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howmanyholesinswisscheese · 14 days

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More Sherlock & Co Headcanons

Because y'all like the first ones so much.

Mariana is one of those heathens who eats the kernels at the bottom of the popcorn bowl and enjoys it.

John and Sherlock have a rotating cast of answers to the age old client question, "So are you two...?" which only serve to confuse the asker even more. It's an incredibly enjoyable sport. Sherlock often just plays dumb, to John's enormous amusement. It's their favorite inside joke.

When he does actually eat it, Sherlock's go-to breakfast food is a boiled egg and soldiers. Fight me. I will not stand for boiled eggs and soldiers slander they are amazing and Sherlock knows it.

John keeps a collection of bloopers/funny moments he's recorded during cases in a folder on his computer. When he's feeling down, he puts in his earplugs and listens to them. He never fails to get a laugh out of it.

Speaking of language headcanons in the last post, Sherlock speaks fluent Spanish (because of course he does). Sometimes he and Mariana have innocuous conversations in Spanish just to mess with John. He finally gets what it's like to be a stranger watching them all converse in BSL.

Sherlock has a strong appreciation for the musical arts. Once, after a particularly sour case, John took Sherlock to the orchestra to lighten his mood. Sherlock didn't express much outward enjoyment, still drained from the previous week's labor, but the next day the pieces they'd heard rang out through the flat as Sherlock's touch brought them to life from memory on his violin. John found this version infinitely more beautiful than any orchestra. and he even glimpsed the ghost of a smile as Sherlock lost himself in the music.

You know how everyone has a different little doodle they do when they're bored and they've got a pen and a bit of paper around? Well, Sherlock does mandalas and circle scribbles, John does little smiley faces and zig zags, and Mariana writes peoples names in calligraphy.

@obsessed-sketches and I both agree Sherlock wears a really heavy, well-worn coat for the deep-pressure stimulation. And a scarf, because those are absolutely splendid to play/fiddle with and being all wrapped up just adds a whole nother dimension to it all.

John uses Microsoft Edge as his default browser. Mariana's exasperated protests have been completely futile in convincing him to switch and to be honest, who knows if there's any hope left for him anymore.

Speaking of browsers, Sherlock would be such a boss at the 2048 game.

Someday I'm gonna have to write a dance lesson fic, because the idea of Sherlock teaching John to dance for a case lives in my head rent free for literally every SH rendition but these two especially. Sherlock freely infodumping about the history of each song he plays as he shows John how to waltz, John filling the silence with nervous rambling, that rapport setting in and them just falling into step after a few minutes and forgetting time is even passing... I know I mostly HC them as a QPR but dear god the intimacy in that may kill me.

Mariana once introduced Sherlock to the National Day Calendar. National Cellophane Tape Day, National Life Insurance Day, National Raspberry Popover Day, and the likes are now slipped happily into conversations at 221B under Sherlock's firm belief that each one is on par with Christmas in terms of their significance in the public eye. Slay, Sherlock. National Days are awesome.

John makes the cutest sleep noises.

Yk how i said Sherlock likes rainbow sour straps. If you've ever eaten sour straps, you'll know there are two ways to eat them: whole, or by tearing the colours into strips. Clearly, as a civilised human being, Sherlock does the latter.

SHERLOCK WOULD TOTALLY WRITE AWESOME POETRY AND READ IT OUT AND JOHN AND MARIANA WOULD BE STUNNED INTO AWESTRUCK SILENCE

Mariana wears those really big hoop earrings. You know the ones.

AAAAH i should stop before this becomes a mammoth block of text. Maybe I'll make a part three.

Thank you kindly for being unwillingly subjected to my opinions coming to my TED talk.

#please i have too many they are literally exploding out of my head #the innocuous domestic ones are the worst i see them EVERYWHERE #NJKGLG AAAAAAA #i probably need help #ive not proofread this post at all but yk what im posting it #sherlock and co #sherlock & co #jonk watson #sherlock holmes #john watson #mariana ametxazurra #johnlock #jonklock #podlock #sherlock and co headcanons #arter speaks

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weebsinstash · 11 months

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Okay this is probably gonna sound really weird but this specific scenario is stuck in the brain—

Thinking of that version of things where you helped YouTwo make friends, imagine if, in some subjective way, they’re better than you. Not in a “better spider person” way, but more like a slightly more appealing face kinda way? Like you barely look different but if you put your faces into one of those evaluator things they’d get a higher score. Maybe they just have good makeup out smth idk. It doesn’t necessarily have to be this but just some random way that YouTwo is thought of as “better”

But eventually, the spider people start actively treating the copy as the original, because they have it in their heads that the original one they love is the best, so the “better” of the two must be the original. Instead of confusing psychological warfare through mix-ups, reader is actively pushed down and away by the spider people, and at this point they simply move away to a normal part of Nueva York (or their home universe, depending on how we’re doing this) since the rest of the society is clearly happy to focus all their love on the other one.

The good bit comes whenever YouTwo slips up, whether by returning to their home universe if reader’s is supposed to be destroyed, making a bad comment, or just any other kind of mistake that makes the entire lobby pause and look like 👀

Because it’s not just the reveal that they’ve been believing this imposter for potentially months now, but also the fact that they now realise they pushed you away and made you feel like shit the entire time

After whatever punishment they see fit for the imposter is carried out, Miguel is rushing to find where you’re staying now so he can try to apologise or explain or try to make it right or something—

But when he’s standing at your door and running through all the events in his head, seeing how pissed you look at him, he’s wondering how he could ever convince you to love him again (he can’t help but default to kidnapping you and controlling you until you understand a fraction of how sorry he is)

Idk that’s just where brain took me— for me, at least, the best bit is the spoiling and smothering that would take place after, wanted or not!

I wrote this at midnight on my phone soo pls forgive if it’s incomprehensible lol

I'm always incomprehensible with weed or lust so you're good here lmao

Honestly I've been trying to sit and brainstorm 1. How does the Society start mistaking YouTwo for you and 2. How does this actually even work

You know how you can say "hey alexa" and she'll activate and then take further commands, but she's technically always listening to be able to receive the "hey Alexa" command? That's fucking Lyla, dude. I don't know if she's connected to every watch or just some of them but like, dude Lyla is an extremely powerful AI? How would you ever escape? It's not exactly clear how wide-ranging her abilities are, but as a program, she's not limited like you and I are. She can technically be listening and in some way processing and recording every single conversation that someone with a watch is having, or... maybe I'm thinking too much into it but sometimes I'm in the middle of brainstorming a you vs youtwo idea and my brain just goes "well wouldn't Lyla technically be there to set the record straight, wouldn't Lyla technically ALWAYS know who you are?"

And I think the answer to this problem... is to just say fuck it lmao! It's a fanfic and Lyla isn't always technically watching everything everywhere all at once even in canon right? She didn't immediately pipe up when Gwen reconnected with Miles in the beginning of ATSV, even though it technically would have been part of her prerogative to stop anything that would interfere with anomalies or the Spider Society. Technically speaking if I stayed completely 100% canon accurate this is how it would go:

YouTwo: --and they've just been pretending to be me this whole time! Please believe me Miguel, you KNOW it's me 🥺 uwu

Lyla within 5 seconds: heeeeey this is awkward but the electronic signature on your watch says you're the other one though lol? And the go home machine scans your dna and dimensional signature and the original doesnt even have a home dimension anymore? Plus here's some recorded audio from Reader's watch where you were threatening them and telling them no one will believe them if you replaced them, sooo.... awkward!

Like how fucking funny would it be if YouTwo is in HQ and is talking to Miguel and others and really playing their part and Spider Byte suddenly sees you log on this dimension's equivalent of Xbox lmao. Margo just looking back and forth and realizing holy shit. Or Reader deliberately ordering delivery food while YouTwo is out stealing their life or teaching their class and then when the delivery Spider shows up at your apartment that definitely only you have access to, that also helps kinda set things straight

I've even thought of like, you become depressed and start letting YouTwo do whatever they want and one day someone is banging on your front door and it's them "Hey you can't just COMPLETELY disappear, I don't want to work your fucking job everyday anymore, you have all these responsibilities and some of these people ALWAYS want to spend time with you" and you just smirk "oh no, guess that's your problem, 'real me'"

It's like. I'm trying to make it believable but if I ever do write the full fic (which I'm trying to but at this point I'm pulled between many different ideas) I want it to be believable? Like, for example, a lot of my dumb werewolf audiobooks have the protag being bullied and abused, and listening to those makes me MAD. I want readers to read this story and how you/Reader is being replaced and tricked and I want people to FEEL emotions about it, not just roll their eyes "this would never happen/this is so OOC"

But no definitely the yandere rose colored glasses start completely fucking you over, and I think another catalyst is, you seeing how "genuine" all your society friends act when they think it's not the real you you're talking to. Like here's an example i thought of. What if youtwo had the exact same hero name and real name as you and you're out and about one day and Miguel approaches you and he just CALLS YOU A NUMBER. Like say your home universe is 1217 and YouTwo's is 1712 and Miguel just walks up to you, "what are you doing here, 1712? You're supposed to be helping with construction in sector 6" and meanwhile you're just like holy shit do some people legitimately not even call YouTwo by an actual name, are these people more evil than I originally thought, holy shit no wonder YT wanted to steal my life" (and it's partially because depending on the person they either think of YouTwo as a Dollar Tree version of you and are nice to them as well but prefer you, OR they hate YouTwo outright for "daring to defile your image" and have the same voice and face as you, they think youtwo brings shane to you or whatever)

So not only are you starting to become upset about feeling replaced and feeling like you were never important to them to begin with, but then you're realizing that, either overall or with certain actions, that a lot of people are more outright mean and heartless than you originally thought?

And you're standing there "oh YouTwo has smaller pores and clearer skin than me, YouTwo actually knows how to dance at the clubs and parties,

BUT NO the shit where they suddenly start pointing out or criticizing things about you they've never commented on, just all of a sudden they have a LIST of things they dint like about you, when you're rhe same you've always been, SHIT HURTS, THAT'S THE DRAMA AND PAIN I'M LOOKING FOR

Miguel over here finally confronting YouTwo "and your little groveling for everyone's attention is so pathetic! Those empanadas you left on my desk weren't even good! They had all the wrong ingredients and they weren't crispy enough, i had to keep throwing them away--

You: a-actually, um, I was the one leaving you food so that you would eat. The first time came out really bad but i got better after the first time. You didn't like them, or did you not even eat them after the first time? 🥺

Miguel: --and they were fantastic, made me think of my Abuela, really took me back to my childhood, spectacular, outstanding, 5 stars

People start just "sounding off at YouTwo"

Pavitr: you wanted to try and make chai and it was so bitter my auntie poured it down the drain!

Porker: and when I introduced ya to him, you made Roger real uncomfortable with the "jokes" you made about him and his wife, which weren't that funny by the way!

Hobie: your style is conformist, it's like you have no real sense of self identity. Why did I see you at one of my concerts in a shitty leathet jacket and some brand new converse? You don't even know punk lace code, and you didn't even say hi, you just lurked like a creep

You: God DAMN that was ALL me, do you guys like ANYTHING about me????

And like, depending on what I choose or your personal preference I guess, the Spider Society has it rough too! Wait, so YouTwo WAS impersonating you, but it started when you LET THEM, and then there were times you could have came forward but didn't and basically "allowed" yourself to be treated like shit and have everything progress, so there's this, huge lingering doubt in tons of people of "wait so when was I actually spending time with Reader and when was I with the fake? Oh shit you're telling me those times the fake was rude as fuck to me, that WAS Reader, but they were rude because they were mad I didn't know who they were? But they didn't correct me and let me keep being mean to them????". Miguel is over here tearing his fucking hair out because UGH YOU'RE SO FRUSTRATING 😤 why did you let it get so bad, don't you know you could've came to him for help at any time?! (Except he totally lost your trust when YouTwo framed you for that elevator collapse from that one previous idea and he totally 100% thought you did it) but he still loves you and knows You're Going Through It, but, he definitely is. Relieved you're still ok but mad at you? Or disappointed? He's updating Lyla to keep a better eye on you, he's swapping out your watch for one that tracks and stores more information and is more personally customized, he may even decide, maybe he's got a little bit of an anxiety problem after everything that happened and he's paranoid "someone will try and take you away again"

It definitely is not your choice whether you return to the Spider Society or not, and I wouldn't put it past them to have you be "guarded" 24/7 from then on. Why is your Spidey Sense tingling when you're just out in the lobby getting some air? Because even if you can't see your loyal protectors, they sure can see you, from every visible surface, and next time you think you're alone in your apartment, well, some of your buddies CAN turn invisible. Maybe you were never really alone as you thought?

