#but after his release because I wrote them in a dm one (1) whole day before reading project amber and oh my god

[feroluce]

Hello!! I came here because I was informed you had some Wriowinne headcanons and ramblings to share? Would it be alright for me to ask for some 👉👈 (or as much as you want to share please I'm desperate for food)

OH BOY DO I.

I feel you anon, I've been shipping them like...since the PV. So I've been stuck in utter absolute hell, getting nothing but father&daughter content from the fandom (shoutout to @hydrachea for being able to dual wield and letting me talk ship to her, light of my life fr weh). I'm hoping now that 4.1 has been out for a little bit, we'll get some more of them, though. I've dug through our dms, and found a hc that takes place after 4.1. So spoilers for that archon quest, but no leaks are involved!

Anyway, I love thinking about how close they cut it at the climax of 4.1, and the aftermath of it all.

Sigewinne somehow finding out what happened down there at the bottom of Meropide while she was evacuating the inmates, and like. She knows what the stakes were. The Primordial Seawater could not be allowed to rise. Clorinde made the right decision in shooting the gate lock. Even if it had killed Wriothesley, it still would have been the right decision.

That doesn't mean it's not a bitter pill to swallow.

Sigewinne can usually put it out of mind during the day, especially when she's busy treating patients, but it's harder when she's asleep. She dreams of the evacuation, and the alarm blaring, and waiting and waiting and waiting, and Clorinde walking past, alone, with her head down and her fists shaking, until Neuvilette finally approaches. Wriothesley isn't with him.

And Neuvilette's face doesn't really show much. It never does. But Sigewinne is close enough to the surface that she can hear the absolute downpour raging outside as Neuvilette tells her that he's sorry, he's so so sorry, and he gives her a gray and black and red coat, so soaked through with Primordial Seawater that he'd been afraid to let anyone else touch it, and the fur collar is matted and wet against Sigewinne's face when she clutches it close-

Sigewinne jolts awake, grasping at whatever is in her reach, which just happens to include Wriothesley's arm. His eyes almost immediately fly open, slurring out a mix of what's goin' on and what's wrong, and then a do we need to evacuate and poor Sigewinne, she feels awful. He hasn't been sleeping as well since the almost-flood, every little sound wakes him up now.

(There are nights where she'll wake up alone, and if she goes looking, she'll find Wriothesley, still in his sleep clothes and looking exhausted, down under their secret passage and staring at Neuvilette's seal over the sluice gate. Like he's keeping watch over it, or just daring it to try and do something.

Whenever she finds him like this, Sigewinne tells him to come on, come back to bed, and he'll keep his eye on it until the last possible second, but generally Wriothesley comes when called, and he'll let her lead him away. On his worse nights, he'll tell her to go back without him, he can't sleep anyway, he's going to stay down here for just a little while longer. He'll be back later. And she does occasionally go back to bed, but most of the time she stays, because she doesn't like the idea of him alone down there. Sigewinne will tuck herself into his side, or she'll get him to relax his guard just enough to lay with his head in her lap, and they'll stay there like that until Wriothesley finally decides he can bear to leave it alone and go back to bed with her.)

So with all that in mind, when she accidentally wakes him up, Sigewinne quickly gets her breathing back under control and pets his hair until he relaxes again. She tells him it's fine, everything is ok. Meropide is safe. Their home and everyone in it is safe. Go back to sleep. He needs his rest if he's going to go up to the overworld for supplies in the morning. She'll go sleep in the infirmary, she just had a nightmare, is all (the truth), it was nothing, she barely even remembers it anymore (a lie).

Sigewinne doesn't even make it out of bed, though, because when she tries to go, she finds her wrist suddenly caught. She turns back and Wriothesley is squinting up at her face, human night vision isn't nearly as good as a Mélusine's. They sit there like that for a moment, until she can see through the expression on his face that he's come to some sort of decision. Wriothesley pulls her back in and Sigewinne lets him, lets him rearrange them into something more comfortable. It's easy to give up when it's him, she didn't truly want to leave anyway. By the time he makes a satisfied little huff into her hair, Sigewinne is tucked under his chin, her face against his chest, one arm wrapped around her to keep her there. She pats his side and tells him ok, ok, she gets it. She won't go anywhere.

Wriothesley buries his face in her hair and sighs at that, something deeper and more content that hilariously reminds Sigewinne of a dog asleep on the floor. "Good." Wriothesley sounds like he's already half-asleep again. His arm still tightens around her waist though, just to make a point. "How could I sleep, when I know you're off somewhere crying alone?"

Sigewinne touches her cheek, and sure enough, it's wet? She has tear tracks. No wonder Wriothesley had been staring at her so hard. She hadn't even realized. And she opens her mouth to protest because she wasn't crying, some tears in her sleep doesn't count, but. Wriothesley is already asleep again, breathing slow and deep and even, and his arm is heavy and warm around her, and his sleep shirt is soft and comfortable against her face, not at all like the fur-collared coat in her dreams.

Sigewinne gives in again, curls into all that warmth and wraps herself up in it, until it lulls her back to sleep.

#sigewrio #wriosig #wriowinne #genshin impact wriothesley #genshin impact sigewinne #THEM..... #augh my heart #I love them so much rolling around kicking making girly noises on my bed #I love thinking about Rosie being protective of Meropide #he put so much work into this place #into these people #I have bigger longer thoughts for that which will maybe go into their own post later #but after his release because I wrote them in a dm one (1) whole day before reading project amber and oh my god #the leaks made it SO much funnier JFKLJASKLDFJ #just realized I called him Rosie in a tag so just for the record that's my nickname I usually use for Wriothesley #it will probably happen again #but anyway yes post-4.1 hurt/comfort #they're so so sweet and they go through it a little bit but they have each other for it <3 #I hope this is enough of a starter anon I have more for later though #thank you so much it made me really happy to get this ask <3 #genshin impact #genshin impact 4.1 #wriothesley #sigewinne #ask #answer #anon

[ashketchup119]

Figuring It Out As We Go Chap. 1

Here we arreeee~ the fic i sat on for a month and a half before i decided to post it~

I got this in my head a couple days after reading the whole spicynoodles tag on ao3, because as yall have prolly figured out, if i run out of content for a ship, i usually begin making the content myself. After i post chaps 1 and 2, i’ll begin updating this every friday, like i do on ao3. I don’t know why i wrote this, but honestly i pumped out 4000 words of it in 2 hrs one night, so yall know im in love w it.

It’s got like, implied nsfw, some emotions on mk’s part, some other stuff goin on 👀 (also if ur emetophobic feel free to stop by the askbox or my dms to ask for a summary bc this might trigger u)

I hope yall like it!!

It had started off as a casual thing.

A release of post-battle adrenaline, the kind of thing MK and Red Son did and then immediately agreed not to talk about or repeat.

But they repeated it, again and again and again.

The sound of their labored breathing echoed throughout MK’s apartment as the two of them lay on the bed, finally spent. MK felt pleasantly drowsy, and basked in the final rays of sunshine that shone through his window.

“I have to go.” Red Son murmured from beneath him. “My parents will be looking for me.”

MK buried his face in the crook of Red Son’s neck, and bit back the words in his throat that sounded suspiciously like “stay, don’t go, let me fall asleep in your arms.” Dangerous words, ones that would make this situation even worse.

They both knew that this was possibly the worst decision either of them had ever made, but MK wondered when “a casual fuck” had turned into something more, something that pricked at his eyes and put words on his tongue. He knew he’d never tell Red Son about any of his blossoming feelings, but he found himself wondering about the demon more and more. He’d never stayed for breakfast, but MK wondered if he drank coffee in the mornings. Maybe he was a chocolate milk drinker. Maybe he drank tea. Did he like pancakes or waffles better?

MK wanted to know everything about Red Son, from the tiny, inconsequential things to the big, life-changing moments.

He just wanted Red Son, in every way.

MK’s breath caught in his throat, but he rolled to the other side of the bed so Red Son could get up. He stared up at the ceiling as he heard the shuffling of clothes next to his bed, and chewed on his bottom lip as he blinked back tears. He’d been very emotional lately, and the feelings swirling in his head didn’t help.

The rustling of clothes stopped, and he heard quiet footsteps head toward the window. He heard Red Son draw in a breath, then listened as the window unlatched and closed as he left.

MK sucked in a breath, then began to cry. He curled in on himself as sobs shook his frame. He cried for lost chances, bad decisions, and missed opportunities. He ached to be held, to be soothed, but the only person who could help him feel better had already left.

He cried until he could cry no more, tired and dehydrated as he was. Then, he showered, using cold water to shock him into awakeness and out of the post-coital funk. He felt slightly better after putting on some pajama pants, then went to his mini-fridge to see if he had any food.

Truthfully, the stomach issues he’d been fighting off and on for a couple months now made it difficult to find an appetite, but he figured it was better to eat something and hopefully absorb some of the nutrients than eat nothing. He’d even tried a liquid-only diet, but had thrown up the liquids too.

He picked a package of dumplings, then settled on the sofa to watch reruns of Monkey King: The Animated Series. Fifteen minutes later, he was once again in the restroom, this time throwing up what little he managed to eat of the dumplings. When he finished, he finally gave in and called the doctor.

“Thank you for calling the clinic, how may I help you?” The receptionist answered.

Mk cleared his throat before responding, “Yes, I’d like to make an appointment,” in his most grown up voice.

The sounds of typing came through the line, and the receptionist asked, “Name?”

“Uh, Qi Xiaotian.”

“Okay, we have an opening tomorrow at 1 PM. Are you available?”

MK thought it over for a moment. On the one hand, he’d have to call in sick, but on the other, Pigsy would probably let him, what with his stomach issues and all. “Yes, I am.”

“Good. See you then!” The line went dead, and MK hung up.

Then, he called Mei.

“Hey MK!” She greeted excitedly. “What’s up?”

“Hey Mei! Can you take me to the doctor tomorrow?” He asked, knowing that Pigsy was busy and Tang didn’t have a car.

Her voice immediately took on a tone of concern. “Okay, but are you okay?”

“Yeah, just an annoying stomach bug.” He replied casually, flopping on the bed as he sipped water from a water bottle. “They’ll probably just give me some pills and tell me to drink liquids. Shouldn’t be too long.”

“Alright, but if it gets bad or you start throwing up blood or something, promise me you’ll go to the hospital?” Mei asked.

MK smiled as he replied, “Yeah, of course.”

It was nice to know that someone cared about him.

He just had to forget about Red Son and remember all the people in his life who loved him.

Mei hung up after that, and MK went back to their marathon. The episodes were ones they’d already seen, but there was a comfort in these older episodes, akin to wearing a nostalgia blanket. They snuggled with their favorite stuffed animal, and soon drifted into a heavy sleep.

#spicynoodles #fanned fiction #lego monkie king #monkie kid #fioawg #spicynoodlesshipping #lmk red son #lmk mk #ash does shit

[brynnmck]

J/B Exchange Recs Round 1!

I have not been around Tumblr much lately because I was so preoccupied with stuff for @jaime-brienne-fic-exchange, but I am trying to get back into the swing of things, and I figured what better place to start than with some recs?

These are currently skewed a bit toward my amaaaazing gift fic and the amaaaaazing ones I beta-ed, since I am way behind on my reading, but there will be more to come!

Backpfeifengesicht by @samirant - I am so unbelievably grateful that I had both amazing prompts/amazing recipient for the fic I wrote, and such a fabulous gift fic too. I was still working on my own fic and very sleep-deprived and flagging when I read this for the first time and I think I may have actually left my body on a wave of sheer euphoria. IT IS ALL THE GOOD THINGS. So many of my favorite vacation/road trip tropes--drunken shenanigans! Intimate late-night conversations while everyone else is sleeping/elsewhere! Friends being too involved in your relationship! Unexpected forced proximity! And the banter is glorious, and the secondary characters are so well thought out and add such depth and vibrance to the story, and the Sansa/Margaery subplot was DELIGHTFUL, and I love the way this structured Brienne's relationship to Tyrion and then to Jaime as an extension of that, and the resolution was handled with an absolutely perfect balance of hilarity and heat. (There was also the stuff throughout that was very targeted to me specifically WHICH I APPRECIATED, so thanks to both Sami and @forbiddenfantasies1 for that). About 20% of the way into the story, I was deeply convinced it was Sami, and in the best possible way--it had the hallmarks I love about her writing: her sense of humor, her gift for banter, her clear affection for the characters, the richness of all the relationships. It was like showing up to a party and unexpectedly finding a friend there, and it was the loveliest feeling. I am thrilled that so many people have read and loved this story but I want everyone in the world to read and love it, so. Please check it out if you haven't! And also check out Sami's hilarious tale of woe regarding her writing process, which is amazing. THANK YOU AGAIN FOR SUCH A PHENOMENAL GIFT SAMI.  ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ ❤️

A favorite line: On any other day, Brienne would have left him - a relative stranger - to his wallowing, but an untold amount of imbibed Pentoshi Slammers stirred up a noble benevolence within her, a little voice that said they had something in common and what good were her broad shoulders if they weren’t offered as a place to rest a weary, heartbroken brow? SO GOOD.

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Lay Your Heartbreak and the sequel You could make me feel so good by @ajoblotofjunk / sdwolfpup - LISTEN. SDW sent me an early chunk of this and I was immediately OBSESSED and I have not stopped being obsessed since. Obviously worldbuilding is a huge strength of SDW's and her creativity with that is a constant astonishment to me. But pop culture is full of examples of people who can create amazing worlds and then utterly fail to populate them with interesting or dynamic characters, whereas SDW's ability to fill in those wonderfully creative spaces with her love for the characters and their love for each other that is just magic. And these fics are the perfect examples of that. The setup is not only fascinating but makes for such fantastically INTENSE feelings, omg, everything just feels like it's crackling off the page; even before Jaime and Brienne and Addam are admitting anything to each other, it's not so much simmering under the surface as boiling. The balance between the three of them is gorgeous, there are two incredibly hot fencing scenes as well as a very hot swimming scene (in addition to the sequel being just one big tangle of brain-scorching hotness), there's a perfect amount of sweetness and softness to play off all the blazing heat, and overall this is one that's going to stick with me for a long time. I know J/A/B isn't everyone's cup of tea, but if you aren't actively opposed to the idea of them, then I highly highly encourage you to check this out. 

A favorite line: That night she dreams of golden skin, hot and soft against her palm – yes, someone moans, yes – the rough scrape of callouses over the arch of her ribs, the scratch of red stubble between her thighs – like this? Yes, more, please more – legs sliding together and between each other, and two mouths touching her all over. Hnnnnngh.

