #Allura x reader #Coran x reader #Lotor x reader #Prince Lotor x reader #Lance #Hunk #Pidge #Coran #Allura #Shiro #Keith #Matt Holt #Monster!AU

[easyfoodnetwork]

Food-Adjacent TV to Stream This Weekend, According to Eater Staff

Actor Sandra Oh, wearing a black chef beanie and a white t-shirt, talks on an iPhone outside a restaurant kitchen. | BBC America

“Killing Eve,” reality TV favorites, classic sitcoms, and more

We at Eater spend a lot of time thinking about food, so when it appears on our TV screen, we take special interest. If you’re looking to stream some non-food TV that happens to be — at least tangentially — about food this weekend, here’s what we recommend.

Terrace House: Tokyo, Episode 11 (available to stream on Netflix)

Terrace House, the Japanese version of The Real World, has had a long history of food-related misdemeanors and crimes, but the most recent one entails broccoli, pasta water, and egg. Ruka, one of the housemates of the Tokyo house, is a complete enigma of a human being and maybe the most naive person to ever grace Terrace House (or the world?). In an attempt to cook broccoli pasta carbonara, he cracks an egg into the pasta water with the pasta, then adds broccoli. It seems he read the ingredient list, skipped the instructions, and simply winged it. Nothing matters, you know?!

In Netflix’s latest batch of episodes (Netflix US runs a couple of months behind Japan), Ruka attempts broccoli pasta carbonara again. I gasped when I saw he was making pasta FROM SCRATCH and squealed when he presented something that not only looked edible, but delicious! His housemates were (understandably) pleasantly shocked and I got very emotional. It’s rare when you see such dramatic growth. I imagine this is what parents feel when they see their children walk for the first time. — Pelin Keskin, Eater associate producer

Community (available to stream on Hulu and Netflix)

In 2009, when Community first aired, I was actually taking classes at a community college. Yet, somehow I’ve made it this long without watching this series created by Dan Harmon and featuring some of the current era’s most memorable actors (See: Donald Glover, Alison Brie, Gillian Jacobs, and Ken Jeong). The first season hinges on narcissistic student Jeff Winger (Joel McHale) starting classes at a Greendale Community College, where he’s pursuing his bachelor’s degree in an attempt to reclaim his suspended law license. Winger joins a Spanish 101 study group (remember when people still gathered in groups?) to incessantly hit on Britta Perry (played by Jacobs). But as the show evolves, episodes become more unhinged, playing into pop culture tropes observed by TV and movie obsessed student Abed Nadir (Danny Pudi). After a while, it becomes easier to view this show as sort of a live-action version of Harmon’s later work Rick and Morty, but with a slightly less noxious fandom attached. This is particularly encapsulated in episodes like Season 2’s “Epidemiology,” in which the whole student body is transformed into zombies after eating expired military rations. Season 2 also features an excellent example of weird TV sponcon in “Basic Rocket Science,” where the study group gets trapped inside a Kentucky Fried Chicken-branded space flight simulator. — Brenna Houck, Eater.com reporter and Eater Detroit editor

Killing Eve (Season 3, Episode 1, available to stream on BBC America)

Killing Eve, a BBC show that for two seasons has been about feminism, fucking, and fighting, has added a fourth “f” to its roster: food. When we reunite with the show’s titular “Eve” (Sandra Oh), we watch her shopping the aisles of an Asian grocery, grabbing ramen cups and snacks from shelves that seem preposterously well-stocked to my pandemic-warped eyes. The multitudes the store holds are intoxicating. We then discover that since we last saw her — left for dead by Villanelle (Jodie Comer), an assassin with whom she is/was mutually obsessed — Eve’s fled her job at MI5 for a gig as a dumpling chef at an Asian restaurant, a perfect place, perhaps, for an Asian American woman to make herself invisible in a city like London. As audience members, we get to watch her deftly pinch pot sticker after pot sticker as she eavesdrops on her relationship-impaired colleagues (once a spy, always a spy, perhaps), a rote activity that probably has a lot more in common with tradecraft than most espionage-based thrillers would have us believe. It’s a nice job for a perfectionist like Eve, one that’ll do well enough until (one assumes) Villanelle returns to her life and again throws it into chaos. — Eve Batey, senior editor, Eater SF

Difficult People (Season 1, Episode 5, available on Hulu)

Much of this criminally short-lived sitcom starring comedians Billy Eichner (Billy on the Street) and Julie Klausner takes place in a restaurant where a struggling-artist version of Billy works to pay the bills. But this episode stands out for its art-imitating-life plot: Julie, who has “the palate of a seven-year-old” stops by Billy’s place of employment to eat, but finds the menu too fancy for her liking (“everything on [the] menu has some kind of chutney or jus on it,” Julie complains).

So, when Billy’s boss leaves town for a few days, the duo convert the restaurant into a pop-up named the Children’s Menu, serving items that would belong on a kids’ menu someplace like Applebee’s. The pair set about marking up chicken tenders and fish sticks and peddling it to food blogs. And because Difficult People is set in New York, home to many people with poor taste but lots of money, crowds lap it up. It’s a fun skewering of a side of the food world that values creatively bankrupt novelty above all else. Looking at you, “cereal bars” and Museum of Ice Cream. — Tim Forster, editor, Eater Montreal

Lodge 49 (available to purchase on Amazon Prime)

I‘m not surprised Lodge 49 was cancelled after two seasons on AMC last fall; I’m delighted it aired at all. This shaggy dog show stars Wyatt Russell (the waggish spawn of Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell) as Dud, an adrift surfer in recession-hit Long Beach, who finds connection through a fraternal lodge along the lines of the Freemasons. Meanwhile his sister Liz (Sonya Cassidy) works at a shitty Hooters knockoff called Shamroxx, run by a ghoulish regional corporate conglomerate, Omni Capital. These days, I’m reminded of Liz’s Season 2 story arc: She’s made manager of Omni’s replacement for Shamroxx, a stupid new steakhouse concept called Higher Steaks. When the restaurant struggles, the way Liz sticks up for her colleagues, who are some of the show’s best minor characters, is an inspiring rebuke of winner-takes-all capitalism — no surprise, as the whole show is basically a socialist document. Ironically it’s not streaming for free, but Lodge 49 is special and well worth buying to watch. — Caleb Pershan, Eater.com reporter

Frasier, Season 1, Episode 3 (available to stream on Hulu)

I know I’m incredibly late getting into Fraiser (most of my coworkers are obsessed with it), but it’s been about a week now and I’m already halfway through the second season. I can’t get enough of it. While Frasier’s advice to his listeners can be a little “meh,” it’s absolutely delightful to watch the main characters give each other therapy through their conversations. And watching each episode unfold feels like much needed therapy right now.

I could go on and on about all the episodes I love, but “Dinner at Eight” is my absolute favorite. Frasier (Kelsey Grammer) and his brother Niles (David Hyde Pierce) decide to take their father Martin (John Mahoney) out to dinner as a way to spend more quality time with him. When the restaurant loses their reservation, they decide to visit a steakhouse at Martin’s suggestion. His pitch: “You can get a steak this thick for $8.95.”

The Timber Mill is nothing like the trendy, pretentious restaurants Frasier and Niles frequent and the duration of the entire meal is a culinary culture clash. For example, when the beef trolley arrives and everyone at the table has to pick their cut of steak, Frasier asks, “How much extra would I have to pay to get one from the refrigerator?”

It’s absolutely heartbreaking to watch Martin get more and more aggravated as Frasier and Niles make ridiculously elaborate orders (a petite filet mignon “very lean, not so lean that it lacks flavor but not so fat that it leaves drippings on the plate”), poke fun at the restaurant, and give the servers a hard time. That’s why it’s so satisfying to watch Martin skewer Frasier and Niles for their snobbery, leaving them to eat the rest of their dinner alone under the scornful eyes of the Timber Mill’s servers as “Tossed Salads and Scrambled Eggs” plays in the background. — Esra Erol, senior social media manager, Eater

Real Housewives of New York, Season 8, Episodes 6 & 7

In times of uncertainty, we seek comfort in consistency: The sun will rise in the east, the tides will ebb and flow, and rich women will scream at each other for our enjoyment on Bravo. Recently, I’ve been rewatching old episodes of Real Housewives of New York and am currently in the midst of its landmark eighth season (“Please don’t let it be about Tom.” “It’s about Tom”). Practically every episode is a hit, but “Tipsying Point” and “Air Your Dirty Laundry” conveniently double as a lesson in the booze business. When jack of all trades/master of none Sonja Morgan announces that she’s releasing a signature prosecco called Tipsy Girl, she faces the wrath of Bethenny Frankel, founder of the Skinny Girl brand. As even the most casual Housewives watcher will tell you, Bethenny is famously protective of her business and turns vicious at any perceived attack on it. “I thought the alcohol was a great idea. I really looked up to what you did and I thought it would be a great way for me to get ahead,” Sonja blubbers to Bethenny in her Skinny Girl brand-blazoned office. It’s because of this episode, and this fight in particular, that I know what a “cheater brand” is.

By the way, I’ve tried Tipsy Girl prosecco and it’s... not the worst wine I’ve had. — Madeleine Davies, Eater.com daily editor

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Actor Sandra Oh, wearing a black chef beanie and a white t-shirt, talks on an iPhone outside a restaurant kitchen. | BBC America

“Killing Eve,” reality TV favorites, classic sitcoms, and more

We at Eater spend a lot of time thinking about food, so when it appears on our TV screen, we take special interest. If you’re looking to stream some non-food TV that happens to be — at least tangentially — about food this weekend, here’s what we recommend.

Terrace House: Tokyo, Episode 11 (available to stream on Netflix)

Terrace House, the Japanese version of The Real World, has had a long history of food-related misdemeanors and crimes, but the most recent one entails broccoli, pasta water, and egg. Ruka, one of the housemates of the Tokyo house, is a complete enigma of a human being and maybe the most naive person to ever grace Terrace House (or the world?). In an attempt to cook broccoli pasta carbonara, he cracks an egg into the pasta water with the pasta, then adds broccoli. It seems he read the ingredient list, skipped the instructions, and simply winged it. Nothing matters, you know?!

