Pouring one out for Afghanistan and Anguilla and Antigua and Aoteoroa and Barbuda and Australia and the Bahamas and Bahrain and Bangladesh and Barbados and Belize and Bermuda and Botswana and Brazil and Brunei and Canada and the Cayman Islands and Cornwall and Cyprus and Dominica and Egypt and the Islas Malvinas and Fiji and Gambia and Georgia (the country) and Ghana and Gibraltar and Grenada and Guyana and Hong Kong and India and Iraq and Ireland and Jamaica and Jordan and Kenya and Kiribati and Kuwait and Lesotho and Malawi and Malaysia and Maldives and Malta and Mauritius and Montserrat and Myanmar and Nauru and Nigeria and Pakistan and Palestine and the Pitcairn Islands and Qatar and St Lucia and Saint Kitts and Nevis and Saint Helena and Ascension and Tristan da Cunha and St Vincent and Grenadina and Scotland and Seychelles and Sierra Leone and Singapore and the Solomon islands and Somaliland and South Africa and Sri Lanka and Sudan and Swaziland and Tanzania and Tonga and Trinidad and Tobago and Turks and Caicos and Tuvalu and Uganda and United Arab Emirates and United States and Vanuatu and Wales and Yemen and Zambia and Zimbabwe tonight

it is all chaos and entropy. the thing is that the chaos and entropy make it beautiful and lovely.

yes, it's true that nature and the universe are uncaring and unspecific, and that is terrifying. i have lived through some of the unfairness - i got born like this, with my body caving into itself, with this ironic love of dance when i sometimes can't stand up for longer than 15 minutes. i am a poet with hands that are slowly shutting down - i can't hold a pen some days. recently i found a dead bird on our front porch. she had no visible injuries. she had just died, the way things die sometimes.

it is also true that nature and the universe are uncaring and unspecific, and that is wonderful. the sheer happenstance that makes rain turn into a rainbow. the impossible coincidence of finding your best friend. i have made so many mistakes and i have let myself down and i have harmed other people by accident. nature moves anyway. on the worst day of my life she delivers me an orange juice sunset, as if she is saying try again tomorrow.

how vast and unknowing the universe! how small we are! isn't that lovely. the universe has given us flowers and harp strings and the shape of clouds. how massive our lives are in comparison to a grasshopper. the world so bright, still undiscovered. even after 30 years of being on this earth, i learned about a new type of animal today: the dhole.

chance echoing in my life like a harmony between two people talking. do you think you and i, living in different worlds but connected through the internet - do you think we've ever seen the same butterfly? they migrate thousands of miles. it's possible, right?

how beautiful the ways we fill the vastness of space. i love that when large amounts of people are applauding in a room, they all start clapping at the same time. i love that the ocean reminds us of our mother's heartbeat. i love that out of all the colors, chlorophyll chose green. i love the coincidences. i love the places where science says i don't know, but it just happens.

"the universe doesn't care about you!" oh, i know. that's okay. i care about the universe. i will put my big stupid heart out into it and watch the universe feast on it. it is not painful. it is strange - the more love you pour into the unfeeling world, the more it feels the world loves you in return. i know it's confirmation bias. i think i'm okay if my proof of kindness is just my own body and my own spirit.

i buried the bird from our porch deep in the woods. that same day, an old friend reaches out to me and says i miss you. wherever you go, no matter how bad it gets - you try to do good.

mold

also quite obsessed with karl being as detached from the story as he is. there's nothing that makes him have to be the detective that has to be involved, but he unknowingly dooms himself by agreeing to work with the KYAL cult. every other detective basically deals with elias head on except weissman, who only meets him right before he kills him. like he's right when he says "by my choices" because everything that leads him to being mixed up with the mannix cult is himself. it's the gambling debts and the choice to do the dirty work for an organisation he knows nothing about. he's the only one that doesn't encounter that body doing police work and it's specifically because he's told to cover it up. he gets himself into the mess and eventually fixes it but the fact that esther always dies in the doomed timelines and he's always too late even if he starts wanting to change things ("till this child. esther.") it just makes me very ill

aight iii’s gone full slasher now he’s seen the comments he’s committing to the bit

“final chance to comply” hello??? you can’t just say that i’ll explode?

Cellbit trying so hard to stay level headed and rational and keep shit together, but when Hombre Misterioso comes in with some fuck shit, and he’s not sure if he’s only hearing him inside his head, his response is basically ‘I can and I will out crazy you without hesitation’. He’s like I have done fucked up shit before and I will do it again if you give me an excuse I swear to god. He’s like I’m level headed and reasonable right now with rigid self control, but if you give me a single reason I will kill us both

ough brain is doing SO bad but sometimes. there are colors

i've been doing a bunch of tartarus runs in reload lately, and it got me thinking about how i miss certain ways FES's clunky gameplay can characterize minato… (ramble about the great clock mechanic + leveling up party members in reload vs fes under the cut)

when i got to yabbashah block in tartarus (block 3), i remember commending the developers for adding the great clock mechanic. it's a much more convenient way to keep party members at the protagonist's level- so when you think about p3 from the perspective of trying to make it easier for people to play, the mechanic succeeds in this respect.

but now that i'm in adamah block, and that i've done lots of my once-a-month tartarus runs… i think that i got a little too dependent on it, and the way that i played through reload feels like a vastly different experience from how i played FES.

in reload, my party's levels are very lopsided. minato, yukari, akihiko, mitsuru, and fuuka are all level 90+, meanwhile junpei and aigis are at level 79, and then… poor ken and koromaru are at 71 and 64 respectively. (i never got to have a great clock for them…)

meanwhile, in FES, my party's levels were much more evenly distributed and were at least level 90. i did all of this manually for every monthly tartarus run because i enjoyed having options available for the taratarus guardians and monthly operations.

with how i perceive minato, i feel that the way i played FES feels more in-line with his character than me dawdling around waiting for the great clocks in reload.