#yandere spiderverse #yandere x reader #sinprompts #yandere stuff

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heyftinally · 28 days

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Swifties do love setting Taylor up.

Just what I saw on Twitter Yesterday:

1989 is a pop Bible that everybody knows. - Well if it's trash maybe.

Reputation is hip hop ??? - What?

Reputation is goth Rock ?? - Lol

That Reputation is also supposed to be R&nB - like where?? wtf?

And her new album the Treacherous Dead Poets Default is an album with a new sound.

Or this yt lady on tt that was claiming that no other artists has transcended genres as successfully as taylor did. 😭 And she mentions Rock? Girl where? And literally there are tons of artists who did it way better than her.

Or that one video which they have now deleted bc taylor was getting dragged. It was a video of her just walking on stage and singing (not live) and the caption was like: I can't believe she was doing that for the first time. ' - Some small part of me does feel sorry for these delusional fanbase. Cause she has the highest grossing tour right now. Big emphasis on right now cause that record is not forever. Anyways they can not post much about her performance anywhere without people using it to drag her. Cause let's face it. She can't perform. She's not serving. She's giving nothing. Her dancers slay more than she does.

Pffffft Taylor went from pop country to pop and never changed again. Slightly different vibes? Sure. Still pop. She wouldn't know rock if it smacked her in the head.

Missy Elliott is hip hop. Early P!nk (ie Most Girls) is R&B. Sumo Cyco is goth rock (+ others, but still). Taylor Swift wouldn't touch any of those genres with a 10ft pole, and quite frankly she'd suck at them if she tried lol.

She doesn't "transcend genres", and considering she can't even make different versions of pop sound good, I think we know why.

And no, she can't perform. Let me flex my expertise here: I'm a trained dancer. Specifically with 26 years of training in tap, jazz, ballet, theater, and contemporary, with additional training in commercial/street jazz (aka music video and tour choreography) and various other styles in sporadic classes. I've literally been choreographing since I was about seven years old, and have been analyzing commercial choreography since I was 15.

That said,

Her performances are not only weak, but they show me that her tour choreographer either

Doesn't exist and she created all of her own "dancing" herself

Doesn't know how to adapt choreography for someone with virtually no dance technique

Actively has something out for Taylor and is trying to make her look bad

I'm going to reference "Look What You Made Me Do" from the Eras tour, because that's the most recent and clearest to illustrate my point

A video of the performance in question, for reference.

Okay, first off, right off the bat, her hand floating on her hip looks awkward and uncomfortable. It's giving "over-excited 8yo at recital". For someone with as much experience as she has performing, I'd expect her to look more settled in her beginning pose. She looks like she's overthinking, and thus it looks under rehearsed.

Then we have that flexed hand - yes it's a nit pick, but that pose belongs very few places outside of a 6yo's tap dance.

Movibg on, her robotic movements look messy as fuck. Sharp isolations like that are HARD. A lot of dancers with years of training struggle with getting the kind of sharpness you would expect to see from that choreography. And on the scale of a stadium like she's in, everything is amplified. If it's messy, it's going to look five times as messy as it might on a smaller scale, because the further away the audience is, the more detail gets lost. So you're movements need to be SHARP in order to translate to the audience. Add to that that this is clearly filmed professionally/intentionally, and it really just looks unprofessional/poorly planned.

Meanwhile the things like the "don't like you" scolding (besides looking childish) are so small that you wouldn't see them beyond the front row. When you're choreographing even for a normal stage, the #1 rule is make everything BIG and intentional. If you're kicking, you're hitting AT LEAST a 45° angle, and with the force of trying to kick the winning soccer (football) goal. Taylor doesn't do that. Those movements are small, sad, and weak, and it honestly looks lazy. I know a 10yo currently doing a competitive dance solo to this song, and I shit you not that 10yo is 50x more interesting to watch perform than Taylor.

So yeah, her music has been one note since Fearless one note (uninspired pop), and her "stage presence" is about on par with an 8yo who doesn't want to be here.

#anti taylor swift #taylor swift critical #ask #anon

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tellthemeerkatsitsfine · 10 months

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Okay, everyone, it’s here. Nish Kumar’s 2022 show Your Power, Your Control, on TV for everyone to see. If there’s anyone who wants to see it and can’t, send me a message or a non-anonymous ask and I’ll send you a link. Anyone, really. I really, really want everyone to watch this, and I am happy to share with absolutely everyone. I say this because I know what the culture’s like on this site, how people think “Oh I don’t know, I haven’t talked to that person before, I can’t just message them out of nowhere, it would be weird.” It won’t be. Even if I’ve never interacted with you before and we’re not mutuals or anything, if you want a link, ask. I want to spread this. Though if you live in the UK and are able to, you should watch this through official channels (Sky and Now TV) so he’ll get whatever support he’ll get from viewcount.

I saw this show twice last year. Once in mid-May in New York City, and once in late July in Montreal. When I booked tickets for his show in NYC, I didn’t know he was going to take the show to Just For Laughs in Montreal. If I had know that, I wouldn’t have booked the NYC tickets, because NYC is an 8.5-hour drive away, and requires crossing a national border, while Montreal is two hours away and in the same country as me. However, I’m glad I bought those tickets before I knew. Because the NYC show was amazing, and it was worth seeing twice. I hated the NYC trip, overall. My dad and I spent all day Saturday driving there, then slept on my brother’s uncomfortable couch (he was briefly living there at the time, so at least we didn’t have to pay for accommodation, which was nice), then spent all day Sunday driving back. I’d never been to that city before, and I didn’t like it, with its crowds and its skyrocketed COVID rates but no one was wearing masks, and its general atmosphere that I just hated. I hated every moment of the trip during which I was not in a room with Nish Kumar. And the whole thing was still worth it. And then of course I saw it again in Montreal. That’s how good a show it was.

The show changed a bit in the couple of months between the two I saw. The most notable being that in NYC, he complained about comedians who use their platform to be a dick to minorities, and then shouted: “Fuck you Dave Chappelle, fuck you Ricky Gervais!” In Montreal, he did the same routine, but this time ended it with: “Fuck you Dave Chapelle, fuck you Ricky Gervais, fuck you Jimmy Carr!” I am a bit curious to see if he leaves all those names in on the filmed version, particularly the last one as he was hanging out with Jimmy Carr on Katherine Ryan’s couch for her Backstage TV show not too long before this, it might fuck that up a bit.

The shows were mostly the same though, you don’t tend to take a show from England to NYC unless you’ve got your material pretty well worked out. The Montreal one did have some references to the fact that an Off Menu episode was recorded live at that same festival earlier that afternoon, and most of his audience had been there (I hadn’t been – I’d considered it because I like Ed Gamble and James Acaster, but the ticket price wasn’t worth it for a podcast I don’t listen to). He made a bunch of jokes about Ed and James, and then after some particularly harsh making fun of them, he added, “Obviously I’m just kidding, I love those guys, they’re my friends. I meant what I said about Gervais and Carr, though.”

Oh, there was something else that happened in Montreal but not in NYC. In Montreal, he was doing the part of the show where he explains that online abuse happens to everyone in the public eye, but it gets worse the more levels you are away from what’s thought of as the “default”. Then he started listing levels of “default”: white, straight, male, heterosexual, able-bodied, etc.

As he did so, I became very aware of my best friend, who was sitting next to me. I had dragged my best friend to Montreal with me, because I loved the show so much and I wanted him to see it too. He, however, is not into stand-up comedy. He’s not into any of this sort of thing at all. I’ve known him for 20 years, I met him because we were teammates in high school, and then after high school we took over as coaches, and we’ve now run a wrestling team together for many years. He is a 35-year-old (now 36) white straight guy who’s been an athlete all his life, and he looks it. He’s really cool for a jock, I swear. He’s a nice guy, he’s a feminist, he’s worked with me for many years to try to fight against the fucked up culture in sport. But he doesn’t, you know, look it. He looks like a jock. And he is a jock. He did not look like he belonged in a Nish Kumar gig. I didn’t realize how much he’d not fit in until we actually go there, and we sat in the front row of the 128-seat room, and everyone else looked like an artsy nerd, and I guess I looked like whatever in-between thing I am, and my best friend looked like a guy who should be in a sports bar and not in a Nish Kumar gig.

Anyway, when Nish Kumar started listing all the definitions of default, I felt slightly awkward, because my best friend is all those things. Now, I want to be clear, because Nis Kumar gets accused of this all the time and it’s fucking horrible when people say that shit: he was not deliberately making the rich straight white men in the room uncomfortable. He wasn’t saying “Fuck those people for being the default”. He was saying “It’s a fact that those people being the default mean, all else equal, they’ll get less online abuse than a visible minority for doing the same shit.” When I saw I felt a bit awkward, I mean that in a sort of affectionate way, when you’re sort of affectionately “called out” by a part of a comedy show, not that Nish Kumar was genuinely making his room an unsafe space for rich white men. Nish Kumar does not hate rich white men! Some of his best friends are Ed Gamble.

But I knew it was already a bit awkward for my friend, so when Nish started listing “straight, white, able-bodied, heterosexual…”, I put a hand on my friend’s shoulder, in a kind of reassuring way. Nish Kumar saw me do this, and stopped talking to laugh. Nish Kumar. Nish Kumar laughed, because of something I did, with the trademark wild infectious Nish Kumar laugh. Then he asked me, “Do you know that guy?” I said yes, and he said oh good, because it had looked like I might be just taking a guess about what he’s like based on his appearance. And that interaction with Nish Kumar is in the top ten coolest fucking things that’s ever happened to me.

So those are my personal stories from seeing that show. I know what it was like in May 2022, and I know it was like in July 2022, and I’m very curious as to what it was like in October 2022, which is when it was filmed. Both times I saw it, it ended with an extended routine about how fucked up it is that Britain worships some old lady (queen) and some special song (national anthem) and the big towel (flag). After that routine, he says, wouldn’t it be weird if she died while I was on stage? When people ask you where you were when the queen died, you’d have to say you were in a theatre, listening to a comedian be, if anything, too respectful about her.

…So even though I’ve seen the show twice, I’m guessing there will be at least a bit of stuff I haven’t heard before in the filmed version, because he’ll have to have rewritten that by October. There was also some stuff early in the show about Boris Johnson that was pretty current to when I saw it, I guess that’ll be different in October too. I’m looking forward to seeing that.

This post has been my preamble before I watch the long-awaited actual special. Just a place to record my thoughts going into it. I’m going to actually watch it now, and see how it compares to my memory of it. My memory of it is of one that did perfectly what I love in comedy – cover important personal stuff and cover important political stuff and tie the two together. Any show that does all three well, while also being funny, immediately becomes a favourite of mine (for another show that does that well, see Ahir Shah’s Ends, which just won the Edinburgh award and I’m very pleased about that). And God, it was fucking funny. Nish Kumar started the energy high, and I remember that both times I kept expecting him to at least start to run out of steam, and he never did. Never slowed down for a moment. Shouted at the crowd at a million words a minute, like he couldn’t wait to tell us everything he had to say, because it mattered and because it was worth saying and because it was funny enough to merit the time and space. I remember losing my breath laughing over and over and over, both times. I am prepared for the fact that some of that came from the atmosphere in the room and it won’t hit quite as hard through a screen. But still, it’s brilliant material, everyone needs to watch it. Like I said, message me for a link. I am here to spread the good news of Nish Kumar.

Also, happy birthday, Nish. It's a good day for comedy.

