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captainadwen · 1 year

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random ff7 remake thoughts from 13ish hours in (under cut for remake spoilers for all the ppl like me who are only playing it like a year after its release....)

- overall i am having lots of fun. exploring Expanded Midgar (tm) is so much fun because it is beautiful and I can tell the love that went into every detail. there are potion vending machines and music posters and “clear icicle mineral water” stuffs and also they made the defeat music into a tango and it gave me trauma when i heard it play in an old ppl home (in game)

- that said, im... kinda reluctantly agreeing with someone else who said the best moments are those from the OG game? some of the expanded bits drag a bit long (also i keep getting lost because im adamant about not using minimap if possible), and it feels like a lot of key iconic moments keep getting interrupted by the shades

- like, to the point that when the shades show up it is My Least Favorite because they just interrupt key introductions and whatnot

- i think the game devs tried hard to balance between returning players and total new players but also it just... idk why couldn’t they have left key aerith scenes alone :c

- speaking of, boy this game ships cloti. like, these first 13 hours are really less “cloud joins a terrorist group” and more “which female interaction will make cloud more embarassed or uncomfy”

(its the jesse ones i am sorry but they made me almost as uncomfortable as they made cloud like nopeeee)

- also, im really pissed off that all three female “love interests” do the lean in from side smiley thing that is more aerith’s thing from like... something, not sure what. crisis core maybe? its notable because its ONLY those three that do it and it annoys me like please... you put this much effort into shipping you can at least have different gestures for when they need to lean down and get clouds attention when hes dissociating

- that said, this... is making me ship cloti? i always preferred them as friends but they have like. actual chemistry now. they interact! have jokes! like yes some of it is the limitations of OG but also its just SO much easier for me to swallow clothi in this game than in OG (no one @ me for shipping wars just because i prefer clerith didn’t stop me from going after barret’s date lmao)

- okay no srsly why cant we give the flower to marlene it makes no sense to change that aside from the fact that gold saucer date isnt in this game therefore no date points accrued but STILL it was such a cute interaction

- clouds consciousness from the og timeline is still aware inside cloud?????????? i only know some spoilers about What The Specters Are About but like that surprised me. along w other minor changes that only sorta make sense but mostly feel like done to get the specters in the story....

- when will i go down to the seventh haven basement :’d

- why was reno’s boss fight so fucking brutal

- no twirly sword battle win animation :d

- i still stand that they made sephiroth uglier

- also sephiroth’s weird obsession with cloud is even more hilarious when so constantly re-emphasized like ‘random nobody managed to kill me through the power of sheer rage and physics when i was going insane bc my alien gene donor kinda took over my brain so now i shall obsess over him and only him while i destroy the planet (or maybe not, that was so last timeline ago)’

- for that note, tifa in the remake is also hilarious if you consider the story from her perspective is ‘that loner boy friendly aquaintance/friend of mine showed up looking like he’d been run over by a train claiming to be a SOLDIER and he has the skills and eyes to prove it so i recruit him immediately to join the eco-terrorist bombing missions i dont really support so he can gain Some Monz and then the next day he gets bombed out by a big robot on live tv on a mission he and i weren’t supposed to be on except these crazy phantoms assaulted my team-mates and the next time i’ll see him* is when my fake human trafficking victim scheme hat i employ like the next day after that makes him crossdress to save me’

(maybe i havent gotten that far yet)

- anyway i love carbuncle free gift summon

#adwen plays ff7r #final fantasy 7 remake #ff7r

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popculturebuffet · 3 years

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Loud House Season 5 Catchup (Blinded by Science, Band Together, Season’s Cheatings, A Flipmas Carol) or Of Mutants, Medicority, Merryment and Money