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The Limit Does Not Exist by @agirlnamedkeith / sameboots - Fics with a power imbalance are something I approach with a lot of caution but I LOVED the way that sameboots handled it here. The fact that this fic includes her signature extremely hot feelings-forward porn as well as a thoughtful exploration of what it can mean to be a woman in STEM is like a beautiful multi-course meal; I cared a LOT about whether they were gonna do it and I was also equally invested in how Brienne’s thesis was going to turn out and where she would go from there. I love Brienne’s stubbornness and determination and even though she’s finding her way here (as you would be, as a grad student), those elements are VERY much on display and they spark fantastically against an initially guarded and caustic but eventually deeply admiring Jaime. And while I don’t want to spoil anything, I will say that I feel like the end is a perfect illustration of one of the major themes of the fic, and I love it so much for that. Watching this one take shape and watching sameboots geek out over her math research was a delight, and the result is excellent (and did I mention, extremely hot). Definitely worth all her work!

A favorite line: “Has anyone ever told you that you’re the worst liar?” (KIDDING HANNAH ILU HERE’S THE REAL ONE:)  The problem with smoothies was that it was hard to make them aggressively., Angrily pushing a button didn’t have the same release as whaling on a punching bag. Brienne didn’t have a punching bag, though, and she desperately needed to do something, and she was hungry. ANGRY SMOOTHING-MAKING. I LOVE IT.

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Right Off the Bat by @hillaryschu - A You’ve Got Mail AU where Jaime and Brienne are rival Little League coaches who unknowingly bond over Twitter is SUCH a great idea, and Hillary committed to it right down to the delightful rom-com-trailer summary. She also put an enormous amount of care into the details of the story--she had references for outfits, buildings, even Jaime’s cologne--and it shows in all the lush descriptions throughout. The banter is sparky, watching their two relationships gradually unfold is a lot of fun, there’s a particular tipsy (on Brienne’s part) Twitter DM exchange that I still get flustered thinking about, and there’s a batting cage scene that will be haunting my brain for a while. Especially given that Hillary had never written a story anywhere near this long before, I’m so impressed that she pulled it off (and fixed some of the most problematic elements of the movie, too). Congratulations to her on rising to the challenge!

A favorite line: But as they part from each other, Brienne lifts the hem of her tee to wipe the dirt and sweat from her face. Her exposed stomach is pale and toned, with softly defined muscles that gleam with perspiration. Jaime trips over home plate. SAME JAIME. SAME.

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X Marks the Spot (where I’ll find you again) by @pretty--thief - PIRATES. I WAS SO EXCITED WHEN I HEARD ABOUT THE PIRATES. And this fic is such a fantastic blend of snappy, exciting swashbuckling (and hilarious use of parrots) and a very poignant backstory that underlays the adventure with all this yeeeeeearning and it’s SO GOOD. The action scenes are thrilling, the descriptions are gorgeous, there is STARGAZING and BATTLE COUPLE, the Jaime snark is chefkiss, Brienne is so brave and committed and quietly full of feelings, there’s a really lovely discussion of the ethics of being in the military, and also Pod and Addam and Arya and PIRATES FOR JUSTICE. SO HERE FOR THAT. And did I mention the yeeeeeearning (which is paid off wonderfully--the penultimate chapter lived rent-free in my mind for about a week after I first read it)? Ugh SO GOOD.

A favorite line: When he had exited his quarters, Brienne had looked at him with so much concern in her eyes it threatened to swallow Jaime whole. He’d felt something similar when he was around Cersei, when they were fucking or fighting; a fire he had once thought he could never tire of, would never want to put out. But Brienne had reached out her hand, as if on reflex, and smoothed her thumb across his tired brow. The ship had continued to sway beneath them, and Jaime didn’t feel fire. He didn’t feel like he would be turned to ash at any moment. He felt a breeze, the wind in his hair and salty air in his lungs. as;lfkja;sldjgas;lfjas;lf 

_____

Federation Fliers by @elizadunc /Ladybugbear2 - A short and very sweet one! I adore the world that Megs created in this and would happily read many many more words in it, but this is a lovely glimpse in and of itself, and made me so happy. Established relationship (which I love), one of my favorite Jaime nicknames for Brienne, a wonderfully badass Brienne and a wonderfully besotted Jaime, all against a fascinating backdrop. So good!

A favorite line: She belonged in the sky. She had a grace to her movements on the ground, but in the sky she was ethereal. HEART-EYES

_____

And now for a few that I just read after they were posted like a normal person:

Wine Down by @slipsthrufingers - SOME MILD SPOILERS HEREIN FYI. Okay first of all, the summary of this fic is deliciously evil and I think we all need to appreciate that. Also, it starts out with Jaime and Brienne having lunch together and these glorious descriptions of food and he has taken note of the specific food she likes and is making sure it’s provided for her and that is SO VERY MUCH MY LOVE LANGUAGE YOU DON’T EVEN KNOW. I FLAILED. And then things go, shall we say, a bit downhill, but in the most achingly beautiful way--Jaime sacrificing himself for Brienne and Brienne determined to tether him to life through sheer force of will and steadfast devotion. Slips puts us right into Brienne’s headspace/heartspace while she’s worrying for Jaime and trying to negotiate the fucked-up Lannister family dynamics (and the observations on said dynamics are wonderful too), and this hits such an excellent balance of Brienne’s rigidly controlled surface and everything that’s roiling away underneath. I’m always fascinated by the idea of what could have happened during the time that Brienne was in King’s Landing and this is such a brilliant exploration of how things could have gone, and Brienne’s interactions with the rest of the Lannisters (and Sansa) give the world that much more depth as well. The descriptions throughout are beautiful, there are so many lovely turns of phrase, the intimacy between Jaime and Brienne is just devastating, and it all comes back around to an immensely satisfying conclusion. SO GOOD. 

A favorite line: The gods had seen fit to give her an unwomanly body, so she had taken up the sword. They had given her an ugly face, so she had perfected her manners and courtesies so they could never be frowned upon. But they had given her a maiden’s heart, and try as she might she had never found the right weapon to protect it. MY PRECIOUS GIRL.

_____

A Matter of Honor by @nire-the-mithridatist - I shrieked at nire in DMs basically the whole time I was reading this story, it made me experience like 90% of the range of human emotions in one night and I’m still mad about it. This features a fascinatingly flipped script where Brienne is the wealthy one and Jaime the supplicant, and an arrogant-ass supplicant he is. Brienne is an angy baby nineteen-year-old who is furious at the entire world and I fucking adore her for it, and watching all the events unfold through the lens of her (generally well-founded) suspicions was a delicious sort of torture where I trusted NO ONE and genuinely did not know exactly what was going to happen next. Nire turns a lot of marriage fic tropes on their head in this and it’s all done brilliantly, and there is EXTREMELY SEXY SWORD-FIGHTING (and as a sexy bonus, Brienne’s perspective on it feels so perfect for someone who is truly an accomplished swordswoman), and nire uses some common elements throughout to just pack in these layers and layers of meaning and significance, and there are many turns of phrase so perfect that they hurt, and then she’s like “hey would you like to re-feel all the feelings in this story again in a very concentrated burst” and it’s SO MUCH, and the conclusion pays everything off amazingly. And even though it’s very swoony and romantic (and HOT. I SHOULD MENTION VERY HOT), there’s a hint of melancholy to it too, reckoning with what it means to be a woman--even a wealthy one--in Brienne’s world, and it’s just the perfect crunch of salt on top of all the sweetness. LOVE. 

A favorite line: He brought her knuckles to his lips. As sweet as honeyed nettles, he declared, “Lady Brienne. You have made me the happiest of men.” As the crowd roared in approval, she felt the sting of his kiss. STING OF HIS KISS ARE YOU KIDDING ME. Also I’m including this for purely thirsty reasons but NO SHAME: He stood from the sofa and went to help his wife undress, and if she noticed his averted eyes and his trembling hands—oh gods, the laces went on endlessly down her back, and with each pull, a little more of her figure was revealed, barely veiled by her gauzy shift—she said nothing. I DIED. I ALSO SAID NOTHING BECAUSE I WAS DEAD. Fuck, man.

_____

The Riverlands Gang Go to the Zoo by @naomignome - Another shorter and very delightful one with Naomi’s typical brand of chaotic humor that I adore. It’s Hyle POV, for one thing, which is good times, and the structure of this is so clever--the way each section of the zoo is used to progress the story is so seamless and happy-making, and there are tons of little jokes and Easter eggs packed in along with a very sweet, snarky emotional storyline wherein Hyle is definitely doomed. Plus another EXCELLENT Brienne nickname in here. LOVELY. 

A favorite line: “Pixel!” he said laughingly, “You know if you fell in the bear pit, I would jump after you without a second thought.” “You need to have a first thought in order to have a second one.” Brienne said dryly. SUCH A GOOD BURN.

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all these people think love’s for show (but i would die for you in secret) by @naomignome - This is SUCH A FLEX because not only did Naomi write TWO fics for her recipient but they are WILDLY DIFFERENT and I’m so impressed with her for doing it! This one is SPIEEEEESSSS and Naomi packs so much tension into 5K, I was on the edge of my seat through the whole thing. Canon events are woven in astonishingly well, and it’s a delicious enemies-to-partners-to-lovers situation that involves some excellent hurt/comfort and excellent use of RAIN to moody/sexy effect and it’s just all very thrilling. YUM.

A favorite line: He lets off a single bullet and it grazes the inside of her thigh, enough to make her wince and draw blood, but not enough to stop her from tackling him to the ground and wrestling him into submission. She’s got both of his wrists pinned above his head and her knee is drawn up and pressed against his torso. Jaime’s chest is heaving under her knee. Her chest is heaving in tandem. From above him, Brienne can see the green of his eyes darken, and even in submission, he’s annoyingly beautiful. Her blood is rushing, and it’s not all adrenaline. WHEW. SAME.

_____

as stars once a year brush the earth by @ylizam / mazily - Another wonderfully bite-sized one (good job actually taking the minimum word count as a guideline, people who did that, unlike the rest of us dumbasses!) that packs a lot into a small space. A canon-ish soulmates AU that’s so understated and dreamy, but with the echo of all the turmoil they’ve gone through to get to this place that brings everything in sharp relief. It’s also funny and sexy and romantic as fuck, and there are gorgeous poetic descriptions, and they spar by a WATERFALL, and just. So much happens in just over 1600 words! IMPRESSIVE.

A favorite line: Her right hand goes numb, unfeeling; back in their rooms Jaime is waking up, and she knows the phantom ache of his missing hand is bothering him. Jaime is waking, and yawning, the bed linens pooling around his waist and highlighting his summer tanned skin. She misses him, suddenly, as wide as the endless sea in front of her. BEAUTIFUL.

OKAY THIS WAS A LONG POST. That’s all I’ve got for now--more to come as I continue my reading!!

#jaime x brienne #jaime x brienne fic rec #jaime brienne fic exchange #braime #so many feelings in this post!! #so many talented writers in this fandom!!

[well-shit-im-a-morosexual-now]

Do you have like a list of prompts you’ve received? I’m kinda curious to see what other people have sent in.

Sure do! Let me know what you think or what you'll be interested in seeing posted first!

WRITTEN & POSTED

1.) this regular is so cute that I (purposely) wrote wrong name on their order so we could chat for a while" (changed it to Mammon forgetting MC's name cause I didn't want to write anything close to an actual name for MC so that it'd be easier for people to imagine it as their MC)

2.) "I know my boss said to not to serve this batch today bc it'll be for tomorrow's special menu but they look drOP DEAD GORGEOUS AND I CAN'T RESIST THE URGE TO HIT ON 'EM NOBODY CAN STOP ME"

3.) Mammon seeing a bug and freaking out, asking MC to take care of it would be really cute.

4.) MC stealing his clothes and wearing it

5.) MC telling Mammon how appreciative they are of him and how glad they are that they were put under his care over anyone else.

6.) "Wait are those - are those bruises?"

PLANNED WITH DATES

7.) mc’s love language is expressed by giving gifts - 10th Sept

8.) imagine MC giving Mammon a ✨ c u t e ✨ crow plushie - 10th sept

*7.) & 8.) are going to be combined*

9.) when Mammon and MC start dating, he 100% calls them "his treasure" (I don't think this was a prompt but I'm writing it) - 10th Sept

10.) dragon!mammon kidnaps royal!mc for ransom, but ends up discovering not all treasures are made of glitter and gold - long 10chap fic planned - after 18th sept no concrete date

11.) Pillow fort with Mammon?? Maybe a movie night??? Bonus if it's a horror movie and he clings to MC????? - 31st Oct

12.) MC gets possessed by a lower demon - 31st Oct (shortened here but original prompt is longer/more elaborate)

13.) Mammon flirting with the MC to steal their wallet. - 28th Aug

HALF WRITTEN

14.) "I've never seen that scar before"

15.) "You're the best thing that has ever happened to me"

16.)"Talk to me please"

*15.) & 16.) are set to be combined with 14.)*

NOT WRITTEN

17.) It was said before that since Mammon is the avatar of Greed, those he loves are very wealthy and those he hates go broke, so if his self esteem is really low it explains why he's broke and asking for money all the time. (Probably not a prompt but fuck it I want to write it)

18.) him singing & dancing to La Bicicleta with MC in the kitchen (I actually wrote an 'imagine' kinda thing as the reply for this ask cause I don't think it's an actual prompt but I liked it so much I wanna flesh it out into a short fic)

19.) Mammon with Crow feathers (it's more elaborate than this but too long to write here) (Not a prompt but like the previous one I wrote an 'imagine' type thing as a reply for the ask and I wanna flesh it out because GIANT BIRD DEMON BOYFRIEND™)

20.) Mammon consistently spelling MC's name wrong on their cup? Or Mammon leaving pick up lines on their drinks? - gonna do the second one cause again I don't wanna write anything close to an actual name

21.) Mammon coping with the realization that MC's never coming back to the original timeline?

22.) "this person is the love of my life but sometimes I wanna strangle em hoW DARE U DO SMTH ADORABLE DO U KNOW U R THE DEATH OF ME SWEET CHEEKS ILYSM❤️️"

23.) "I rlly hate the fact that ur babysitting ur niece/nephew (but I love this lil fella can we adopt them) but I overheard a couple say WE R A PERFECT FAM I'M-"

24.) “You bake when you’re stressed and sometimes you give me cookies, but recently you’re giving me whole baskets each day, now I’m not complaining but are you okay?”

25.) how's Mammon feel about MC dying from Belphie considering how he told MC at the beginning that if they were in danger, he'd be the one to save them, and if he couldn't save them, they should just die?

26.) him realizing he has a second with the new MC after his MC dies in lesson 16

*25 & 26 were one prompt but I broke it into two fics*

27.) Like, say MC makes it really obvious Mammon’s her favourite and Belphie tries to sabotage him, but it just keeps going wrong. (More elaborate prompt but shortened here)

28.) au where the demon lords are instead revered as local deities. Mammon falls for human MC. (More elaborate prompt but shortened here)

29.) really angsty mc x mammon fic. maybe something with mc sobbing “please don’t be mad at me” or “i can be better, don’t leave” due to accidentally swallowing a hysteria potion or something?