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gren-arlio · 1 year

Text

The first round of translations are done!

You heard it here, folks. I've successfully finished the entirety of the first video I've sent a few posts back. For the record, I WILL give timestamps to let people jump to what they want to see, don't worry. Every scene has Schezo, and this post will be LONG.

To keep my sanity in check: I'll release this in two parts, because my God this takes a while to type. I'm talking hours. I hope you understand.

Here's how it'll be formatted:

(Character):

(Line 1)

(Line 2)

[Narrator]

(Character 2)

(Line 1)

(Line 2)

Option A

Option B

Option C

----- <- End of Scene

Here's some screenshots of some of the faces. They got a charm to them. Most of them won't be in the first part, but hey, it's still cool.

And here's the video:

youtube

Timestamps:

0:14 (Start of the story, has Schezo and Mysterious Voice (Doppelganger Schezo,)

1:40 (After the Tower, has Schezo and Fufufu.)

3:00 (Schezo reaches the theme park, featuring Arle, Rulue, and Minotauros.)

5:37 (Schezo is terrible at directions and asks for help, featuring Kikimora and a Bulletin Board.)

7:56 (Schezo goes to Walmart, featuring Momomo.)

8:26 (Entrance to the Dungeon: Arle Version)

9:21 (Entrance to the Dungeon: Rulue Version. After that, it's just Schezo saying the default phrase for entering.)

11:30 (Skeleton-T boss encounter. Go to 13:11 for his loss quote.)

13:54 (Tickets? In MY treasure chest?)

I will note if something seems a bit off in brackets, or if there could be an edit or the sort. As well, I'll try to keep it formatted like the text in game.

Now before we begin, I want to say two things. The first is that I'm in NO WAY A JAPANESE SPEAKER. Some things might be wrong, so please correct me if they are. Second, I wish to ask a question to the community. I have more of these, but they're not chronologically ordered.

This won't affect if they're posted or not, just when they're posted.

With that out of the way, I hope you enjoy!

Prologue: (0:13)

Schezo:

So this is the Space-Time Crystal...

if I absorb this, I'll grow even stronger...

...It's been a while since I've last seen it. This Crystal distorts space and time.

Every time I stepped outside, the maze changed shape, forcing me to restart over and over again...

A crystal with this much power can be of very good use to me...

[Schezo touches the crystal, and tries to absorb its power. A cutscene occurs, and Schezo stops grabbing the crystal.]

Schezo:

Gwaaaa...What is this power...

Wait...I'm the one...being absorbed!?

Mysterious Voice: (Crystal)

Poor fool...I've become a part of you, and you're now a part of me...

Schezo:

Who is it!? ...Could it be that the crystal is talking!?

Damn, if I stay here...I've got no other choice! (He apparently teleports or runs away.)

Mysterious Voice: (Crystal)

He got away...Hmpf, a smart move.

For a human, he quite evil...Well, if you take this power away, the rest is a bunch of loose ends...

...With this power, it's possible to make a bigger trap. I could make a much larger one...

-----

Finding Waku Waku Puyo Puyo Land: (1:40)

[A while later...]

Damn it, what's happening to me? Oh man...

Ever since that encounter, I haven't been able to do much magic anymore...I have to do something to regain my strength...

[Fufufu enters the scene.]

Fufufu:

Fufufu, you've came.

Schezo:

If you're a merchant...you're also a business man. I'm in a bad mood. Find someone else.

Fufufu:

Fufufu, you see this?

Schezo:

It's just a flyer...Eh? What the-!?

[It show the flyer]

Flyer:

High Tech Theme Park: "Waku Waku Puyo Puyo Land"

The shape of this place changes every time you enter! It's an amazing fighting attraction!

If you clear all the attractions, the "Amazing Magical Item," will be yours! (For the record, they don't really clarify it.)

With this, you too can be a first class mage!

Schezo:

Hey, merchant! Is what said on this flyer true?

Fufufu:

Fufufu, you should definitely go. (Leaves)

Schezo:

...It's just like that tower...It's like the power of that crystal!

Could it be that something similar is there!? I'll have to check it out myself...

[Schezo decides to go the Theme Park mentioned on the flyer.]

-----

Entrance to the park: (3:00)

Schezo:

I'm finally...here at last.

[Schezo got a little lost, but managed to find his way to the theme park.]

Huh? Is that Arle?

[Arle is spacing out at the entrance to the theme park.]

What, you're here too?

(Arle finally comes into view.)

Arle:

Schezo!? You're here alone to play with yourself?

Schezo:

No! Did you hear about the rumors too?

Arle:

Huh? What rumors?

Schezo:

Don't you know what this place is like? If you clesr all the attractions,

You can get a "Amazing Magical Item" or the sort.

Arle:

Heh...Is that so?

Schezo:

Well, I don't have time for idle talk. I'm leaving.

[Schezo leaves Arle and enters the theme park.]

Hm? It's that woman...If I remember, it's that martial artist, Rulue, who's always chasing that Satan around.

Rulue:

...Obtain a magical item...

I'll be the one to get it to match Arle and win over Satan!

(Schezo then entrances the scene)

Schezo:

That's not happening.

Rulue:

Who said that!? ...Oh. You're just the perverted mage.

Schezo:

Who's the pervert!?

Rulue:

What!? No way...

You're after Satan too, aren't you?

Schezo:

Huh? Satan?

Well, I guess you can say that. (I'll take him down eventually!)

Rulue:

As expected...

You're trying to court Satan! That's unforgivable!

Schezo:

What!? No, you stupid bitch! Why would I want to make a move on that bastard!? (Yeah he does this sometimes and it's hilarious.)

Rulue:

Keeeee! What did you say? That's it, we're done!

Minotauros:

You're not gonna make Master Rulue look like a fool. Umoooh! (His battle cry or something, tbh I don't really like Minotauros.)

Schezo:

I can't take such a large swing like that!

...Rulue, I'll tell you this. That magical item is mine,

And I don't plan to give it to a woman who doesn't have a shred of magic!

[Schezo quickly leaves the scene.]

Two troublesome women are here...I'm in trouble...

----

Schezo sucks at directions: (5:37)

Now, where to go...

(He goes to the info board.)

Well, this seems like the place for info. Let's see what we can find.

(Now to tell you guys a bit about some navigation boxes.

You see, they're organized into 4 sections.

Listen (AKA talk to Kikimora.)

Ranking

Bulletin Board

Return

In this case, they click Listen. Please note I'm probably gonna translate the important ones at the moment.)

Schezo: (Again)

Hey, Cleaning staff.

Cleaning Lady: (Kikimora)

Cleaning staff? There's none. Well, I do clean, but...

I'm Kikimora. I'm an usher here.

Schezo:

A usher? Well, if you are one, you're going to have to explain something to me.

Kikimora:

What do you want me to explain?

(These say, in order:

Game Summary (Which the player clicks.)

About items

About shops

About ranking

When in Need (The player clicks later.)

Back)

All of the parks attractions involve the same formula.

You'll be fighting monsters and navigating a maze.

Of course there's all kinds of items and tricks inside also. It's not just fighting monsters.

If you can think carefully and use these items and tricks well, it'll be easier to proceed with your adventure.

If your HP drop to zero, it's a game over, and you lose all the EXP and items you worked so hard to get. (You think Schezo is thinking "The hell is an EXP and a Game Over?")

The first attraction is relatively easy, but each attraction gets harder as you clear them.

So please, do you best.

Schezo:

Alright, got it.

(The textbox opens again, and this time the player clicks "When in Need.")

Kikimora:

This is where we explain things to newcomers.

We also have a bulletin board full of useful and informative information, so please see e check it frequently.

You can also see your rank score, so try to aim for #1!

If you do get a high score, you could get a wonderful prize.

Schezo:

How many points do I need for the prize?

Kikimora:

Actually, I don't know myself.

Schezo:

You're a useless usher. You should know that.

Kiki:

Sorry. (I'm sorry...)

Schezo:

No no no, I'm not judging you.

I was just speaking to myself. Dont worry about it, okay?

Kikimora:

Yes, Sir. (... ...)

Schezo

(Wait, why am I apologizing?)

(The player then goes to the bulletin board.)

Oh, a Bulletin Board. I'll check it out.

(A text box appears saying "Welcome to Puyo Puyo Dungeon.")

Bulletin board:

If you're entering an attraction, try the Puyo Dungeon first!

An exciting adventure awaits you!

-----

Schezo goes to Walmart: (7:56)

Schezo:

So this is a store...

Momomo:

Momomo, welcome to the shop!

Schezo:

Oh! There's the shopkeeper.

Momomo:

There's a lot of danger in the attractions.

You'll be safer if you bought items, so buy a lot.

Schezo:

...What a talkative clerk.

(Text box appears, showing either:

Buy

Sell

Leave <- )

Momomo:

Hope to see you again.

Entrance to the Dungeon: Arle Version. (8:26)

Schezo:

Arle's here... hey, Arle.

Arle:

Hey, why did you come here?

Schezo:

Err, that's none of your business.

Arle:

Aha! Are you here to pick up women?

Schezo:

Huh?

Arle:

I thought you came to chase after girls, like you like usual.

Schezo:

No, of course not!

And what do you mean by "Like Usual?"

Arle:

Because you're always chasing girls saying "I want you!"

Schezo:

I...don't do anything of of the sort!

Arle:

There you go again...well, you are a guy, so...

Schezo:

You know what!? I'm done...

Talking to her drives me nuts...among other things.

-----

Entrance to the Dungeon: Rulue Version: (9:21)

Schezo:

Ah, not this meat muscle woman!

Rulue:

What did you say!? Are you trying to pick a fight?

Schezo:

Hmpf. That's what you get for calling me a pervert earlier.

Rulue:

You pervert, you nonsensical pervert! What's wrong with calling you that?

Schezo:

You're such a child! Don't spout these ridiculous things!

Minotauros:

Umoooo! Don't make fun of Master Rulue!

Schezo:

Cows stay out of this!

Minotauros:

Umoooo! (God I hate typing that.) Master Rulue, can I fuck this guy up?

Rulue:

Do as you please.

Schezo:

I don't have time to be playing games with you guys in a place like this!

Rulue:

Oh? Are you running away?

Schezo:

(Damn that scruffy look on her face. Someday I'll make her into a crying bitch.

Even so, we're still a little behind Rulue and the others...

I can't afford to waste my time here...Sorry, but I can't just stand here!)

After this he just says a generic quote of "Let's go inside the Dungeon!"

-----

Skeleton T boss encounter: (10:17)

Skeleton-T:

Hello? Are you a visitor?

Schezo:

Hm? What are you- What're you doing here?

Skeleton-T:

Hmm~ This tea is really good. Would you like a cup?

(The player says no)

What? You won't drink my tea!?

I can't forgive someone who takes advantage of another's good will!

Schezo:

Well...That's an interesting accusation. Alright, I'll play along.

Skeleton-T:

Ocha-cha-cha-cha! Let's go!

---

Beating Skeleton-T: 13:11

Skeleton-T:

Happaaa... (I used his loss quote from Puyo 7.)

Schezo:

Ha! You were no match for me!

----- (Yep. That's it.)

Tickets? In MY Theme Park? (13:54)

What's this...? ...They're tickets!

(Schezo gets tickets to Fire Mountain, Water Paradise, and the Starlight Stage.)

Here we go. Now we can enter more attractions.

(Then he asks if you want to leave the Dungeon.)

-----

And that's Part 1! Part 2 will release later, just give me time to type it all out.

Hope you enjoyed.