Merry Christmas everybody! And it’s Christmas Week so expect christmas out the jingle jangle for the next few days. And starting us off is something long overdue as coverage of the Loud House FINALLY resumes just in time for christmas. Yes it’s been over a month since the last episode and while i’ve covered two holiday episodes since then, I haven’t gotten back to season 4 despite, like Ducktales and Amphibia, it being on my roster. The answer why: I had a ton of comissions coming in, and other projects going on including ducktales coverage, so I kept putting off banned together/blinded by science for weeks.. until they coldied right into Season’s Cheatings and a flipmas carol. So yeah this one’s way too late and I will TRY not to have this happen again. I can’t promise they’ll be same day of or right on time as unlike Disney and Cartoon Network who are really good about putting their stuff on the app same day or that morning or streaming services which I own so.. yeah, Nick likes to take their sweet time sometimes and isn’t as steady with their release schedule. It’s why I ended up deciding not to do regular coverage of the casagrandes, though don’t be suprise if it shows up here on occasion as I sitll like it quite a bit. Nick is just a pain in the ass to deal with. Point is it’s here now and in time for the holiday season so i’ve delayed this long enough. Let’s get back to Season 5 after the cut

Blinded by Science:

So yeah... i’m just going to say it.. this season.. has been fucking weird.

I mean sure there’s been plenty of normal episodes: The Boss Maybe, Strife of the Party, Kernel of Truth, Banned Together, Season’s Cheatings. There are more normal standard Loud House episodes than the weird ones... but that just makes out how looney some episodes have gotten stick out MORE. I mean among episodes tackling Leni struggling to step into Lori’s true, an obnoxious party despute, a news antics episode, Luna dealing with her career, and a holiday shenanigans episodes.. we’ve also had Lincoln get shipped off to Canada for an episode, Lincoln thwart a supervillian plot, Lori learning her school has a friendly ghost caddy that everyone who goes there knows and just accepts like that’s a normal thing, and with two of today’s episodes, Flip being some kind of monsterious miracle of science or possibly having an x gene we don’t know and then being visted by the ghosts of christmas past, present and future, who for no explained reason look and act like Lisa, Lincoln, Clyde and Lucy.

I mean I can stretch disbelief for a lot of cartoons and i’m fine with it. Lisa does it pretty much on concept. But stretching things a bit for a joke is fine.. but it’s gotten to the point where the plots have gone from grounded slice of life stuff to really weird high concept stuff and it’s really hard to tell if this is going to work or not as Schooled and Family Bonding were not great, especially the latter, Ghosted was pretty good, Flipmas Carol was okay and this one... is decent. So it’s two good, two bad and one neutral. It’l take smore more episodes to see if this is a good thing or not.. I was leaning toward not before this block, but it’s very clear by the fact multiple writers have done this and the one whose done this the most wrote normal episodes last season, that this is an overall creative decision and thus something ‘im just going to have to live with. And hey, it gives me more material to work with so there you go. So yeah let’s actually talk about this episode: Lisa is scrambling because she has a presentation at a big science convention, but doesn’t have any new discoveries to report. She does have snakebird though, which is exactly what it sounds like and exactly as delightful. Everyone should have one of those I don’t know how this isn’t worth presenting. Just put snakebird in hat. Lincoln comes to help because Rita heard snakebird and wanted to make sure lily was okay, and all he’s doing is taking her for a ride so it’s fine. Snakebird should be a part of my a different world style spinoff I’m just saying. Or with Stella.. I have a lot of spinoff ideas and only one of them has gotten a cease and desist from viacom so that’s progress!

Point is Lincoln ends up being a very good big brother and takes her to flips for a flippee as that usually helps him think. He also crouchs down adorably to reach her height at one point.

Like it’s jsut really precious to see that. It also does something the show does at it’s best: Weave the other siblings into each others plots organically. Lately they haven’t been as good at that with some exceptions and while it’s fine to have a few episodes where the rest of the family isn’t involved it is weird to just sorta.. cordon off 11 of our leads instead of giving them their own unique dynamics with each other. And while I do think Lincoln gets way to much of the spotlight at times, and his episodes have not been the best this season, I do think he works perfectly here: He’s the one with the most history with flips, so his role he ends up taking in the plot make sense, and him taking a big brother role and taking her down there is really adorable. It’s honestly easy to forget sometimes since half his sisters outage and outrank him by a lot that LIncoln has some authority and brotherly duty himself but when it crops up it’s really nice to see.