30.) "This is nice. You and Me. Against the world."

31.) "If anything happened to you--I couldn't..." "Will you stay with me? Tonight? I just--I'd feel better knowing that you're near..." "I can't stand the thought of seeing you hurt." All have massive Mammon-after-Belphie-killed-MC vibes.

32.) MC being troubled about dying and mammon being the only one to notice

*31.) & 32.) are going to be combined*

33.) “You’ve done the unthinkable, you know. You’ve made me fall in love.”

34.) mammon and mc are doing a movie night and mc fall asleep and they basically confess in their sleep without knowing it

Fics that don't have planned dates are going to be released on a weekly basis. The fic that I write & post will depend on which prompt makes my imagination go nuts each week. After sept 18 I'm hoping to write & post at least two fics a week.

** nothing is gonna have a sad ending or be a tragedy (I can't hurt myself like that) so at most it'll have a bittersweet ending

**MC will always be gender-neutral (they/them pronouns) and unnamed with no defining features. They will have somewhat of a consistent personality though because I always imagine my mc when writing these and I will probably use headcanons I have but nothing will be overly specific so that you can read the fics with your mc in mind

Because I like to suffer I'm still accepting prompts/requests despite all this so feel free to send them either through asks or dms or feel free to come scream at me about anything because I will scream back

That's it✌

#asks #answers #long post #obey me #obey me shall we date #obey me mammon #mammon x mc #mammon x reader #obey me! #shall we date? obey me! #swd obey me #swd mammon #om! mammon

[eponymous-rose]

Talks Machina Highlights - Critical Role C2E71 (SDCC Edition!)

Tonight’s guests? EVERYONE. This is a recording of the SDCC panel from this past weekend!

There’s a table read of the first three pages of Vox Machina: Origins Volume 2, to be released August 14!

Ashley gets asked about the fate of an NPC from the first campaign. Ashley: “Uh. They all died.” Matt: “That’s your fault now.”

Lessons learned through the journey of CR? Liam: “It’s all about the people you travel with.” Matt: “If you can stick to making friendship a priority in your life, good things will come.” Their friendship has been the most important thing to maintain and check in with. Sam highlights how amazing it’s been to watch the community grow year after year.

Favorite RP moment that didn’t involve their own characters? Sam: “Well, that takes me out.” Travis: “I was such a fan of Vex popping out of the water in the bathtub.” Sam: “Anything Matt Mercer does is a pretty fantastic roleplaying moment.” Liam: “I think a certain pirate woman reaching the end of her line.” Laura: “I think Scanlan’s whole... (gestures) as much as I hated it personally.” Marisha: “There were some Percy-Vax standoffs that were pretty great.” Matt: “Percival and Grog having the fight underneath the Keep shortly after the Chroma fall.” Liam: “I really liked Percy and Vex in Syngorn.” Taliesin to Marisha: “I liked you at the Pirate King, busting out all that Cobalt Soul stuff. I wasn’t prepared.” Marisha: “Neither was I!”

Matt talks about how adapting the show to the animated series involves some creative truncation, but also involves holding his ground about what’s too important to change even if it doesn’t tie a perfect narrative bow. “This isn’t mainstream media, this is Critical Role! Some things should be messy. Some things are their own threads.” He’s enjoyed watching new people come up with new takes, and he’s excited to cast some of the NPCs.

The idea is floated of a full-day Sam Riegel DnD Beyond telethon. Sam: “Marisha, can we--” Marisha, glaring: “Uh-huh.”

What has Marisha taken away from Keyleth’s and Beau’s different experiences with leadership, in her leadership role IRL in the company? "I feel like Beau helps me be more assertive in my opinions.” Travis: “We don’t argue with Marisha very much, because she punches people in the face more now.”

Liam’s spell choices are a balancing act between trying to accomplish his own goals and trying to optimize the group’s performance. He’s taken Seeming for the party, but the opportunity to use it hasn’t arisen yet.

Taliesin gets asked “Is there X number of character deaths that would keep you from playing in this campaign?” Taliesin: “There’s really only one way to find out.” Matt: “Is it double digits?” Taliesin: “I at least have two more undeveloped ideas that hopefully will be used in the next campaign.” Liam: “Let’s get to that fourth character!” Taliesin: “I hate you all.”

Missed opportunities and plot threads? Matt can’t go much into it, because for both campaigns 1 and 2, there’s a chance they’ll wind up going back there. There’s a facet of campaign one’s story they got to continue with a one-shot that will be airing soon. He’d hoped there would be more delving into Thordak’s history, and there is another Horn of Orcus out there. Also the Clasp’s relationship with Emon. Ashley is still haunted by “that gosh-dang box”. Matt: “I answered that already.” Ashley: “I DON’T BELIEVE YOU. I DON’T BELIEVE YOUR ANSWER.”

Was Nott seriously considering leaving with her family? Sam, as Laura slowly reaches for his throat: “Yes, absolutely.” He’d been going back and forth with that for a while now. “Nott loves traveling with this gang, but she really wants to be home.” He called Matt about it to warn him that Nott might not be in the campaign anymore. “But I think what happened on Thursday was right for the moment, and we’ll see how it plays out.”

Matt gets asked about how to avoid min-maxing as an experienced DM when he gets the chance to play in someone else’s game. Matt notes that there’s nothing wrong with min-maxing if everyone’s on board with it, but that, the more that you play, the more you might enjoy trying something off-the-wall. There’s also the importance of respect when playing at the tables of less-experienced DMs, where you remind yourself that it is their table. Taliesin: “Part of the fun of the meta-game of D&D is that it’s changing all the time.” He points out that the Magnificent Mansion used to be considered a dump spell until Sam really showed what it could do. Taliesin highlights the challenge of experimenting in these less explored areas.

Sam gave Nott a kid in her backstory because he loves his own kids so much and wanted some of that feeling in the game.

Matt’s favorite Sorrowsworn? The Lonely, which is why he wanted to use them in the game the first chance he got.

Taliesin and Matt are asked if they might release Molly’s whole backstory at the end of the campaign. Matt: “When this campaign’s over, we’ll definitely do that.”

Caduceus is hoping some of his family’s at the Kiln, and potentially some of the other families. “He’s built of expectations. We’ll see how it plays out if those expectations aren’t met.”

“I feel that Yasha is obviously in the best hands with Matt. I, personally, I love the storyline. It’s so much to play with, and it goes with a lot of the backstory that I wrote, and a lot of what Matt prepared, and stuff that I don’t even know, and stuff I do know. I love it! I feel really good about it, but I can’t wait to come home and see what’s going to happen if Yasha comes back.” Matt: “Depending on when you come back, there’s a good chance you’ll have to make a new character.” (The general tone here is that it would be an in-the-meantime thing.)

Matt gets asked how he makes sure everyone in the party gets their time in the spotlight. “It doesn’t always work out, but trying to consider what aspects of the story can play to their individual strengths. You can offer opportunities for each of them to shine, hopefully.” He also highlights that a lot of it is the players respecting each other at the table and being comfortable with the expectation of equal time to shine. “Communication is the key to a good, healthy game group.” Laura also highlights that you as a player can engage other players’ characters if you notice they’re fading into the background a bit.

There’s a brief foray into Evanescence. As you do.

What advice would Matt give himself if he could go back to the first campaign? “Don’t stress so much about what people on the internet think about you. Guard this wonderful little lightning-in-a-bottle family and you’ll be fine.”

If Beau were a druid, what would her go-to wildshape be? Marisha: “I shouldn’t curse. A DAMN OWL. Take that, Thaddeus.”

Marisha: “I feel like the Mighty Nein has turned into fighting for the everyman.” Laura: “I feel like Vox Machina, though, we felt we knew who the good guys were. As the Mighty Nein, I feel like everything’s so gray, and it’s harder to make that choice, and therefore what steps up is everything around us and needing to protect the people who are victims of the bigger picture.”

Matt gets asked how to manage his DM-life balance in terms of parceling out prep time. “It can vary. Whenever I’m driving somewhere, if I have more than 20 minutes of a drive, that’s usually my brainstorming period.” He also tries to keep weekends free with no prep and instead reserves a couple evenings a week to prep, although it sometimes bleeds through to early Thursday morning. “I prepare more than I used to,” largely because of the Internet’s watchful eye in terms of continuity.

#critical role #critical role spoilers #talks machina #talks machina spoilers #long text post

[spamzineglasgow]

(HOT TAKE) Notes on a Conditional Form by The 1975, part 1

In the first instalment of a two part dialogic HOT TAKE of The 1975′s latest album, Notes on a Conditional Form (Dirty Hit, 2020), Maria Sledmere writes to musician and critic Scott Morrison with meditations on the controversial motormouth and prince of sincerity that is Matty Healy, the poetics of wrongness, millennial digression and what it means to play and compose from the middle.

Dear Scott,

> So we have agreed to write something on The 1975’s fourth studio album, Notes on a Conditional Form (Dirty Hit/Polydor). I have been traipsing around the various necropoli of Glasgow on my state-sanctioned walks this week, listening to the long meandering 80-minute world of it, disentangling my headphones from the overgrown ferns, caught between the living and dead. Can you have a long world, a sprawling fantasia, when ‘the world’ feels increasingly shortened, small, boiled down to its ‘essentials’? Let’s go around the world in 80 minutes, the band seem to say, take this short-circuit to the infinite with me. I like that; I don’t even need a boat, just a half-arsed WiFi connection and a will to download. I’m really excited to be talking with you, writing you both about this; it’s an honour to connect our thoughts. I want writing right now to feel a bit like listening, so I write this listening. When my friend Katy slid into my DMs on a Monday morning with ‘omg the 1975 album starts with greta?????????’ and then ‘what on earth is the genre of this album ?!’ I just knew it had to happen, this writing-listening, because I was equally alarmed and charmed by the cognitive dissonance of that fall from Greta’s soft, yet urgent call to rebel (‘The 1975’), into ‘People’ with its parodic refrain of post-punk hedonism that would eat Fat White Family on a Dadaesque meal-deal platter ‘WELL, GIRLS, FOOD, GEAR [...] Yeah, woo, yeah, that’s right’. Scott, you and I went to see The 1975 play at the Hydro on the 1st of March, my last gig before lockdown. I’d been up all night drinking straight gin and doing cartwheels and crying on my friend’s carpet, and the sleeplessness made everything all the more lush and intense. Those slogans, the theatrical backdrops, the dancers, the lights, the travellator! Everything so EXTRA, what a JOURNEY. And well, it would be rude of me not to invite you to contribute to this conversation, as a thank you for the ticket but also because of your fortunate (and probably unusual) positioning as both a classically trained musician (with a fine-tuned listening ear) and fervent fan of the band (readers, Scott messaged me with pictures of pre-ordered vinyl to prove it).

> It seems impossible to begin this dialogue without first addressing the FRAUGHT and oft~problematic question of Matty Healy, the band’s frontman, variously described as ‘the enfant terrible of pop-rock’ and ‘outspoken avatar’ (Sam Sodomsky, Pitchfork), ‘enigmatic deity’ (Douglas Greenwood for i-D), ‘a charismatic thirty-one-year-old’ and ‘scrawny’, rock star ‘archetype’, not to mention ‘avatar of modern authenticity, wit, and flamboyance’ (Carrie Battan, The New Yorker). ‘Divisive motormouth or voice of a generation?’ asks Dorian Lynskey with (fair enough) somewhat tired provocation in The Guardian, as if you could have one without the other, these days. ‘There are’, writes Dan Stubbs for The NME, ‘as many Matty Healys here as there are musical styles’. So far, so postmodern, so elliptical, so everything/yeah/woo/whatever/that’s right. Come to think of it, it makes sense for The 1975 to draft in Greta Thunberg to read her climate speech over the opening eponymous track. Both Matty and Greta, for divergent yet somehow intersecting reasons, suffer the troublesome, universalising label of voice of a generation. Why not join forces to exploit this label, to put out a message? I’ve always thought of pop music as a kind of potential broadcast, a hypnotic, smooth space for desire’s traversal and recalibration. More on that later, maybe. What do you think?

> You can imagine Matty leaping out of a cryptic, post-internet Cocteau novelette (if not then straight onto James Cordon’s studio desk), emoji streaming from his fingertips like the lightning that Justine wields in Lars von Trier’s film Melancholia (2011); but the terrifying candour of the enfant terrible is also his propensity to wax lyrical on another (bear with my clickhole) YouTube interview about his thoughts on Situationism and the Snapchat generation. It feels relevant to mention cinema right now, if only in passing, because this album is full of cinematic moments: strings and swells worthy of Weyes Blood’s latest paean to the movies, but also a Disneyfication of sentiment clotted and packed between house tracks, ballads and rarefied indie hits. Nobody does the interlude quite like The 1975. Maybe more on that later, also.

> Where do I start though, how to really write about this, how to attain something like necessary distance in the space of a writing-listening? Matty Healy, I suppose, like SPAM’s celebrated authorial mascot, Tom McCarthy, poses the same problem of response: how to write about an artist whose own critical commentary is like an eloquent, overzealous and self-devouring, carnivorous vine of opinion?  

> Now, let’s not turn this into a discussion about who wears pinstripes better (we can leave that to readers - these are total Notes from the Watercooler levels of quiche). There seems to be this obsession with pinning (excuse the pun) Matty down to a flat surface of multiples: a moodboard, avatar, placeholder for automatic cancellation. He’s the soft cork you wanna prod your anxieties through and call it identity, you wanna provoke into saying something bizarrely, painfully true about life ‘as it is now’. Healy himself quips self-referentially, ‘a millennial that babyboomers like’. I don’t really know where to start really, not even on Matty; my brain is all over the place and I can’t find a critical place to settle. I’m lost in the fog and the stripes, some stars also; I haven’t even washed my hair for a week. Funnily enough, in 2018 for SPAM’s #7 Prom Date issue I wrote a poem called ‘Just Messing Around’ where the speaker mentions ‘pinning my eye to the right side / of matt healy’s hair all shaved / & serene’ and you don’t really know if it’s the eye that’s shaved or the hair, but both I guess offer different kinds of vision. Every time I google the man, IRL Matty I mean, I am offered a candied proliferation of alluring headlines: ‘The 1975’s Matty Healy opens up on his beef with Imagine Dragons’, ‘The 1975’s Matty Healy savagely destroys Maroon 5 over plagiarism claims’. Perhaps the whole point is to define (or slay?) by negation. Hey, I’ll write another poem. The opening sentence comes from Matty’s recent Guardian interview.