#Youtube #japanese translation #madou monogatari #waku waku puyo puyo dungeon #schezo puyo puyo #rulue puyo puyo #arle puyo puyo #schezo wegey #doppelganger schezo #this took forever to write and my hands hurt a bit from it #part 1 #kikimora puyo puyo #arle nadja #the fact that schezo is somewhat acting like the dude from my tumblr banner is both funny and unnerving

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adelle-ein · 1 year

Text

CSP 2.0 features test and rant

I bought my copy of CSP in 2022 due to a variety of Wacom-caused convoluted circumstances, meaning I get the "upgrade" to version 2.0 for free. So, because I enjoy talking about (and shittalking) digital art programs....my thoughts on the "upgrade." To summarize, this update is basically the same as various pre-2022 CSP updates, adding a handful of useful and some godly-sounding features. It doesn't change anything fundamental about the program, really, although allegedly background saves are faster and more reliable now (massive dick move to lock that behind a paywall!) On this PC, I really only get lag on background saves with huge files or if I haven't saved at all for hours, so I haven't really tested that aspect. Other features are: a new brush setting that allows for allegedly more realistic color mixing, a few new 3d model options, an AI auto-shading program, and ~*~align tools ~*~ which really should have been implemented like...five years ago minimum but hey. But, hey, are these features actually as ~life changing~ as Celsys makes them sound? Traditionally no but let's find out

Upon installation I was immediately greeted by said align tools. They were just...there.

Fantastic UI decision I love it. Anyway I couldn't get this stupid window to be part of a sidebar, or treated as a tool, or anything except for a floating window. God knows why it has to be its own "palette" instead of being just a regular tool like liquify etc, but I ended up getting rid of it. figure I'll put it back whenever I need it. It seems to work fine, though in usual CSP fashion it is excessively complicated if reasonably easy to figure out.

And now the new brush color mixing setting (new brushes on the right/bottom). This was the only feature I was personally really excited for. It's something of an improvement and feels a little closer to Krita's infinitely superior painting engines. There are replacements for nearly all of the "thick paint" default brushes, some pastels, and a few assorted others. The "wet wash" brush still lags horrifically at every size even on blank canvases, just fyi.

The updated brushes have the "ver 2.0" tag. And I'm not sure if this was added in a recent update or my own faulty memory, but you can add multiple default brushes from the "add defaults" window now, thank god. I remember having to reopen the damn thing and add them one by one.

I painted this Celica entirely using the new defaults (plus design pencil for the lineart and a custom watercolor for the background, but the painting is all the defaults.) It's definitely a step up, again it feels more like Krita which is my favorite program for painting. Is it worth the upgrade price, though? For me personally, not really.

The head model seems to work well enough, it has settings to let you adjust the features and seems nicer than the various user-made options on the asset store. That being said, using and manipulating the 3d assets is as obtuse and frustrating as ever, and I personally think they make my art look incredibly stiff and robotic, so idk if I'll be using this much.

Just to illustrate how little I use the models, apparently I didn't even have them installed. I had to redownload the entire default asset set to get my hands on them so I could test out the "hand pose" thing. Basically, CSP claims that you can take a picture of your hand and have the model instantly recreate that hand pose. It doesn't look like you can just...use an existing picture. Because that would be too useful. Get posing and upload yourself to the CSP AI instead.

No pictures, because I couldn't get a shot on my shitty webcam without my face in it, but it was unimpressive. The poses were...vaguely similar to the pictures, I guess, but not exactly the pinnacle of accuracy.

This was a straight-fingered peace sign, for example. It's in the general realm of correct, but...not what I was aiming for.

I never use the text tool, for the record - I don't really do comics, and also I hate it. Even with the update, it is still not...good. Better than Krita's, maybe? At least by a bit. But still quite awful. And that's bizarre to me, because this is what was originally *manga studio*, used and promoted primarily by manga and comic artists. But its text tools suck, as well as its general graphic design capabilities.

Trying out the new fog settings...it just looks like a gradient, honestly. I'm not sure why this would ever be helpful. School-live vibes from my little experiment here (i've never watched school-live lol)

Multilayer liquify actually works decently. There's a jolt of lag when you start it and at the end when your changes register, but the actual action of moving your cursor is fairly smooth, unexpectedly. I did it with a huge stack of layers and was pleasantly surprised by the results. That being said, liquify in CSP is really finicky, and even that little bit of lag might prevent it from being a consistently usable tool in my workflow. Not sure yet.

As for the AI shading assist....

I tried a bunch of old .csp drawings and the only one I could even get it to run on was the Eunie above. And it still looked like absolute shit no matter how I messed with the settings. I could have tried to do every layer individually but I just didn't have the patience for a feature I frankly don't want, AND that's not what it was advertised for so I don't see that as a valid test anyway. I just couldn't get this one working, it looks hideous, and I have no desire to have something be shaded for me automatically. Flatting, lineart cleanup, sure! Not the lighting and creativity and stuff that's actually fun! Hard pass.

There's also a fish-eye ruler. I don't see this ever being useful for me because I honestly don't like fish-eye perspective much. Meh.

So...yeah. That's all. That's the upgrade. It's not an impressive upgrade by any means, and clearly just a handful of assorted desirable features Celsys deliberately left out of the last year or so of updates in order to try and bill them as "2.0" now. No significant improvement to the base program, just assorted bells and whistles. And of course, even if you pony up for the flat upgrade fee, you do not get access to any new features going forward. Even if they finally drop a decent selection of filters or make the text tool workable, we plebians will have to pay if we want the goods. And get any features we don't continually pay for revoked.

Wait, how does that work? Yeah, Celsys has been incredibly bad at explaining their bizarre new plans. People have no idea what's going on -- they think CSP is sub-only now, that their copies of 1.0 will be revoked, that everyone's getting 2.0 for free, that they can pay for individual updates they want...nope. TLDR: You can pay a flat price to get version 2.0 now, either as a base program or an upgrade to 1.0. Users who bought 1.0 recently (roughly mid-2022 to 2023, I believe), like me, get that upgrade for free. Alternately, you can pay a yearly or monthly fee to get not only 2.0 but any other continuous upgrades Celsys rolls out between 2.0 and 3.0 (if, say, they add better filtering options or an automatic flatting tool, you must pay for the subscription to get them.) If you at any time end that subscription, ALL updates are revoked and you return to 2.0. 3.0 will be available eventually under the same system. Mmmm microtransaction art program (except worse, you can't even keep your microtransactions and this program ALREADY HAD microtransactions through premium assets to begin with! aaaaaaa why does ibispaint have a bad reputation and not this?)

Also, bear in mind that if you upgrade your 1.0 license to 2.0, you lose your 1.0 license immediately and permanently. 1.0 licenses are for two computers and 2.0 licenses are for one. Reddit confirms that you will be forced to uninstall from one computer if you upgrade the license. So if you have CSP installed on two computers, absolutely do not upgrade, you're essentially throwing away one copy of the program to add a small handful of mediocre features to your other copy. This might be one of the most disgusting parts of the whole deal, actually, because BOY they do not make this clear up front and their little stans are defending it tooth and nail.

So, what's the pricing plan for all this? Um...honestly, I'm not sure. I'm navigating the website right now trying to figure it out and I am totally, utterly lost. The plan is distributed across several pages, and I suspect Celsys is relying heavily on machine translation, so things are...slightly incoherent. I believe it's only $10/year for the PRO (not EX, which is $30) upgrade pass, which isn't unreasonable on the surface, but the "revoke features if you don't keep paying" bit sure is. Not to mention how many user-made assets will be inaccessible to those without the same versions as the creators, or how people's 2.1+ files may break if that person stops paying for their subscription...like, they don't deserve even $1 for pulling this shit and I'm really disappointed by the huge number of users I see not only buying into but defending this awful shit.

Celsys is clearly trying to be the next Adobe, gently easing their users into being forced to go fully subscription-only. We'll see how that works out for them, but I think they are drastically overestimating the loyalty of their userbase, the lack of alternatives, and their rate of use in the professional industry (unlike Adobe, nobody is mandating CSP in graphic design college courses....) They're slowly boiling the frog as we speak -- we'll see how long the userbase can stand it. Personally, I would suggest just waiting for 3.0 - nothing in this upgrade is exceptional, and I wouldn't assume anything else the devs put out for the next couple years is.

TLDR: mediocre update is mediocre, fuck celsys

#csp #txt #lace reviews

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16bpp · 2 years

Text

The Problem People Have Where They Generalize Whole Genres Of Games Under One Central Idea or: How I Learned To Stop Whining And Open My Mind To Actually Interesting and Good Games

For the record, I couldn't think of a good short title.

// Alternate caption: Oh boy, another iwbtgg 200 word essay?

Hi. I try to avoid writing long blog posts about stupid menial shit, but you're reading this so that means I'm taking the time of my day to write one!

I was mindlessly scrolling through Discord as an average person just does nowadays when I saw something that sort of irked me. To paraphrase, it was in regards to the game OMORI and how the concept has been done before. Although this criticism is sort of valid and I'll elaborate why soon, the only real problem is that they called out specifically RPG Maker fans for defending it mainly.

Now I only considered that a problem because it showcases one of the things I never really liked about how people viewed RPG Maker games. In fact, it was something I fell for too!

It was the idea that RM games are just the same garbage. Depression and anxiety, blah blah blah.

Of course now this has become more prevalent with OMORI becoming a big shot name in regards to RM games with the whole depression anxiety meme spreading around like hot pancakes. Though I'm here to tell you that like, that line of thinking is pretty stupid.

All humans are of course prone to generalizing things, that's just part of human nature. But this one only irks me because there ARE good RM games out there. People only really focus on either

Aye that depression and anxiety game

I believe these two, especially the latter, are the most prevalent is because of how RPG Maker, no matter what version, is easy enough to pick up and use. Of course, it takes some getting used to (especially older versions like 2003 and XP), but at it's core that's what the software is meant to be: "POWERFUL enough for a developer, SIMPLE enough for a child, VERSATILE enough for any platform!"

Ayo save the princess with the default RTP gfx

Although this belief has helped make thousands of games, it manages to be one of the biggest pitfalls of RPG Maker. It lowers the bar enough for low effort, garbage games to be made. Due to this, you can argue RPG Maker games get the same treatment as Unity games. People see that "made in Unity free version!" watermark and go "eugh Unity". In the case of RPG Maker games, it already has a fairly recognisable UI and for games that haven't switched from the default graphics, art style. Hell, it even applies to music! Once people open up a low effort, and for lack of a better word, shitty RM game, their mind will immediately make the connection: "Man this game fucking blows!". After said person may run into several games of the same calibur, the mind will usually make the connection "RPG Maker and it's games fucking blows"

The criticism that I mentioned was sort of valid in an earlier paragraph, because in my honest opinion, it does not matter if a concept is done already. It matters the way the developer or writer presents the concept. There are definitely games that do this, such as Future Cat's 2016 game OneShot. It blends in fourth-wall breaking, making connections with the main character and the player, and the idea of only having one chance to do things beautifully. All of these concepts have definitely been showcased in other games, but OneShot has to be the only one that has done it almost perfectly. Review soon.

But in conclusion,

The signal to noise ratio for good RPG Maker games ends up being way too much noise and some signal.

But hey, what do I know. I'm just some schmuck on the internet.

#not a shitpost #oneshot (game)#rpg maker #I can't wait for like 0 people to read this #200 word essay #real talk

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milkplusvn · 2 years

Text

Soundless FV: NVL Mode Reborn

Tip: You can get these same posts sent right to your e-mail by subscribing to the newsletter.

Today, I’ll show you the nitty-gritty of rebuilding the screens for the port!

NVL in Ren'Py

As I said in the previous issue, I've been working with Ren'Py since middle school. Back during those days, I wanted all of my visual novels to be in NVL mode, because I simply believed it was the superior text display method (I still kind of think that...). I was a super amateurish programming newbie, but I wished to closely replicate how NVL appeared in visual novels that used the NScripter engine regardless of my skill for my own self-satisfaction.

So, I figured out how to do it, in the dumbest way possible. That stupid way persisted all the way to Soundless.

Let me paint the picture that is the old code for you. We'll use the first three sentences from Crime and Punishment to demonstrate what I did.

First, here is what the excerpt is meant to display as in-game. (Sorry for the lack of formatting here—Tumblr refused to let me format it correctly.)

On an exceptionally hot evening early in July a young man came out of the garret in which he lodged in S. Place and walked slowly, as though in hesitation, towards K. bridge.

He had successfully avoided meeting his landlady on the staircase.

His garret was under the roof of a high, five-storied house and was more like a cupboard than a room.

