#this vaccine clusterfuck was at least free

[demonfox38]

Completed - Final Fantasy IV

Okay, what would you prefer to call this? "Final Fantasy IV Easy Type"? Just "Final Fantasy II"? What's in a number, anyway?

So, my sister got married!

In all honesty, this was a point of stress for my parents and me for the last six months. Not that we had any qualms with the groom! He's solid. The issue was that the wedding was taking place in Colorado. You may have heard me mention that I live in Iowa. So, okay. Just take a flight, right? And you would be right, if your family wasn't paranoid or had any available back-up help. It was my parents, three dogs, and my ass in a van for a day one way, each way, hoping to God that some emergency didn't crop up.

I drove in a hailstorm, man. In a vehicle type that I had never driven before.

And then I had to give a speech at the wedding!

Everything went about as well as could be expected! Well, minus the COVID-19 outbreak that happened afterwards. (Yours truly did not fall ill. Yay for vaccines and a functioning immune system!) But, I had to do a lot of preparing to get to that point. Readying outfits and a speech, practicing stress reduction techniques and mindfulness, accepting what I could and could not control, staying focused on the present moment. Stuff like that. Several of the games I picked this year were selected to help that process. "Super Mario Bros." was some kind of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy session. "Resident Evil 4" was…well, we all know about what "Resident Evil 4" does to one's nerves. "Baroque" ended up being a good exercise in rolling with the punches. "Star Fox Zero" and "Star Fox 64" were last minute confidence boosters, helping me to remember what I had learned. I'm sure "Lunar 2" did something as well, but honestly, sometimes you just need a break, too.

Finally free of all obligations, I decided to spend my Memorial Day weekend in total hedonism. Given the circumstances, weddings were still on my mind. "Say," my thoughts went, "I should play a video game with a wedding in it. What do I have at home for that?"

"Final Fantasy IV" and "The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask" came to mind.

I decided that the first five months of my year was enough of an anxiety attack without adding "Majora's Mask" to it.

"Final Fantasy IV" chronicles the tales of Cecil Harvey, a dark knight with a troubled conscience. After witnessing and participating in multiple atrocities, he gets it in his head that Golly Jee Wilikers, maybe his king and army sucks. Along his path to redemption, he recruits (and frequently loses) multiple people to aid him in his quest to reclass himself into a better person and maybe stop the dickheads he was working for from ruining the entire planet and its moons.

Does he succeed? Err…

Well, he fails his way up, at least.

The particular version of this "Final Fantasy" that I played was the original NTSC Super Nintendo release. Which, I'm assuming you know by now, was called "Final Fantasy II." I'm guessing if you know about this game, you know about the whole clusterfuck of the naming convention behind it, so I'm going to skip the spiel. I just wanted you to know what variant I played before we got too deep into this. Because damn, does this game have multitudes.

Name shenanigans aside, "Final Fantasy IV" is very much the younger sibling of "Final Fantasy II" in terms of overall tone and progression. Both plots toss characters aside like rejected toys the first chance they get. While "IV" is kinder than "II" in terms of fatalities, it absolutely sets up its roster mutilation as the same bloody mess as its predecessor. It just doesn't have the guts to commit to its vile deeds. Spoilers, but of all the party members that appear to die at one point or another, only one stays truly dead. It's wild, considering the multitudes that come and go.

Where "IV" gets meaner is in how much Cecil is an absolute disaster of a hero. Not that he doesn't try to do the right thing or is anything less than civil about his actions. Everything he tries to do goes to shit. Magical crystals get stolen routinely. His girlfriend gets sick, then kidnapped. His best friend is brainwashed so often that the folds of his cerebrum have gone smooth. Hell, he even loses multiple child co-stars in horrific ways. Not to mention what a disaster his family is! Absolute (multiple) shipwreck(s) of a man. Sometimes, it feels like he only succeeds because he keeps getting new rides from his friends (who then, of course, end up hospitalized for the rest of the game because that's how "Final Fantasy IV" rolls.)