In Netflix’s latest batch of episodes (Netflix US runs a couple of months behind Japan), Ruka attempts broccoli pasta carbonara again. I gasped when I saw he was making pasta FROM SCRATCH and squealed when he presented something that not only looked edible, but delicious! His housemates were (understandably) pleasantly shocked and I got very emotional. It’s rare when you see such dramatic growth. I imagine this is what parents feel when they see their children walk for the first time. — Pelin Keskin, Eater associate producer

Community (available to stream on Hulu and Netflix)

In 2009, when Community first aired, I was actually taking classes at a community college. Yet, somehow I’ve made it this long without watching this series created by Dan Harmon and featuring some of the current era’s most memorable actors (See: Donald Glover, Alison Brie, Gillian Jacobs, and Ken Jeong). The first season hinges on narcissistic student Jeff Winger (Joel McHale) starting classes at a Greendale Community College, where he’s pursuing his bachelor’s degree in an attempt to reclaim his suspended law license. Winger joins a Spanish 101 study group (remember when people still gathered in groups?) to incessantly hit on Britta Perry (played by Jacobs). But as the show evolves, episodes become more unhinged, playing into pop culture tropes observed by TV and movie obsessed student Abed Nadir (Danny Pudi). After a while, it becomes easier to view this show as sort of a live-action version of Harmon’s later work Rick and Morty, but with a slightly less noxious fandom attached. This is particularly encapsulated in episodes like Season 2’s “Epidemiology,” in which the whole student body is transformed into zombies after eating expired military rations. Season 2 also features an excellent example of weird TV sponcon in “Basic Rocket Science,” where the study group gets trapped inside a Kentucky Fried Chicken-branded space flight simulator. — Brenna Houck, Eater.com reporter and Eater Detroit editor

Killing Eve (Season 3, Episode 1, available to stream on BBC America)

Killing Eve, a BBC show that for two seasons has been about feminism, fucking, and fighting, has added a fourth “f” to its roster: food. When we reunite with the show’s titular “Eve” (Sandra Oh), we watch her shopping the aisles of an Asian grocery, grabbing ramen cups and snacks from shelves that seem preposterously well-stocked to my pandemic-warped eyes. The multitudes the store holds are intoxicating. We then discover that since we last saw her — left for dead by Villanelle (Jodie Comer), an assassin with whom she is/was mutually obsessed — Eve’s fled her job at MI5 for a gig as a dumpling chef at an Asian restaurant, a perfect place, perhaps, for an Asian American woman to make herself invisible in a city like London. As audience members, we get to watch her deftly pinch pot sticker after pot sticker as she eavesdrops on her relationship-impaired colleagues (once a spy, always a spy, perhaps), a rote activity that probably has a lot more in common with tradecraft than most espionage-based thrillers would have us believe. It’s a nice job for a perfectionist like Eve, one that’ll do well enough until (one assumes) Villanelle returns to her life and again throws it into chaos. — Eve Batey, senior editor, Eater SF

Difficult People (Season 1, Episode 5, available on Hulu)

Much of this criminally short-lived sitcom starring comedians Billy Eichner (Billy on the Street) and Julie Klausner takes place in a restaurant where a struggling-artist version of Billy works to pay the bills. But this episode stands out for its art-imitating-life plot: Julie, who has “the palate of a seven-year-old” stops by Billy’s place of employment to eat, but finds the menu too fancy for her liking (“everything on [the] menu has some kind of chutney or jus on it,” Julie complains).

So, when Billy’s boss leaves town for a few days, the duo convert the restaurant into a pop-up named the Children’s Menu, serving items that would belong on a kids’ menu someplace like Applebee’s. The pair set about marking up chicken tenders and fish sticks and peddling it to food blogs. And because Difficult People is set in New York, home to many people with poor taste but lots of money, crowds lap it up. It’s a fun skewering of a side of the food world that values creatively bankrupt novelty above all else. Looking at you, “cereal bars” and Museum of Ice Cream. — Tim Forster, editor, Eater Montreal

Lodge 49 (available to purchase on Amazon Prime)

I‘m not surprised Lodge 49 was cancelled after two seasons on AMC last fall; I’m delighted it aired at all. This shaggy dog show stars Wyatt Russell (the waggish spawn of Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell) as Dud, an adrift surfer in recession-hit Long Beach, who finds connection through a fraternal lodge along the lines of the Freemasons. Meanwhile his sister Liz (Sonya Cassidy) works at a shitty Hooters knockoff called Shamroxx, run by a ghoulish regional corporate conglomerate, Omni Capital. These days, I’m reminded of Liz’s Season 2 story arc: She’s made manager of Omni’s replacement for Shamroxx, a stupid new steakhouse concept called Higher Steaks. When the restaurant struggles, the way Liz sticks up for her colleagues, who are some of the show’s best minor characters, is an inspiring rebuke of winner-takes-all capitalism — no surprise, as the whole show is basically a socialist document. Ironically it’s not streaming for free, but Lodge 49 is special and well worth buying to watch. — Caleb Pershan, Eater.com reporter

Frasier, Season 1, Episode 3 (available to stream on Hulu)

I know I’m incredibly late getting into Fraiser (most of my coworkers are obsessed with it), but it’s been about a week now and I’m already halfway through the second season. I can’t get enough of it. While Frasier’s advice to his listeners can be a little “meh,” it’s absolutely delightful to watch the main characters give each other therapy through their conversations. And watching each episode unfold feels like much needed therapy right now.

I could go on and on about all the episodes I love, but “Dinner at Eight” is my absolute favorite. Frasier (Kelsey Grammer) and his brother Niles (David Hyde Pierce) decide to take their father Martin (John Mahoney) out to dinner as a way to spend more quality time with him. When the restaurant loses their reservation, they decide to visit a steakhouse at Martin’s suggestion. His pitch: “You can get a steak this thick for $8.95.”

The Timber Mill is nothing like the trendy, pretentious restaurants Frasier and Niles frequent and the duration of the entire meal is a culinary culture clash. For example, when the beef trolley arrives and everyone at the table has to pick their cut of steak, Frasier asks, “How much extra would I have to pay to get one from the refrigerator?”

It’s absolutely heartbreaking to watch Martin get more and more aggravated as Frasier and Niles make ridiculously elaborate orders (a petite filet mignon “very lean, not so lean that it lacks flavor but not so fat that it leaves drippings on the plate”), poke fun at the restaurant, and give the servers a hard time. That’s why it’s so satisfying to watch Martin skewer Frasier and Niles for their snobbery, leaving them to eat the rest of their dinner alone under the scornful eyes of the Timber Mill’s servers as “Tossed Salads and Scrambled Eggs” plays in the background. — Esra Erol, senior social media manager, Eater

Real Housewives of New York, Season 8, Episodes 6 & 7

In times of uncertainty, we seek comfort in consistency: The sun will rise in the east, the tides will ebb and flow, and rich women will scream at each other for our enjoyment on Bravo. Recently, I’ve been rewatching old episodes of Real Housewives of New York and am currently in the midst of its landmark eighth season (“Please don’t let it be about Tom.” “It’s about Tom”). Practically every episode is a hit, but “Tipsying Point” and “Air Your Dirty Laundry” conveniently double as a lesson in the booze business. When jack of all trades/master of none Sonja Morgan announces that she’s releasing a signature prosecco called Tipsy Girl, she faces the wrath of Bethenny Frankel, founder of the Skinny Girl brand. As even the most casual Housewives watcher will tell you, Bethenny is famously protective of her business and turns vicious at any perceived attack on it. “I thought the alcohol was a great idea. I really looked up to what you did and I thought it would be a great way for me to get ahead,” Sonja blubbers to Bethenny in her Skinny Girl brand-blazoned office. It’s because of this episode, and this fight in particular, that I know what a “cheater brand” is.

By the way, I’ve tried Tipsy Girl prosecco and it’s... not the worst wine I’ve had. — Madeleine Davies, Eater.com daily editor

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[atallwhitefountainplayed]

My thoughts on Black Mirror - Season 4

[SPOILERS AHEAD]

Black Mirror is a brilliant fictional show featuring dramatic stand-alone episodes that showcase the potential progression of new technology in the modern age and how the consequences of it might shape the future.

Season four marks the second season of the show after Netflix bought the rights to the third season back in 2014.

In my opinion and upon viewing each episode of the season once at this point, season four of Black Mirror is the worst so far. I was so disappointed by these episodes and I truly hope that season five (should it be commissioned) is a lot better. The feeling of wonder and intrigue mixed with unease that made me fall for the show in the first place is gone in this season. One of my problems is that for the most part, there's really no shock factor. There's nothing all that gripping or thought-provoking about this season. In the previous seasons, I was frequently left in a state of awe as well as unrest because of how close to home each (or most) of the episodes hit. Wondering about how the world would really react to such things. Baffled and thinking that these episodes may one day be a reality; that some of the ideas explored aren't too far off legitimacy in my own lifetime.

Season four did not hit these marks for me. There wasn't any episode that left me feeling disturbed or wondering "what if?". Maybe it's in part due to the fact that there were a lot of ideas that seemed to borrow from previous episodes so nothing I observed was really that new of a concept. There were a lot of "new" tech ideas that centred around the brain and the mind, I suppose to appeal to people... with brains? My point is that it's been done before and this season is one that uses it a lot, whereas with season one we get one of those kinds of episodes (The Entire History Of You); season two uses one (White Christmas); season three has a different kind of approach and does it really well with episodes like Playtest and San Junipero in terms of tech that directly affects the brain. Sure season 1/2 are comparatively shorter seasons but they still did something worlds apart in each episode.

So now for each episode and what I thought:

1. USS Callister

This episode is easily my favourite of the bunch. It took a little while for me to get into at first but I still enjoyed it. It was a very self-aware episode that poked fun at the original Star Trek series. I've never seen the original Star Trek but I could at least appreciate the homage to it while also understanding the humour (or at least a lot of it). USS Callister was enjoyable because it was tense and generally it was gripping. I was excited to see what would happen and it made me root for the simulated but sentient crew. I loved the fact that when Daly paused or left the game, that the crew reverted back to their old selves and were blatantly upset with being imprisoned in this game but were also burdened with a sad touch of hopelessness. The story was easy to follow and the characters' motivation was relatable as well. The ending was quite tense what with all the crew trying to basically commit suicide, or whatever passes for suicide in virtual reality. You wanted them to succeed in wiping themselves from existence because the alternative was an eternity with this misogynistic, megalomaniacal, evil god who could do anything he wanted to them. What gripped me about this part was that having seen Black Mirror before, there was every possibility that they wouldn't succeed and that they'd be trapped forever, so it was surprising and enlightening to see them triumph and even better to see the antagonist trapped inside his own personal tampered game, unable to leave as he was once free to do.

In comparison with the rest of the seasons of Black Mirror, USS Callister is a good episode but personally, it isn't one of the best.

2. Arkangel

The unfortunate part of Arkangel is that I can 100% see this happening in the future. It's the equivalent of putting your child on a leash for their entire life. This episode succeeds in the fact that it made me feel some sort of emotion and empathy for the character of the child/teenager. It taps into the paranoia and anxiety I'm sure parents have of letting their children off into the world on their own and amplifies it by 10. The very real idea some parents these days have of trying to protect their kids from the world we live in by filtering what they are able to experience in the world. In Arkangel you see this mother losing her daughter in the park because she can't keep an eye on her. So the consequence of her being a shitty mother isn't her thinking "well maybe I should be more mindful and keep a closer watch of my child", it's "I can't keep an eye on my child with my human brain, so I'd better get her chipped with a GPS that lets me see where she is and also what she sees at any given moment". Fuck you, mum character. This technology allows the mother to alter her daughters' perception of the world, filtering out anything "bad" such as an angry dog, blood, porn, even the basic display of negative human emotions such as sadness. As a result of this implant, this girls' character becomes very dull and pacified, lacking in any sort of real excitement in her own life because she physically can't see or really interact with anything with negative connotations. Arkangel is a nice take on how stunted kids can be if their parents are too strict and limit their personal growth; it is a subject that is very present in modern society with kids getting involved with violent video games or watching scary movies; getting involved with the wrong people and doing stupid things like taking drugs due to either being pressured or feeling like they have to because their friends are. The reality that Arkangel is trying to convey I think is that no parent can truly shield their child from all the bad things in the world; it just isn't plausible. Also that keeping an eye on your child in every aspect of what they do isn't always the best idea. In my experience, kids are going to do stupid things; that's just what they do. Hopefully though with the right parenting they are able to right themselves and become decent people.