But yeah while Lincoln’s gesture was nice it does nothing to help. But what does is Flip himself. Honestly before these episodes i’d barely seen Flip and he’s alright. He’s not bad it’s just with this having happened just a few years ago

So i’ts really hard for him to stand out in comparison when he’s kind of generic. He’s still pretty damn loveable though. And this episode has as he drops a drum of cheese on his foot, it does nothing, eats cheese right out of the barrel which..

I mean at least have some sanitary standards man. Get a bowl or put it in a bathtub or something. Figure it out. But yeah it turns out his heart is also in his arm, literally on his sleeve.. something they don’t point out so it’s a subtle and well done joke.

Anyways yeah... so this is where the weird stuff comes in. Flip is some sort of miracle of science despite in all other episodes clearly being a normal human, And I like it.. while some bits of it are gross, i’m not a gross out guy so if you like that it’ll be up your ally and I respect that. But for the most part it’s just weird, bizzare stuff I can’t help but chuckle at like Flip having gills on his leg or being able to surivive freezing tempratures while not moving at all. See this works better than the spy episode in terms of what the fuck or to a lesser extent schooled because while it is fucking bizzare.. it works and it’s just swining so hard for the fences, it hits the moon. With the other two one didn’t bring it up till the end and the other just.. suddenly annoucned Royal Woods is next to canada and that lincoln taking a boat there was feasable. This just works for me. So Lisa takes him to the conference, with Lincoln and Clyde joining in to serve snacks and promote the food and fuel which works, I also like the gag about them being late because they argued about what Science Casual meant. Lisa shows off this monstrosity and gets praise.. and a shady scientist asking if she can use flip for her experiments which lisa talks him into and Flip agrees to because, like his agreeing to lisa’s experiments he likes money and tasks the boys with running things. Naturally handing a miracle of science over to a shady science lady you know nothing about backfires and lisa trying to search incognito labs just blows up the computer.. somehow. Don’t think too hard about it. But LIsa finds lily petting a rat and soon finds the rat comes from flip begging for help. And upon spying on the lab, Lisa finds that flip is basically being tourtured and feels she did no better which.. no. While she did use him as a test subject, she also did so with his full consent, and for free publicity. She didn’t harm flip as while she subjected him to a lot of crap NONE of it harmed him like Ingognito’s experiments are. This attempt at a moral dosen’t work when Lisa , while still seeing only flip for his achivments, did nothing unethical. Flip willingly signed on for this and was never once in danger. And look medical trials can be unethical epsecially when people are deseperate. I get that. But here Lisa did nothing wrong and given her usual tendency to ignore scientetific ethics, that’s a lot. Lisa goes to the boys for help and together they all sneak in and free flip in a decent sequence using various stuff from flips. The doctor for her part, as she was planning to shoot flip up into space without a suit to see if he could surivive because evil, gets blasted up. So yeah.. this episode ended with a 4 year old, an old man whose apparently a mutant of some kind x-men or otherwise and two 12 year olds having killed a woman.

And then they all just.. have flippees for aj ob well done. I mean yes the lady deserved it but still.. you all just killed someone! YOU SHOULDN’T BE ACCEPTING THIS. WHAT JUST HAPPENED. AND WHY DOSEN’T SNAKEBIRD HAVE HIS OWN MOVIE. EPISODE OVER.

Final Thoughts on Blinded By Science: This one was okay. Insane, VERY insane, but okay. I’ve seen way worse, from this very season but man is it weird and man is that ending just...