What nerfs this initial experience is the translation for this version of the game. Like, we all have a good laugh about Garland "knock(ing) you all down" and Ted Woosley's particular flavor of "Final Fantasy VI"'s translation. Those at least were generally grammatically correct. This one has a lot of strange, startling errors. Like, mixing up the contracted verbs don’t and wouldn't, frequent fragmented sentences, using weird "Legend of Zelda"-esque possessive patterns (like, "sword of dark force"), and so on. It's understandable, if you look at the credits for this game and what happened to its translators. Only one out of the three did translation work for more than one game, and even she pivoted to different roles after this release. It's better than something like "Samurai-Ghost", but it is still weirdly off. It may have been excessive to get a fourth translator, but man. Another set of eyes could have helped.

I saw a line that was (to paraphrase) something along the lines of "These people can summon monsters! They're known as Callers!" And something within me became anemic.

Nintendo's archaic censorship policies did nothing to help this translation, either. It's very hard to have this overwrought story about interplanetary suffering and fatalities when the translators aren't allowed to use terms like kill, death, or dead. Not to mention how weird it gets when holy becomes white and pray becomes wish. I mean, it reads better than the average TikTok censor-dodging speech, but it's still painfully noticeable.

I'm just saying. "Earthbound" got to have a Pray function not 3 years later. It makes a world of difference to be able to say what you mean. (The ESRB may be a fussy nanny, but if Nintendo's old policy was the alternative, I'll take the fussy nanny any day. Plus, it'll also tell you how newer games will scar you for life on their website! So, wee!)

Another surprisingly wonky feature of this game is its menu system. Like, you don't usually think about menus, right? You just click on things and execute functions. There's an annoying behavior to this game's X menu that didn't sit well with me. Every time you want to use an item or a spell, you would be returned to the root of the submenu in question. So, you couldn't just sit there and spam spells or potions on someone to get them back to full health as soon as possible. It's a little nitpick, but it's one of those irritants that added up for me.

The programmer here did go on to make much better menus for subsequent "Final Fantasy" games, so credit where credit is due! There was just a little growing pain to be had with this title. And really, the battle menu is pretty solid (minus an item duplication glitch, but hey! What's a "Final Fantasy" game without that?) Being able to split spells and pick targets is a nice feature! It's simple and often overlooked, but I think it should still be appreciated. You didn't have that in the first "Final Fantasy." And it also auto-corrects attacking units targeting a dead enemy, so that's also good!

I can be a positive reviewer! I swear!

Aesthetically, this game is a bit split down the middle in terms of quality. I mean, it's the earliest "Final Fantasy" game for the Super Nintendo, and a very early Super Nintendo game to boot. So, you're not exactly getting the beautiful, consistent pixel art from "Final Fantasy VI" here. It definitely looks like something that got upscaled from the Nintendo Entertainment System. However, there are still some cool sprites in the mix. The music is usually pretty good, too! The only one that threw me off was a piece titled "Another Moon." Because, hey. I get it. The moon's gonna be a weird place to go for an RPG. But, listen to that and tell me you weren't thinking of squeaking monkeys or the farty Mansion Basement theme from the Director's Cut of "Resident Evil."

And, hey—if you need a palette cleanser, "The Lunarians" isn't a bad moon piece. Occasionally, the game can handle the moon just right!

Had I played the "Final Fantasy" games in order, I think I would have found this game more challenging. Its latter half loads up on bosses that require more advanced tactics to overcome, particularly for its optional content. I suspect that if you are playing this game, it's going to be after the likes of more popular titles like "VI", "VII", and "X". A lot of those games borrow from this game's bag of tricks. But, once you see things like Reflect Magic Spam boss and Death Countdown boss, having that tossed at you isn't going to be much of a curveball.