My problem with this episode is that it isn't incredibly fun and is often just a bit frustrating. The characters aren't memorable for any sort of positive act and the protagonist (the daughter) isn't hugely relatable in the sense of her own experiences. For example, I can't really remember a whole lot of what she gets up to; all I remember is just her being at school and not being able to form meaningful relationships as a child but then as a teenager she has a friend who she does see outside of school. It would have been nice to see how they formed that friendship because it seems like it would be difficult in her position. Then as a teenager she goes out with her friends and does drugs and has sex. But that's about it really. Then her mum ruins her relationship with that guy with the van who she's known since they were kids, drugs her smoothie, terminating her early pregnancy (if there was one). Then the daughter finds out and bludgeons her mother with the device she used to spy on her. Maybe there was supposed to be some ironic bliss in that ending but it didn’t do much for me.

I didn't like the ending much because it didn't really make me feel anything. I didn't care that the daughter ran away and I didn't care if the mother lived or died. I would have liked to have seen some character development from the mother and also some character traits in the daughter that made her something more than a slab of boring nothing. Arkangel had some good ideas but really I don't know that it was executed all that well.

[To be continued (I have to go to sleep; it's 3 in the morning)]

[komahinasecretexchange]

Title: Side Hope: Aftermath

Author: @deliriousgummi

Rating/ Warnings: T for mention of things in game and DR3 Side: Despair

For: @pearltoroses

Prompt: Set after DR3 Hope Arc where they just kind of talk about despair

Author’s note: Hey! I apologise for how late this is! Komahina is my ultimate OTP so I hope I did it justice :). I took ‘despair’ in the prompt as the events that took place in the game. I really enjoyed writing this so i hope you’ll like reading this too. Thanks for reading! :D

The summer heat still hung in the air despite being mostly washed out by the serenity of the night. A peaceful atmosphere drifted through, leaving the brown haired teen with a sense of calm. The pale yellow orb glowed in the starry night above, radiating its soft light upon the quarterdeck. Hinata laid back on a makeshift bed – just a bench covered with a piece of cloth – , soaking in the constant sounds of the whirring fan and the lapping waves.

He made no sign of movement, just the occasional rise and fall of the chest as he gazed up blankly at the ceiling. His mind stayed empty other than the reviewing and replaying of past events, letting them pass by with no particular thought. It was rather strange to remain in this happy dreamlike ending after everything, almost too perfect. He let out a sigh; he of all people should know nothing horribly tragic would occur. Just as he was swinging his legs to the side about to return to the cabin, the faint tap of footsteps alerted him to another’s presence.

“Hm? You’re still awake out here?”

Hinata changed to a sitting position, turning to face his new companion with a warm smile.  “And you? We’re only reaching Jabberwock Island by dawn, Komaeda.”

A brief chuckle reverberated through the air before settling back to its usual raspy voice that Hinata so became fond of, “True, sleep is something we’ve all been lacking. May I sit?”

“Yeah. Come on, there’s plenty of room on the bench.”

The messy, white-haired teen beamed, his smile reaching his eyes signalling its genuity. He leaned against the wall, taking Hinata’s right as the other scooted over to give him more space. The two stared at the nothing in front of them, indulging in the placidity that was so hard to obtain nowadays.

Hinata turned his head yet again, this time fixing his eyes on the steadily ticking clock situated on the paper white wall, rocking in turn with the ship.

tick

“So why are you awake anyway?” He started. Might as well begin their inevitable conversation and enjoy his friend’s company while it lasted.

“Ah, I was just cleaning. Since I couldn’t sleep I thought I should just clean up. I do have experience in that regard after all.”

“Hm, this place is becoming a bit of a sty. Though I did mention earlier we were arriving in the morning, it wouldn’t do to leave this place so dirty. When was the last time we mopped the decks? The party?”

“Yeah,” Komaeda stated, returning a light-hearted smile. “So what about you? Can’t sleep? Such brilliant hopes like you should get adequate rest.”

Hinata nodded, unable to find the energy to dissuade another of Komaeda’s rambles. He thought back to Hope’s Peak Academy and the events that transpired there. He thought back to his time as Kamukura and the scientist’s excited murmurs. He thought back to the Steering Committee and the nameless student council and Junko. He thought back to despair, hope, his fascination, his boredom, everything and the galaga clip…

“Do you want to head to the deck? There’s a pretty nice view right now.” The auburn haired boy took a look at Komaeda’s grey-green optics, noticing their underlying concern.

“Sure.”

tock

Komaeda wasn’t kidding about the view. Millions of sparkling stars shone bright in the seemingly endless abyss of night, shades of purples and blues and blacks gleaming through the clouds. It was the simple depiction of nocturne.

They took a seat on the ground, feeling the ruffle of plastic fake grass.

Hinata sucked in a breath, “Can we talk?” He paused, bracing himself for all the memories he carefully hid  behind lock and key. “About the killing game that is.”

Komaeda stared at him, most likely in puzzlement though he couldn’t pinpoint the exact emotion, “Are you sure?”

He couldn’t exactly blame the other for his hesitation. There has not been a night where he himself have not woken up in cold sweat, the events of the past flashing vividly in his mind, haunting him from their grave. He had to remind himself: they all experienced this. If anything, Komaeda was the most numb to this, given his past experiences that Hinata determined as the truth. Giving him a nod, he began his talking, “I need to. If not, I would never be able to move past it.”

“Shall I start then?” Hinata gave a sign of approval as Komaeda proceeded, “I must say it’s still a shock that I wasn’t killed that day at the party. I planned everything to become a stepping stone to hope but I guess I’m just trash.”

“Don’t talk like that.” Hinata sighed as Komaeda gave a slight laugh. He would be unable to stop his self loathing but he could at least try. “You know you really are headstrong. I wish you would be able to see the good in you that I do.”

At that, Komaeda gave a blank stare.

“Anyway, I really wish you didn’t plan that murder. You have no idea how heartbreaking it was for us to see Toga- I mean Sagishi like that…” Stumbling across his words, Hinata made a mental note to not call his classmate that. It was a habit he had yet to correct and while Imposter was still unwilling to share his name, it was at least a sign that trust was slowly growing between them as he now refused to don his masks. The name still had negative implications but they would bridge the gap. They surely would.

“Haha, yeah. I will let you know that you cannot change my beliefs but please do know I will never endanger anyone here again. Moving past that, Monokuma’s punishment for Teruteru was really cruel… To turn such a brilliant hope’s talent against himself, it really is despairing.”

Hinata winced, recalling the painful screams that echoed through the screen as he saw his friend go through inexplicable torture. It was there and then that he was reminded of the cruel reality that awaited them at that island. But now after that simulation, they are now each other’s pillars of support, slowly building up each other and be their source of comfort.

We will always be there for each other

tick

“The motive that Monokuma prepared for the second trial really was a low blow. I can never forgive Junko for that. Such despair like that is unforgivable.”

The reminder of that trial still exists in the form of Fuyuhiko’s scar across his eye though it was obtained from a previous, different event. It was difficult to remember that the cause was something else however, They all still blame themselves for it; it’s so painfully evident in their eyes.

“Yeah. And to learn that Twilight Syndrome was actually real. That really hurt Fuyuhiko and Peko and Mahiru.” And our whole class too by extension. Hinata continued, afraid of the sudden influx of images that will surface in his mind when he stops, “I was actually growing closer to Natsumi during that time. She really was a great friend even if others didn’t see it. It definitely would help if she stopped bullying and picking on Mahiru and Sato, I wish she did in fact but… her desire to be with her big brother. I have to say she was one of the influences in my decision to turn to Kamukura. And I can’t say I was ever close to Sato but her devotion to Mahiru was undeniable. It’s just wishful thinking but there are days where I just hope they were both still alive and breathing and living here with us.”

It wasn’t just them. Hinata dearly missed his family despite their terrible decision to let him sign on for the project. He missed that he would never again see their faces and kind smiles as they led him through the harsh depths of reality.

None of them would ever. Not Akane and her seven siblings, not Ibuki and her ex bandmates, not Sonia and her beloved subjects, not Gundham and his mother, not Souda and his parents, not anyone…

“You know, it really is hard to recall Hiyoko’s reaction to Mahiru’s death. It’s also really heartbreaking for the execution too,” Hinata carried on speaking, desperate to change the topic, even to one that might be equally bad. Komaeda offered a look of understanding and silence to allow him to vent. “When we reach the island, let’s offer them all a shrine. Taking after Hiyoko’s idea, that may be the best way for us to grieve and remember them.”

“That is a wonderful idea. I’m sure the others will appreciate it dearly.”

“Don’t forget about your parents and dog too. We need to make one for them too.”

Komaeda stared, stunned and shocked. Slowly, he gave a small laugh, expressing all of his gratefulness and muttered, “Thank you.”

They might be gone physically from this world but they will still remain in Class 77’s hearts and minds. Forever.

tock

“Actually, you were quite sick during the Despair Disease weren’t you. I mean your current illnesses probably made it worst. What was it again? Stage 3 malignant lymphoma and frontotemporal dementia?”

“You’re right. I’m surprised you remembered that, especially since I told you that it was a lie. That’s quite a bit of trust that you are willing to place in trash like me.”

“I told you to quit that. You never listen to do,” Hinata mumbled, shaking his head as he started again in a louder tone of voice, “I really am glad you’re better now. It was quite a scare.”  

“I apologise for that.” Komaeda provided a carefree smile, though it was immediately noticeable to someone close that it hid sadness deep underneath.

“You know you can talk to me right? Even anyone here. We told that to Mikan and that applies to you too.”

“This much be such amazing luck that you’re taking such interest in me. I can’t begin to imagine the bad luck that will befall me later.” He tugged at his jacket and pulled it closer, an action that did not go unnoticed by his partner and spoke again before he could object, “Mikan is a surprisingly good actress when it comes to it. Well, that could be debated by the despair she was under.”

Hinata nodded; no one had really suspected her of the brutal murders of Hiyoko and Ibuki before the trial. It added onto the hopelessness with the sudden disruption of Hiyoko’s and Fuyuhiko’s working towards a change of attitude towards the group plus the the interruption of Ibuki’s concert. It added on to Nekomaru’s presence in the hospital, in the battle of life and death and the appearance of the Despair Disease.