Superstar

I’m not an avocado, not everyone thinks I’m amazing. That’s why they call me the avocado, baby was a song released by Los Campesinos! in 2013, same year as the 1975’s debut. In the am I have been wanting to listen and Andy puts up a meme like ‘The 1975 names their albums stuff like “A Treatise on Epistemological Suffering” and then spends 2 hours singing about how hard it is to be 26’ and I reply being 26 IS epistemological suffering (isn’t that the affirmative dismissal contained in the title, ‘Yeah I Know’) I mean only yesterday I had to ask myself if it’s true you can wish on 11:11 or take zinc to improve your immune system or use an expired provisional license to buy alcohol like why are they even still asking I thought indie had died after that excruciating Hadouken! song called ‘Superstar’ which was all like You don’t like my scene / You don’t like my song / Well, if you Somewhere I’ve done something wrong it seems a delirious, 3-minute scold of the retro infinitude of scarf-wearing cunts with haircuts, and yeah sure kids dressed as emos rapping to rave is not the end of the world, per se, similarly I had to ask myself is there a life in academia is there a wage here or there, like the Talking Heads song And you may ask yourself, well How did I get here? Good thing I turn 27 next month Timothy Morton often uses the refrain, this is not my beautiful house this is not my beautiful wife to refer to those moments you find yourself caught in the irony loop and that’s dark ecology the closer you are the stranger it feels like slice me in half I’ll fall out with more questions you can plant in the soil like a stone or stoner, just one more drag of does it offend you, yeah? will I live and die in a band Matty sings the sweet green meat of my much-too-old -and-such-youthful experience of adding healthy fat to conference dialogue, like ‘Avocado, Baby’ was released on a record called No Blues I believe a large automobile is hurtling towards me now in negative space and the driver is crooning Elvis and reciting my funding conditions and everything feels like there aren’t not still people who believe the new culture of content is a space ‘over there’ and you can still have earnest power ballads about love if you want them =/ to cancel (too many tabs don’t make a tableau but in the future facebook has a paywall) and fame is a drag the pressure we put on the atmosphere, like somewhere you’re alive and still amazing asking wtf I’m reading this novel by Roberto Bolaño set partly in 1975 before we had internet it seems poets got laid a lot that year in Mexico City before I was born to pick up video calls with a spliff in one hand in the splendid, essential heat like a difficult knife in my side you can put me on toast, grind the pepper over me gently and say fucking hell this has taken forever.

> I guess I want or wanted to begin with this question of difficulty that rises when responding to Notes on a Conditional Form. How do you approach an album whose delayed release places it in a position of considerable hype, an album whose world tour and promotion is again delayed by global pandemic, an album shrouded in the ever-shifting controversy of Matty’s persona, an album whose length and sonic variety risks collapse into litanies of zany superlative and necrophilic attempts to revive musical category as vaguely relevant here? As beautiful as it is to catalogue the offbeat Pinegrove vibes of ‘Roadkill’, the shoegaze croons of ‘Then Because She Goes’ and the pop-punk, chord-bright euphoria of ‘Me & You Together Song’, I could keep going and going with this. I could just list and just list this. The album is a generous offering: a tribute to the album as form in an age where attention tapers away on high-streaming playlists set to conditioned, circadian moods curated by the likes of Spotify or Apple Music. The album is a Borgesian plenitude of multiple pathways, multiple timelines, infinite feed, choose your own adventure; a hypertext of cultural reference almost worthy of Manic Street Preachers at their Richey Edwards era of paranoid, intellectual peak; a metamodernist feat of oscillation between irony and sincerity, an extended tract, a drunk millennial ramble, a journey that loops from house party to club basement to the streams of sexuality repressed and expressed encounter...and yet. It is both more and less than these things. In trying to capture Notes on a Conditional Form with some pithy, journalist’s statement, I’m doing it all wrong.

> Sidenote: I recently listened to Rachel Zucker give a 2016 lecture on ‘The Poetics of Wrongness’ as part of the Bagley Wright Lecture Series. She makes a case for wrongness in poetry and critique, rejects the poem of pithy essence, the short, pretty and to the point lyric whose meaning is easily digested in a greetings card, or A Level exam paper, say. ‘Instead of the Fabergé egg of the short lyric, I prefer the aesthetics of intractability and exhausted exhaustedness’, the mistakes, lags or aporia made along the way in one of these long and winding poems. Notes on a Conditional Form is full of what some might deem mistakes, digression, exhaustion; but it is also peppered with the gloss of almost perfect pop ‘hits’ such as ‘Me & You Together Song’ and ‘If You’re Too Shy (Let Me Know)’. A wrong poem should be, ‘ashamed and irreverent’, which feels like a decent description of The 1975’s general orientation towards artistic conception. There is cringe and incongruity, there is by all intents and purposes ‘too much of it’, whatever we mean by ‘it’. And yet, that is its beautiful poetics of wrongness, the sound of wrongness, which ‘prefers the stairs’ to the easy elevator pitch (as Zucker puts it), that ‘prefers a half-finishing crumbling stairwell to nowhere’. I like to think about this 1975 album as a kind of exhausting Escherian scene of shifting, crumbling stairwells, shuffling and reassembling against the glistering backdrop of the internet’s inverse void, where everything, literally everything is translated to a starry excess of 1s and 0s, our collective binary data, the white hot, unreadable howl of our noise. What do you think Scott, would Matty find this image agreeable? Does that matter?

> Pushing dear Matty aside, say what you like, let’s start (again) with the title: Notes on a Conditional Form. Following 2018’s A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships, it’s fair to position these records as gestures towards philosophical statements ‘of the times’. Important to recognise the resistance to total or dominating knowledge built into the titles: these are not complete tracts or theses, but rather ‘a brief inquiry’ and ‘notes’. It’s obviously the ancient yet *hip* thing to do in capital-P Philosophy, to put out your statement on aesthetics and ethics, and I think The 1975 are playing with that tradition and its failure. You can imagine if his attention span were different, Matty Healy would’ve already written a PhD thesis on this stuff and published it as drunken bulletins on LiveJournal in 2007. As it stands, we have the smorgasbord sprawl of this eclectic record to get through in this cursèd year of 2020 — it’s not like we have much of anything better to do right now, when everything feels so futile, beyond reason and even the greatest human endeavour. Haha, woo, Yeah :’(((.

> Let’s stay in that conditional space between crying and laughter. Conditional form is interesting as a term, often used in grammar to refer to the ‘unreal past’ because it uses a past tense but does not actually refer to something that literally happened in the past: If I had texted him back, we would probably have gone to the gig that night. There’s something about the conditional as the ur-condition of the internet, the proliferating possibilities it offers and the hauntological strains of what could have been had we chosen x option over y, z, a, b, c, infinity...As millennials, we often make decisions by hedging, always caught in the conditional state of what it is to be. Hovering in the emotional shortcuts provided by dumb yellow icons, the poetics of abstraction. A verb form’s dalliance with uncertain reverb; and so we live our conditional lives.

> To push this further, we can say the internet is, as ever, Matty Healy’s natural habitat. In a recent podcast interview with Conor Oberst for The Face, Healy tells his favourite emo-country hero that ‘my natural environment by the time I started The 1975 was the fucking internet’. So how does that ecosystem play into the music? In a damning review for The Line of Best Fit, Claire Biddles concludes:

The 1975’s first three albums are ideal and distinct worlds to inhabit, each individually cohesive but situated in specific contexts — the anticipation of the small town, profundity in the face of vacuous fame, and the horror and isolation of late capitalism. Perhaps because of its broken genesis, Notes has no such common context, and ends up feeling flat, directionless and inessential, where its forebears felt vital, worthy of devoting a life to. For a band with proven dexterity in deftly capturing the nuances and quick changes of contemporary conversation, it is disheartening to witness them with nearly nothing of note to say.

That description — ‘flat, directionless and inessential’ — is kind of how I experience the internet right now, in the paradox of Web 2.0 becoming utterly essential, somehow, to how I live my life, how I love, how I am with friends. The internet as my ecosystem, my utility, my complete environment, my Imaginary — beyond the mere utility of a WiFi connection. Broken genesis might well describe the childhoods of those of us who grew up online, whose platforms collapsed around them, whose adolescent data was lost in the great ~accidental annihilation of the MySpace servers, whose identities were always already fractured, performed, anonymised or exquisitely personalised, deferred into only the (im)possible keystroke of utterance and trace, the fort-da play of MSN sign-ins. ‘My life is defined by a desire to be outward followed by a fear of being seen’, Matty says in a new short film for Apple Music, released in tandem with the album. The internet requires this chiaroscuro destiny: not to burn always with Baudelaire’s hard and gem-like flame (O to be an IRL flaneur beyond times of lockdown) but to endlessly flicker between the bright green light of presence and the shade of what once was called afk, away from keyboard. To live and burn in the gap between extroversion and introversion, to live in this conditional state of tendency. To express with emoji, send pics, is to both reveal and withhold something else, essential.

> I like albums to feel like worlds; I appreciate Biddles’ evocation of the cohesion experienced in the first three 1975 records. But perhaps it is a kind of violence to assume a world must have cohesion to exist. What is even meant by ‘common context’? What pressure are we putting on a singer, a band, a cultural moment to produce something familiar and harmonious, and to whom, at what scale? What does it mean to be the biggest band in the world...for a bit? How does that work when everything is dissonance, transience, noise, interference; both this and not-this; when life itself is lived as the flat traversal of a millioning existential terrains that seem to collapse into this nowness in which I feel myself sliding forever? Can anyone weigh-in on what it means to make music, art or writing that’s ‘worthy of devoting a life to’, because the gravity and force of that condition for good art, good pop, seduces me so.

> Maybe the point is to always be in the middle, to never quite start to write about The 1975, to find yourself always already writing about this album because this album was always already writing about your life. I have said nobody does the interlude quite like The 1975, but I was being coy, because the hottest twentieth-century philosophical double act, Deleuze and Guattari (haters gonna hate), do the interlude rather nicely. The point of a rhizome being ‘no beginning or end [...] always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo’ as they write in A Thousand Plateaus (1980). I see the musical interlude of a pop record, the instrumental moment without lyric, as a kind of middling gesture that places the listener in that conditional state of presence and absence, a hinge between songs, times and narrative moments. Maybe my favourite moment in A Thousand Plateaus is the statement: ‘RHIZOMATICS = POP ANALYSIS, even if the people have other things to do besides read it, even if the blocks of academic culture or pseudoscien-tificity in it are still too painful or ponderous’. Painful or ponderous might be a fair critique levelled at the enfant terrible vibes of Matty’s lyrics and generic pick’n’mix, but isn’t this tactic a kind of swerving punch at the categorical violence that keeps people out of academia, that keeps academic discourse so often stale in the first place? Unlike most journal articles, let’s face it, pop reaches ‘“the people”’. Perhaps Notes on a Conditional Form is the rhizomatic sprawl of the myriad we need as an alternative to institutional hierarchy, ring-fencing and the language games of academia. Surely the title is a reference to the very ‘pseudoscient-tificity’ D&G mention? I’m gonna quote Richard Scott’s blurb to Colin Herd’s 2019 poetry collection, You Name It here (not least because the indie publishers, Dostoyevsky Wannabe, come straight out of Manchester, home to The 1975, and because Herd’s poetic spirit is pure pop generosity with a platter of theory on the side), because I want to say similar things of this album: ‘Colin Herd’s poems are masterpieces of variousness. They are talismans against Macho demons. They are snatches of theory operating under lavish spills of language’. The good thing about Herd’s poetry and Matty Healy’s lyrics is that the impulse towards romantic or florid expression is always tapered by an interest in the mundane and everyday. Healy is always singing about pissing or buying clothes online or, as on ‘The Birthday Party’, singing about ‘a place I’ve been going’ that seems to consist of the lonely, infinite regress of conversations about seeing friends and watching someone drink kombucha while buying, in the convenient life of rhyme, Ed Ruscha prints.

Ed Ruscher, Cold Beer, Beautiful Girls (2009)

> So what kind of listening does this rhizomatic sprawl demand — does it expand beyond the banal or find a holding space there, a heaven of affect chilled to late-modernity’s crisp perfection? ‘The End (Music For Cars)’ is a luxurious, Hollywood ‘soaring’ moment, all strings and swells, fucking woodwind, and comes as the third track on the album, where normally you’d place it as some kind of penultimate climax, the album’s landscape pan-out or big swelling screen kiss in three-dimensional rotation. The band’s ‘Music For Cars’ era comprises their two most recent records, and you have to take it as a nod to Brian Eno’s 1978 ambient classic Ambient 1: Music for Airports (Matty recently interviewed Eno again for The Face, cool). The thing about cars is you drive around in them, you follow rules but also whims and desires, convictions; you choose to join others or you pursue the selfish acceleration (‘People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles’ goes the laconic teenage refrain in Bret Easton Ellis’ 1985 debut novel Less Than Zero). You only listen to music half-attentively; you don’t listen close enough to trade in souls. Are we being invited to experience this album as an ambient disruption of figure and ground, presence and absence, here and there, space and place, intimacy and despondency? Driving feels increasingly ‘directionless and inessential’ when the scale effects and obscenities of the anthropocene, of covid and other late-capitalist crises loom in our vision, when the sign systems we used to navigate our lives by seem to shimmer out of focus, or pixelate and deteriorate through endless memetic replication... You can’t help feel like Biddles review kind of misses the point.

Sylvano Bussoti, Five Pieces for Piano for David Tudor (1959)

> What point would that be though, in a world of rhizomatic overlap and intersecting, middling lines, a direction without seeming end? I love the approximation at work when Biddles writes, ‘with nearly nothing of note to say’, because that seems to be a possibility condition for writing in the age of the internet. To write in a way that is almost less than zero and loop back upon some kind of infinity, yet keep it in 2-step. I think back to Rachel Zucker’s image of the half-finished crumbling stairwell, and feel an amiable sense of approval towards this band who always work between the registers of diary, confession, advertising, provocative sloganeering and faux-didactics, never quite settling in to specifically tell you this particular story. It’s all mess, and it’s awful and delicious, I’m sorry. ‘Nothing Revealed / Everything Denied’ is the title of track 13 on the album: that movement between nothing and everything feels like the absolutist, absurdist conditions of ‘truth’ possibility in the Trumpocene/age of so-called ‘post-truth’. ‘Life feels like a lie, I need something to be true’, Healy sings with strained conviction in the song’s opening. But what is at stake in this truth? ‘I never fucked in a car, I was lying’, goes the line, referring back to the dramatic in medias res opening to ‘Love It If We Made It’, notable banger from A Brief Inquiry…: ‘We’re fucking in a car, shooting heroin / Saying controversial things just for the hell of it’. If lying is a pun on telling a mistruth or laying back, practically sexless in a passive state, there’s a deliberate play on apathy, agency and distortion here. It’s something Matty seems snagged on. On ‘I Like America & America Likes Me’ he collapses aesthetic superficiality, capital’s lyric abstraction (‘Oh, what’s a fiver?’) and generalised crisis into this (un)conscious desire for shutdown, expressed in fragmentary bullets of needing-to-know-and-not-know: ‘Is that designer? Is that on fire? Am I a liar? Oh, will this help me lay down?’ And then that impassioned refrain, processed through vocal distortion as if to enact the difficulty in clarity as overcome somehow by the sheer making of noise: ‘Belief and saying something / And saying something / And saying something’. It’s the endless, driving recursion of our lives online, online.