Each sentence gets a line of its own, separated by single line breaks. They are displayed one by one, with two different click to continue indicators nestled at the end of the text: one kind that tells you you're going to the next line, and another line that lets you know the screen will be cleared and the page will "turn".

Because of (what I believe was) certain particulars about how the engine worked when Soundless was first made, in order to get those two different kinds of indicators, I had to write...this.

nar "On an exceptionally hot evening early in July a young man came out of the garret in which he lodged in S. Place and walked slowly, as though in hesitation, towards K. bridge.{w}\nHe had successfully avoided meeting his landlady on the staircase.{w}\nHis garret was under the roof of a high, five-storied house and was more like a cupboard than a room."

nvl clear

Just a giant paragraph of all the page's text shoved into a single string.

But now, the engine has changed, and my knowledge has expanded! I don't need to do this anymore. It's set up so that Ren'Py can automatically tell which of the indicators it's supposed to use whenever the words nvl clear are coming up. All you have to do from there is just tell Ren'Py what the pictures are.

So, now Soundless's code looks more like this:

nar "On an exceptionally hot evening early in July a young man came out of the garret in which he lodged in S. Place and walked slowly, as though in hesitation, towards K. bridge."

nar "He had successfully avoided meeting his landlady on the staircase."

nar "His garret was under the roof of a high, five-storied house and was more like a cupboard than a room."

nvl clear

Looks a lot better, right? This seems really awesome until I tell you that I had to go through the entire script and make sure everything was getting broken up like this. I did do Find and Replace for most of it, so it wasn't too painful, but I still had to comb through it to make sure everything was done correctly. Sometimes, the spacing would get strange and it wouldn't replace correctly, because some of Soundless's old code is, uh, manually word wrapped.

Yes.

I used the enter button to manually word wrap it. In jEdit. Many many years ago.

It hurts.

Couldn't you have just kept it like that?

I actually could have. It still works! But that would've hurt the backlog.

When I hastily gave Soundless an actual backlog and not just Ren'Py's default rollback back during the Version 2.0 update, I just made a simple backlog screen and told Ren'Py to record it page-by-page and not line-by-line and called it a day. My memories of what it actually looks like have been blacked out because all I remember is that it looked pretty bad with a tiny scrollbar, and I don't want to remember it.

Due to strange cuteness that I don't understand despite my efforts to make it not do that, the current backlog can still get a little janky, but it now records things in a sane line-by-line way...but I have to make sure that the lines it records aren't too long. That old way of doing it produces massive paragraphs that go past this limit. Cutting it up is the only way to preserve your mind.

This also meant I had to cut up any instances of text filling up the screen. I did this in a clever way as many times as I could so it still looks like fairly unbroken giant walls of text. When you look at the backlog after reading these parts, you'll find that it was all actually individual lines. Personally, I think this is much better, because your heart gets to sink when you see line after line of "Begone!" as you scroll.

Styling, Ruby Text

When I tell you that styling it was a pain, it was really a pain!!!!!!

I had to keep cross-comparing what I was doing with an old Soundless window open at the same time. It didn't take forever, but going back and forth tweaking the numbers until everything fit on the screen just like how it used to was a pain.

But nothing compares to what I had to do with the ruby text. Oh boy, I hated it. Ruby text in Ren'Py gets its own special style, and in order to make it appear properly, you need to change the line height. Not only did I have to figure out a way to do this without breaking everything, but I also had to make it so the ruby text font changes when you pick a different font.

I eventually settled on making a unique character that holds any lines that include ruby text. I also had to give the font change buttons another action that does some things under the hood that I don't really know how to explain in a simple way. Speaking of those buttons, the action list is incredibly long and ugly...I hate looking at it.

The only little issue I had with it was that sometimes the English translation for a line in Doon Po Sa Amin was longer than the Tagalog. It still looked fine in-game, but when you viewed it in the backlog, the beginning of the translation would be cut off. I had to do some weird solution to make it so it's always readable, whether in-game or in the backlog. It unfortunately...doesn't look the greatest, but I'd rather people be able to read it than go "oh, that's pretty, would be nice if I could read it, though."

This concludes the issue. I'm not sure what I'm going to talk about next, but I was thinking it could either be the first part of the accessibility series or something about the violent images toggle. We'll see!

youtube

#soundless vn #english visual novel #visual novel development #horror vn #yuri vn #Youtube

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dru-plays-starbound · 2 years

Note

☾ hylotl ☽, ☼ glitch ☼, ☾ floran ☽, and ☼ apex ☼ for the ask game? (The symbols were to amusing to not include.)

Hi 'Non :D

☾ hylotl ☽: you often go with casual, survival or hardcore?

I mostly stick with survival.

I do have a casual game, but I mostly use it for "sandbox" purposes - i.e. I've got a new mod I want to look at all the items in it, or I need to work out how to build something without worrying about resource restrictions.

I've not yet been brave enough to do hardcore mode, but I have been itching to start a new playthrough, so I maybe I'll be brave next time... and record my adventures in almost dying XD

☼ glitch ☼: which biome do you often build your home on?

Garden planets. I know, it's very basic of me XD I do like branching out and building bases elsewhere, but they're more like supply caches than homes (and, weirdly, always on Tundra planets...).

☼ apex ☼: your opinion on all the playable races/species?

Hylotl are the best, obvs ;)

(Nah, I only think that because they were one of the last races to be introduced in Beta, so they still have that ~*mystique*~ to them)

Apex - They're just Planet of the Apes meets 1984, which bothers me in an undefinable but deep-seated way. I don't see the appeal of them, never really "got" them as a race. More power to people who like them, but not for me.

Avian - hehe cute birb go brrr. The religion fundamentalism aspect bothers me, but I enjoy their brightly coloured culture. The villages are always delightful to come across because the occupants are always friendly and welcoming. I feel like having an avian around will always make any environment happier.

Floran - I adore these stab-happy meat-munchers. There's just something so wonderful in the single-mindedness of their world-view. Though, I do feel like their current incarnation has been toned down from the Beta version I played, and I kinda miss that. Floran go ssstabby-stabbity-stab <3

Glitch - They're... interesting. I really like the backstory, that they had a physical creator, and I wish something more had been done with it. I very much prefer the fanon and interpretations of Glitch I've seen on Tumblr to the actual Lore XD They're just little guys, chugging along in life.

Human - Humans gonna human? IDK, I wish they weren't so present-day. I wish they spoke in space slang, and I wish they had better furniture options. ¯_(ツ)_/¯ They're the default, vanilla option, what more can I say?

Hylotl - As I mentioned above, these are tied with Floran for my fave race. There's something... majestic about them. Maybe they just speak to my inner-Brit? Keep calm and drink your tea. They definitely still hold that "new race" appeal to me, despite having played one as my main for nearly 2 years XD

Novakid - When they first came out, I thought they were super cool. They glow! They have trains for spaceships! They're 100% neurodivergent rep! What's not to love? I played Caseswing for, IDK, a year and a half? And I really enjoyed having her as my main. But I guess I've gotten a little sick of them, because everyone one else and their snugget clearly thought the same, and now you can't move for novakid OCs ^.^'

Thanks for the questions, 'Non! Happy Starbounding 🌠

Questions from this Ask Game

#answered ask #Anonymous

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hydrus · 2 months

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Version 568

youtube

windows

zip

exe

macOS

app

linux

tar.zst

I had a good couple of weeks mostly figuring out better behind-the-scenes URL handling.

full changelog

urls

For normal users, tl;dr: URLs better now, you don't have to do anything.

I made a dumb mistake when I first created the downloader engine in how I handle URLs behind the scenes, and today it is fixed. You don't have to do anything, and you shouldn't see any big changes, but in general, URLs and query texts with unusual characters should work better now. You may also notice a URL in the file log or search log will appear one way, e.g. with japanese kanji, but when you copy it to clipboard, it is all encoded to %EF kind of stuff--your browser address bar probably works the same way. It should just mean things copy between your hydrus and other programs with fewer hiccups.

If you regularly use some very odd URLs or downloaders, there might be a hiccup or two. A file that relies of strange encoded characters in its known urls might redownload one time if a subscription hits it, or one extremely strange query text (it'd be a single tag query that has a % character somewhere in the middle) might need to be renamed to %25. If you have a crazy custom downloader that relies on %-encoding tech, please pause it before you update, and then do a test afterwards--it may be the hack you added for the old system is no longer needed. In any case, let me know how you get on, and if we run into a problem with a certain downloader, we'll fix it together. Overall, I'm hoping that working with encoded URLs exclusively will make more complicated downloaders easier to figure out in future, rather than having to fight with odd characters all the time.

I decided to cancel this release last week because I wasn't confident on how I was handling the advanced edge cases of encoding here. I am happy I did, because while all the 'just download from a booru' style downloaders (like the defaults) were fine, the most experimental downloader situations (that e.g. needed encoded parameter keys) needed more work. If you are a downloader maker, then you will be in the guts of these changes, so please check out the changelog. There's new UI in 'manage url classes'--path components and parameters now have their own edit panels with linked text boxes that show the normal and encoded values of the stuff you are entering, and there's also new 'ephemeral token' tech that lets you decide in what ways undefined parameters should be clipped before the URL being sent to the server. The idea of the 'request URL' being different to the 'normalised URL' is broadly elevated and exposed across the program.

other highlights

I also added a 'tag in reverse' checkbox to the new 'manage tags' 'incremental tagger' thing. It adds tags like 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 instead of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

And all new system:url predicates have new labels. They are all a bit simpler, and they should copy/paste into the system predicate parsing system. All existing system:url predicates still have their old labels, so if this is a big deal, you'll want to recreate them and re-save your session/search.

Thanks to a user, the new docx, xlsx, and pptx file formats get some nicer thumbnails and a little metadata. It should all recalculate soon after update.

The Client API is now more careful about which files you can undelete, and it also now lets you clear file deletion records.

next week

I want to put proper time into getting a 'future build' working. Last time I tried, I ran into some technical problems related to the newer libraries I wanted to bundle, so I'll see if I can fix it all and have a test release for people to try. Otherwise, I just want to clear out some small jobs that this URL work boshed.

#release #Youtube

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iosgods · 1 year

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fahrni · 2 years

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Saturday Morning Coffee

This is my favorite part of the morning. It’s quiet. Our puppers, Kolby, and our kitties have been fed and Kolby has been let out to do his business. I have my coffee — on the couch with an ice pack on my knee — composing this post.

Sweet silence.

Ars Technica: “Brian Kernighan said hello, asked how their US visit was going, and dropped off hundreds of lines of code that could add Unicode support for AWK, the text-parsing tool he helped create for Unix at Bell Labs in 1977.”

It’s so encouraging to see a legend of computing going strong.

Steven Beschloss: “I didn’t intend to return to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis so soon, but the combination of his latest nastiness combined with the emerging approach of his newly decided Democratic opponent, Charlie Crist, made it clear that the Florida race for governor represents more than the question of who will lead Florida into the future. This is shaping up to be a battle between leadership driven by anger and cruelty and leadership that believes kindness and compassion must define our fate.”

I can’t for the life of me understand why people vote for someone so cruel. He has every trait that made Trump such a disaster and he’s a lot smarter than Trump, which makes him even more dangerous.

Democrats are winning because they are the party of freedom. The freedom to choose. The freedom to make a living wage. The freedom to love. The freedom to vote. The freedom to live on a sustainable planet. Republicans are losing because they are a cult that worships a moron.

— Bradley Whitford (@BradleyWhitford) August 24, 2022

Platformer: “Zatko maintained his public silence for eight months — and then showed up on Tuesday throwing bombs.”

My initial reaction to this news was it would help Musk get out of the Twitter deal. Now I don’t think it’ll help him.

He’s still gonna need his $54.20 per share.

There’s also the ever popular musk.social sitting out there for a $1MM donation to Planned Parenthood. Quite a deal!

Puck News: “‘It’s not been a fun morning,’ Stacy Spikes told me today from New York, where he’s been prepping the new and (hopefully!) improved MoviePass.”