“Thinking back on it, that’s where we first learnt about Junko. Or at least alerted to her existence,” Hinata hummed. Komaeda only nodded in response, clearly deep in his own mind.

It hurt to think of Mikan’s ranting, to learn that their friend, no, their whole class was capable of such terrible deeds after Junko’s brainwashing. It could be said that wasn’t and was them.

But… that is their past. The future is what they look to for a better them. The future is why they keep walking despite all the pain. The future is… where they are now.

tick

“Nekomaru’s and Gundham’s trial, huh?” Komaeda put up a hand to his chin, hand brushing against his off-white hair strands.

“That had been one of the bigger shocks in my opinion. Murder directly conflicted with Gundham’s morals at the island,” his thoughts immediately flew to the animal breeder, the bicoloured haired teen’s chuunibyou nature masking a kind soul for both humans and animals alike. “I’m glad his Four Dark Devas of destruction are still safe, multiplied even.”

“And Nekomaru is back to his regular state too. I can’t say that I ever got used to his robotic form. It was just downright strange.”

“You got that right.”

Hinata reflected back to each of their awakenings. They were all out of order from the killings, dependent on the victim's’ mental state and how they died. Gundham and Nekomaru were quite close to each other in terms of when they woke: Gundham first, celebrated by being surrounded by his animal partners and Souda’s thankful sigh and Sonia’s tears of relief and Nekomaru about two people after, accompanied by Akane’s immediate declaration of a challenge as a sign of a weight being pulled from her shoulders. They all had their closest somebody’s back to them.

Recovery would be slow but it is definitely there.

tock

“If there was a ranking of how shit these trials were, the fifth one has to be at the top. You don’t know how hard it was…”

“I apologise but I cannot say that I regret my decision. I simply did what I thought would best fit the situation. At that time, Chiaki really was the only hope left there,” Komaeda said, a small but understanding smile lingering on his face.

“You really are a weird enigma. To be honest I’m not sure if I should but I forgive you. That’s what I want at least,” Hinata uttered, soft but powerful words echoing it’s meaning. “One thing I regret though, is not getting to know Chiaki further.”

He had no idea why he mumbled that but he needs to get it out, to let someone know.

“She.. she was practically my guiding light before I met all of you. Before all of this bullshit ever happened in the first place. I miss playing games with her, getting to know her. In the simulation even, she kept guiding me. She was probably my closest friend there after you stopped talking with me and being friends with me. And in both lifes, I pretty much condemned her to death…”

Komaeda glanced, a worried look plastered on his face. His hand hung in midair, probably unsure whether stopping or letting it continue was the best choice. Hinata paid no heed to it and continued.

“When I was Izuru, I let everything happen. I never stopped Junko or protect all of you. I just… watched her bleed out in front of me. And even as myself, even if it was forced, I had to pick her as the culprit. I just watched again, watched her be crushed by that by that stupid bear!”

At this point, small teardrops started dripping down from his eyes. They fell onto his clenched hands, blending in with the sweat that had started to gather. At this point, he didn’t care. He just needed to cry.

“I’m sorry… I don’t exactly know how to respond in this situation. I think maybe this would help though.”

Before he could understand Komaeda’s words, Hinata was pulled into an embrace. He felt the comforting warmth of his companion. He leaned in, desperate to find support from within his close friend, burying his face in the cotton of the now soaked t-shirt.

“Thank you,” Hinata managed to get those words out under his increasing sobs. Komaeda’s hands delicately caressed the side of his face and that action continued until the the other raised his head and muttered.

“Let me ask of you one more request.”

Hinata pressed his lips against Komaeda’s smooth one. He could taste the vague taste of mint, most likely from his toothpaste, as he eased in, taking in a sense of both solace and pleasure.

As he was satisfied getting what he wanted, he pulled away, leaving Komaeda with a stunned look and a inscrutable stare.

Then, Komaeda laughed. It was full with joy and so genuine.

“I really do love the hope within you from the bottom of my heart,” he beamed, twinkling with such a brightness.

The two of them moved closer to each other, enjoying the company of the other as the seagulls start calling in a rhythmic beat. A sweetened honey atmosphere rested over the two, covering them like a blanket of security.

tick

“We’re here.”

#fanfiction #komahina #komahina secret exchange

[cheerisuu]

Im Back.

Boy, how time flies fast when you’re busy keeping things feel right. I mean, they’re supposed to be. I’m going to make this update as quick as i can and as precise as i can, bet i cant do both tho lmao.

It has been approximately 3 weeks since Rock Bottom (i guess it’s what you call it? Well, close.) and things has been quite, nice.

The month of July has really been a journey of what felt like forever. Today is the 12th of the month and i have come to the point where i realised that the mind is the only thing that keeps us from doing or achieveing something that we want. And this applies to a couple of situations:

I learned how to do a buck tuck.

This is one of the few things i achieved as i underwent through a “therapaeutic healing” after the incident. I surrounded myself with the few people that im friends with in our Pep Squad and fortunately my friend Dapitanon, P. also had a common friend which made our days more progressive. Just the act of cheering for each other to do one’s best really lifts everyone’s morale.

“It’s really all in the mind.”

We ARE physically capable of doing things but our mind seems to think that there’s an invisible obstacle that prevents us from pursuing what we want to achieve. I realise this as we were practicing for a back tuck, which i proudly achieved (with a spotter pa hehe). But that achievement was already some proof that if i can have control over my body, i can do all things if i just believe just enough to do it right. Heck, I think I’ll attach my tuck video somewhere on here.

1st of July.

We went to a dog cafe.

Idk what’s with me but i really like to do something special at least once a month with him and WITHOUT telling him. After all, I can’t just let myself be carried away with the emotions that lead me almost to the verge of thinking it was over, right? So despite our awkwardness and difference of treatment (slight), I still picked him up (with miraculously good timing too) with our Navara and was able to use it for the whole day before returning it back to my Granddad’s. Did i mention he got car sick? It was the cutest. (Am i weird for saying that? Doesn’t matter tho lmao) i thought of going to the dog cafe cause i was thinking, “Hey dogs can like help with your mental and emotional health right? So why the frick not.” Im surely going to post a little GIF here somewhere on how cute the doggos were. And when i tell you, dogs CAN bring the purest out of anyone. We literally were like talking to babies man and boy the dogs were HUUGE, only the pugs were like “hey hooman u can luv me unlyk diz oder bitchez” haha. But if ever things do go well for us in the future, we are DEFINITELY going to get a golden retriever man. It’s my dream!

Anyways, we also got to watch our first movie as “barkada pero gusto ang isat isa” or BPGAII, it was Toy Story 4. And bitch, dont get me started on how we were wondering if it was a child’s movie or not coz boi, we did NOT like the jump scares at ALL. But still, me being an emotional, soft potato, it still made me cry in the end. The meaning behind was great it was all about taking the risk, which was kind fitting? For him at least hekhek. Basically Woody chose to be with his hoe, Bo, for Buzz, his bro. But this aint no movie review so, *boop.

I gave him my skin care?

Ok tbh this was so random right. He realised my skin was glowing better (coz bitch, we aint lettin no sadness ruin this skin ya feel?) so he asked what was i using cos he was contemplating on his gorgeous face that he was getting ugly now. (The audacity, am i right?? Lol) so i CLEARLY (no pun intended) put into the effort of giving him some travel bottles and put in some samples of what moisturiser and micellar water i was using right, and i guess it worked out well? I also got to drive it TO him still. But the good side of this was i was able to be with my Granddad and spend some time together as his driver hihi.

LADY DRIVER.

So I’m getting good at this driving thing right, as driving from Malaybalay to Cagayan, Davao to Tagum and vice versa, Tagum to Maco and back. So i might as well be good at city driving and yall cant tell me otherwise lol,

(SIDENOTE:except for the fact i got stopped by the Yellow Ranger in Ecoland coz i was at the left lane at a traffic light and my mom told me to go straight WHICH WAS WRONG I GUESS THATS A THING RIGHT, so i was almost charged 1500 pesoses. But thank Heezuz i was with my mom and she was able to talk through the officer but sadly we had to name drop my Granddad since he was a known regional director at LTO before. Sorry Pops, i swear it’ll be the first and last time.)

Back to real time, i helped him with his errands and was really lucky with the timing coz my Dad went off for a trip and my mom was left with his car. So yup, got the chance to borrow it for half of the day and drove all the way to Maa to get a keyboard his friend is letting him use for the mean time, her name is Jen and she’s the sweetest. (No backstory will be dropped for privacy). Aight, so we drove back to their house at Magallanes but didn’t have enough time to say hi to his folks coz it was noon and they were on siyestas, right. I still regret why i didnt like fake-pee or something tho. HahahahahahahDONTJUDGE. We ate for some late lunch at SML and felt korek coz before we joke about “asa ta nag park?” And now we get to be in the situation haha. It’s funny coz just when i thought things were detoriating between us, the world just chooses to keep things tight and close and say something like “oh, u guys are having an emotional conflict and struggle about ur relationship? Here are things that only REAL couples do and i hope u enjoy em!!” Dumbass. Jokes aside, I drove him home and goodbyes are still awkward, but i was starting to understand the type of ‘low-key’ he means.

Usapang Gym.

Oh wow it’s already the fifth point. If you manage to read this far, congrats! You get nothing but to keep on reading this rollercoaster wreck lmao. I wasn’t expecting he would pay the whole month at our gym and expects me to come with him. And it came to me: i kept on thinking that i should ask for assurance but in reality, he really does mean what he said about just being “me”. Things were different but things also got better. It’s like losing some and gaining some right? Like a body excrcising, losing weight, gaining muscle, idk its a weak analogy but its close enough for yall to understand. It’s our first week today, (it’s Friday) i hope i could keep up tho haha. I guess I’ll keep progress updated? Idkidkidk. Also, i got to mention thats he is VAIN af. Idk if its a good thing or just a tragedy waiting to happen haha. I also became his coach, (oha san kapa haha), he told me he wanted help with increasing his verticle as he would help me with abdominals. So i bought sets of ankle weights only to find out the first one didnt suit him so i had to buy another set. AND IT WAS HALF THE PRICE I BOUGHT THE FIRST SET AND IT WAS BETTER. Prices will be disclosed. (250) So i like, i do my own workout right and he suddenly shows his hot-headed side of things coz he was upset he had to go home early coz there was this no-towel-no-workout policy at my gym so we had to cut our day short.

In times like these, my mind just goes to places to different situations. All the what-ifs start filling up my mind on how he could react to other situations that would cause a similar effect on what his character was showing right. But in the end, i still give kudos to myself coz im able to keep up and cope with how quick his personality changes sometimes. And sometimes, im the one with a crack on the head lmao. Well, most of the time.

TAKE AWAYS.

Fast forward to this very moment, its 11:30 in the evening and im recalling all of this on a positive note. Today was an addition to a great day we had as a rest day from gym. We watched Spiderman: Far From Home and i guess its now my current favorite and HAD to watch it twice.