> Back to ‘The End (Music for Cars)’ which really is the middle of the beginning. It’s weird to listen to songs about driving and lying down in the middle of lockdown, drowning in the bloat of social media, on top of our ongoing climate emergency (yeah, remember that, it’s still happening), where high-carbon travel feels like an exhausted, almost impossible concept. A musician complaining about travelling is an age-old subject for a song, but this feels just as much about living in the in-between times of the internet (remember the sweet naivety of the information superhighway) as much as the great Road, for which Kerouac longed as much as Springsteen, Dylan, or Lana Del Rey. Is Matty Healy homesick though? ‘Get somewhere, change my mind, eh / Get somewhere but don’t find it / I don’t find what I’m looking for’. It’s all ‘(out there)’ as the parenthetical refrain goes, but maybe ‘out there’, outside, is the maddening supplement, as Derrida would say, to our lives online, thus revealing their mutual, entwined dependency. Imagine the M6 but tangled up crazily, zanily, like one of those Sylvano Bussoti scores. It’s not like you’re trying to get home, get back, exactly. It’s not like you can just click back on your browser and erase that trace of the touch that enacts it. That’s the weird-ass sensation of being an ecological being: ‘Wherever you go, there you are’, writes Tim Morton in Being Ecological (2018). We’re all pretty alien, even to ourselves.

> If life feels like a lie, as Matty sings, does it matter anymore whether it is or not? Or, to pose the question differently, how do we feel into, attune to something like ‘truth’, a shared reality or feeling? ‘Out there’ is only a state of ellipsis [...] a vine extended, something for the listener, user, consumer and/or human to cling to — or be strangled by. In the aforementioned Apple Music video, Matty takes away the canvas and presents the frame beneath, in a gesture that is comically overwrought with Duchampian pretention around the state and context of the artwork itself. ‘Sometimes I think what is the point of...it’s not my atheism coming out, it’s just my being human coming out’, he muses. The phrase ‘coming out’, with its connotations of closeting, shame and cocoon-like emergence is intriguing here. In a dehumanising, post-internet world of neoliberalism and its attendant microfascisms, its commodification of all kinds of art, its easythink translation of poetry-to-advertising, what would it mean to come out as human after, or better still, in the middle of all this? It’s significant that he trails off after ‘the point of…’, for surely the point itself (of the art?) would be to find yourself here, there, right in the middle of it all. And then in ‘Nothing Revealed / Everything Denied’, it’s like Matty is calling us back from that epistemological and ontological boiling point of knowing and being, like in singing we could go along, we could feel present and ‘true’ again, even with friction and difference. We gotta take hold, cool ourselves down from the rhetoric and into warm emotion, the smell of paint, erotic vibration of bass, in a manner of speaking.

> What if the mode of inquiry were not to investigate but rather to follow the lines of flight, to riff on this world where narrative arcs and chains are replaced by the multiple possibilities of hallucinatory experience, what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities whose development avoids any orientation toward a culmination point or external end’? To just desire and trace it. This, Scott, is where you come in (and I finally shut up to listen). There is so much more to write about this album, echo for echo, and I feel like I’ve only begun the tracing which was already beginning: I want to know your thoughts on The 1975 and America, on gender and genre, on bodies and football and friendship, on political engagement, those house beats, on the beautiful, sultry appearance of Phoebe (fucking) Bridgers, on sincerity, on the question of ‘What Should I Say’...It’s been playing on my mind that I will never say what I want to, or should, or would say of this album, but this perhaps is what I would otherwise have said. I give you my notes in conditional form.

Read part 2 of our review in Scott Morrison’s response here.

Notes on a Conditional Form is out now and available to order. 

~

Text: Maria Sledmere

Published: 23/6/20

#review #reviews #music reviews #album review #The 1975 #Matty Healy #Maria Sledmere #music criticism #Scott Morrison

[bmaxwell]

Top games of 2019

For much of the year I thought I might have a hard time building a solid list of 10 games. As it turned out, I could have made a top 20 without much trouble. So it was a good year for games, but maybe there weren’t many 10/10 classics for me. I did have BT’s, BB’s, and even a BD-1 though!

First up, my Old Game of Year: Yakuza 0

The dichotomy between Yakuza 0′s melodramatic main story and its silly tongue-in-cheek side missions made the game an absolute joy to play. One minute you’re dealing with warring Yakuza factions and torn loyalties, and the next you’re doing minigames like karaoke, bowling, RC car racing, and darts, and then you’re helping a dominatrix find her confidence or helping a human statue sneak away from his post to go take a much-needed shit. All throughout you’re also beating the shit out of legions of street thugs and yakuza dudes using kicks, punches, bats, bicycles, salt shakers, teapots, and whatever else is handy. I fell in love with this game in a way I very much did not expect.

Also good ”old” games:  World of Final Fantasy, Ni No Kuni 2, Steamworld Heist, Odin Sphere Leifthrasir

Best Music: Death Stranding

The game’s score is good, but the licensed music was key in some of Death Stranding’s best moments. The above song starts playing during your first journey in the game, and the tone is just spot-on perfect. Death Stranding works for me in a similar way that American Truck Simulator works for me. When you’re barely surviving a long trek, and a peaceful, melancholy song starts playing just as you reach the top of the hill and finally see your destination? Just perfect.

Also excellent music: Sayonara Wild Hearts

Most disappointing: Control

Well, I got fucking Alan Wake’d by Remedy again. Fantastic atmosphere and setting for a game, cocked up by repetitive, boring combat. So much about Control is so very good. I love the mystery of the janitor and the main character, the Twilight Zone/X-Files vibe of the agency and the Oldest House. The game’s architecture is arresting, and the writing is excellent. 

But for me it was undone by the combat which quickly became a tedious, thing I had to Get Through to see more of the good stuff, and the more challenging fights became something I just didn’t want to engage with anymore. The checkpoint system and maps weren’t helpful, and I received too many optional side quests that I couldn’t complete because I hadn’t found the necessary traversal power yet. I loved so much about the game, but the moment to moment playing of the game was frequently not fun for me.

Ultimately it felt like a game that did not respect my time. The game desperately needed an Easy setting so I could just blow through the bits that I didn’t like. Like Alan Wake, I expect to be pulled back into it and then bounce off again at least two more times. 

And now, the games that were in the running for the top 10 but missed the cut:

Dicey Dungeons:

You roll dice and spend them to activate equipment, gaining more equipment as you go. It’s a close cousin to deckbuilding games, but a little lighter and more forgiving. Slotting dice into cards feels good though. The variety in characters and cards help give this game good replay value. Give me randomized cards/gear, and characters to unlock in a run-based game and I’m a happy guy.

Judgment:

Yakuza minus Kiryu and Majima, with some investigation minigames thrown in. It’s pretty good! Most of the new detective minigames feel like they get in the way (tailing people is just silly, taking photos doesn’t work great). I never really felt strongly compelled to stick with it though. I miss the charm of Kiryu and the grime of 80′s Kamurocho. It’s an excellent game I might have enjoyed more if I hadn’t played Yakuza first.

Chocobo’s Mystery Dungeon: Everybuddy!:

This port of a Nintendo Wii roguelike is one that I missed in its original incarnation. It’s got the “I move - all the enemies move” turn-based gameplay that I love, and classes to unlock. All of this is very much my shit. It’s goofy the way that Final Fantasy games are, and the design feels older than it is (I thought it was a PS2 port before I looked it up). But hey - give me stuff to unlock and the old “I move - you move” gameplay and, again, I’m a happy guy.

Ring Fit Adventure

This game is getting me to exercise just about every day. It’s not a great video game (nor should it try to be) but as a workout tool it’s wonderful for someone like me who has trouble finding the time and motivation to go out of the house and exercise.

Untitled Goose Game

You are a winged angel of chaos in this joyous little game. I found the gameplay itself to be pretty shallow and lacking, but it’s a wonderful sandbox to play in. Tormenting people is great fun, and the way the goose animates is just perfect.

Table of Tales: The Crooked Crown

This was the PSVR game that stood out the most for me this year. It’s a tactical RPG complete with a DM that narrates everything, tiles to move your characters around on, and card-based combat. It’s a charming game and I hope they make more. 

Luigi’s Mansion 3

This was my first game in the series, and I enjoyed it more than I thought I would. It’s a charming game, and the variety from floor to floor. I could forgive the wonky control scheme, but I think there’s just a low ceiling on how much a cutesy, family-friendly Nintendo title can resonate with me these days.

Dragon Quest Builders 2

Dragon Quest and Minecraft had a baby. This was my favorite game of the year for turning my brain off and checking things off a list. I’m not sure Dragon Quest Builders 2 is a Great Game, but it’s wonderful gaming comfort food for a Dragon Quest fan.

Void Bastards

Void Bastards might be this year’s Dead Cells - a run based game that never quite hooked me, but I’ll keep coming back to it. The developers really did a lot without a lot of variety in the way of art assets. It’s a satisfying, often funny shooter (admittedly not my jam). What a terrific name though.

Steamworld Quest

The Steamworld series is an impressive, weird thing. I’ve never seen a series change genres like this; they started with Steamworld Dig (Metroidvania) then made Heist (a tactical combat game) then another Dig, and finally this year they released Steamworld Quest - a deckbuilding RPG. Customization and unlockables are among my favorite gaming buzzwords, and they’re here in spades.

Sayonara Wild Hearts

More of a visual companion set to a pop album than a conventional game. This is for me what Rez was for a lot of folks. Most stages are autorunners where you’re collecting hearts, dodging obstacles, shooting giant wolves, and fighting lesbians while racing atop motorcycles. It’s a story about love, heartbreak, and finding yourself, told through music and images. Nice to have a game that feels like it was made specifically for marginalized folks.

10. Concrete Genie

Concrete Genie’s best trait is its earnestness - an increasingly rare thing in 2019. It’s about an artistic being pursued by bullies in a run-down town. He finds a magic brush that lets him paint friendly monsters into life and also paint magical landscape scenes onto buildings in an effort to bring life back to the town.

The themes of the game and how they’re handled feel a little after school special to me, but the game has a lot of heart. And the gameplay loop of creating monsters, painting buildings, and unlocking new types of things to paint never got old because it’s so damned beautiful. And you have a lot of room to be creative with how you paint. The game is not challenging, and I think the experience is better for it. There is some light platforming, puzzling, and combat, but none of it ever got frustrating. A wholesome game like this was a very welcome thing this year.

9. Indivisible

Indivisible is a odd mashup of platformer, RPG, and fighting game that blends those well enough that I can't easily put it into any one box. For me, it’s the closest to a fighting game I’ve played in probably 20 years. It has launchers and finishers and timed blocks. You collect a big old army of people you can swap in and out, the writing is smart. The platforming parts are the weakest part of the game, as some of the jumping challenges can feel uneven, and there’s a lot of “I see what I have to do, now I just need to try over and over until I execute”

The setting (Asian mythology as a backdrop) and combat felt unique enough to keep me going, and the game has a charm and personality. I like how the main character is a well-intended fuck up that has to atone for her mistakes, somewhat reminiscent of Mae from Night in the Woods.

8. Children of Morta

This is an action RPG with character progression where you are playing members of a family. The gameplay is solid, and the game drip feeds story and character interaction between runs. It’s a well-narrated and charming thing. The writing can be funny and often touching. There are story bits like the uncle crafting a pair of daggers for Kevin, who falls in love with them. Mary - his mother - takes them away for being too dangerous, and she doesn’t want her boy putting himself at risk helped me feel invested in the characters and story more than most ARPG’s.

The movement and combat feel snappy, and there are plenty of skills to unlock so you always feel like progress was made even when a run falls short. There are plenty of little secrets and tchotchkes to find in the dungeons, and between runs you can see the family members doing their own thing in the house where they live together. It’s a refreshing take on the action RPG genre.

7.  Outer Worlds

I remember when The Outer Worlds was announced at The Game Awards. None of this checks any boxes for me: sci-fi setting, shooting, wacky characters. You can make your character DUMB and get special dialogue choices! Humor in game very rarely works for me, and this sounded like it was going to be that jaded, shitty Rockstar brand of humor. Hard pass from me.

Enter Xbox Game Pass. The Outer Wilds Worlds started getting positive word of mouth and it was included with Game Pass, so I figured I may as well give it a go. I encountered something I didn’t expect: really terrific writing.

I turned the difficulty down to its lowest settings and mowed through the game, savoring the tongue-in-cheek dialogue in a world where corporations own literally everything. The first character you meet is hiding out in a cave because he’s been wounded. Not too wounded to give you the company’s sales pitch though! It’s not the best choice, it’s Spacer’s Choice.

The whole “corporations are in charge” bleak humor hits more than it misses, but the real star of the show is your companions. They are generally convincing and feel like real, fleshed out characters and not simple tropes. Each companion character gets their own interesting set of side quests (except for the dumb boring robot companion). My first companion Parvati’s story revolved around mustering the courage to pursue a romantic relationship with a woman. They wrote Parvati as an asexual character, and it felt natural and not forced - not an easy task. 

It leans into being a dumb video game in all the right ways and made me care about the characters more than the story. The story’s cynicism wore thin eventually, but the game ended at just about the right time and didn’t overstay its welcome.

6. Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order

Jedi Fallen Order lies at the intersection of 2 things I admire more than enjoy: Star Wars and Souls-likes. It’s also EA doing their best to show that they can release a AAA Star Wars game with no microtransactions after the tire fire that was Star Wars Battlefront II. This game is an excellent make-good for EA, though I’m sure it’s more “We had to do this to restore consumer trust in us” than any real change of heart.

This game, at the time of this writing on a base PS4 anyhow, has some jank. Textures would often pop in after a second or two, I had a Stormtrooper get stuck in place like a statue, and I had a couple of hard crashes. Despite all of that, I kept coming back to the game every night until it was finished. And it impressed me enough to put an EA Star Wars game in my top 10. You win, universe. The combat was a good balance of fun shit like force-pushing dude off a cliff and tense one-on-one battle where parries and dodges are needed to get by.

The game’s story is what kept me wanting to see what was next. It’s a game set in the Star Wars universe with the confidence to resist reminding you of the characters and places you know from the films, and it’s better for it. I found myself invested in the fates of the characters. While the main character is more or less a blank cipher for the player, he’s still a better protagonist than Anakin Skywalker because I didn’t actively dislike him.

5. Bloodstained 

New games succeeding as remakes or homages with goofy videogame-ass videogame stuff was sure a theme this year. Bloodstained is so ridiculous in so many ways. A lady asked me to bring her a specific piece of armor to honor one of the fallen villagers. When I did so, she tearfully thanked me then gave me 3 pizzas as a reward. The paintings on the walls will often come to life and attack you; those paintings are all portraits of people who backed the game on Kickstarter. One of the enemies resembles a giant house cat, another is a giant domestic dog. NPC’s repeat the same dialogue, such as a quest giver named Lindsay who says “Kill those murderers DEAD!” every time you speak to her. 