Yeah that takes it down a bit but overall really enjoyed this one, Moving on. Real behind and got four to go so

Band Together: I think I have one of my many reaction images that says it best here:

Given i’ve seen pretty much every Luna episode, she’s my faviorite and i’ve been blatant about that, and all of them are pretty good, I had high hopes for this one. And it STARTS promisingly enough: Luna is rocking out with her band which finally has a name! The Moon Goats. Which I like a lot: Besides reminding me of the objectively awesome Mountain Goats, it fits thehir personality and also reminds me of fellow teenage garage band goat cheese pizza from Zits... I miss when that strip was about teenagers and not two old men yelling about teenagers. Metaphorically. Point is I like this and my recent scott pilgrim kick means this is even better. We also find out Scoots is a huge fan of the band. Which is fantastic. Why an old lady with questionable morals is their biggest fan I do not know. We also get a band prank and fully names for the other two: Sully, the guy and Mazy the girl. I mean their not given MUCH character, Sully likes to bash his head on the keyboard and Mazy is uh there. And that is one of the episodes downsides: Despite being the first episode with Luna’s band to NOT focus on just Sam... the rest of them, and Sam really get to do nothing. The fact Sam and Luna are together dosen’t even factor into the plot. I honestly think it’s what removes the episodes punch, that we don’t KNOW these characters and thus LUna posisbly leaving them behind has no weight. In contrast the series actually did something similar with little build up but made it work with the episode where Leni’s friends are trying to make her choose between them: Her mall coworker friends or her school friends. While we didn’t KNOW her school friends like the mall ones, the episode took time buliding them up so we got why Leni loved both and why this was so unfair to make her choose between them. Here it’s just two well designed carboards and a sam. And without the stakes of it possibly impacting Luna’s relationship, which I don’t want obviously but at least we have a stake in at this point, there’s just.. not a lot. Plus the solutions kind of obvious. But what’s the problem? The band performs for a big manager who only needs Luna to fill in for a professional band. The IDEA as i’ve said is good: LUna being forced to pick between her friends and her career, and both sides not being happy about it. But it’s just.. wasted. Besides clearly being bigger than 30 minutes, apparently we needed the half hour slot for a caddy ghost, this story just feels slight. Luna ends up with the other band and the manager gets on her for acting like she does with her friends.. but she’s a 16 year old who dosen’t know any better. What’d you possibly expect? none of it just really works. She goes back, no one is suprised, and the only part that really works at all.. is the ending. After welcoming luna back , as their roadie at first and clearly it’s more of a joke, Chunk plays with the band and gets Luna’s spot. THAT is not a bad ending and while I”ll miss the big lug, it’s really nice to see the guy get a big break and Chunk is low key one of my faviorite parts of the show. But otherwise yeah, this was almost nothing and given how usually FANTASTIC the Luna episodes are, this one was a really huge disapointment. No need for final thoughts moving on.

Seasons Cheatings: This is a quick one but only because there’s no real character stuff or bad parts, i’ts just a decent if contrived holiday episodes. It’s the annual family gift swap, and Lincoln wants a backpack for (insert thing he likes #37). That being said I DO like that Lincoln isn’t just into one thing obession wise as even with my tendency to hyperfocus due to my autisim, I have TONS of things I love and glom onto. YOu can tell just by my massive assortment of reaction images and quotes. So it’s nice for a show to for once NOT have a nerdy kid just have one hero they focus on. So it’s rip hardcore this time, with a fancy backpack. Why Lincoln didn’t just ask for it for christmas is beyond me and is the only thing that bothers me about the episode. Ohterwise i’ts pretty decent; LIncoln’s trying to cheat his way to victory by getting the right sister for the swap. Which really ends up boiling down to first LIly, since the parents will choose, but since LIly did her own gift this year, he then tries one of the older sisters since obviously, they actually take this seriously and have the money to get something nice with various shenanigans including lincoln dressing up like his own mother. Neat. It’s nothing amazing but it is neat.

Naturally he forgets his own, and has to trade his gift to Chandler to get Lola a nice gift in time. Also Chandler is apparently Lincoln’s black market hookup ala hustler kid. I genuinely love everything about this from the fact it fits his character, to the fact him being rich means there’s a genuine way he can get the resources, to the fact that despite being rich and probably not needing to do this it still fits he’d do it anyway because he’s kind of a scamp. If they use Chandler more like this, as Lincoln’s sorta shady frienemy who Lincoln and Co and possibly the sisters go to for shady schemes and crookery, i’ll be fully on board with it. Plus it might finally squeeze liam out of the group and give us someone willing to hit rusty. So all good things.