Speaking of Twice, bruh i want to do a dance cover so bad of #Fancy or #YesOrYes coz i been itching and the choreo is sooo goood! Not to mention Twice was in Manila last 29th of June. *sighs in broke* but i cant say it was the best concert from them coz there were complications like Jungyeon had a sty and was wearing an eye patch the whole concert, Dahyun got sick after along with Mina who wont be attending the 2019 Twicelights Worldtour because she gets anxiety attacks and feels insecure about performing on stage suddenly. I mean i know you got no idea what im talking about but its just sad to think of the fact that even someone so adored by many people, someone who has great physical, social and emotional support, can still feel the lack of these mentally. And if you’re one of those people who feels anxious about anything? I hope you get well soon and i hope you find the true meaning of your purpose in this simulation, because you are not alone. x

In addition to almost wrapping this up, i also treated myself again something from Adidas (coz again, bitch, if no man gon treat me i gon treat myself! HAHA!) which i later on realise i now own 3 bags from there and thinking to get a fourth one....someone help me¿ i also have to mention i already treated myself about a week ago (🎶) by waxing my own axillae, grooming my own brows, a gorgeous lippie from Beauty Cottage called Elegant Impressionist shade #9 Byzantine for half its original price haha, nothing beats fishing me through a sale. Speaking of treat, my Dad gave me my first pair of Tigers man and i cant help but tell yall its the same pair that the He wanted and it totally pissed him off that i got the pair he wanted first so bad and now he doesn’t know what to do coz he’s afraid if we have the same pair we might wear it at the same time and it would be cringy and weird (now for normal people that would sound cute right, matching kicks and all. But no. Not in this lifetime.), since im just blabbering of how im spoiling myself might as well end it here folks.

Guess I’ll keep you updated on how stuff might go on from now since class is fast approaching. Tomorrow I guess I’ll be attending a send-off party for our friend she’s going to the U.S soon. Oh, did i mention the re-run for Endgame is out? 🤔

[30-days-of-exciting-stuff-blog]

Day 10 - Black Mirror [Series]

Do you ever feel fabulously grateful for something crappy that happened to you, because it eventually led to something good? This is one of my favourite things in the world. I had one of these moments a few weeks ago. A co-worker had been motivating us all week to spend a crazy Friday night out. For totally work-unrelated reasons, I had been feeling pretty depressed lately and most of my evenings were spent alone in my apartment (mostly re-watching bad Youtube videos, probably in order to make sure that I still didn’t like them), so I looked forward to this night out. Getting anywhere close to drunk was off the table because I had made some damn good resolutions, but I was kind of hoping that we’d meet wonderfully weird people, and find a place where the decoration would make me laugh even more than the huge portrait of Angela Merkel that took up all the space of the ladies’ restroom door in a Germany-themed bar I once went to. Enjoying the city lights and probably dancing - to some terrible 2000’s music that would remind me of the awkward teenage parties I usually wasn’t invited to anyway – sounded like a nice sequel to this.

In case you wonder: The weird Angela Merkel bar is actually called the Black Forest Society, and it’s located in Lyon, France. They have nice, original, good-resolutions-incompatible cocktails made with Black Forest Gin and fancy liquors and cocoa, sometimes served in kitschy recipients. A bit expensive, but still a nice experience. Oh, and they have bretzels as well.

Unfortunately, they had all lost their motivation sparkle by the time Friday came. Some of them wanted to get up early tomorrow, some had other plans, some were tired. I ended up being the only one who actually wanted to go. I had booked my train tickets to my parents’ for the next morning, so it became clear that this would be another lonely night in my flat. I soon found myself texting my co-worker, whining about how bored I was and asking her if she could think of something nice for me to read or watch.  She suggested me to try Black Mirror if I wanted food for thought about modern society. Black Mirror is a series of one-hour standalone episodes. That, my friends, is already a pretty great point for people like me who try to watch a zillion series at once - and inevitably end up forgetting what the hell the hot smart gay intern’s name is because 1) all these character names adding up can be rather confusing 2) they find time for an episode of the show every two months or so. Standalone episodes have that great habit of rightly assuming that, just like Jon Snow, the viewer knows nothing. Each one has its own cast, setting, and reality, which basically makes them short movies. What they all have in common in Black Mirror is the theme of new technologies and their unexpected consequences.

By the way: Connor Walsh. The hot smart gay intern from How to get away with murder is Connor Walsh. He’s one of the main characters for the Seven’s sake, how could you even forget?

As you may have noticed, the theme is pretty broad, which allows for a number of variations. Some episodes are built around a specific fictional technology – what would happen, for instance, if everyone had a chimp implant that recorded everything they did, saw or heard, and allowed them to replay the entire memory, either in front of their eyes or on a screen? The Entire History of You is centered around that possibility. In an alternative reality where this technology allows personal data storage to go even further than it currently does – and anyone who once cringed in front of an n-th attempt from Facebook to revive awkward 8-year-old memories to celebrate a virtual friendship birthday will probably argue that this has already gone way too far – memories are never faded, let alone erased. Every recording is potentially an evidence to the jealous protagonist, who suspects his wife to have cheated on him with her ex and gets more and more paranoid as he keeps replaying potentially incriminating memories. The chilling Be right back, on the other hand, introduces us to realistic androids simulating the deceased using their previous communication data. Martha, a grieving young woman whose husband died in a car crash, reluctantly begins to communicate with an artificial intelligence accurately imitating her late partner – humour, interests, reactions, everything is calculated to sound like him. The digital ghost is convincing and Martha soon finds herself in love with him, until she gets frustrated with his inability to express emotions accurately, and his lack of the traits that were not expressed by her deceased husband in his digital life. The resulting story is truly haunting – no pun intended -, and is both a heart-wrenching exploration of grief and a starting point to an authentic riot of questions in the viewer’s mind, the most interesting probably being “What spares the human from a thinking machine anticipating its reaction to every situation, and able to be loved by the ones who knew the person behind?”.

The Entire History of You - Nah, you told me your relationship had lasted one week, not one month, LOOK, I HAVE PROOF. *Memory replays*

Hi digital ghost, I guess.

My favourite episodes, however, are those set in dehumanized, acerbic, cynical dystopias, built and revealed slowly over the course of the episode. In the thought-provoking Fifteen million merits, citizens only go out of their confined sleeping boxes to cycle endlessly on exercise bikes to power their screen-covered surroundings and generate Merits, a currency that allows them to skip the untimely, inopportune, sometimes obscene advertisements that keep interrupting their activities to sell them nothing but virtual items such as accessories for their avatars. Sleep. Cycle. Skip ad – if you can afford it. Interact briefly with one or two avatars. Repeat. The protagonist progressively becomes aware of the vacuity of this existence and craves realness since he got a glimpse of it in the singing voice of one of his co-cyclers, but even the only perceived escapes usually turn out to be smoking mirrors. Another great episode, Nosedive, is set in a colourful, alternative reality where people rate one another using their phones. Ratings determine their employability, access to services and overall value in society – some neighbourhoods are exclusively reserved to people with high ratings, and a low rating will make you lose your job. This leads people to obsess over their ratings and calculate every single social interaction, hoping to get the favours of high-rated people in order to raise their score and finally be able to get the discount they need to rent a house. Satires about social media society probably aren’t uncommon, but this one has that cynical feel created by the sharp contrast between the pink-and-pastel visuals and the hypocritical, chained social interactions that take place under a social media eye constantly ready to pull people under if they dare speak their minds or complain about anything. Nosedive gets even scarier when you think back about it and realise that the terrifying society described over the episode already exists, although in a less visible way. Social media does play a huge role in our personal and professional lives – who never thought of posting something on the social media just to impress someone? Who never heard a story of someone who got in trouble at work, or didn’t get hired, because of social media material? Who never got stuck into a conversation about what a common acquaintance posted on social media the day before? Who never paid at least a little attention to the number of likes they got on their Facebook post? And about the whole rating thing – I’m pretty sure you’re already familiar with “We’ll go to that restaurant, it’s really well-rated on Tripadvisor” or “If you liked it, please don’t forget to rate us”. And actually, apps that rate people are already a thing.

Fifteen million merits and Nosedive - Different atmospheres, different alternate realities, same feeling of suffocating fakeness.

This is where Black Mirror generally gets brilliant: Although the alternate realities depicted in the show are usually noticeably different from ours, the viewer always ends up seeing a reflection of their own society. The scenarios X-ray aspects of our modern world and disguise them in a satirical, clever, accurate way that makes you think back about Black Mirror episodes long after you watched them. The questions raised by the series go way beyond the usual “You should all turn off your phones, get real again and go for a walk in the forest with your neighbour, social media turned you into narcissist brainless zombies” rhetoric. The variety of scenarios, from political satire to intimate drama, make sure you keep being surprised and never get bored. However, you will probably get uneasy pretty often – and I’m not saying that because the first episode revolves around the Prime Minister being ordered to have sex with a pig in order to save a princess from being killed. A cuddly blanket, a nice cup of tea, your favourite biscuits and a pair of arms/loving cat/soft toy (depending on what you have in store) are probably advised during, or after, a Black Mirror episode. Not providing yourself with that equipment and watching it right before going to bed will be at your own risk – I promise you don’t want your nightmares to turn into technologically advanced dystopias. Old school monsters are easier to run from.

And also: This is the tenth post of this Tumblr, which definitely deserves to be celebrated with the song that kind of inspired it. As hinted in the Crypt of the Necrodancer post, it’s the famous standard “My favorite things” (except I usually write it, like everything on that Tumblr, with the British spelling – I’m neither British nor American, and I’m trying hard to avoid cliché-ridden justifications such as “because it makes my blog posts smell like my beloved Twinings tea”). Just like that enthusiastic blog of mine, it’s an enumeration of amazing things. Let’s face it, “whiskers on kittens, bright copper kettles and warm woollen mittens” probably sound much better than “sad novels, weird computer games, robot exhibits and sci-fi-ish series”, but I promise I love kittens and soft mittens as well. I just don’t have enough material to write about them. Anyway, I thought you may enjoy this cover by Pomplamoose as much as I do.

#black mirror #the entire history of you #nosedive #15 million merits #fifteen million merits #be right back #pomplamoose #my favourite things #my favorite things #dystopia #series #technology #cover #social media #data storage #connor walsh #how to get away with murder

[ciathyzareposts]

The Shareware Scene, Part 5: Narratives of DOOM

Let me begin today by restating the obvious: DOOM was very, very popular, probably the most popular computer game to date.

That “probably” has to stand there because DOOM‘s unusual distribution model makes quantifying its popularity frustratingly difficult. It’s been estimated that id sold 2 to 3 million copies of the shareware episodes of the original DOOM. The boxed-retail-only DOOM II may have sold a similar quantity; it reportedly became the third best-selling boxed computer game of the 1990s. But these numbers, impressive as they are in their own right, leave out not only the ever-present reality of piracy but also the free episode of DOOM, which was packaged and distributed in such an unprecedented variety of ways all over the world. Players of it likely numbered well into the eight digits.