And there is a metric ton of shit to find, collect, and craft. Most of the gear you equip looks goofy as hell. And the more new skills and gear you unlock, the more overpowered and broken you feel. The dialogue is corny as hell and plays things straight, which is the only way a screwball game like this actually works. The combat feels good. Experimenting with the powers and systems is a blast, and uncovering the map and secrets is satisfying. 

4. Fire Emblem 3 Houses

- Despite being extremely my kind of shit on the surface, I’ve never done more than dabble with a Fire Emblem game. When I heard people invoking Persona and Harry Potter. I mean, a strategy RPG with relationship stories set in a school environment checks too many of my boxes to ignore.

What surprised me with the game is how much I came to really know the students in my house.* I felt like I knew Bernadetta, Dorothea, Ferdinand, Edelgard, and all the others. Alternating between exploring the school grounds, choosing lesson plans, having tea with a student, and leading them into battle was a nice way to mix up the experience. Training them in skills based on which character class you wanted to promote them to was a nice touch. 

3. Death Stranding

Death Stranding has all of the batshittery it was rumored to have: Norman Reedus hiking around with a baby in a jar, poo grenades, tar squids, and people with names like Die Hardman, Mama, and Fragile. Kojima has about as much subtlety as David Cage with the metaphors and themes of the game. Cell phones latch onto you like handcuffs, and Likes are much sought after to the point where people are addicted to them. The game is all about reuniting America and forging connections. You play as a man named Sam. He’s a porter who works for the Bridges company. His name is Sam Porter Bridges.

Sam is playing a major role in reconnecting the country by hand delivering packages from city to city as well as reconnecting the country up to wifi. Continuing with the games themes, Sam has a touch phobia. It’s a game about isolation and introspection, and about the need for connection with one another. Hideo Kojima makes for damn certain that you know that when you play the game. It’s a little like David Cage, but with less cringe and more weirdness. 

It’s an introspective game full of small moments. Sam curling up under a structure that another player has built, exhausted and cradling his jar baby as a melancholy song plays is the kind of moment that doesn’t play well in a demo or a video, and won’t resonate with everyone. Those of us it does work for, however, are in love with the experience. It takes the hard-to-describe appeal of a game like American Truck Simulator and adds a decidedly human element to it. There is comfort to motion and travel. We like to be rocked, or transported in a vehicle as babies. It’s the simple comfort of motion, and a way to connect to our world. There’s something to that.

I love seeing this level of ambition and weirdness from a major AAA release. 

2.  Disco Elysium

He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.

I thought of Dr Gonzo of Hunter S Thompson fame early and often while playing Disco Elysium. It’s an easy connection to make; you wake up face down on the floor of a demolished hotel room. You have a wicked hangover, wearing nothing but your undies. Your necktie whirls around the ceiling, attached to the ceiling fan.

I got sloppily dressed and staggered out my door, where I was confronted by an attractive woman in the hall. Some primal part of my character thinks it’s a good idea to ask her to fuck; you crudely do so, and it goes the way you might expect. I was fresh off of playing The Outer Worlds, so I was used to any dialogue prompt associated with a skill being automatically a positive thing. As it turns out, your character gets all sorts of a impulses that aren’t always in your best interests. This first interaction put me off a little bit, I don’t want to play a game that’s trying to be cool and edgy. As it turns out, this isn’t really that.

In Disco Elysium, you play as a cop sent to sort out a murder where a body was found hanging in a tree behind this hotel. Seems that, after 3 days, you’ve managed to run up a hotel bill that you can’t pay for, frighten the patrons by threatening to shoot yourself in the head in the hotel before you lose your badge and your gun. Another cop is sent to assist you since you’ve accomplished exactly nil after 3 days. He’s from another precinct and doesn’t know you, so you haven’t burned up all of your goodwill with him yet (unlike everyone else in your life).

At a glance, it’s a Baldur’s Gate-style isometric RPG with a modern setting. In practice, it’s a lot more than that. First off, the game has no combat. Or rather, no conventional combat. Any physical encounters (which were exceedingly rare in my play) are handled through dialogue choices determined by how you’ve built out your skills. And the way the game manifests your skills is smart and feels organic, not forced.

The skills aren’t the usual RPG fare. There are 24 of them, consisting of stuff like Visual Calculus, volition, Pain Threshold, and Shivers. As you might have guessed, 24 skills in a game with no conventional combat means there is a LOT of writing in this game and just as much variance from one play to the other. My detective was a highly emotionally sensitive guy, able to pick up on what folks may be hiding, very in-tune with the cosmos, and deeply introspective (upsettingly so?).

It’s a detective RPG with a healthy dose of political intrigue, class warfare, and nihilism. Disco Elysium feels like an actual adult game, and not in the “look at all this violence and titties” sense. The best comparison I have is Planescape Torment.

1. Resident Evil 2

- What a complete game. This was my first Resident Evil game and I am in love with it. The game drops you into a hostile environment that slowly transitions from a horror show with danger around every corner to feeling like a space that was very much mine. Creeping around an unfamiliar environment in the dark with a flashlight and limited ammunition, as it turns out, is fun as hell. 

The combat is slow and deliberate in a way that made the action feel satisfying and not cheap; when I did encounter enemies that moved quickly and suddenly, it got my heart rate going. And my arc with Mr X from pure terror to minor annoyance to acceptance as part of this undead infested police station I call home felt pretty special. 

He is an indestructible character that follows you endlessly like the Terminator. You’re faster, but he is relentless. Hearing his heavy footsteps somewhere in the vicinity was a nice atmospheric touch. I had a couple of instances where I was running from something, turned a corner and collided with this 8 foot tall beast.

Resident Evil 2 is just the ideal dose of scariness, and gets all the dumb videogame-y parts exactly right. It feels like a Metroidvania, a world filled with locks and keys where the secrets are drip-fed to the player. Creeping through an unfamiliar area with only 2 shotgun shells and 5 pistol rounds left was a deliciously tense experience, one that other games rarely give me.

The game’s second playthrough felt a lot more different from the first than I’d feared. I’ve never really played another Resident Evil game, and I’ve never had any interest in horror games. And now here I am anxiously awaiting next year’s RE3 remake. 

*Black Eagles, baby!

[justwritingscibbles]

Release the Puppos!

Ok, first of all, fuck this illness!  Secondly, I felt bad for not posting the past few days because this Tumblr is sorta part of a schedule I put up for myself and I want to keep too it!!! 

Anyway, while I was wasting away in bed I thought up a few fics I wanted to write.  Please forgive me if my writing is a little wonky; I have literally gulped half a bottle of cough medicine. So I’m a little sleepy and drowsy. Probably not a good idea but I couldn’t find a measuring cup or anything.

This one is just a little Markiplier fic where you’re a subscriber of Mark’s channel and you go to the meet-up with some hairy companions.  Enjoy! 

(Y/D/N)- Young dogs name. (O/D/N)- Older dog’s name. (Y/T/N)- Your Twitter nickname/ or social media nickname

You have always wanted to go to a meet-up. Not only to see Mark but also to meet some of the other subs.  You were always commenting on Mark’s tweets and sometimes even posting some fan-art. People started following you and you started chatting.  You wouldn’t say you were popular or well-known in Mark’s community, but you had a fair number of people following you on most social medias because of him. Every so often he’d retweet one of your artworks and you contributed to his charity live-streams too. Once, he had called out your name excitedly and yelled,  ”That’s the person that draws awesome me pictures!”

Mark had tweeted another location for a meet-up. A park not far from your home.  But as always, you were stuck and unable to go. Usually it was work, school, even family had become an obstacle. But today, it was two large dogs who were currently snoozing on the lounge-room floor.  You sighed and wrote your reply on Mark’s twitter;

“I’m dog-sitting and can’t leave them alone! Can I bring the puppos?” 

You knew you wouldn’t get a reply from the Youtuber himself, but you added a photo of the dogs anyway.  The largest dog, (Y/D/N), a big brown shaggy hound with golden eyes, lifted his head just as you took the photo. The result was adorable. His floppy ears were propped up and his head tilted slightly.  The slightly smaller dog, (O/D/N), an elderly Labrador, continued to snooze, completely ignoring your calls to lift his head. You posted the tweet and continued to scroll through your phone.  It wasn’t long before your notifications started beeping. You checked your Twitter, finding people were reposting your tweet and replying to the photo. 

“Awww! So cute! You have to bring them!” 

“This is unacceptable! You can’t miss out on another meet-up!” 

“I want those dogs!”

You smiled at each Tweet and tried replying. More and more re-tweets and replies came and you got fed up with notifications, so you turned them off.  You ignored Twitter for some time, already jealous with the fans who were going. You’ll probably see what was happening in a video on Mark’s channel in the next few days. You checked your Twitter one last time; amazed at the number of retweets you had received in the short space of time.

“Keep retweeting so Mark can see this!” 

“I’ll show him when I get there!” 

“Everyone show Mark and make him see the puppies!” 

You laughed at each one and went through the list liking them.  Then, your phone vibrated with a DM from Twitter and you almost let out a squeal when you read the message. 

“YOU BETTER BRING THOSE PUPPOS OR I’M GOING TO KIDNAP THEM!”  Tweeted from Markiplier. 

You spent almost no time leaping from your couch, grinning like a lunatic as you ran about the house finding your shoes and actually getting out of your PJs for once. Upon grabbing the dog-leashes (Y/D/N) bounded over to you, barking excitedly. You looped the clip around his collar and did the same to (O/D/N).  You were practically dragged out of the house by (Y/D/N) with (O/D/N) trotting behind you.  The park was a few blocks away and the closer you got, the more nervous you were becoming.  What if someone there was allergic to dogs? Or someone was scared of dogs? Maybe this was a bad idea, I mean (Y/D/N) could accidentally knock someone over or (O/D/N) could get agitated with someone and growl at them.  But it was already too late. By the time you had the thought to turn around and retreat home, you were on the outskirts of the park and the mass of people had spotted you.  “Oh my God, it’s the puppies!” You heard someone cry. Your nerves escalated as the crowd turned to you and started shouting excitedly.  But you couldn’t help but smile as you started towards them. (Y/D/N) started tugging against his leash, his tail wagging madly.  “Release the puppos!” You heard a familiar voice bellow. You shrugged and trapped (Y/D/N) between your legs as you unclipped him from his collar.  “Brace yourselves!” You called as (Y/D/N) galloped towards the hoards of screaming people.  He crashed into the many legs, almost drowning under reaching fingers and gentle pets.  A few people approached you, politely greeting you and asking if they could pat (O/D/N). You nodded and they crouched beside the older dog, who lazily wagged their tail and panted happily.  “So, your (Y/T/N)!” Mark said with a wide smile.  “Hi! I couldn’t bear losing my dogs to a kidnapper, so I had to bring them.”  The man laughed and crouched down beside (O/D/N) to give them a gentle scratch behind the ear.  “A lot of people here didn’t want you missing out.” He continued to speak to you from the ground. “I’ve always wanted to meet you as well. Your art is amazing.”  You blushed and chuckled, “Well, my muse is pretty inspirational.”  Mark flashed you a brilliant smile and stood, gesturing to the crowd.  “Well, come meet everyone. We were about to start the video.” 

You followed Mark into the middle of the park, where (Y/D/N) was running around, almost overwhelmed with excitement. A few people were chasing after him, seeming to play tag with the dog.  Then (Y/D/N) found, what you guessed was Mark’s bag, and removed a football from it.  “Hey!” Mark yelled, starting towards the pup. “That’s mine!”  (Y/D/N) started running. His ears flapped like wings as he bounded away from the man. Everyone started laughing as Mark gave chase. He tried leaping onto the dog, even tried herding him towards the crowd, but (Y/D/N) seemed to dodge every hand as they made a grab for the ball.  You laughed along with everyone else. Enjoying the comical show that was unfolding in front of you. Finally, you thought it had gone on for long enough and you whistled loudly. The hound skidded to a stop, his golden eyes fixed on you with a quizzical stare.  “Give it here,” You ordered, keeping your voice friendly.  (Y/D/N) trotted over to you, his ears slanted backwards and his eyes mischievous. He slowed as he neared you, lifting his head up slightly to place the ball in your hand. “Don’t you dare,” You warned, but before your fingers could find purchase, (Y/D/N) had jumped back and started running.  But he ran straight into Mark’s legs and the man caught hold of the dog’s collar and plucked the toy from his jaws.  Cheers flooded the park as Mark lifted the ball up like a trophy. Grinning wildly.  “Markimoo- 1, doggo- 0″ Mark smirked and booped (Y/D/N) on his wet nose. He looked rather disappointed, but wagged his tail none-the-less. 

As Mark set up the cameras and arranged the crowd as he needed, you had found a nice spot under a tree to watch.  Others had joined you, too nervous or anxious to join in the activities. But the small group around you were happy stroking your dogs fur and laughing at what Mark was making the others do.  You weren’t sure what was happening. It had started off as a game of tag, then evolved into stick-in-the-mud, then the ball came in as the crowd formed a circle. Mark was in the centre kicking the ball as high into the air as he could for someone to catch.  Those who caught it, had to make up a ridiculous dance routine and make animal noises to go with it. At one point, Mark had kicked the ball but it struck the toes of his shoes and the object flew in a unexpected arc. It had almost hit you as it came tumbling through the canopy of the tree. You saved yourself by slapping it away, but managed to accidentally hit (O/D/N).  “Oh no! I’m so sorry!” You cooed, cradling the dog’s head as if you had seriously injured it. Mark over-exaggerated the situation by running over and dramatically throwing himself in front of the dog, begging their forgiveness and apologizing profusely.  (O/D/N) looked very confused, and responded by gently tapping Mark’s bowed head, as if to say  “You are forgiven, loud-one” Mark laughed and returned to the circle. 

The whole situation was cringey and amazing all at the same time.  Finally, when the time of the meet-up was nearing its end, Mark ushered your group up and into the middle of the park.  “Right, now it’s your turn!” He told you and you quickly panicked as he kicked the ball into the air. You instinctively watched it soar skywards and you angled yourself so when it plummeted back to earth, you caught it in your hands, cradling it on your chest.  People cheered and Mark grinned broadly, “You have to make up a dance sequence now!” Groaning, you dropped the ball and started krumping. It was sloppy, and your cheeks glowed red from embarrassment, but people were laughing and cheering you on.  When was the last time you even danced? A loooong time, a voice at the back of your head replied. “You have to make an animal noise!” Someone in the back reminded you.  You rolled your eyes and turned to (Y/D/N), “Howl!”  Weeks of training paid off as (Y/D/N) lifted back his head and started to howl. A long deep sound that you started dancing too. A few others followed your lead, and soon you had a large group of people boogie around (Y/D/N).  Like some weird ritual, everyone started making strange howling noises and you couldn’t help but laugh. It was all so ridiculous!  Finally, Mark hushed everyone and told them that it was time to back up.  You said your goodbyes and clipped your dogs back on their leashes.  Before you started walking home, someone gently touched your shoulder and you turned to face Mark.  “It was really nice to meet you, (Y/T/N)” He said with a small smile. “I hope you come to the next meet-up.”  “Of course!” You beamed, “And my name is (Y/N) by the way.”  “It was a pleasure meeting you, (Y/N). We’ll have to meet up another time.” He winked at you and shouldered his bag, heading towards his car.  You couldn’t help but smile and you quickly turned away so no one could see you blushing.

