#Seriously devs if you read this you have good ideas but you change your minds so much that the entire thing collapses | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

bunnyadvocate · 2 years

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Hello, I read your post on the history of r/visualnovels and I noticed it was from 2018 so I was wondering what your thoughts on the subreddit's current state are, if you don't mind talking about it.

First, a disclaimer. I’ve not been involved with /r/visualnovels for ~6 years, so I don’t have much insider knowledge and you shouldn’t take any of my commentary too seriously. With that out of the way, let’s do a history recap since my last post.

At the time of my 2018 subreddit history post, the subreddit was slowly being strangled by a mod team who was still operating under the old heavily-curated mindset, where non-news posts were ruthlessly removed, but without the balance of organising community events and engaging with the subreddit community, instead spending their time on Discord.

The following couple of years followed this same path. Occasionally there would be a post where folk complained about the overly-restrictive posting rules and lack of mod team engagement, to which a fresh mod member would be added with promises of change. Each new mod would follow a similar arc of engaging for a couple of months, but then wouldn’t be seen outside of Discord. (Shout out to Demeteloaf, the only mod who genuinely worked hard for the subreddit throughout his tenure. But one low-tier mod couldn’t overcome the impassive inertia of the rest of the mod team.)

This pattern finally broke in ~2020 when Nai got added as a mod. Nai (like insanityissexy) is one of the few people who had a vision for the community and the self-drive to make it happen (see his EVN dev community work). Whether his plan for a more EVN friendly subreddit would have been good or bad, or even feasible in the face of a userbase that was broadly impassive or hostile towards EVNs, is something I’ll skip over. Either way, Nai was left to be the face of change at a time when reddit as a whole was becoming more restrictive on “loli” content. Whether the “no sexualising the loli” rule Nai announced was merely following reddit’s rules, or a push towards catering towards EVNs (where “loli” content was rare, unlike Japanese VNs), I’ll leave to the reader to decide.

Regardless of the motivation, this was another rule on top of an already restrictive rule-set by a mod team that rarely engaged with the subreddit community. It angered both the loli-fans and those who felt this was yet another imposition by an out-of-touch mod team.

Cue Gambs.

I would never have guessed Gambs would come roaring back. He never expressed any interest in the subreddit when I was a mod, nor did he seem interested in VNs. He’d only read ~7 and that was years earlier.

It was an absolute rout of the old mod team. Even the friends they called in from Discord couldn’t offer more than a “maybe the mods will perform better in future?” defence in the face of a userbase utterly fed up with them. Again, a shout-out to Demeteloaf who stood by his principles and publicly stood up to Gambs’ takeover, but a solo mod can be dismissed easily. The rest of the mod team were far too used to hiding behind their mod powers to silence dissent to be able to sway public opinion against a mod who had more power than them.

Gambs clearly had no idea what he was doing though, as he threw mod powers at first users to profess agreement with his takeover. Fortunately the first two users were the right choice, SuperAnge and Tauros. Both old community members who genuinely cared about the subreddit.

They removed almost all of the posting restrictions, and put to rest the argument about whose fault the subreddit’s poor state was. I’d previously wondered whether Discord’s popularity was always going to doom the sub, but Ange and Tauros showed there was a lively subreddit community if only you let them post. /r/visualnovels ‘activity exploded, and the old mod’s attempt to recreate the former heavily-curated version on /r/vns died to inactivity.

As well as being wrong about Gambs’ return, I was also wrong about Gambs’ departure. I assumed he wouldn’t have any ongoing interest in the subreddit. He didn’t seem to read VNs any more, who would be care about the community? Well it turns out he’s addicted to drama as badly as I was during my depressed phase of life. While Gambs’ cloaked his behaviour as trolling, the litany of grievances he’d repeatedly bring up showed how sensitive he was towards criticism (yes, I’m aware of the irony of me calling out someone else for holding onto grievances). As someone who had similar issues, I genuinely believe Gambs needs the help of a therapist.

Regardless of the cause, Gambs was the source of repeated drama on the subreddit in the years since. Getting into disputes with former community members, translators, localisers, and now even VNDB. He tries to wield the subreddit as a weapon, directing them as those he’s upset with, but with limited success while Ange and Tauros were holding the line and limiting his drama posts. But if you oppose someone with ego issues, sooner or later you become their enemy, and eventually Ange and Tauros were removed. Shout out to Tauros who repeatedly opposed Gambs’ misbehaviour, knowing he’d be removed as a mod for it. It’s a shame Ange wouldn’t publicly back him up, likely the only well-liked community member who might have rallied the subreddit.

So that finally brings us to the current-day, a subreddit with minimal rules outside of criticising the dear-leader. On the positive side, the subreddit has never been more active. While I’m not into all the meme/image posts, there’s no denying the community as a whole likes them given their upvotes. This is more the direction I originally wanted to take the subreddit, giving it more freedom, but with one significant missing piece: I think the subreddit should be split. With the activity the sub gets now it should be possible to divide some activity, having a sub dedicated to discussions and another for news posts, perhaps splitting JVNs and EVNs while leaving the core sub as a free-for-all. That way those who want to engage in discussions or are fans of EVNs aren’t drowned out by JVN memes.

We tried this once with limited success when me and insa made /r/vnsuggest to redirect /r/visualnovels users who wanted VN recommendations, although in that case we also removed the original /r/visualnovels posts too.