But we do get a REALLY sweet ending as Lily, having seen her big brudder sad, paints him a picture. We also get the sweet image up top of LIsa and Lucy having given each other the same gift. Overall not a bad episode. Not nearly as good chirstmas story wise as 11 louds a leapin, but with a shorter runtime and a tight premise it still works and is still very sweet.

A Flipmas Carol: Another very simple but alirght one.. and ANOTHER flip episode. And another one I can speed through a bit more. Basically it’s the night before christmas and Flip is taking advantage of the neighborhoods desperation with shoddy merchandise.. and forcing Lynn to work off the debt for some accidnetal damage on christmas eve and day. I mean she is legally of working age so this is legal but it’s still sketchy. Which is Flip’s wheelhouse. Naturally this leads to a christmas Carol Parody and the weird part as the ghosts resemble and act like the loud kids> This is never explained, it’s really weird especially since Clyde ghost refrences his therapist.. but given the louds were in there and are in there enough for Flip to know them well, same with the mcbrydes, it easily could be a guilt induced hallucination or simply the ghosts taking a familiar form so i’m not going to dicker over it. It’s weird but you know not sudden super spies, golf ghosts or childrne comitting murders weird and as I mentioned up top, holiday episodes get a little more leway with me in terms of weird shit. not by a lot but by just enough.

So they take him through what you’d expect: The Past gives Flip a sympethatic and well done origin story: Flip had a date with the girl of his dreams, but lost out due to a comination of Scoots selling him bad goods and bad tickets in middle school and vowed never to be hurt again barney stinson styles. The present shows him the consequenceds of his actions on other people’s christmas including whatever he gave the louds to make christmas dinner having turned into some form of abomination, causing him to actually feel guilt. The final one shows him having died, buired alone with no one to care in a ditch with a pizza box and having lost everything due to his practices. It ends how you’d expect, he goes to eveyrones houses and fixes things before giving the loud kids present and clearing lynn’s deabt before that happens. Not much to really dig into here, just a pretty good specail. Both of the christmas episodes are good, and while again not as good as the first one aren’t bad themselve.s

So yeah overall this crop was okay. No real standouts, but outside of Band Together nothing bad and even that had extra scoots, luna’s band getting a name and that cheeks suish. All in all not a bad batch feels good to be caught up. Until next time courage.

#the loud house #christmas #lisa loud #lincoln loud #clyde mcbride #luna loud #sam sharp #saluna #chester monk #scoots #flip #rattus #lily loud #lola loud #lucy loud

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lookwhatilost · 3 years

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social systems, concepts, ideas are like objects. they're not just this or that thing, but compounds, made up of parts, molecules and atoms, etc... you have stories, ideas, observations, memes (in the literal sense) the pattern is replicated, galaxies and solar systems and planets, molecules and atoms, people, cells, social structures, ideologies, languages, a universe of causality in which life can exists must be one ordered by some compulsion towards a self replication. a religion persists because it replicates itself, a language, a story, like living organisms, but self perpetuation is also adaptation, so the thing persists but changes, until a dinosaur becomes a bird and it's just an endless ship of Theseus

it's ok to make a reference like that if you can open the wiki article and get the analogy in like a minute or two, then it's just shorthand. it's not pretentious i swear. im nice. im normal.

anyway like, we can't talk about capitalism or communism or fascism or sex or gender or whatever without breaking it into it's components. but it's not neat and tidy like hard science, it's a empirical smear across our collective concious (culture). unlike the classic four quadrant ideology chart, the thing we all know is stupid but also sorta believe for lack of anything better, an actual visualized ideology would be a 4-d cobweb, a crazy complicated infini-hued flowchart, a nexus of idealogical atoms, but zoom out and you get a smear of color, with discernable patterns but lots of fuzzy parts, ever shifting like rainbows on an oil slick, discernable but not so neat and tidy as "bottom left"