I'm not saying you won't ever die. It's just going to be one of those things where you'll quickly see what you did wrong, reset, and knock it out of the park. Past number crunching, all you have to contend with is bastard semi-opaque walls and donking your way around hidden paths. Hell, you might even have the skills for that by now.

Do I like "Final Fantasy IV"? Yeah, in the same way I like an average Disney animated movie. It tries to have fangs from time to time, but its gnawing comes off as more endearing than threatening. It's still a generally good experience! I just wouldn't expect you to have a religious awakening playing it.

Do I think you should play the NTSC SNES variant of "Final Fantasy IV"? You absolutely can do better. You can get versions for various consoles (like the Playstation, Game Boy Advance, Nintendo DS, and Sony PSP), as well as on Steam. The Playstation release seems to be closest aesthetically to the original release, but I do have a fondness for the audio and pixel-crunchy Game Boy Advance release, as that one is a bit closer to "Final Fantasy VI" in appearance. The Nintendo DS version is if you're into low poly 3D models, and the Sony PSP version is for those who like to smear Vaseline into their eyeballs!

Any way you slice it, you can at least get something better to read. Assuming the Vaseline doesn't damage your vision, anyway.

#post game evaluation #final fantasy iv #please enjoy me talking too much about my personal life and this wonky screenshot

[rightnowls]

Okay so I’m definitely late to the party, but I just wanted to get my thoughts down about the tour situation (and ramble about a whole lot of other things too). First off, I want to say that I am American… and I have tickets to go see Harry perform in October. That being said, I’m pretty angry. His label has always wanted to make him seem unattainable, and this debacle solidifies that. He’s always seemed very grounded despite everything going on around him, but he’s been seeming more and more stale towards the fans as time passes. But in concerts, that’s when he has relatively free reign, and that’s when he seems super close to us once more. It’s just that his social media is so fucking dry and impersonal that it’s hard to even like him right now.

And to add to that, the tour situation. Again, I’m American. And I think it’s wildly irresponsible to have a tour at the moment. I have tickets to a Green Day show in early August, but I’m only truly comfortable with that because I’m out of school for another month afterwards, so there’s no chance of me spreading the virus as long as I’m responsible following being in such a massive crowd. But Harry’s tour is going more and more towards flu season, and with mask mandates being lifted in most places, as well as so many of his fans being back in school… it all just kind of seems like a recipe for disaster, doesn’t it?

I’ll admit, I don’t know much about the delta variant apart from it being highly infectious. But I do know that those who got Pfizer (which I did) may need booster vaccines, and those who got the Johnson and Johnson (which my brother did) are at a higher risk for getting COVID despite the vaccine. So nothing is truly looking up, and yet New York State (where I live) is entirely opened up. And we actually have people getting the vaccines. Imagine the Deep South.

So put this all together, and we have a disaster waiting to happen. Do I blame Harry himself? Not entirely. In fact, I don’t place most of the blame on him. His team has truly fucked him over for the past few years, ruining his image more and more as time goes on. They wanted him to be a rockstar, and they did it, but what is the cost? We have some believing he can do no wrong and that he’s making entirely good decisions with this. We have some believing he’s the devil incarnate for going on with this tour despite common sense dictating it’s a bad idea. We have people who can’t get refunds after spending their hard earned dollars on tickets and hotels and transportation. We have people who weren’t even told their shows were cancelled. This whole situation has been a clusterfuck, but most people are blaming Harry himself, when in reality it’s most likely his team’s fault. That’s really not doing wonders for his image, now is it, Jeff?

That being said, he’s not blameless. It’s his tour. He has to be aware of what’s going on to at least some extent, and I don’t believe that he has no say in this. I really don’t know much about the industry, seeing as I’m a 16 year old girl with an interest in cars that go fast, not how contracts work in the music industry, but I’m sure that while his tours are part of his contract, he can negotiate at least some, especially with COVID being in the mix.