Yet if the precise numbers associated with the game’s success are slippery, the cultural impact of the game is easier to get a grip on. The release of DOOM marks the biggest single sea change in the history of computer gaming. It didn’t change gaming instantly, mind you — a contemporaneous observer could be forgiven for assuming it was still largely business as usual a year or even two years after DOOM‘s release — but it did change it forever.

I should admit here and now that I’m not entirely comfortable with the changes DOOM brought to gaming. In fact, for a long time, when I was asked when I thought I might bring this historical project to a conclusion, I pointed to the arrival of DOOM as perhaps the most logical place to hang it up. I trust that most of you will be pleased to hear that I no longer feel so inclined, but I do recognize that my feelings about DOOM are, at best, conflicted. I can’t help but see it as at least partially responsible for a certain coarsening in the culture of gaming that followed it. I can muster respect for the id boys’ accomplishment, but no love. Hopefully the former will be enough to give the game its due.

As the title of this article alludes, there are many possible narratives to spin about DOOM‘s impact. Sometimes the threads are contradictory — sometimes even self-contradictory. Nevertheless, let’s take this opportunity to follow a few of them to wherever they lead us as we wrap up this series on the shareware movement and the monster it spawned.

3D 4EVA!

The least controversial, most incontrovertible aspect of DOOM‘s impact is its influence on the technology of games. It was nothing less than the coming-out party for 3D graphics as a near-universal tool — this despite the fact that 3D graphics had been around in some genres, most notably vehicular simulations, almost as long as microcomputer games themselves had been around, and despite the fact that DOOM itself was far from a complete implementation of a 3D environment. (John Carmack wouldn’t get all the way to that goal until 1996’s Quake, the id boys’ anointed successor to DOOM.) As we’ve seen already, Blue Sky Productions’s Ultima Underworld actually offered the complete 3D implementation which DOOM lacked twenty months before the latter’s arrival.

But as I also noted earlier, Ultima Underworld was complex, a little esoteric, hard to come to terms with at first sight. DOOM, on the other hand, took what the id boys had started with Wolfenstein 3D, added just enough additional complexity to make it into a more satisfying game over the long haul, topped it off with superb level design that took full advantage of all the new affordances, and rammed it down the throat of the gaming mainstream with all the force of one of its coveted rocket launchers. The industry never looked back. By the end of the decade, it would be hard to find a big boxed game that didn’t use 3D graphics.

Many if not all of these applications of 3D were more than warranted: the simple fact is that 3D lets you do things in games that aren’t possible any other way. Other forms of graphics consist at bottom of fixed, discrete patterns of colored pixels. These patterns can be moved about the screen — think of the sprites in a classic 2D videogame, such as Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros. or id’s Commander Keen — but their forms cannot be altered with any great degree of flexibility. And this in turn limits the degree to which the world of a game can become an embodied, living place of emergent interactions; it does no good to simulate something in the world model if you can’t represent it on the player’s screen.

3D graphics, on the other hand, are stored not as pixels but as a sort of architectural plan of an imaginary 3D space, expressed in the language of mathematics. The computer then extrapolates from said plan to render the individual pixels on the fly in response to the player’s actions. In other words, the world and the representation of the world are stored as one in the computer’s memory. This means that things can happen there which no artist ever anticipated. 3D allowed game makers to move beyond hand-crafted fictions and set-piece puzzles to begin building virtual realities in earnest. Not for nothing did many people refer to DOOM-like games in the time before the term “first-person shooter” was invented as “virtual-reality games.”

Ironically, others showed more interest than the id boys themselves in probing the frontiers of formal possibility thus opened. While id continued to focus purely on ballistics and virtual violence in their extended series of Quake games after making DOOM, Looking Glass Technologies — the studio which had previously been known as Blue Sky Productions — worked many of the innovations of Ultima Underworld and DOOM alike into more complex virtual worlds in games like System Shock and Thief. Nevertheless, DOOM was the proof of concept, the game which demonstrated indubitably to everyone that 3D graphics could provide amazing experiences which weren’t possible any other way.

From the standpoint of the people making the games, 3D graphics had another massive advantage: they were also cheaper than the alternative. When DOOM first appeared in December of 1993, the industry was facing a budgetary catch-22 with no obvious solution. Hiring armies of artists to hand-paint every screen in a game was expensive; renting or building a sound stage, then hiring directors and camera people and dozens of actors to provide hours of full-motion-video footage was even more so. Players expected ever bigger, richer, longer games, which was intensely problematic when every single element in their worlds had to be drawn or filmed by hand. Sales were increasing at a steady clip by 1993, but they weren’t increasing quickly enough to offset the spiraling costs of production. Even major publishers like Sierra were beginning to post ugly losses on their bottom lines despite their increasing gross revenues.

3D graphics had the potential to fix all that, practically at a stroke. A 3D world is, almost by definition, a collection of interchangeable parts. Consider a simple item of furniture, like, say, a desk. In a 2D world, every desk must be laboriously hand-drawn by an artist in the same way that a traditional carpenter planes and joins the wood for such a thing in a workshop. But in a 3D world, the data constituting the basic form of “desk” can be inserted in a matter of seconds; desks can now make their way into games with the same alacrity with which they roll off of an IKEA production line. But you say that you don’t want every desk in your world to look exactly the same? Very well; it takes just a few keystrokes to change the color or wood grain or even the size of your desk, or to add or take away a drawer. We can arrive at endless individual implementations of “desk” from our Platonic ideal with surprising speed. Small wonder that, when the established industry was done marveling at DOOM‘s achievements in terms of gameplay, the thing they kept coming back to over and over was its astronomical profit margins. 3D graphics provided a way to make games make money again.

So, 3D offered worlds with vastly more emergent potential, made at a greatly reduced cost. There had to be a catch, right?

Alas, there was indeed. In many contexts, 3D graphics were right on the edge of what a typical computer could do at all in the mid-1990s, much less do with any sort of aesthetic appeal. Gamers would have to accept jagged edges, tearing textures, and a generalized visual crudity in 3D games for quite some time to come. A freeze-frame visual comparison with the games the industry had been making immediately before the 3D revolution did the new ones no favors: the games coming out of studios like Sierra and LucasArts had become genuinely beautiful by the early 1990s, thanks to those companies’ rooms full of dedicated pixel artists. It would take a considerable amount of time before 3D games would look anywhere near this nice. One can certainly argue that 3D was in some fairly fundamental sense necessary for the continuing evolution of game design, that this period of ugliness was one that the industry simply needed to plow through in order to emerge on the other side with a whole new universe of visual and emergent possibility to hand. Still, people mired in the middle of it could be forgiven for asking whether, from the evidence of screenshots alone, gaming technology wasn’t regressing rather than progressing.

But be that as it may, the 3D revolution ushered in by DOOM was here to stay. People would just have to get used to the visual crudity for the time being, and trust that eventually things would start to look better again.

Playing to the Base

There’s an eternal question in political and commercial marketing alike: do you play to the base, or do you try to reach out to a broader spectrum of people? The former may be safer, but raises the question of how many more followers you can collect from the same narrow slice of the population; the latter tempts you with the prospect of countless virgin souls waiting to embrace you, but is far riskier, with immense potential to backfire spectacularly if you don’t get the message and tone just right. This was the dichotomy confronting the boxed-games industry in the early 1990s.

By 1993, the conventional wisdom inside the industry had settled on the belief that outreach was the way forward. This dream of reaching a broader swath of people, of becoming as commonplace in living rooms as prime-time dramas and sitcoms, was inextricably bound up with the technology of CD-ROM, what with its potential to put footage of real human actors into games alongside spoken dialog and orchestral soundtracks. “What we think of today as a computer or a videogame system,” wrote Ken Williams of Sierra that year, “will someday assume a much broader role in our homes. I foresee a day when there is one home-entertainment device which combines the functions of a CD-audio player, VCR, videogame system, and computer.”

And then along came DOOM with its stereotypically adolescent-male orientation, along with sales numbers that threatened to turn the conventional wisdom about how well the industry could continue to feed off the same old demographic on its head. About six months after DOOM‘s release, when the powers that were were just beginning to grapple with its success and what it meant to each and every one of them, Alexander Antoniades, a founding editor of the new Game Developer magazine, more fully articulated the dream of outreach, as well as some of the doubts that were already beginning to plague it.

The potential of CD-ROM is tremendous because it is viewed as a superset not [a] subset of the existing computer-games industry. Everyone’s hoping that non-technical people who would never buy an Ultima, flight simulator, or DOOM will be willing to buy a CD-ROM game designed to appeal to a wider audience — changing the computer into [an] interactive VCR. If these technical neophytes’ first experience is a bad one, for $60 a disc, they’re not going to continue making the same mistake.

It will be this next year, as these consumers make their first CD-ROM purchases, that will determine the shape of the industry. If CD-ROM games are able to vary more in subject matter than traditional computer games, retain their platform independence, and capture new demographics, they will attain the status of a new platform [in themselves]. If not, they will just be another means to get product to market and will be just another label on the side of a box.

The next couple of years did indeed become a de-facto contest between these two ideas of gaming’s future. At first, the outreach camp could point to some notable successes on a scale similar to that of DOOM: The 7th Guest sold over 2 million copies, Myst sold an extraordinary 6 million or more. Yet the reality slowly dawned that most of those outside the traditional gaming demographic who purchased those games regarded them as little more than curiosities; most evidence would seem to indicate that they were never seriously played to a degree commensurate with their sales. Meanwhile the many similar titles which the industry rushed out in the wake of these success stories almost invariably became commercial disappointments.

The problems inherent in these multimedia-heavy “interactive movies” weren’t hard to see even at the time. In the same piece from which I quoted above, Alexander Antoniades noted that too many CD-ROM productions were “the equivalent of Pong games with captured video images of professional tennis players and CD-quality sounds of bouncing balls.” For various reasons — the limitations inherent in mixing and matching canned video clips; the core limitations of the software and hardware technology; perhaps simply a failure of imagination — the makers of too many of these extravaganzas never devised new modes of gameplay to complement their new modes of presentation. Instead they seemed to believe that the latter alone ought to be enough. Too often, these games fell back on rote set-piece puzzle-solving — an inherently niche activity even if done more creatively than we often saw in these games — for lack of any better ideas for making the “interactive” in interactive movies a reality. The proverbial everyday person firing up the computer-cum-stereo-cum-VCR at the end of a long workday wasn’t going to do so in order to watch a badly acted movie gated with frustrating logic puzzles.

While the multimedia came first with these productions, games of the DOOM school flipped that script. As the years went on and they too started to ship on the now-ubiquitous medium of CD-ROM, they too picked up cut scenes and spoken dialog, but they never suffered the identity crisis of their rivals; they knew that they were games first and foremost, and knew exactly what forms their interactivity should take. And most importantly from the point of view of the industry, these games sold. Post-1996 or so, high-concept interactive movies were out, as was most serious talk of outreach to new demographics. Visceral 3D action games were in, along with a doubling-down on the base.