I think a lot of people know this on some level, this is nothing new, but it's easy to choose not to think about it, especially when feeling emotional, doublethink a bit to just Make It A Bit Easier and also again, for lack of better options. the alternatives to the prevailing ways of thinking have not really coalesced yet, you can't quite put a name to it, can't quite see it clearly on the bleeding edge of the horizon

to use a dumb example with no emotional stakes, let's take the "is a hotdog a sandwich meme." What is a sandwich? an agglomeration of molecules literally, but also conceptually. each molecule like salami, or bread (atomic structure - 2 x slices x opposing), vegetables, mayo. So sandwich and hot dog are distinct things, but made up of common concepts, common elements (bread containing meat, condiments, vegetables). within these combinations you can produce a distinct hot dog, or distinct sandwich, but also on the margins, a twilight zone of ambiguity.

Generalizations are necessary, there's patterns, objects... say social classes, and we can recognize and name them, but they're also rough approximations of things, zoom in at all and it breaks down, a simple table becomes an incomprehensible mass of swirling particles. if you fixate on trying to nail down to the nanoangstrom the fixed border between sandwich or hotdog, the exact perfect definition of each (and every specific exception), you will go insane because it's not possible, you're building a sandcastle at best.

so you wanna go like "is this country liberal or fascist" well man idk is it a hot dog or a sandwich, it's a thing made up of millions of people and moving parts, that blurs into the world around it in ways much less clear and simple than borders on a map. like when does liberal america become fascist america? when did the last dinosaur lay the first bird egg? is an el camino a car or a truck?

we need to both be able to break things down into their pieces, and those pieces further still, but also get a sense for perspectives, big and small picture, planets vs atoms, and match how we think about things to which scale we're looking at, perspective context

human civilization is like a big computer network, a big super brain, but a slow and stupid one. each person like a neuron, song, dance, poetry, art, heiroglyphcs, writing, are synaptic connections, our physical preproduction the literal cells reproducing. the whole universe is way too big to fit in one brain. we all get better understandings of different parts. some people deeply understand one part, some broadly understand many parts. ideally all these by necessity limited understandings mesh together into a more complete view. so people (nodes) with a breadth of approximate knowledge are the bridges, the medium of information transfer and translation, between those with a more narrow but deep knowledge, feeding information back and forth like genes, mutating them self conciously but still fallibly.

so this vast different array of people, with different levels of expertise and interest, different ways of thinking, even all their distortions, are all necessary to fit human knowledge and observation together into one bigger picture, however flawed and inescapably contradictory. some fear the internet because, even with all the malignant forces attempting to shape it, it makes the big brain computer bigger and faster, it in some partial sense (as it almost always is) collectivizes truth, thought, reality, threatening the existing stories/ideologies/etc. but even if it also produces a lot of garbage, at least at first as it whirrs up, a slimy mutant crawling upon the slimy primordial sea, it's a necessary step that... idk hopefully maybe... really does amount to some greater human understanding, or consciousness

I mean, I'm not sure about it. there's a lot that can go wrong, but *maybe*

idk i guess i think if you could sort this into a more coherent ontology, a more refined version explaining things, and we took it seriously, maybe we might be able to get past the deadlock and myopia of how we think, and talk, and even act now. idk i guess i think if you could sort this into a more coherent ontology, a more refined version explaining things, and we took it seriously, maybe we might be able to get past the deadlock and myopia of how we think, and talk, and even act now. i think human will, ideas, idealism, whatever: it's like the sails on a sailing ship, and the material reality is like the tides and winds and weather. you're mostly at the mercy of forces beyond you but sometimes when it's like 50/50 between the elements, it makes the difference. I mean if we're dictated totally completely in a fatalistic predistinatory way by material condtions then we have no will, at which point what we believe and why doesn't matter because we can't choose it and it wouldn't matter even if we could, so why not

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