So, it’s his team’s fault that everyone was told about this shit way too late, but I do think Harry is not blameless. In all honesty, I’m hoping the tour gets postponed or cancelled, just as a big fuck you to his team. And that’s coming from someone who has tickets and really wants to be able to go see him. But I don’t like what this has cost. For anyone.

If you read through that whole thing, that’s absolutely insane. I just kind of started spewing words out towards the end and it’s two in the morning so I could wake up in the morning and regret saying anything at all, but at least I was able to get my half-coherent thoughts down, even though most of it was interspersed with “I don’t really know much about”s and unrefined thoughts.

Treat people with kindness.

#harry styles #love on tour #this whole debacle #his unattainable image is not doing wonders #fuck you Jeff #and fuck the team behind this as well #and Harry #a little fuck you to you as well #not quite as big #but I’m still mad #covid mention

[thessalian]

Thess vs Symptoms

Okay, I’m not really suggesting as per my previous reblog that Trump’s faking the COVID thing. At least in part because his entire handling of the pandemic has been based entirely on “It’s nothing, it’s no big deal, it’s just like the flu, just get on with it”. My fears are numerous, all based on him turning out asymptomatic:

Trump will overrule any medical guidelines, go to rallies as he did before, infecting all manner of people

Trump will insist on debates in an attempt at a win/win situation: if Biden refuses, he’ll call Biden a coward; if Biden agrees, Trump will say that Biden’s agreeing with him that COVID’s no big deal. Plus then Biden might catch it (and given the latency period of COVID and that clusterfuck of a debate, Biden might already have it)

He’ll say he’s healthy because of the hydrochloroquine and the sunshine from his numerous outings playing golf, encouraging more people to go out, which is bad not only from the point of view of COVID but for the upcoming flu season

It will further encourage the anti-mask, anti-vaccine people and everything else will get worse: “See? The PRESIDENT has it and he’s fine!”

Either way, his health under COVID is going to be treated the exact same way as any of his health records were when he was examined prior to inauguration: we will hear nothing. He may not be fine, but we’ll hear that he’s fine and if he stays in quarantine, we won’t have much proof of anything different unless he’s moved to a hospital (which ... I know 10 Downing Street has no real medical facilities, but does the White House? Could they get him a ventilator in there, if it got really bad?), and that could probably get suppressed for awhile at least.

I suspect massive misinformation to be coming out of the White House in the wake of this - all damage control, all the time. I feel horrible for saying this, but I pray the man gets symptoms. I said back in March when I had symptoms that I wouldn’t wish that on anyone ... but that’s not true, as it turns out. Unbelievably, I don’t want him to suffer particularly, and I still can’t bring myself to wish death on anyone, even him. However, the implications of Trump turning out to be asymptomatic on both a national and global scale are too unfortunate to contemplate at this point.

So - and I say this with all due guilt and regret - Donald Trump? Reap what you have sown. I am hoping for fever, dry cough, chest pain, tiredness, and ... no, this one I can wish on him guilt-free ... may you never taste another burger. Let your sense of taste die as a permanent reminder of what you ignored, and the people who died as a result. Your dying won’t bring them back and I don’t know what it says about me that I can’t wish you dead or even truly seriously ill, but goddamn do you deserve something.

#Thess on COVID

[fapangel]

What are your thoughts regarding Elon Musk?

A great question. Long story short, I alternate between wanting to love Elon Musk as one of the few venture capitalists on Earth with a fucking brain, and wanting to drown him in a scummy pond for being such a fucking West-coast weenie retard. 

Elon’s Genius

Waitbutwhy.com got a series of exclusive interviews with Elon, and while the star-struck explorations of the author might be of questionable objectivity, he did a great job of summarizing how Elon thinks. And the single most important thing about Elon was expressed in a verbatim quote from the man himself:  

Like look at Galileo. He engineered the telescope—that’s what allowed him to see that Jupiter had moons. The limiting factor, if you will, is the engineering. And if you want to advance civilization, you must address the limiting factor. Therefore, you must address the engineering.