I’m gonna go to bed now! Hope you enjoyed!

#Markiplier #puppos! #one-shots #a little fluff

[aurelliocheek]

John Romero about Doom: 25 Years of Rip & Tear

Fast. Brutal. Hardcore. Merciless. That is Doom.

Doom – ‘nuff said!« That‘s how a Post Mortem on one of the most influencial games of all times could actually look like. Doom wrote games history, Doom is pop culture, Doom is a name that stands for high-speed, hardcore and merciless shooter-action. Everybody knows it, almost everybody played it in at least one of its many different forms – be it the classics, extraordinary mods, Doom 3, fan-projects or id Software‘s Reboot from 2016, published by Bethesda.

On 10th December 2018, Doom celebrated its 25th anniversary. Seriously, is there any better reason to take the time and sit and chat with John Romero, one of id Software‘s founders and Doom‘s creators? We don‘t think so!

One does not simply create a game and thereby a completely new genre, which not only lasts until this day but has ever since evolved tremendously. Looking back at how it came to life, how does it feel being its creator? Hmm… I don’t really think of it this way, which is funny. Even though we made first-person shooters, we originally thought of it as making a better maze game. One that was faster and more fluid – that’s what it felt like at the very, very beginning. Action games or even RPGs before »Wolfenstein 3D« or even »Catacomb 3D«, which was a very fluid moving maze game with demons and stuff, were all built like these 90°-turn wall passages, where each tile only had enough room for one object like a person or enemy; take for example »Might & Magic«, »Ultima« or »Eye of the Beholder«. However, all that these games did was making better wall graphics, but they didn’t make it smoother and faster. And I think, that’s kind of what we did: we took out that block movement, which started with »Maze War« in 1974 – and even that already had deathmatch in it!

There was a game called »Wayout«. It took place in a similar maze, but there were some spaces in the game that were a little bit more open and in which you could fluidly move around. It wasn’t super-fast – it still was an Apple II, with 1 MHz – but fluid. You could turn around in 360° and I was super impressed when I saw that and so I knew that it was possible.

»Catacombs 3D« (upper picture) and »Hovertank One« were the predecessors of »Wolfenstein 3D« and »Doom«.

In 1991, »Hovertank One« was the first time we actually had 3D on screen and moved around in the same kind of mazes (laughs). After Catacomb 3D, we eventually got to Wolfenstein 3D, which was really fast – as fast as we could go in VGA. But Doom really changed it all and it did so, because the environment changed. We got out of these block mazes and went into places that were way cooler and that aspect was very important for the genre to start.

Whenever someone creates something outstanding, people on the outside – in this case gamers – develop high expectations for whatever comes next, and with it there often goes a certain amount of pressure: the pressure of fulfilling these expectations. How has creating Doom influenced your career and how did you deal with the pressure? Well. At id Software, the only pressure we had was our own. We wanted to make really good games. That was the whole point and it didn’t matter what anyone else thought or what other people said; for example, things like »It’s too satanic!« or whatever – we didn’t care at all. It was never going to stop us from doing what we wanted and we never let it pressure us. Nobody makes the best game every time they make a game! By the time Doom came out, I had been making games for 14 years, and during that time every game was getting better and better, but you can’t expect your next game to be the best that’s ever been made, that’s just not realistic. We knew that, because at that point each of us had been making games for at least 10 years. And if you make a lot of games, they’re not going to all be hits – that’s just simple facts. Yeah, we had pressure, but it was our own drive to make really cool stuff! Actually, Doom was the only game where we said at the very beginning that we need to make the best game that we could imagine playing – that was the only time we ever did that (chuckles). »Demons on the Prey«

A Week of Deathmatch with John Romero at GDC, 2013, San Francisco.

Going back even further: what actually sparked the idea for Doom, besides the urge to make a more fluid and advanced maze game, but also in regard to story, setting and everything there is? Did you get any inspiration from books or movies for example? (laughs) It was actually inspired from our D&D campaign. We played »Dungeons & Dragons« for a long time. John Carmack was our dungeon master and he had a world that he had been developing for years when we got together. It had tons of characters in it and it was super political – it was really great! And the D&D campaign ended when I, well… did something that destroyed the world. I opened up a portal to a plane where all the demons are, and they all just poured out over the course of months and destroyed everything in the whole world. Carmack obeyed his own rules and the world was over… and it was due to demons flooding in and ruining everything there was.

So, that was the end of our playing D&D for a while (laughs).

When we were thinking about making Doom, we thought about using this idea, the story about demons pouring in through some kind of portal, and the player actually has the ability to stop it. With that idea, we were thinking about a setting, and we wanted to do something ›sci-fi-futurish‹, because we had already done the ›World War‹ II thing, and we thought that with the new technology we can actually make it look pretty cool. So, with this futuristic setting in mind, Tom Hall came up with the idea of bringing it all to Phobos, where the UAC (Union Aerospace Corporation) was experimenting with teleportation. Doing that, they accidentally opened up portal to hell, but instead of aliens, it’s actually hell coming through (chuckles) and that was something new. No player expected to find hell in space, and that made the game surprising and very interesting. Adding in some of our favourite stuff sci-fi-wise, we thought about what sci-fi-action movies were big at that time and »Aliens« instantly came to mind. We wanted something like that, something terrifying. Also, the dark humour – that’s just part of who we are, and back then »Evil Dead 2« was one of our favourite movies of all time, so we wanted to have this sensibility, and of course the chainsaw and the shotgun (grins)!

In hindsight, is there something you were never 100% happy with? Well, yeah… I wish that I had made a lot more levels… You know, I just made the first episode and not even the boss level, Sandy Petersen had made that because we were just down to the wire. It was a really busy year. We started the game with Tom, until he left us in August. In September, Sandy came on board and first plowed through all of Tom’s stuff and started retexturing and fixing things, and just trying to get a lot of levels done. That was what Sandy was doing, while my work in the beginning was creating the level editor – can’t make any levels without an editor, right? I had to program the tool, and it was really hard coming up with levels that didn’t look like Wolfenstein or rather everything we’ve ever seen in our whole life. So, creating the abstract level design style and developing all that took some time to bring it as far away from Wolfenstein as we could. Then I had to do all the level programming: everything that happens in a Doom level – meaning stairs, doors, lights flickering, you name it – I wrote all of that code, plus the ›save & load‹ code, as well as the tools outside of Doom like the install program, setup, and DM. All of that took me a lot of time and I just wish I would’ve had more time to make more levels.

That’s the only regret I have. Other than that, I still think it turned out great – but it could’ve even been better!

»Aliens« and the character of Ash Williams from »The Evil Dead« inspired certain elements of Doom, be it the atmosphere within the game or… well, the chainsaw and shotgun. Groovy! Copyright: 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment

If you had the chance to make Doom with today’s tech, how would it look? Or rather: were there any features you weren’t able to realize due to technical limitations? Hmm, if I had the same tech as back then, pretty much the same, only with me making more levels. With today’s tech? Completely different, obviously (laughs). Regarding features: no… (pauses). No, we actually put everything in that we wanted to have in the game – at that time! After a game comes out and you see what people do with it, then of course you get all kinds of ideas of what would be really cool to have. But those things didn’t exist while we were making the game. There simply wasn’t any game like it, so there’s really no way to say »Oh yeah, we messed up« or »We didn’t do a lot of things, because we didn’t have enough time«, simply because those ideas didn’t exist as the game wasn’t out, yet. Everything in the whole world was pre-Doom.

In Germany, Doom I & II were indexed, but re-rated after roughly 19 years. In October 2012, Bethesda released the »Doom 3: BFG Edition«, which included the (not indexed) »Doom3« as well as both the originals. And the amazing thing after having played both games again after almost two decades: they still hold up to this very day and that is quite impressive. Yeah, right? It’s like with »Super Mario« or »Donkey Kong«. It still feels excellent. It’s just that no one really knows how to nail a classic. You have to have a lot of experience making stuff before that’s going to happen. Nowadays, source ports of Doom feel smoother than it did at the very beginning. Now it’s super smooth and really, really fast!

Looking at so many other games that exist, no matter the genre, a lot of them aged really badly. What are, in your opinion, the key elements for Doom not being one of them? Number 1: I think that one of the most important things when you start programming a game, is that it’s tied to a timer, you need to have timer chip control. That means that you’ll never go too fast on any future computer. When we wrote our games, even before id Software, John and I were individually writing games with timer chip control. So as soon as our game starts we immediately set the timer chip for the refresh rate we want the game to go at, and to make sure it doesn’t go faster than that. If it went slower than that, then we would have code that would fix the speed of the character to match where they should be, for example if your CPU was a little too slow. So you actually have to have code to handle moving too slow on a slow computer, but also ensures that moving is never too fast on future computers as well. That’s unbelievably important.

When you go and look back at any games from that time period, they just zoom all over the screen, as they’re just too fast, because CPUs are insane now. The ones that are still super playable are the ones that have real hardware control. None of the Origin games had timer control because they were maxing-out the fastest computers when they released (laughs).

Is it safe to say, that first-person shooters are your favourite genre? I think so, yeah. I mean, it’s super immersive, it looks amazing, there’s lots of great puzzle-solving in that space. I love »Half Life 2«’s physics puzzles – being in a space like that is just so much more immersive than any 2D puzzle game. But that’s a totally different kind of thinking. Before making shooters, I did a ton of different games. For me, Wolfenstein was game number 87! Before that, I had already made 86 games – and that’s only the ones that were being published. So, yeah, I had some practice before Doom (laughs). Up to today I‘ve now made a total of around 150 games.

As an example: Less than a year ago, I did a 10-hour gamejam. The title turned out to be a really cool little game called »July 4th 1976«. I worked on it with a coder friend of mine, and it was super creepy and different. I put it in the App Store, and boom – a new game (laughs). There’s another gamejam next weekend I want to attend. Maybe I can put out another game.

Actually, the last time I’ve been to a gamejam, my son joined me. He flew over from the US to Ireland for father’s day. So, we did a gamejam in the city with a whole bunch of other people and we made something really cool, but the idea was way too big for the time we had. I want to finish it though, because the idea was really cool. You see, I’m always making stuff. I’m currently working on three different games at once.

In 2016, id Software released its Reboot of Doom – fast-paced, hardcore, brutal, real. Its successor »Doom Eternal« is set for 2019.

Are there any other genres or genre-typical mechanics you would like to mix with an FPS? Well, when creating an FPS, I don’t really think about genre-merging, because to me that would feel kind of artificial. When I want to make a new shooter, I rather think about what I want to do in this gameplay style that hasn’t been done and what I haven’t seen before. Take the original »Prey« for example, where you could walk on walls, which totally changed the whole game. They didn’t mash up any genres, they simply put in a very cool feature.

Actually, I do have some cool ideas, but I can’t really talk about them, because… well, you know…(laughs)! But seriously though, there’s still so much that hasn’t been done in FPSs, yet. And it’s amazing how the genre evolved. Just take the first-person perspective. The fact alone that with »Quake« we have created a fluid high-speed first-person perspective, all in 3D. Even games like »World of Warcraft« had to come from that. In fact, the lead programmer of WoW worked on Quake. So when you talk about influences, Doom sure was the beginning, but Quake’s impact was also big. The Production Director for »Overwatch« is the same guy who coded the 3D engine for »Star Wars: Dark Forces« back in 1995. And it’s funny how eventually it all goes back down to Doom, when it comes to a full 3D world.

We actually helped Valve when they started working on »Half-Life«. They came over to our office, and we set them up with a Quake Engine license, and I talked to them about what kind of team they’d need to make an FPS, then they started their company. But it’s not only FPSs – Markus Persson who created »Minecraft« once told me that Doom was the reason he became a programmer. So, you could say that without Doom, there wouldn’t be a Minecraft today (laughs).

From all the first-person shooters that came out in recent years, which is your favourite? Ummm… (long pause). You know, I really like the new »Doom«! It’s got the attitude, it’s got the speed. And for today, it was about making things move fast, but you just can’t have 50 super-fast demons on you, you just couldn’t live. It’s got just the right amount. In the original Doom, we often had a lot of enemies on the screen, but they would move slower. But yeah, it just feels like a really good hardcore shooter and it inherits the essence of how hardcore shooters should be and how we wanted to make them.

… the starting scene where the Doom Marine just takes the screen on which he’s told what’s going on and he just throws it away. All in all though, it feels like they treated the material with the right attitude and necessary respect. (Starts cheering) Yeah! It‘s like »I don’t care. There is no story. Rip & Tear!« And you’re right, they really got what Doom was and made it right. This is absolutely what we would have done if we had the tech. They went into the same direction we would have gone anyway. They worked on it for seven years – that’s such a long time, but they took the time and they made it right. It’s hardcore, it’s really great!

What’s your opinion on »Doom Eternal«? Unbelievable! It was such a great idea just going for that grappling hook – just do it! (laughs) But seriously, everybody is excited about it, because with the Doom they already made they proved that they know what Doom is and how to make something awesome. And what they did with the next one, was basically what we did with »Doom 2: Hell on Earth«. We didn’t mess up anything, but we took what everyone liked and made it better, and that’s exactly what they did with Eternal: they took what everybody liked and made it better, and they did not mess up anything that was already in the game. That’s how you make a sequel!

And you know what? I’m actually more excited for what comes after Doom Eternal (laughs), I mean, I really want to know where Doom goes, because we’ve seen nothing after Doom 2. This is the fifth Doom, and I’m waiting for the next Doom 3 – the real one, not the remake! Looking back at »Half-Life 2«, it was a great game. It was more expansive in scope and more scientific, such a great adventure to go on with all the changing environments and everything. But Doom… Doom is visceral, that’s the major difference.

From left to right: John Carmack, Kevin Cloud, Adrian Carmack, John Romero, Tom Hall, Jay Wilbur.

What did you think about all the easter eggs? Like the little Doom Marine figurine you fist-bump when you find it, the Icon of Sin or Commander Keen’s helmet and skull on a stick? (Laughs) The figurine was so great, and it wasn’t that hard to find. At some point you just turn and backtrack, and then you find him sitting there and I was like »Ah, so little collectibles are a thing now.« And it’s actually funny that they put the word ›Doom‹ on Keen’s helmet, because the only validation for that can be found in Doom 2. There’s a secret level at the very end, where Commander Keen is hanging, and you can shoot him, that’s about it.