To blame the industry’s retrenchment — its return to the demographically tried-and-true — entirely on DOOM is a stretch. Yet DOOM was a hugely important factor, standing as it did as a living proof of just how well the traditional core values of gaming could pay. The popularity of DOOM, combined with the exercise in diminishing commercial returns that interactive movies became, did much to push the industry down the path of retrenchment.

The minor tragedy in all this was not so much the end of interactive movies, given what intensely problematic endeavors they so clearly were, but rather that the latest games’ vision proved to be so circumscribed in terms of fiction, theme, and mechanics alike. By late in the decade, they had brought the boxed industry to a place of dismaying homogeneity; the values of the id boys had become the values of computer gaming writ large. Game fictions almost universally drew from the same shallow well of sci-fi action flicks and Dungeons & Dragons, with perhaps an occasional detour into military simulation. A shocking percentage of the new games being released fell into one of just two narrow gameplay genres: the first-person shooter and the real-time-strategy game.

These fictional and ludic genres are not, I hasten to note, illegitimate in themselves; I’ve enjoyed plenty of games in all of them. But one craves a little diversity, a more vibrant set of possibilities to choose from when wandering into one’s local software store. It would take a new outsider movement coupled with the rise of convenient digital distribution in the new millennium to finally make good on that early-1990s dream of making games for everyone. (How fitting that shaking loose the stranglehold of DOOM‘s progeny would require the exploitation of another alternative form of distribution, just as the id boys exploited the shareware model…)

The Murder Simulator

DOOM was mentioned occasionally in a vaguely disapproving way by mainstream media outlets immediately after its release, but largely escaped the ire of the politicians who were going after games like Night Trap and Mortal Kombat at the time; this was probably because its status as a computer rather than a console game led to its being played in bedrooms rather than living rooms, free from the prying eyes of concerned adults. It didn’t become the subject of a full-blown moral panic until weirdly late in its history.

On April 20, 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, a pair of students at Columbine High School in the Colorado town of the same name, walked into their school armed to the teeth with knives, explosives, and automatic weapons. They proceeded to kill 13 students and teachers and to injure 24 more before turning their guns on themselves. The day after the massacre, an Internet gaming news site called Blue’s News posted a message that “several readers have written in reporting having seen televised news reports showing the DOOM logo on something visible through clear bags containing materials said to be related to the suspected shooters. There is no word yet of what connection anyone is drawing between these materials and this case.” The word would come soon enough.

It turned out that Harris and Klebold had been great devotees of the game, not only as players but as creators of their own levels. “It’s going to be just like DOOM,” wrote Harris in his diary just before the massacre. “I must not be sidetracked by my feelings of sympathy. I will force myself to believe that everyone is just a monster from DOOM.” He chose his prize shotgun because it looked like one found in the game. On the surveillance tapes that recorded the horror in real time, the weapons-festooned boys pranced and preened as if they were consciously imitating the game they loved so much. Weapons experts noted that they seemed to have adopted their approach to shooting from what worked in DOOM. (In this case, of course, that was a wonderful thing, in that it kept them from killing anywhere close to the number of people they might otherwise have with the armaments at their disposal.)

There followed a storm of controversy over videogame content, with DOOM and the genre it had spawned squarely at its center. Journalists turned their attention to the FPS subculture for the first time, and discovered that more recent games like Duke Nukem 3D — the Columbine shooters’ other favorite game, a creation of Scott Miller’s old Apogee Software, now trading under the name of 3D Realms — made DOOM‘s blood and gore look downright tame. Senator Joseph Lieberman, a longstanding critic of videogames, beat the drum for legislation, and the name of DOOM even crossed the lips of President Bill Clinton. “My hope,” he said, “[is] to persuade the nation’s top cultural producers to call a cease-fire in the virtual arms race, to stop the release of ultra-violent videogames such as DOOM. Several of the school gunmen murderously mimicked [it] down to the choice of weapons and apparel.”

When one digs into the subject, one can’t help but note how the early life stories of John Carmack and John Romero bear some eerie similarities with those of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. The two Johns as well were angry kids who found it hard to fit in with their peers, who engaged in petty crime and found solace in action movies, heavy-metal music, and computer games. Indeed, a big part of the appeal of DOOM for its most committed fans was the sense that it had been made by people just like them, people who were coming from the same place. What caused Harris and Klebold, alone among the millions like them, to exorcise their anger and aggression in such a horrifying way? It’s a question that we can’t begin to answer. We can only say that, unfair though it may be, perceptions of DOOM outside the insular subculture of FPS fandom must always bear the taint of its connection with a mass murder.

And yet the public controversy over DOOM and its progeny resulted in little concrete change in the end. Lieberman’s proposed legislation died on the vine after the industry fecklessly promised to do a better job with content warnings, and the newspaper pundits moved on to other outrages. Forget talk of free speech; there was too much money in these types of games for them to go away. Just ten months after Columbine, Activision released Soldier of Fortune, which made a selling point of dismembered bodies and screams of pain so realistic that one reviewer claimed they left his dog a nervous wreck cowering in a corner. After the requisite wave of condemnation, the mainstream media forgot about it too.

Violence in games didn’t begin with DOOM or even Wolfenstein 3D, but it was certainly amplified and glorified by those games and the subculture they wrought. While a player may very well run up a huge body count in, say, a classic arcade game or an old-school CRPG, the violence there is so abstract as to be little more than a game mechanic. But in DOOM — and even more so in the game that followed it — experiential violence is a core part of the appeal. One revels in killing not just because of the new high score or character experience level one gets out of it, but for the thrill of killing itself, as depicted in such a visceral, embodied way. This does strike me as a fundamental qualitative shift from most of the games that came before.

Yet it’s very difficult to have a reasonable discussion on said violence’s implications, simply because opinions have become so hardened on the subject. To express concern on any level is to invite association with the likes of Joe Lieberman, a politician with a knack for choosing the most reactionary, least informed position on every single issue, who apparently was never fortunate enough to have a social-science professor drill the fact that correlation isn’t causation into his head.

Make no mistake: the gamers who scoff at the politicians’ hand-wringing have a point. Harris and Klebold probably were drawn to games like DOOM and Duke Nukem 3D because they already had violent fantasies, rather than having said fantasies inculcated by the games they happened to play. In a best-case scenario, we can even imagine other potential mass murderers channeling their aggression into a game rather than taking it out on real people, in much the same way that easy access to pornography may be a cause of the dramatic decline in incidents of rape and sexual violence in most Western countries since the rise of the World Wide Web.

That said, I for one am also willing to entertain the notion that spending hours every day killing things in the most brutal, visceral manner imaginable inside an embodied virtual space may have some negative effects on some personalities. Something John Carmack said about the subject in a fairly recent interview strikes me as alarmingly fallacious:

In later games and later times, when games [came complete with] moral ambiguity or actual negativity about what you’re doing, I always felt good about the decision that in DOOM, you’re fighting demons. There’s no gray area here. It is black and white. You’re the good guys, they’re the bad guys, and everything that you’re doing to them is fully deserved.

In reality, though, the danger which games like DOOM may present, especially in the dismayingly polarized societies many of us live in in our current troubled times, is not that they ask us to revel in our moral ambiguity, much less our pure evil. It’s rather the way they’re able to convince us that the Others whom we’re killing “fully deserve” the violence we visit upon them because “they’re the bad guys.” (Recall those chilling words from Eric Harris’s diary, about convincing himself that his teachers and classmates are really just monsters…) This tendency is arguably less insidious when the bad guys in question are ridiculously over-the-top demons from Hell than when they’re soldiers who just happen to be wearing a different uniform, one which they may quite possibly have had no other choice but to don. Nevertheless, DOOM started something which games like the interminable Call of Duty franchise were only too happy to run with.

I personally would like to see less violence rather than more in games, all things being equal, and would like to see more games about building things up rather than tearing them down, fun though the latter can be on occasion. It strikes me that the disturbing association of some strands of gamer culture with some of the more hateful political movements of our times may not be entirely accidental, and that some of the root causes may stretch all the way back to DOOM — which is not to say that it’s wrong for any given individual to play DOOM or even Call of Duty. It’s only to say that the likes of GamersGate may be yet another weirdly attenuated part of DOOM‘s endlessly multi-faceted legacy.

Creative Destruction?

In other ways, though, the DOOM community actually was — and is — a community of creation rather than destruction. (I did say these narratives of DOOM wouldn’t be cut-and-dried, didn’t I?)

John Carmack, by his own account alone among the id boys, was inspired rather than dismayed by the modding scene that sprang up around Wolfenstein 3D — so much so that, rather than taking steps to make such things more difficult in DOOM, he did just the opposite: he separated the level data from the game engine much more completely than had been the case with Wolfenstein 3D, thus making it possible to distribute new DOOM levels completely legally, and released documentation of the WAD format in which the levels were stored on the same day that id released the game itself.

The origins of his generosity hearken back once again to this idea that the people who made DOOM weren’t so very different from the people who played it. One of Carmack’s formative experiences as a hacker was his exploration of Ultima II on his first Apple II. Carmack:

To go ahead and hack things to turn trees into chests or modify my gold or whatever… I loved that. The ability to go several steps further and release actual source code, make it easy to modify things, to let future generations get what I wished I had had a decade earlier—I think that’s been a really good thing. To this day I run into people all the time that say, whether it was Doom, or maybe even more so Quake later on, that that openness and that ability to get into the guts of things was what got them into the industry or into technology. A lot of people who are really significant people in significant places still have good things to say about that.

Carmack speaks of “a decade-long fight inside id about how open we should be with the technology and the modifiability.” The others questioned this commitment to what Carmack called “open gaming” more skeptically than ever when some companies started scooping up some of the thousands of fan-made levels, plopping them onto CDs, and selling them without paying a cent to id. But in the long run, the commitment to openness kept DOOM alive; rather than a mere computer game, it became a veritable cottage industry of its own. Plenty of people played literally nothing else for months or even years at a stretch.

The debate inside id raged more than ever in 1997, when Carmack insisted on releasing the complete original source code to DOOM. (He had done the same for the Wolfenstein 3D code two years before.) As he alludes above, the DOOM code became a touchstone for an up-and-coming generation of game programmers, even as many future game designers cut their teeth and made early names for themselves by creating custom levels to run within the engine. And, inevitably, the release of the source code led to a flurry of ports to every imaginable platform: “Everything that has a 32-bit [or better] processor has had DOOM run on it,” says Carmack with justifiable pride. Today you can play DOOM on digital cameras, printers, and even thermostats, and do so if you like in hobbyist-created levels that coax the engine into entirely new modes of play that the id boys never even began to conceive of.

This narrative of DOOM bears a distinct similarity to that of another community of creation with which I happen to be much better acquainted: the post-Infocom interactive-fiction community that arose at about the same time that the original DOOM was taking the world by storm. Like the DOOM people, the interactive-fiction people built upon a beloved company’s well-nigh timeless software engineering; like them, they eventually stretched that engine in all sorts of unanticipated directions, and are still doing it to this day. A comparison between the cerebral text adventures of Infocom and the frenetic shooters of id might seem incongruous at first blush, but there you are. Long may their separate communities of love and craft continue to thrive.