I totally took advantage of MoviePass in 2017. I saw a few movies and it was so worth the price.

This new and improved version could be a boon to movie theaters looking to put butts in seats in our endemic COVID world.

Macworld: “The problem is that, with a month or so to go before macOS Ventura goes final, the System Settings app in the beta is a bit of a disaster. Unless things change in a hurry, Apple is in danger of replacing one of the worst system apps in macOS with a new app that’s just as bad or worse.”

I would love to know why this new OS app is so klunky. I haven’t experienced it myself but from all accounts it’s a real mess.

Now, it could be the app is waiting on some changes from the SwiftUI team to fix some nasty bugs or, perhaps, we’re seeing learning pains from the developer responsible for the app? It happens to the most seasoned developer when you have to make that brain shift to a new paradigm.

If it manages to ship in a buggy state with a terrible user experience it doesn’t bode well for SwiftUI. Who wants to invest their time in a technology that’s not ready for prime time?

Of course SwiftUI is the future of app development for all Apple Platform based applications, it’s just really ugly at the moment.

SwiftUI is amazing until you're totally blocked on something dumb like a custom back button. (Yes, you can hide default and add your own. Yes, that breaks back swipe. Yes, you can override the pan gestures. No, you can't prevent it from fucking up a NavigationPath.)

— Craig Hockenberry (@chockenberry) August 26, 2022

Fresnoland: “In 2021, the Fresno area experienced 69 days over 100 degrees – a record-breaking number of days, according to data from the National Weather Service. There have already been more than 50 days over 100 this year.”

I was born and raised in the great San Joaquin Valley of California. Yes, it’s hot, no way around it, but these increasing days over 100 degrees isn’t good in so many ways. Climate change is real and we’ve screwed ourselves. The human toll is just getting started.

Jalopnik: “Tesla CEO Elon Musk is none too pleased with Tesla drivers who are pointing out major issues with the company’s Full Self-Driving software, according to Insider.“

Have you seen some of the very damning videos of Tesla’s running over child sized mannequins? It’s really disturbing and Musk isn’t happy about it. He wants them pulled. So much for open feedback.

Fully Self Driving vehicles is a pipe dream at the moment and Tesla is experimenting right out in the open. Tesla’s are dangerous cars when used in FSD mode and it should be banned from general use until Tesla can consistently demonstrate it works.

The UC system was free for Californians until the late 60s when Reagan, then Governor, cut state funding.https://t.co/E5Mf2NPN1c

— Derek Powazek (@fraying) August 24, 2022

Yes, believe it or not, University of California schools were once free to attend. As a nation we need this to come back. Make all State Colleges and Universities free. If you want to go to Harvard that’s fine, you can pay for your education. It gives folks choice and will make America a better place.

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myempirepro-blog · 2 years

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Pre-Foreclosure - Door Knocking Scripts (… & 5 TIPS)

Can you make $10,000 per month knocking on doors in your neighborhood with a simple script of exactly what to say to pre-foreclosures? Yes. That's exactly what I am about to share with you in this video.

--> READ THE BLOG POST HERE

https://myempirepro.com/blog/?p=5597

--> WATCH VIDEO VERSION HERE

https://youtu.be/zoOg5UTOvtI

But first, please go ahead and like, share and subscribe to this channel and I will be sharing more videos around this topic.

Also, use the comment area below to let me know if there is anything specific you want me to cover in the next video.

We are talking about pre-foreclosure in real estate and how to make $10,000 per month with it. What the heck is pre-foreclosure?

Pre-foreclosure is the first phase of a legal proceeding that ultimately can conclude in a property being repossessed from a defaulted mortgage loan borrower.

Default means that the monthly mortgage payments are stopped due to some type of life crisis.

The lender of the mortgage loan files a notice of default on the property in pre-foreclosure because the borrowing owner exceeds the contractual terms for delinquent payments.

That's typically about 60-90 days. It depends on what state the subject property is located.

If we are lucky enough to have you as a subscriber on this platform, you know we talk a lot about a real estate money making strategy called wholesale real estate where you do not need cash for capital, good credit, experience or license to make money.

We simply use marketing campaigns to find deeply discounted properties, lock them up under a purchase contract and sell the equitable rights in the contract to an end buyer who is typically an investor who wants to fix it up and resell for profits.

Based on my personal experience, you can make up to $82,000 from one single deal, average $15,000 to $30,000 and make as low as nothing on a deal.

“Making nothing�� has happened to me once ever since 2005 because of unforeseen circumstances.

Wholesale real estate as a 5 stages process from data to deal starts with... you guessed it... DATA.

Precisely, we are talking about data of distressed homeowners. One of such types of data is pre-foreclosure.

It's safe to assume that a home listed at the county government building on the public pre-foreclosure list represents a nightmare to the homeowner; hence the phrase "distressed homeowner".

Access to pre-foreclosure data also represents the beginning of fortunes for anyone who knows how to turn the concept of “data to deals” to a system that can be used, rinse and repeat over and over again.

This is a money making strategy that I stumbled into while I was in the middle of my masters degree program (Engineering Management) back in 2005.

I went on to turn it into a system (which included a script) that made me so much money before the market crash in 2008. At the time, I didn't appreciate the power of the scripts and the system I had created... not until another 6 years (2014).

At the time of recording this, there is a recession looming that has not been officially announced yet but the reality is that the latest report from the Bureau of Labor and Statistics reports a 9.1% inflation rate — the highest since 1981.

Because of this system that has now been refined and cleaned up with my experience and the availability of technology, I won't be making the same mistake I made back in 2008.

With turning pre-foreclosure to profits through the stages...

Stage 1 - Data

Stage 2 - Contact

Stage 3 - Leads

Stage 4 - Contract

Stage 5 - Leads

This is the time to take this business seriously and get off the sidelines. The opportunities are endless for you and I to take advantage of.

Please be safe out there but here is the script for door knocking pre-foreclosure:

"John?" Once someone opens the door, just call out the first name without asking for permission. Don't say things like "Is John here?" or "Can I speak to John please?"

"Hello. Are you open to entertaining an offer on this house?" If it's John, ask him or whoever if they are open to entertaining an offer on the house.

"Please write here a good phone number and email address to reach out for an offer in the next business hours?" If they are open, ask them for their phone number and email address where you and your partner can send an offer within the next 24 business hours.

"Why are you selling?" Ask them why they want to sell?

"How soon do you need to sell?" Ask them how soon they need to sell?

"Do you have an idea of what you want for the house if we can close in 10-14 days?" While you are at it, ask them to give you an idea of how much they are willing to accept if you can close in 10-14 days.

"When is a good time to call you tomorrow?" You want to secure the next conversation before you exit this particular conversation.

If you get a "NO" on any of those questions, simply thank them for their time and don't forget to ask for referrals. "Oh okay. Thanks for your time, do you know anyone that needs to get rid of any unwanted property?"

Don't give up so soon. Give them a business card in case they need to reach out if they encounter anyone... you never know.

Now... door knocking is an old school way of closing your first deal and many more after. But there is also a new school way of doing it.

Door knocking is a contact stage outreach campaign strategy that works but there is a big challenge here and I want to carefully spell it out for you.

Before I do that, if door knocking is working for you or has worked for you, all you have to do is to keep doing what you are doing and leave this video right now.

But if it has never worked for you or you just have a feeling based on your prediction that it won't work for you,

..or you want to scale your business faster, easier and simpler leveraging simple technology,

The good news is that there are at least 3 new school ways of attracting even better quality distressed homeowners and motivated seller leads that already know they want to give away their house to you.

The big challenge of door knocking as a contact outreach campaign is if you are willing to keep working until it works or if you will quit before it works. Big question right?

Share your thoughts below in the comment area please

Before you leave, be sure to access my 2 books for free:

Smart real estate wholesaling and Real Estate Money secrets... at www.smartrealestatewholesaling.com

You will also get an invite to access my exclusive membership...at the time of recording this video at just $1. You will be able to access 2 different coaching programs that normally cost a minimum of $2,500 each.

Check out this episode!

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professorspork · 3 years

Note

If you're accepting non-superhell prompts, I'd love to see a conversation between Nora and Emerald! I've been REALLY loving these microfics, I've subscribed to you on Ao3, I'll read whatever else you write

[Gahhh that’s so nice you’re so nice!! thanks for being patient on this one, finding my Nora took some doing]

It’s occurring to Emerald that she’s never had a close female friend before.

You say that like you’ve ever had any friends before, the voice in her head that sounds suspiciously like Mercury needles her, but she brushes it aside. Like—okay, yeah, she’ll concede the point when it comes to Cinder. In hindsight, whatever they’d had going on between them may have been... super intense... but it probably had never been friendship, in the usual definition. But she and Mercury were friends, no matter what the judgy little shitstain version of him who lives in her head has to say about it. They’d always gotten along. Told each other stuff. It’s not like there’s more to it than that, right?

It had always been like that. Been—instinctive somehow, with guys. Before Cinder, on the street, it was always the men who’d been easiest to manipulate; who would empty their pockets for a smile and a sob story. And then she and Merc had been two sides of the same coin for so long, and then... well, Hazel’d liked her enough to die for her, apparently. (Which—that’s a door that she keeps closed, thanks. She shuts it firmly again, now.) Oscar seems fond of her, in a sweet, uncomplicated sort of way that she really doesn’t know what to do with, seeing as he shares headspace with like a trillion year old man and the idea that anything to do with that kid could be “uncomplicated” is batshit. Ren vouched for her once, and then again, and now he keeps doing it, like it’s habit, like she should just be used to the fact that people are going to have her back, to ask her if she’s eaten, to turn to her with a raised eyebrow in conversation like her opinion would be constructive.

Anyway.

Now that she’s noticed the pattern, it seems like the kind of thing she should probably… work on, or whatever. And Nora seems like an obvious place for Emerald to start. They’ve been thrown in together a lot, lately, Emerald and Oscar expected to fill in the gaps of what’s left of the old JNPR by default. Not that they’ve ever really had a conversation about it—Emerald can’t think of the last time Nora said two words to her that weren’t combat warnings like “more Grimm coming” or “on your left,” but. That’s probably just because things have been tense. She remembers Nora being friendly, on the whole of it. Off-puttingly friendly, even, back at Beacon.

How hard could it be?

The answer, it turns out, is absurdly hard. Nora’s barely ever in the temporary barracks they’re all living out of, instead always checking on the refugees, going on supply runs over esoteric requests, volunteering for extra patrols. Emerald used to find that kind of dogged do-goodery gag-inducing, but now that she’s been the helping hand herself a few times, she’s starting to see the appeal. The way people look at you when you’ve been of service, it’s—nice. Really nice. But Nora works utterly thankless jobs, the kind most people don’t even notice, let alone appreciate. And when they have their insufferably long leadership meetings and they’re talking about distribution of resources or whatever, Nora’s a fierce debater—jumping in to advocate for the people from Mantle sometimes even before May can. As far as Emerald can tell, she does this stuff just because... she believes in it. Because it’s the right thing to do, and someone has to.

She can’t imagine what it would feel like, to have the attention of someone like that turned on her. She’s craved it from the wrong people for so long, but now that she has her pick of options... she’s letting herself actually want the right kind, for once. She thinks.

Which is all to say that largely through no fault of her own, Emerald unexpectedly finds herself sitting with a profound, fervent desire for Nora Valkyrie to think she’s cool.

She hates that.

Fighting with Nora is easy.

(—er. Alongside. Fighting alongside Nora is easy. Emerald’s done fighting with these people. Very done.)

It’s weird, because Emerald’s finding working with a full team to be a real adjustment. When battles get big enough to merit it, she’s used to keeping to the sidelines to use her Semblance for nefarious purposes, or, in a jam, used to having Mercury’s six—literally, because all the forward momentum from his feet-first style always left his back wide open. Figuring out where to put herself so that Oscar can use her shoulder as a fulcrum as he dodges, or trying to aim for the Grimm Ren isn’t already shooting (ugh)—it’s taking work.

But somehow, it’s not work for Nora. Nora seems to anticipate with perfect ease how Emerald will move or what she’ll be doing; Nora bobs and weaves around their ragtag little band with her war hammer like it’s breathing.