Yeah. You’re sitting there saying “no shit, Sherlock, who doesn’t understand that?” But the shit some journalists say will just blow your fucking mind. Yes, this is an actual journalist, in one of the few semi-respectable, mostly-sane publications left on earth (by dint of catering to people who have to make sums add up at the end of the day,) saying that Trump should make space-based solar power satellites a priority. Not talking it up as a nice theoretical tech, not wondering about it, but pushing this as a serious short-term policy priority. 

Incidentally, this is how Elon Musk feels about that bullshit. Yes. Being a sane, intelligent human fucking being, he’s capable of understanding basic opportunity costs, and since he’s aware that hair-brained pie-in-the-literal-sky schemes must be constrained by the actual ability to fucking build this shit (i.e. engineering,) he’s capable of stopping long enough to realize that building and orbiting a vast fleet of satellites designed to blast the Earth with microwave lasers is fucking retarded compared to just building more solar panels right here on Earth. 

This ties into the second massive, massive thing that makes Elon Musk unique - he’s a venture capitalist that knows what the fuck a BUSINESS CASE is. Despite being a save-the-world-I-want-to-build-unicorns idealist, he actually understands the basic principles of economics and markets. To wit, nobody’s going to give him eleventy trillion dollars for free to do decades of R&D to realize his Big Dream, so it has to fund itself, and furthermore, major advances in technology and the human condition don’t spring from individual genius companies, but from entire industries. This nice diagram produced by Waitbutwhy’s eloquently fawning author expresses the same with more colored boxes and less exasperated fucking invective, if that’s your thing. 

What you’re looking at - especially the box at the very bottom that says SUSTAINABLE FUCKING BUSINESS MODEL - is the concept that any gormless asshole on the street can grasp (business gotta make money) but the multi-millionaire masters of the universe that gave Juicero ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY MOTHERFUCKING MILLION DOLLARS TO BUILD A WI-FI ENABLED JUICER COULDN’T FIGURE OUT. 

Yeah. Some of his businesses don’t make money, like Tesla. They release glowing reports that retards eat up, while anyone who worked in the actual 100+ year old auto industry look at these sillicon valley nerds who think they know fucking everything after a few years of research and just wait for the inevitable explosion. (Despite their cheery PR, people who know what they’re looking at see nothing but trouble in their business. To say nothing of how the Ultimate Dream of Everyone Driving Electric is flawed by the basic resource limitations of PLANET FUCKING EARTH. And then there’s shady shit. When they discovered that the established automakers have hundreds of acres and tens of millions of dollars worth of suspension torture-testing facilities for a goddamn reason, instead of repairing their janky suspensions under warranty, they offered to pay half the repair cost if the customer would sign a fucking nondisclosure agreement. Tucker Torpedo this motherfucker ain’t, is all I’m saying.)

But ya know what? I can forgive that, because SpaceX. SpaceX forgives a lot. And there is a business case there - there’s enough rich virtue signalling fuckheads to support a small car company, at the very least - so the premise itself isn’t just pissing up a suspension bridge cable on a bridge to nowhere, like most venture capital bullshit. Even the Hyperloop isn’t that bad, because even though it’s fucking retarded, Elon’s probably only looking at it because of his “Boring Company” project. He looked at the ongoing clusterfucked abortion of a high-speed rail line that California’s doggedly carrying to term, and correctly surmised that digging fucking tunnels the length of a huge earthquake zone would be cheaper, in the long run, than trying to navigate the political clusterfuck of buying contiguous right-of-way for the whole damn length. A tunnel is a tube, and as long as it’s a tube, you may as well use the damn Hyperloop thingy, right? There is thinking, there. A brain, is working. And hey, at one point SpaceX was an idea just like this - the Great Ones of industry often leave a trail of dead and dying projects behind them while the One Great Success just climbs higher and higher. It’s worth it, and it’s why Trump’s “six bankruptcies” don’t mean jack shit compared to his dozens and dozens of successful businesses.