Speaking of secret levels: »To win the game you must get 100% on level 15 by John Romero.« – A guy called Zero Master obviously managed to be the first to get 100% of all secrets in said level. Really? After more than 20 years? And what’s the story behind that? Yup, that’s real, nobody had done that before (laughs). Basically it was a special sector that I made while making this level. I put a secret teleporter behind a wall and that teleporter would take you somewhere. But instead of the destination where the teleporter took you being marked as a secret, I marked the teleporter itself as a secret. Normally, when you go into a teleporter, you never actually touch the sector inside the teleporter – you hit the line and you’re teleported. There’s also some weird movement stuff going in that little space. To mark a secret, you also need to be at the same vertical height as the sector, and this sector is above where the player is at. In this case, the players touch the line before they reach the same height as the sector and so they’re gone.

This player who discovered it actually used a Pain Elemental to push them into the teleporter to mark that secret. No one’s ever done that (laughs) and you could tell that guy did it on purpose because he pushed the Pain Elemental all the way down this really long hallway to get there. Sometimes it’s really fascinating what players actually come up with, they do all kinds of crazy stuff (laughs)!

If you could choose one game, you would’ve always loved or still would love to be a part of – your own games excluded –, which one would it be and why? Minecraft! It’s just the best game ever made, and unlike any other game. It’s absolutely incredible! World of Warcraft would be another choice; WoW is derived from »Everquest«, which again is derived from »Ultima Online« – there’s already a lineage there. But it gets to be grindy and repetitive, while Minecraft is just unlimited creativity – simply an amazing game, and its effects on the game industry are yet to be felt even more. Take »Fortnite« or, rather, its building aspect, which is obviously influenced by Minecraft.

In which regards do you think – positive as well as negative – has the games industry changed the most over the last 25 years? Huh… there’s been so many things. The rise of Facebook and Facebook gaming was very interesting and completely unforeseen, just like Minecraft. These huge things, they just appear. »POOF« and there they are, changing the internet.

If you’re a kid who loves Minecraft, however, have fun trying to download mods for it, because everybody’s mod pages and download sites are garbage! It’s horrible, they’re just trying to lure kids into installing all kinds of other stuff. Which download button do you click? If there’s ten buttons, nine of them are installing malware and one actually takes you to the mod you want – that’s insane! Especially as the appetite from kids is there.

And just look at Facebook games. Millions of people make and play these games. I made a Facebook game myself, and I had 25 million people playing it every month. That’s absolutely crazy! It was really interesting to see these things rise up and have this kind of exposure. And it influences everybody else. A lot of people are creatively influenced, others are influenced monetarily, and they just want to make money off that idea, so there’s a ton of ›gold-rushing‹ towards those things.

After 24 (!!) years, player Zero Master finally managed to discover the last and final unrevealed secret. Check the video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=irNoHfnLXRM

Is that rather positive or negative now? Oh no, I think it’s great. The kind of gameplay that evolved on Facebook using your friend network was unlike anything anyone had ever seen in a game before. Nobody had a network like that to connect to, and it was really interesting to see how designers would exploit or use the network that they have or even extend the network to people they don’t know, because these are people that also play the same game. That way they even meet new people through the game. It was really interesting to see this development and it showed how a platform like Facebook could really influence game design in a big way.

… and something really negative? On the whole there’s been a ton of positivity. But… well, #Gamergate, that should never have happened. And lootboxes (laughs). Lootboxes are still in flux. But it depends: if it’s only about stuff for peacocking, it’s one thing. If it’s ‘pay to win’, then it’s so not cool!

What’s your advice for young developers who try to get into the industry today and hopefully survive there? Find something that you’d like to do and mod a game using that skill. Mod multiple games, get experience in doing that and if you like it a lot, then create a portfolio page and get in touch with the companies you’d like to work for. And if you want to make games – well, start making them, however you can. The internet is packed-full with all the information you could possibly ever want. There’s no excuse for not making stuff!

Over the years you’ve probably been asked the same questions over and over again, and once more today. Now is your chance: if you could pick one question you’d like to answer that no one’s asked you before, which would it be? (Laughs) Hahaha, oh geez! Well… (pauses), what was it like making games on the Apple II?

And now you’ve got to answer it. It was tremendous amounts of fun. The Apple II was a finite computer that has nothing to do with today’s computers, which are endless, and you never stop learning. This computer was finite and limited in what it could do and what it had in it. But even with those limits, there was still an unbelievable amount to learn in order to master it and going from BASIC to assembly language and then all the techniques that you could use in assembly that are very different than 8-bit computers of that time period that had hardware systems for sprites and stuff like that – the Apple II had none. A lot of programming techniques had to be developed to put stuff on the screen manually. The interesting ‘problem’ that programming in assembly language brings is that there’s a lot you have to have in your head to write a game in it. And when one person is doing that, it’s hard to really focus on a big and cool new game design, because you already have incredible amounts of stuff in your head in order to just make even a simple game.

Making big games didn’t really happen back then. And if there were any, like the Ultima games, and “Wizardry”, it was because that programmer was just better than most people. They had more practice before making their cool big game, so they could focus more on the design than on the implementation of it. They had already spent years getting good at coding, so they could now focus more on design. And in the early days it was hard to find the time because the industry had just begun in 1977, so it was a race. But it was an amazing time and fun sharing information with other people, and back then everyone was discovering stuff for the first time. There were hardly any books, so it was even cooler when you could actually get a piece of information from somebody, or find a cool trick somewhere in a magazine. It was simply the most fun time ever, because it was also during the arcade explosion and all of the creativity that was coming out in the arcades, all the games that no one had ever seen before, coupled with the fact that you have that going into your head and you could make that stuff happen on a computer. There’s no end to what you can do, there’s no end to what you want to do.

Looking back at your time at id Software: in hindsight and despite how it all went down between you and John Carmack, is there – still today – a specific moment you wouldn’t want to miss for the world? Basically, everything up until halfway through 1995.

John Romero is a legend! Besides that he was the Co-Founder of id Software and creator of classics like »Commander Keen«, »Wolfenstein 3D«, »Doom I & 2« and »Quake«.

The post John Romero about Doom: 25 Years of Rip & Tear appeared first on Making Games.

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Patient 13: Journey to a Diabetes Cure?

New Post has been published on http://type2diabetestreatment.net/diabetes-mellitus/patient-13-journey-to-a-diabetes-cure/

Patient 13: Journey to a Diabetes Cure?

Filmmakers Lisa Hepner and her husband, Guy Mossman, are on a mission to bring the story of diabetes and the quest to find a cure to the silver screen. For Lisa, it's not just professional — it's personal. Lisa was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes 20 years ago while in college and has worked for the past 15 years producing documentaries for the likes of Discovery Channel, TLC, MTV and PBS. Now she wants to highlight the struggles of living with the disease while showcasing some breakthrough research in a new documentary called Patient 13.

Her story focuses on Scott King (no relation to the former Diabetes Health editor), who is a type 1 diabetic, researcher and biotech engineer in San Francisco. Scott, along with his team at Cerco Medical, and Dr. Jonathan Lakey, one of the original scientists of the breakthrough Edmonton Protocol, have developed an innovative way to protect islet cells from becoming damaged or killed off during transplantation. The method uses a small, thin sheet of islet cells with a protective membrane to keep the immune system from attacking the cells, but still allows the insulin to pass into the bloodstream. The research is about to enter the final phase of clinical trials, and if successful, is projected to enter the human trials phase sometime next year in Europe.

Lisa and her husband will be trailing Scott and his team throughout the whole process, but they need our help! The documentary is in desperate need of financial support and they're asking us — the diabetes community — to help fund the project. To find out more about the film, the story behind its name, and Scott's research, we spoke with Lisa last week:

DM) You are quite an accomplished documentary filmmaker. What made you want to take on this as-yet-unfunded diabetes project?

LH) We're following an incredible story with very high stakes, and we also have an opportunity to shine a light on life with diabetes. The elevator pitch explanation is that essentially we are following one man's quest to cure diabetes.

Scott King has had diabetes for 30 years and has been working on curing diabetes since he was a student at Harvard. After graduation, he worked on Wall Street, and while there, he wrote a paper that analyzed the economic feasibility of curing diabetes. It was the first paper of its kind. What he predicted was that there would be a cure, and it would come from islet cell transplants.

Fast forward to 2011. Now, this prediction might be coming true. What we're doing is following his journey and his team's journey. But it's not just about Scott. It's about Dr. Jonathan Lakey and two of their scientists, too. We're following this crew at a very important juncture in their lives when all of their research is being put to the test. Is this going to work? These guys are onto something that could be really big!

In about a month, canine trials begin at Cedar Sinai hospital in Los Angeles. If the dog trial works, they'll go to human trials. Then we'll be follow people as they want to get into the trial.

It gives us — as storytellers — an opportunity to pull back the curtain on what it's like to live with diabetes. We're stepping in with this narrative arc, showing what it's really like to live with type 1 diabetes.

So many hopes for a cure... Do you really believe this one is "it"?

Diabetes is quite complicated and a lot of people have been working on this for years. Because scientific innovation — especially medical innovation — takes so long to get to the bedside, we can forget that this disease is even curable. This may not cure diabetes, but it may be the best treatment out there.

What exactly does the title "Patient 13" mean?

Scott King wants to be the 13th patient in his own trial. He spoke to a peer of his at UC Davis about being in the trial, and his friend said that you shouldn't be in the first 12; you should first be present to see how the trials are doing in the others. You should know that the people in the trial are flourishing.

Other researchers are trying to protect islet cells as well. What's unique about the research that Scott and his team are doing?

It's an islet cell transplant that doesn't need anti-rejection drugs. That's the critical key. They have created an islet sheet that is micro-thin, it's the size of a small credit card. It would be transplanted into the wall of your abdomen, or possibly the pancreas or liver. What's great is that the protection around the sheet is porous enough for the insulin to go out, but thick enough to keep the immune system from destroying the beta cell. The sheet is put it through laparoscopic surgery and if the sheet somehow causes issues, it can easily be taken out, unlike the other encapsulated technology.

How did you get involved with Scott and his team?

We actually have the same endocrinologist at UCLA, Dr. Andrew Drexler. He knew I was looking for a good story to tell about diabetes, and he knew I wanted to do a profile on the search for the cure. I'd looked at the Artificial Pancreas and also other biological cures. He said, "You should talk to Scott King. He's cured diabetes in rats."

What will happen if the scientists aren't successful? Don't you have a lot riding on them curing these dogs?

We're less concerned about this being a huge success, and more about the story. We don't need a Disney ending. As a filmmaker, what happens, happens. We're going to learn a lot on this journey.

The way we're filming the documentary is called "vérité filmmaking." We're essentially flies on the wall, following the action. We'll be velcroed to Scott King. We'll watch him test like a maniac. We'll shoot him when he goes for treatment for his diabetic retinopathy. We'll follow people who are signing up for the human trials. We really want to capture the exterior and interior monologue of living with this disease.

Besides the hope for a cure (God willing!), what is it about this story that intrigues you so much?

It's a universal journey of wanting to make it, but the stakes are huge. The stakes could change medical history. So the potential is intriguing to me. But even just the journey of these guys is intriguing. They've been doing this for 30 years. This is a culmination of all their work. I can relate to their working up and working forward.

They could actually end suffering for millions of people. And the other aspect, in terms of diabetes awareness, is that people don't understand how demanding this disease is. How costly, demanding, and debilitating it is.

Medical research is awfully fickle. Do you have any idea when this documentary might be finished?

We're looking at Fall 2013, which seems far away, but we're following what's happening in real time. If the dog trials start in a month, then the human trials wouldn't start until mid-2012. Then we'll edit and do post-production on the film. We do want to send it to Sundance, and we do want to do the whole festival circuit. We would love to do a theatrical release with a major broadcaster, like HBO, which is a huge supporter of documentaries.

We also want to get it into hospitals or even in the diagnosis kits given to patients. We want to really have a big education outreach. We're working with a strategist on what kind of tangible outreach we could do. When the lights go up after a documentary, people feel inspired that they can do something. We want to heighten awareness of what this disease is and raise more money for more advances. If the islet sheet works and this protocol works, we still need to find a source of these cells, like xenotransplants.

The response we've had so far as been great. People are hungry for a movie like this. And I want to tell this story. Our story of diabetes will continue and we just want people to be part of it.

But in order to get this off the ground, you need to raise a lot of money, right? How is that going?

Right now we're using Kickstarter, which is an online platform to raise money in a short period of time. On Nov. 3, we launched a 30-day campaign to raise $30,000. If we don't raise all the money by Dec. 2, we don't get any of the pledges! It's a real incentive and motivator to raise that money.

We started filming in 2010 and have been filming sporadically. We want to be able to follow the action of the canine trials when they start in a month. Dogs are a great model for diabetic humans. If it works in dogs, there's a 99% chance it will work in humans. We want to be there when dog #3 goes three months without insulin.

On the fundraising, how far do you still have to go?

We're at $27,000 and we have 11 days to go. This is what I want to stress about Kickstarter. It's all about the $10 donation. If 500 of your readers donated $5, that's $5,000! No matter how big or small, every donation matters.

Plus people who back the project with pledges will get certain premium prizes, depending on the amount. For instance, $25 will get you a complimentary copy of the Patient 13 DVD. $75 will get you an autographed copy of Dan Hurley's book, Diabetes Rising. $1,000 or more will get you two tickets to the premiere screening, and $5,000 will get you lunch with Scott King and Jonathan Lakey!

If we don't reach our goal, we don't get anything.

Besides this particular project, has your own life with diabetes influenced your work as documentary filmmaker?

It definitely influenced what I did with my life. I was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes when I was 21 and studying abroad in Edinburgh. I wasn't hospitalized, I was just sent home with my syringes. And that's when my diabetes education began.

Life's really short and there's no straight path. What was I going to do with that info? I had originally planned to go to law school after college, but I was being exposed to all these interesting stories living in Scotland. My passion was actually being a journalist.

When I got my diagnosis, I realized that I had to follow my passion. I realized I could be dead in a week without insulin. I thought, 'Don't waffle, Lisa, choose what you really want to do.' And that's how I started in on this big adventure. When I graduated from University of Toronto, I worked in radio for a bit, and then I got my first job in documentary filmmaking at 23. I've been working in the industry ever since.

Lisa and her husband really need our support to get this film off the ground. Support Patient 13 by watching the trailer and donating to their Kickstarter campaign now!

Disclaimer: Content created by the Diabetes Mine team. For more details click here.

Disclaimer

This content is created for Diabetes Mine, a consumer health blog focused on the diabetes community. The content is not medically reviewed and doesn't adhere to Healthline's editorial guidelines. For more information about Healthline's partnership with Diabetes Mine, please click here.

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