It doesn’t bother Emerald until it does, and she means to bring it up casually but there’s never a good time. So it just… stews, and stews, until she can’t keep it bottled up anymore.

Which means that instead of the earnest question she intends it to be, it comes out like this:

“Okay, seriously? It’s creepy how you do that.”

It’s just the two of them, plus the handful of dweeby Atlesian tech-types they’re escorting back from their foray installing some fancy hydro-filtration modules on the outskirts of the camp. And it’s not like Emerald had felt outmatched by the half-dozen Ravagers that had decided they looked like lunch—she can shoot Ravagers in her sleep, at this point—but still. The way Nora had moved around her, it was like they’d been fighting side by side for years.

Nora just cocks her head to the side. “Do what?” she asks, like she hadn’t just basically read Emerald’s mind in front of the water nerds.

Emerald does a complicated gesture with her hands, wrist over wrist, and then flicking two fingers—trying to evoke the way Nora had flipped over Emerald’s back and then kicked off, just trusting Emerald would reel her back in with a chain in midair before a Grimm could fly away with her sorry ass. “That.”

“Oh!” Nora laughs and rubs at the back of her neck, looking sheepish. “It’s nothing. I guess it’s just not a big deal for me? Like—I was there when Ren built StormFlower. The cables are newish, but we practiced so much back in Atlas… I dunno. It’s just reflex, when your weapons are so similar. Fighting with you, it’s almost like fighting with him. I don’t even have to think about it.”

Nora swallows, then, and makes a face Emerald can’t interpret—disappointed, maybe, or ashamed. Which: good. She probably should be, taking things for granted like that.

“Well—just—” Emerald’s not even sure what she wants to say. Ask, next time? Don’t? “You shouldn’t make assumptions. I’m not your boyfriend, okay?”

The venom she puts behind the word is directed more at herself than Nora—frustrated, again, that she’s put herself in the position of wanting so desperately to be liked.

Pathetic.

Nora just nods, looking glum.

“Yeah,” she murmurs, cheeks pulling in a bitter smile. “You’d think I’d be able to keep that one straight, huh?”

She says it with such pointed irony that for a second Emerald wonders if she’d gotten it wrong somehow, but like—Nora and Ren are a thing, right? That’s—everyone knows that.

“Hey, what—?”

“Let’s just go,” Nora says, and Emerald automatically falls into line behind her.

They make the rest of the walk back in silence.

Sometimes at night, when she can’t sleep, Emerald likes to climb up to the roof of the barracks and look out over the refugee camp.

It’s—peaceful, is all. A good reminder of where she is; how far she’s come. The night sky in Vacuo has more stars than she’s ever seen, and being able to watch over all these people who have somehow become her responsibility… well.

A part of her will always be standing on the rooftop at Beacon, looking down on pure chaos as a queasy, frightened sensation twists in her gut and its noxious voice whispers you did this, you did this, you did this. What did you think was going to happen, you stupid little girl? You don’t get to feel sorry for it now.

But she does.

Weird how the only thing that’s helped is actually doing something about it.

She hears a scuffling noise over her shoulder, and she’s got Thief’s Respite drawn and ready before she can even really register what she’s heard. She relaxes when she sees it’s Nora at the other end of the barrels, unarmed and hands raised—a funny little smile on her face, like yeah, fair enough, I should have known better than to try and sneak up.

“Just me,” she says, unnecessarily.

Emerald holsters her guns. “Can I help you?” she asks, and—what is it about her voice, that makes sentences that would be nice if any other human said them come out straight-up hostile?

Nora shrugs, hands dropping to her sides. “I was hoping we could talk; I figured you’d come up here if I waited long enough.”

Well, see—what kind of lesson is she supposed to take from that? She’s been hoping for Nora to talk to her for weeks, and acting like a bitch is the thing that gets her what she wants? Good guys are supposed to know better.

And there’s the way she said it, too. Like everyone knows Emerald comes up here to brood; like it’s a big open secret. The knowledge sits uncomfortably in her stomach, makes her feel watched. Even now, even here, she can’t get a moment alone. Not really.

“What, so you’re spying on me now?”

Nora’s eyes narrow. “I have a pretty bad track record when it comes to losing people. Makes a girl want to put in a little hustle when it comes to keeping tabs on her friends.”

And Emerald would snark at that, or maybe apologize, or something, only—

Nora thinks they’re friends?

“Well, take a seat, I guess,” she mumbles, scooching to the side as though she needs to make room on the massive, empty roof.

Nora walks over and joins Emerald on the asphalt, letting her legs dangle over the edge. Seemingly unsure of where to start, she stares at her hands. Emerald stares too, but her eyes can’t help but wander—tracing the way scars, silvery in the moonlight, spiderweb up Nora’s bare wrists and forearms to fetter her shoulders, clavicle, neck. Like cracks in a pane of glass, right before it shatters.

(Only that’s not it at all, is it? It’s not a sign of weakness, but a warning of strength. I care this much, her scars announce to the word. You wanna try me?

Hazel’s arms always looked like that.)

Emerald doesn’t want to be the one to break the silence, sure that whatever she’d say would be incredibly stupid.

Luckily, Nora has no such qualms, and opens with: “I really admire you, you know?”

Emerald stares, jaw slack, certain she’s heard wrong. “I—what?” She’d say something defensive, like yeah right or you don’t have to make fun of me, only Nora’s eyes are so wide and so guileless they don’t leave any room for argument.

“I mean it,” Nora adds. “I know we don’t know all that much about each other, but… here’s what I do know: I can’t remember a time I saw you without Mercury right behind. Just like me’n Ren. And the way you fought for Cinder…” Nora smiles a sad, private little smile. “You don’t fight like that unless it’s personal; unless someone means something to you. Just like me’n Ren. And now you’re here. All on your own. And you didn’t have to be. That’s—don’t you think that’s crazy brave? I sure do.”

Of course she fucking doesn’t. Crazy brave would have been walking away the first, tenth, hundredth time she had a flash of panic about what she was doing. Or, better yet, doing something about it. Crazy brave is taking thirty thousand volts to get to your friends; it’s flooding your veins with pure crystalline power and saying Go, I’m doing what Gretchen would have done, it’s—

She closes that door.

“It’s not like I really had a choice,” she sighs, dodging the question.

“Oh, you know that’s not true,” Nora scoffs dismissively, tilting sideways to nudge Emerald with her shoulder.

And Emerald jolts, because—look, it’s not like no one touches her. They have to manhandle each other all the time in battle, and… and Oscar gives her high fives sometimes, which makes her embarrassingly pleased. But what Nora’s offering now, that kind of buddy-buddy casual contact…

… it’s been a while, is all.

“So, why did you want to talk to me?” Emerald asks, overwhelmed and suddenly desperate to find a way to get this conversation over with. She feels like she’s sprinted five miles; like she’s had the crap kicked out of her and she has to go somewhere to lick her wounds. Too much, too fast.

Nora laughs—a chuffing, cynical noise that doesn’t sound at all like her. “Looking for pointers? See, I’m trying this thing where I do things on my own, but I just—I suck at it. Like today; you saw. Even when I’m not with Ren, all I do is… is act exactly the same way I do when I’m with Ren. Like I literally don’t know how to exist without him, whether he’s actually there or not. And I know that’s not fair to anyone; I didn’t mean to treat you like—” She shakes her head, biting her lip. “You’re not just some stand-in. It’s not you at all. I’m just—broken, or something. One trick pony.”

“No, hey—”

“But you figured it out,” she barrels on, which is good, because Emerald doesn’t actually have a clue what she would have said there. “You don’t have anyone and somehow you’re just, like—good to go!” Nora says it cheerily, like it’s a compliment, but has the grace to balk a little when she hears how it sounds. “…sorry. That’s—sorry.”

Emerald shrugs, drawing her knees to her chest and resting her chin there. She feels like an idiot; building it up for weeks like spending time with Nora would solve all her problems when, surprise surprise, Nora’s just as fucked up as she is.

“Hate to disappoint you, but I don’t have any hot tips,” she mutters into the crooks of her elbows. “I don’t have a clue what I’m doing. Like—you want to know the really sad part? I was just following your lead.”

“My…?” Nora can’t even finish repeating it, which: Emerald can’t blame her. It’s so dumb. “Huh?”

“Come on. You know.”

“I don’t,” Nora says, voice thick with exhaustion. Like she’s sick of herself. “Ask anyone—I’m not the brains of the operation.”

Hearing Nora talk about herself that way makes Emerald’s chest feel tight; like her ribs have locked in place so her lungs can’t expand. She doesn’t know how to explain it; not without sounding like a starry-eyed fangirl or a moron with a crush and that’s not what this—it’s only that—

She chooses to start a different way.

“You wanna know why I switched sides? Like, really why?”

Nora softens, and reaches out to touch the back of Emerald’s left hand, where it dangles over her knee. “Sure,” she says, but Emerald barely hears it; it’s taking all of her concentration not to clench her fist or pull away in response.

“I overheard Oscar—or, Ozpin, I guess, I don’t know—talking to Hazel about Salem, about her goals. And… listen. No one joins under Salem because they’re trying to kill the world, okay? I mean, no one but Tyrian, anyway. We were all just trying to… find ways to get by. And when Cinder found me, she—” Emerald swallows, hard. This cuts too deep, too close. It’s not something she can just say. “I wasn’t trying to be some big villain, or something. I was just—looking out for the people who were looking out for me. And why wouldn’t I? No one else ever seemed to think I was worth it.”

“Of course you are,” Nora cuts in, quiet but vehement. “Everyone is.”

“See, the worst part is that you mean that when you say it,” Emerald grumbles, scrubbing at her face until smears of color kaleidoscope behind her closed eyes. “I figured people like you didn’t exist, and then Cinder and Merc were glad to prove me right, and—I let them. You know? And maybe if I’d just held out a little longer…”

“You’re not the only one here who’s ashamed of her past. Harriet tried to blow up Mantle, like, a month ago.”

“That’s not—forget that. I’m talking about you. Nora.” It’s the first time she’s ever said her name like that—addressing her, in conversation. It feels… astonishingly intimate, for so small a thing. Emerald powers past it. “Every day, I see you do something ridiculous, like double back on a patrol because you forgot you promised some kid a candy bar, or something, and that—matters. To me. It’s so stupid, but it’s not, because… argh! I want—it’s—” She tries to get her mouth to form the words, that’s the kind of person I want to be, but they stop in her throat.

Still, Nora seems to get the message. Her eyes seem suspiciously shiny for a moment—but when she blinks, it’s gone. “I… thank you.”

“Don’t mention it,” Emerald grumbles. Saying it like she means it: seriously. Don’t mention it.

“I understand what you mean, though. For years, the only person who looked out for me was Ren. And if he’d said…” Nora trails off, then, cocking her head to the side as she works through something. “Huh.”

“What?”

“Nothing, just. I remembered something. I was about to say that if Ren told me the only way for us to get by was a life of crime, or something, I would’ve taken his word for it, but—the opposite happened. We decided to enroll at Beacon. And that wasn’t his idea; it was mine. I always wanted to be a Huntress. To… to be the one strong enough to help people, instead of always needing the help. He wasn’t sure if we would make it, but I was. We were together, right? How could we lose?” She chuckles, a little, shaking her head at herself. “Get a load of that. He followed me.”

They smile at each other, then. Like they’ve figured out something profound. Maybe Nora has; Emerald hopes so.

“I’m glad you’re here, Emerald,” Nora says, and—there it is again. The frisson of electricity that comes with being referred to by name.

Of course, then Emerald ruins it by blurting out:

“Of course you are, all your other friends are dead.”

Which—“Fuck!” she sputters, because she didn’t mean to say that. What is wrong with her? “Sorry! Sorry.”

Nora only grins at her, feral and incisive. “Yeah, well. Yours are evil, so. Pick your poison. At least I’m proud of mine.”

Touché.

“Still glad I’m here?” Emerald jeers, because her first instinct is still to press on the bruise to see how much it hurts.