FES's gameplay loop left me with the very strong impression that minato has to work twice as hard as everyone else in SEES does. it makes sense because, yeah, he's the leader, but something about having minato run through tartarus multiple times with different groups of people just to make sure that they are adequately prepared speaks volumes about his character, to me.

and while the tired mechanic is present in reload to some degree, most notably with allowing you to freely raise your courage stat when you visit edogawa after school… the tiredness system doesn't hit the same way that FES does, i think.

the way your party members in FES will call it quits when they return to the entrance floor at tartarus when they're tired, versus minato, in spite of all his tiredness and sickness, still pushes through tartarus because it's his responsibility…. idk!!! i miss that! i feel like this really hammers home the difference between minato and the rest of SEES, how minato doesn't really see himself as a human with needs worth respecting as long as he's useful to someone.

i don't think that tartarus being tedious (in FES especially) is not what most people would describe as fun, and i can respect people thinking it's a slog. but, regardless of how it feels to play, it doesn't change that FES's gameplay loop is a fundamental building block in how i perceive minato…

of course, i do recognize that you can just opt to NOT use the great clock in reload (and it's great when players are offered the choice to not partake in mechanics)! i definitely think that if someone really wanted to, they could manually level up party members, but i do feel that kind of playstyle isn't necessarily "incentivized" to the type of people who are into playing games for Having a Good Time. it's kind of like… "why would you do that when there's a much more convenient option available to you."

in any case! despite my woes, i do want to emphasize that i'm glad that reload has a much more smoother gameplay loop than the original P3 did, because it does make the game more accessible to people. having played both FES and reload, it feels very strongly apparent to me how the core gameplay formula of persona has really been refined in the past 18 years (to think og p3 was 2006 and reload is 2024.. time flies!). and reload has made revisiting a story that i love so dearly much, much easier because the gameplay just bops!

at the same time, due to my "i miss characterization informed by weird and dated FES gameplay quirks" woes, i still think that playing FES is worthwhile. (really, i feel this way about all iterations of p3! i think it's worthwhile to see what each version and side media has to say even if it doesn't Land™ for you.) but i also understand why people wouldn't want to play it, so i will keep writing posts about things i liked from FES's gameplay because i'm still very fond of FES (especially in respects to minato. these mechanics are so telling about him!!!) 💪

loki: i don’t want to be alone.

the s2e6 loki writers, for some reason: so anyway i have an idea-

like. . .are any other Polin fans out there that do not give a singular flying fuck about Debling? we should form a club lol because from the very bottom of my heart and with my whole chest: I could not care less about him. Not sorry, I'm tuning into S3 for Pen and Colin and Pen and Colin alone

whatever you do DON’T think about how papyrus undertale’s biggest motivations lie in encouraging the people around him to improve themselves and finding the joy in friendship and how he doesn’t have any of that in deltarune whatsoever and instead he’s just hiding inside of a dark house while everyone else is outside going about their lives relatively fine without him just dont think about it

we just found a fucking 75+ year old pipe under our house covered in 5 inches of cement while we were trying to clear a blockage. tell me that the previous owners of this house didn't have something to do with the buried. i mean, we have probably found the coffin 2.0

Update: there are worms in the pipe. there are WORMS in the FUCKING pipe

wtf was old lady judy doing 20 yrs ago, huh?

wtf were you doing, judy?

and im not gonna take "i fucked worm woman" as an answer

Which version of Rick is your fav?

it's so hard for me to choose tbh. HOWEVER, I'd say Evil Rick

then I'd say it's C-137 and Memory Rick

I love how pathetic™ Evil Rick really is tbh. love that he's being controlled by his Morty. can you guess who my favorite Morty is?

just bc im a lesbian doesnt mean tht i wont at times become deeply entranced with the beauty of male actor or character. it just means i wld rather be locked in a room with a man with a knife than do anything romantic or sexual with one

oh no I smoked too much weed and gave myself zoomies both from the excitement from my new peak pro and the excitement from the new weed itself and def smoked way more than I should have and probs will continue to smoke more than I should because of this double dose of excitement until I finally just pass out after days of hardly sleeping recently lmao

but ANYWAYS before that happens !!! I currently have the strongest urge to go wreck people in fucking battlegrounds to level one of my assorted disc priests and because like …. ever since I got 100k honorable kills achieve, I’ve wanted that goddamn fucking ‘the Bloodthirsty’ title from the 250k honorable kills achieve and I was farming that before I stopped having the drive to game a few months back.

so let’s see how queues go at 2am on a fucking Wednesday morning, I wonder if I’ll give up before I find a bracket with fast pvp queues tonight tbh. it’s more likely I’ll end up pugging a raid on my mistweaver main if it takes too long to get into a battleground just to preoccupy myself for a bit and try to get a chance at trinkets and shit lmao