And yet - despite that amazing presence of a god damned brain in his skull - he still manages to go full fucking retard sometimes to a degree that makes me want to catch his tongue with a vise-grip to make the stupid noises stop. 

Elon’s dumb-fuck bullshit

This slashdot article neatly sums up the problem. The short version is that lots of very rich people in Sillicon Valley were going around acting very serious about the possibility that our entire world and universe is just a huge computer simulation and we gotta try to break out of it somehow. 

Billionaires. These people are fucking billionaires. And this is how they spend their time. This quote from Business Insider sums up the reason why: 

The piece doesn’t give any clue as to who those two billionaires are – although it’s easy to hazard a few guesses at who they might be, like Musk himself or Altman’s friend Peter Thiel – but it’s fascinating to see how seriously people are taking this theory. According to Musk, it’s the most popular topic of conversation right now.

“The most popular topic of conversation right now.” If ever you doubted that there’s a vast wealth discrepency in the United States, look no further - not only is the West Coast rolling in economic opportunity for the right people - especially with the right connections - but there’s so many multi-zillionares out there that their entire social circle can consist of nothing but. This is some zany philosophical fad that caught on and percolated around, like memes and fads do, via usual social interaction - except for these people, their friends consist mainly or only of multimillionare tech CEOs. 

And that, in a nutshell, is why obviously intelligent people who’s words can make stock prices in multiple huge companies employing many thousands of people do a damn jig feel no reservations at all about saying things in public that make them sound like fucking idiots. When you contemplate the sheer distance between the world of us ordinary humans and these privileged Coastal Gods, it’s enough to fill you with an almost instinctive rage. As a good seal-clubbing communist-hating rabid frothing conservative bigot bastard from Soviet Mordor, I wouldn’t give a shit if these Masters of Industry at least bore passing resemblance to the Randian ideal. I’d be down with that. Even if their huge underwater cities did spring a leak and a massacre or two, that’s life, you know? 

But this shit? This!? No. I draw the fucking line here, pal. There’s some floof-ass hair-brained bullshit I’m not going to stomach. 

But entirely aside from my impassioned-downtrodden-country-boy-rage-at-the-coasties-grapes-of-ree, there is the simple fact that people idolize, hero-worship and generally LISTEN to this man, and that imparts some level of responsibility on him to not say fucking stupid shit. The reason I’ve resisted making a Paetron for so long (aside from my crippling depression, self-doubt and general talent for self-sabotage) is that it’d impinge, ever so slightly, on my total freedom to say any stupid shit I want, because I’m not beholden to anyone, at all, to sound sane or coherent. (My fiction writing is a testament to this.) So I’m keenly aware of the decorum and care a public speaker ought to have - it relates directly to how big an impact his words are liable to have on people, and for Musk, that’s a lot.

Elon’s latest shtick - which is also popular with all his millionaire friends - is screaming and crying about how AI is going to replace all of us. Well, no, that’s just the luddite screeching of Sillicon Valley in general now, Musk is actually claiming that AI will rise up and fucking kill us or some bullshit. His newest company, OpenAI, has a great business model and all - developing mind-machine interfaces, which is a thing and will be a much bigger thing in short order - but he’s still going around telling everyone that AI is some evil terrible scary thing, and that’s causing actual goddamn harm. It’s all fine and good to loathe “science deniers” if they’re arguing against climate change, food pasteurization, the Health Dangers of GMO Crops and childhood vaccinations, but when it’s bullshit like the health effects of radio waves and the coming AI apocalypse, suddenly these fucking geeks are all ears. And here they have a successful CEO who’s Made Science Things Fly and has half the world sucking him off repeating this chicken-little fear-mongering bullshit. In ten to twenty years the anti-vaccers are gonna be screaming NO AI NO DRIVERLESS WHATEVERS REEEEE AND IT’S GOING TO BE THE FAULT OF PEOPLE LIKE ELON FUCKING MUSK.