Nora laughs, and gets to her feet. “Believe it or not, yes. If putting your foot in your mouth was all it took to get booted from Hero Club, I’d have been kicked out a long time ago.” She reaches down to offer Emerald a hand; Emerald takes it, letting Nora pull her to standing. “Now go and get some rest, huh? None of us can ever sleep when you’re up here thinking so loud.”

“That an order?”

“Advice. Friends give it, from time to time.”

And—yeah. Maybe they do.

#typeoneninja #emerald sustrai #nora valkyrie #rwby #emerald and nora #fic what i wrote

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anime-grimmy-art · 3 years

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Told you guys I’d ramble in due time.

I absolutely adore Bravely Default 2. It came at a really bad time cos I can’t waste 70 hours on a jrpg, but well, it’s too late to be concerned about that now. And as is tradition with me obsessing over a new game / show / whatever, you’ll basically find a fullblown review disguised as ramblings right under the cut. Be aware that I’m gonna talk about EVERYTHING, so spoilers are a given. Some maybe even for the previous Bravely Default games.

Also, if you wanna talk about this game in any capacity, hit me up, I’m DESPERATE to talk more about it.

Just for reference on how long this is gonna be, I made a voice recording while driving to remember all the points I wanna make, and that recording is almost 2 hours long. I did cut it down but still, this is gonna be a lot.

I’ll start off with the things that actually bugged me about the game, since there are only 3 things that really bothered me. First of, I really don’t like that you can name Seth. He has too much personality to be a self insert and player integration is not that big of a part in the game that this decision can be justified. It wouldn’t bother me that much if it didn’t leave a bad mark on the ending. First of all, we were robbed of Gloria desperately shouting for Seth, which makes the impact work less, and it’s just so prevalent that the name can’t be said because you have all the normal sound design going. If they’d just let the credits still play I wouldn’t have batted an eye, but because every other sound comes in it’s so obvious they’re just silently shouting in this scene, which makes it look silly. Like I said, this decision is more a detriment than an addition, and it’s a shame it casts a shadow on an otherwise heartfelt ending.

Speaking about lost potential, the other thing that really bothers me is the lost potential in certain plot points and character conclusions. I mainly mean Adam and Edna here. Both of them have been built up to be these formidable foes but they just, die. If it was just Adam I’d be fine with it, since you expect Edna to backstab him and be the actual big bad of the story, but I cannot fathom why they dropped Edna this HARD. If not Edna herself, I don’t understand why we don’t get more of a reaction from the Fairies and especially Adelle. I mean, Edna was her sole reason she left for her journey in the first place, then Edna dies and that’s it? No part where she grieves for a second? No concern from the others about Adelle? Mind you, I haven’t finished all the Sidequests, so maybe there actually is one in which this is addressed, but I think even just a Party Chat after Bad End 1 would have been sufficient to show how Adelle suddenly feels about the loss of Edna. It would have made Bad End 2 / The Secret Ending even more impactful, because, yeah, of course, you kinda know Adelle isn’t going to turn her back on fairy kind, but one of the reasons she doesn’t leave is because if Enda didn’t get a happy ending, then she shouldn’t either. It would have been amazing foreshadowing if she showed this sentiment before this scene happened. Other than that, it’s a shame that we know so little about Edna, or rather, how she became “bad”. I get she’s supposed to be corrupted by the Night’s Nexus, but how did it even come to this? It can’t have been a gradual thing, after all, Adelle says Edna was always good natured and then just disappeared one day. Really would have loved seeing more of that plot point.

Ok, last gripe I have, some choices in the soundtrack and sound design. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love the OST, and I will get to that, but damn, whatever Revo used for the lead instrument in Wiswald hurts my ears. It’s a really good track, but I always have to turn down my volume because these high pitched sounds physically hurt. And for sound design. Dude, the Night’s Nexus is the least threatening, nightmare fueled abomination that ever existed. I get that its growl is kinda supposed to be layered with Edna’s or sth, but it, it just sounds silly. If they went the route of just swinging between different voices or began distorting it from phase to phase, it would have been fine. But the choice they made really made an otherwise creepy design just absolutely silly.

Ok, enough jammering, on to the good stuff. Like I said, there’s going to be a lot, so I’ll try to be brief in each aspect.

Gameplay

I honestly like the new battle mechanics more than the old ones. This individual, turn based system feels way more dynamic and it’s easier to strategies in battles. Because nothing made me more angry than setting up for a heal and the enemy suddenly being faster than me and killing my healer. Now it’s easier to plan ahead a bit.

I also found myself experimenting more with the jobs. Not sure what it really is, but none of the party members leaning more towards certain types of jobs and the job leveling being way faster probably helped.

And I know some people get up in arms because the boss sometimes can be a real pain in the ass (looking at you pope dude), I still found it very interesting getting around counters or even using these counters as a benefit. As an example, I made Adelle my main physical fighter and gave her lots of counter abilities to help her profit from being countered by enemies themselves. Now, she can attack enemies, get countered, automatically evade that counter and earn a BP at the same time. Made a lot of boss fights way easier and fun to exploit.

Music

Ok, I will try my best to be really, really brief, because in my recording this part takes up almost 40 minutes. Anyways, Revo might have just become one of my absolute favorite composers ever. I don’t know what kind of magic he used, but I initially wasn’t that impressed with the OST, but every time I listened to it, I just fell in love harder and harder. Before getting into specifics, I wanna highlight the two things that made me love this OST overall. First of all, this soundtrack almost seems like a refinement of BD’s. While losing some of that fairytale vibe, it sounds even more fantasy now. And in contrast to the original, this almost sounds more balanced? Like, BD’s OST felt high energy throughout, BD2’s on the other hand manages to find a good balance between high and low energy pieces. Like, the character themes or battle themes are absolute hype, but the overworld themes are a lot calmer and easier to listen to while exploring. Second big point that makes this soundtrack amazing is that Revo is an absolute god at using emotional progression/storytelling and leitmotifs in his songs. And heck, do I love myself my leitmotifs. You’ve got some obvious ones, like the final battle theme in which all the character themes and other leitmotifs are integrated. Then you got some maybe more subtle once, just like how the overworld themes are just the main theme, just a lot calmer and using the lead instruments of the towns of the areas.

But my absolute favourites gotta be the character themes and the main theme. I love how fitting the themes for the characters are and in general, each of them is such a bop. At first I prefered Elvis’, because I sure am a sucker for jazzy vibes, but over time Adelle’s became my fav. It’s just something about the trumpets, and how the theme almost sounds a bit melancholic and bittersweet, that drew me in. And considering her story, mostly her bad end, that the bittersweet tone really fits.

Then there’s the main theme. Just like BD’s it shouts “triumphant anthem” and it definitely gives you a very familiar vibe, but I’d argue it has even better emotional progression. Heck, the first time I heard the music start up in the reveal trailer, I didn’t have to look at the screen to know this is gonna be a BD game. Also, the credit song version had me weeping at the true end. I’m someone who’s very easily affected by music (if me shouting about soundtracks on this blog wasn’t proof enough) and just hearing that ending song, getting the after credits scene, just for the second credits to start as a freaking duet. Dude, at that point I just started sobbing, I’m not gonna lie. Just this little part showed how much Revo knows how to put emotion in a song and also write it in such a way that he can elicit strong, emotional reactions from you too.

Story

People have been complaining how the story is too boring and kinda disappointing in comparison to the last one, but I just think the games tried to accomplish different things here. Since the BD series is a celebration of old, classic jrpgs, “cliche” storytelling is a given. Though, BD did throw a lot of meta stuff in there too. BD2 in contrast just feels like a direct execution of that initial idea. It feels familiar, it feels comfy and it feels safe. Except for the little things with the endings and then overwriting the Nexus’ “save file”, BD2 doesn’t really get that meta, which is totally fine. It doesn’t try to reinvent or innovate anything, it just wants to be a fantasy story, that might be cliche, but still fun and enjoyable in its own right.

I’d also argue that the pacing is a lot better than the old game, because with BD I sometimes found myself skipping through scenes to get on with the story. Not that this game didn’t have me rushing through stuff as well, but I found it kept my intrigue way better than the original.

Characters

Next to the music, this is the part that I absolutely love the most. While, yes, they did lose a lot of potential with some characters, mostly with the villains, the main cast is just so much fun. I love these 4 dorks so, so much.

I honestly can’t stand how much people compare them to the original cast. Yes, ofc, I’ve been doing my fair share of comparisons too, but calling these four a more boring version of BD’s party physically hurts me. Because except for some initial impressions, the Heroes of Light are completely different from our beloved Warriors of Light.

While yes, Seth and Gloria give off strong Tiz and Agnes vibes at first, they both grow into such different characters that they’re not really comparable. I think this shows with Adelle and Elvis even more. I do understand how people could compare Adelle and Edea, since they’re both the feisty girl type, but I can’t understand how people can see Ringabel and Elvis as the same character type. While those two are the “suave” party members, they act so differently from another. And that’s honestly apparent the first time you meet them.

Anyways, I love these 4 so much.

We technically don’t know a lot about Seth at all, but they manage to pull so much out of just the fact that he’s a sailor, that it makes him really endearing, really fast.

I was kinda disinterested with Gloria at first, because again, the initial impression was Agnés2.0, but she grew on me a lot. Gloria is way more hard headed and honestly sassy in comparison to Agnés and I absolutely adore it.

Elvis. Elvis, my man. I love this fantasy scottosh wizard so, so much. He’s such a ridiculous character but so endearing at the same time. You got all this dorkiness, with him setting himself on fire as a student, him doing god knows what for a good drink or just laughing danger and prejudice in the face. But then you got his super empathetic and caring side. Mind you, most of his wise moments come from quoting Lady Emma, but still, as much as he’s hopeless with certain social situations, he’s actually still really good at reading the room and playing things smart. He’s a smart and powerful idiot, which makes him a danger to everyone and himself, and I love him for it. (I also can’t believe they called him Lesley I MEAN COME ON)

And then there’s Adelle. I liked her from the start, but I didn’t think she would stick out to me. I think now she’s my favourite character. Not even talking about all the stuff that happens in chapter 3 and onward, because these story threads are awesome in their own right, but there’s just something about her personality that’s interesting and appealing to me. Like I said, I’m not surprised people compare her to Edea, I did too at first, but while Edea walks very close to the line of a Tsundere, I was really surprised that Adelle is, well, not a Tsundere at all. Yeah, of course she’s putting Elvis down a lot, but that stems more from her preventing his ego from going to his head than her being all embarrassed. No, Adelle is actually really well adjusted when it comes to communication. While it’s hilarious that she and Elvis met with her chucking her shoes at him, the two just got along well right from the start. Adelle in general has this really open and helpful personality, but also doesn’t shy away from putting her foot down, even if that sometimes comes out as an embarrassed sputter. She’s also the mother hen of the group. She looks out for the other three and gets concerned about them real fast.

I dunno, Adelle just really grew on me over the course of this game, and then her kinda being paired with Elvis too, as partners and as partners, makes me like her even more. Because as much as I like their personalities individually, I like their character dynamic even more. I honestly love the relationships between all four of them a lot. You really feel them grow closer as friends and all the little character sidequests just always made me really happy.

Conclusion

You might not believe me, but I really held back there. This could probably have been 3 times its length. As much as I love this game, it’s of course not perfect. It struggles and flails in some parts a lot and it certainly has some aspects that might turn people off. But for me, it was just a very familiar and comfy game that didn’t necessarily deliver anything new, but that told its story in such a way that it still got me excited to keep going. The soundtrack is absolutely amazing and the conclusion of the story actually got me to cry. While not groundbreaking, this game is highly enjoyable and leaves you absolutely satisfied at the end.

Also, I would like to iterate that I am desperate to get more content about this game, so if you wanna chat about it, hit me up.

Anyways, anyone else felt like having a fever dream when everybody in chapter 2 started talking fantasy scottish? Cos I sure did.

#bravely default #bravely default 2 #bd #bd2 #fanart #review #ramblings #seth #gloria #adelle #elvis #elvis lesley

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