As you have doubtless gathered by now, the legacy of DOOM is a complicated one that’s almost uniquely resistant to simplification. Every statement has a qualifier; every yang has a yin. This can be frustrating for a writer; it’s in the nature of us as a breed to want straightforward causes and effects. The desire for them may lead one to make trends that were obscure at best to the people living through them seem more obvious than they really were. Therefore allow me to reiterate that the new gaming order which DOOM created wouldn’t become undeniable to everyone until fully three or four years after its release. A reader recently emailed me the argument that 1996 was actually the best year ever for adventure games, the genre which, according to some oversimplified histories, DOOM and games like it killed at a stroke — and darned if he didn’t make a pretty good case for it.

So, while I’m afraid I’ll never be much of a gibber and/or fragger, we should continue to have much to talk about. Onward, then, into the new order. I dare say that from the perspective of the boots on the ground it will continue to look much like the old one for quite some time to come. And after that? Well, we’ll take it as it comes. I won’t be mooting any more stopping dates.

(Sources: the books The Complete Wargames Handbook (2000 edition) by James F. Dunnigan, Masters of Doom by David Kushner, Game Engine Black Book: DOOM by Fabien Sanglard, Principles of Three-Dimensional Computer Animation by Michael O’Rourke, and Columbine by Dave Cullen; Retro Gamer 75; Game Developer of June 1994; Chris Kohler’s interview with John Carmack for Wired. And a special thanks to Alex Sarosi, a.k.a. Lt. Nitpicker, for his valuable email correspondence on the legacy of DOOM, as well as to Josh Martin for pointing out in a timely comment to the last article the delightful fact that DOOM can now be run on a thermostat.)

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/the-shareware-scene-part-5-narratives-of-doom/

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

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Food-Adjacent TV to Stream This Weekend, According to Eater Staff added to Google Docs

Food-Adjacent TV to Stream This Weekend, According to Eater Staff

 Actor Sandra Oh, wearing a black chef beanie and a white t-shirt, talks on an iPhone outside a restaurant kitchen. | BBC America

“Killing Eve,” reality TV favorites, classic sitcoms, and more

We at Eater spend a lot of time thinking about food, so when it appears on our TV screen, we take special interest. If you’re looking to stream some non-food TV that happens to be — at least tangentially — about food this weekend, here’s what we recommend.

Terrace House: Tokyo, Episode 11 (available to stream on Netflix)

Terrace House, the Japanese version of The Real World, has had a long history of food-related misdemeanors and crimes, but the most recent one entails broccoli, pasta water, and egg. Ruka, one of the housemates of the Tokyo house, is a complete enigma of a human being and maybe the most naive person to ever grace Terrace House (or the world?). In an attempt to cook broccoli pasta carbonara, he cracks an egg into the pasta water with the pasta, then adds broccoli. It seems he read the ingredient list, skipped the instructions, and simply winged it. Nothing matters, you know?!

In Netflix’s latest batch of episodes (Netflix US runs a couple of months behind Japan), Ruka attempts broccoli pasta carbonara again. I gasped when I saw he was making pasta FROM SCRATCH and squealed when he presented something that not only looked edible, but delicious! His housemates were (understandably) pleasantly shocked and I got very emotional. It’s rare when you see such dramatic growth. I imagine this is what parents feel when they see their children walk for the first time. — Pelin Keskin, Eater associate producer

Community (available to stream on Hulu and Netflix)

In 2009, when Community first aired, I was actually taking classes at a community college. Yet, somehow I’ve made it this long without watching this series created by Dan Harmon and featuring some of the current era’s most memorable actors (See: Donald Glover, Alison Brie, Gillian Jacobs, and Ken Jeong). The first season hinges on narcissistic student Jeff Winger (Joel McHale) starting classes at a Greendale Community College, where he’s pursuing his bachelor’s degree in an attempt to reclaim his suspended law license. Winger joins a Spanish 101 study group (remember when people still gathered in groups?) to incessantly hit on Britta Perry (played by Jacobs). But as the show evolves, episodes become more unhinged, playing into pop culture tropes observed by TV and movie obsessed student Abed Nadir (Danny Pudi). After a while, it becomes easier to view this show as sort of a live-action version of Harmon’s later work Rick and Morty, but with a slightly less noxious fandom attached. This is particularly encapsulated in episodes like Season 2’s “Epidemiology,” in which the whole student body is transformed into zombies after eating expired military rations. Season 2 also features an excellent example of weird TV sponcon in “Basic Rocket Science,” where the study group gets trapped inside a Kentucky Fried Chicken-branded space flight simulator. — Brenna Houck, Eater.com reporter and Eater Detroit editor

Killing Eve (Season 3, Episode 1, available to stream on BBC America)

Killing Eve, a BBC show that for two seasons has been about feminism, fucking, and fighting, has added a fourth “f” to its roster: food. When we reunite with the show’s titular “Eve” (Sandra Oh), we watch her shopping the aisles of an Asian grocery, grabbing ramen cups and snacks from shelves that seem preposterously well-stocked to my pandemic-warped eyes. The multitudes the store holds are intoxicating. We then discover that since we last saw her — left for dead by Villanelle (Jodie Comer), an assassin with whom she is/was mutually obsessed — Eve’s fled her job at MI5 for a gig as a dumpling chef at an Asian restaurant, a perfect place, perhaps, for an Asian American woman to make herself invisible in a city like London. As audience members, we get to watch her deftly pinch pot sticker after pot sticker as she eavesdrops on her relationship-impaired colleagues (once a spy, always a spy, perhaps), a rote activity that probably has a lot more in common with tradecraft than most espionage-based thrillers would have us believe. It’s a nice job for a perfectionist like Eve, one that’ll do well enough until (one assumes) Villanelle returns to her life and again throws it into chaos. — Eve Batey, senior editor, Eater SF

Difficult People (Season 1, Episode 5, available on Hulu)

Much of this criminally short-lived sitcom starring comedians Billy Eichner (Billy on the Street) and Julie Klausner takes place in a restaurant where a struggling-artist version of Billy works to pay the bills. But this episode stands out for its art-imitating-life plot: Julie, who has “the palate of a seven-year-old” stops by Billy’s place of employment to eat, but finds the menu too fancy for her liking (“everything on [the] menu has some kind of chutney or jus on it,” Julie complains).

So, when Billy’s boss leaves town for a few days, the duo convert the restaurant into a pop-up named the Children’s Menu, serving items that would belong on a kids’ menu someplace like Applebee’s. The pair set about marking up chicken tenders and fish sticks and peddling it to food blogs. And because Difficult People is set in New York, home to many people with poor taste but lots of money, crowds lap it up. It’s a fun skewering of a side of the food world that values creatively bankrupt novelty above all else. Looking at you, “cereal bars” and Museum of Ice Cream. — Tim Forster, editor, Eater Montreal

Lodge 49 (available to purchase on Amazon Prime)

I‘m not surprised Lodge 49 was cancelled after two seasons on AMC last fall; I’m delighted it aired at all. This shaggy dog show stars Wyatt Russell (the waggish spawn of Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell) as Dud, an adrift surfer in recession-hit Long Beach, who finds connection through a fraternal lodge along the lines of the Freemasons. Meanwhile his sister Liz (Sonya Cassidy) works at a shitty Hooters knockoff called Shamroxx, run by a ghoulish regional corporate conglomerate, Omni Capital. These days, I’m reminded of Liz’s Season 2 story arc: She’s made manager of Omni’s replacement for Shamroxx, a stupid new steakhouse concept called Higher Steaks. When the restaurant struggles, the way Liz sticks up for her colleagues, who are some of the show’s best minor characters, is an inspiring rebuke of winner-takes-all capitalism — no surprise, as the whole show is basically a socialist document. Ironically it’s not streaming for free, but Lodge 49 is special and well worth buying to watch. — Caleb Pershan, Eater.com reporter

Frasier, Season 1, Episode 3 (available to stream on Hulu)

I know I’m incredibly late getting into Fraiser (most of my coworkers are obsessed with it), but it’s been about a week now and I’m already halfway through the second season. I can’t get enough of it. While Frasier’s advice to his listeners can be a little “meh,” it’s absolutely delightful to watch the main characters give each other therapy through their conversations. And watching each episode unfold feels like much needed therapy right now.

I could go on and on about all the episodes I love, but “Dinner at Eight” is my absolute favorite. Frasier (Kelsey Grammer) and his brother Niles (David Hyde Pierce) decide to take their father Martin (John Mahoney) out to dinner as a way to spend more quality time with him. When the restaurant loses their reservation, they decide to visit a steakhouse at Martin’s suggestion. His pitch: “You can get a steak this thick for $8.95.”

The Timber Mill is nothing like the trendy, pretentious restaurants Frasier and Niles frequent and the duration of the entire meal is a culinary culture clash. For example, when the beef trolley arrives and everyone at the table has to pick their cut of steak, Frasier asks, “How much extra would I have to pay to get one from the refrigerator?”

It’s absolutely heartbreaking to watch Martin get more and more aggravated as Frasier and Niles make ridiculously elaborate orders (a petite filet mignon “very lean, not so lean that it lacks flavor but not so fat that it leaves drippings on the plate”), poke fun at the restaurant, and give the servers a hard time. That’s why it’s so satisfying to watch Martin skewer Frasier and Niles for their snobbery, leaving them to eat the rest of their dinner alone under the scornful eyes of the Timber Mill’s servers as “Tossed Salads and Scrambled Eggs” plays in the background. — Esra Erol, senior social media manager, Eater

Real Housewives of New York, Season 8, Episodes 6 & 7

In times of uncertainty, we seek comfort in consistency: The sun will rise in the east, the tides will ebb and flow, and rich women will scream at each other for our enjoyment on Bravo. Recently, I’ve been rewatching old episodes of Real Housewives of New York and am currently in the midst of its landmark eighth season (“Please don’t let it be about Tom.” “It’s about Tom”). Practically every episode is a hit, but “Tipsying Point” and “Air Your Dirty Laundry” conveniently double as a lesson in the booze business. When jack of all trades/master of none Sonja Morgan announces that she’s releasing a signature prosecco called Tipsy Girl, she faces the wrath of Bethenny Frankel, founder of the Skinny Girl brand. As even the most casual Housewives watcher will tell you, Bethenny is famously protective of her business and turns vicious at any perceived attack on it. “I thought the alcohol was a great idea. I really looked up to what you did and I thought it would be a great way for me to get ahead,” Sonja blubbers to Bethenny in her Skinny Girl brand-blazoned office. It’s because of this episode, and this fight in particular, that I know what a “cheater brand” is.

By the way, I’ve tried Tipsy Girl prosecco and it’s... not the worst wine I’ve had. — Madeleine Davies, Eater.com daily editor

via Eater - All https://www.eater.com/2020/4/17/21225037/killing-eve-food-adjacent-tv-to-stream-this-weekend

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