In theory there’s already a split, /r/vns as a news/discussion hub has revived after Gambs continued drama forced regulars away, but the antagonism between the mod teams (or rather Gambs’ antagonism towards everyone else) means many user’s on /r/visualnovels aren’t aware of the alternative subs and so can’t make informed choices about where they subscribe.

Another approach could be to replicate /r/anime’s methods, where they have specific days for posting memes and a series of megathreads.

As for the future, I expect if the /r/visualnovels mods aren’t going to offer a more curated experiences for those who want it, others will try to create their own subs. But it’s unlikely Gambs would look upon that with approval and seek to stifle any mention of a successful alternative, so the userbase are stuck with the free for all on /r/visualnovels for the foreseeable future.

I’m not sure how useful any of my rambling has been, but I hope it’s been an amusing read. Obviously I have a bias against some of the old mods so you should factor that in.

P.S. Not directly subreddit related, but I think Gambs getting banned from Twitter is probably the best thing that could have happened for him. It massively limits his opportunity to spark drama and get himself into self-destructive fights. Fewer feuds is good for him and good for the subreddit.

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theseerasures · 3 years

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Which part specifically? I mean, yeah, the whole game is a disaster, but I'd love to hear specific points. There was so much I didn't like about Fates that it just collectively merges as 'bad' in my mind.

it's not really anything specific tbh!! because the way Fates is misogynistic is not different from the way the other Fire Emblems (that i’ve. played. it’s possible all the ones pre-Sacred Stones were actually Forbidden Feminist Utopias) also carry that unmistakable whiff of misogyny. it's not done out of malice, it's just...a franchise that loves to play high fantasy tropes straight, particularly the bit about Restoring the Good Monarch. i never got the sense that they thought hard about the fact that the dude protags (Ephraim, Ike, Chrom) get intricate coming of age stories about tempering their talents for murder with wisdom, while all the lady "protags" (Eirika, Elincia, Micaiah) mostly don't change at all and just kinda swan around doing the "we are ethereal maidens too good for this sinful earth" thing, and when they do wibble it's always about how they wish they could be as "strong" as their dude counterparts except they inevitably can't and don't want to be, because war is bad!!! there's too much war in this war game franchise, buy our next DLC for how to solve war with war

(Lucina's a weird case, but that's why i love her, and...i suspect the only reason Lucina got to be the way she is was because she was doing DRAG, which is a rabbit hole that we don't have time for.)

Fates (sidebar: i played Revelations but i know what happens in Birthright and Conquest. i ended up doing all the Paralogues, because i was morbidly curious about how many different ways you could tell a "no dad!!! it's your dream" story, and the answer was "around four, so spreading them across TWENTY ONE versions basically creates the story equivalent of ultra skim milk.") doesn't do anything functionally different from its predecessors, it's just...more egregious this time, because so much of the story feels exclusively catered to drawing attention to it. i get the sense that the devs were trying to aim for bigger, more sophisticated storytelling than what they did with Awakening, which is why we got Fire Emblem: More Royals Than Ever and the requisite chin-stroking about families of blood vs. families of choice, but that they were trying to be Deep (tm) just made the parts that have always been shallow in the franchise look uglier.

i'm just gonna talk about the Royals, because the story privileges the Royals to a truly mind-bending degree (see above: high fantasy, monarchism). with the Royals we have:

the Hoshido/Nohr sibling matchy-matchy that is eerie from the outset (did Sumeragi and Garon set TIMERS so they'd impregnate women at roughly the same time and murder the babies who didn't come out the right gender?), even before you get to the part where they are "foils" for each other in p much aesthetic only, since their personalities are not actually that different when you get down to it. you have the Dutiful Big Bro (Xander and Ryoma), the Closeted Lesbian Big Sis (Camilla and Hinoka, representing opposite ends of the gender presentation spectrum), the Insecure Lil Bro (Takumi and Leo), and the Incorruptibly Pure Lil Sis (Sakura and Elise, the latter of whom for her crime of being outgoing was punished with death in Birthright, which...yikes)

so like. extremely paint by numbers right from conception (heh). why couldn't Xander have been the one who was Naive and Not Ready for This World? because he is Boy, which means he can only be flawed in the Boy Ways, so he must be Too Worldly instead. why couldn't Camilla be the oldest? she's already jaded and weird, so why not make her the heir just to shake things up? because she is Girl and Too Weird and Wearing BLACK, and weird girls in black can't be queen--even if Xander dies, she can't be queen.

Azura is clearly supposed to The Chrom Surrogate of this game insofar as she's your blue haired pal with whom you share a destiny, but she is The Chrom Surrogate but MAXIMUM GIRL, so she's the quintessential non-combatant class, she has a special song that soothes the hearts of warriors, she LITERALLY DIES FOR THE PEACE (TM) IN BIRTHRIGHT AND CONQUEST. (and obviously her hair can't be the Fire Emblem Classic shade of blue--that's too masculine.)

wrt the second gen, lineage is passed through the dad in the eugenics factory this time, which is on paper a fine shakeup from in Awakening, but...ALL the definitely-royal second gens are boys? don't get me wrong: i actually adore what they did with Forrest--like, fucking superb u gender-nonconforming fashion-loving Prince of Peace--but Forrest being an actually interesting inversion of what we expect (that isn't played for laughs!!!) makes all the other boys come off as much blander than they could be. why can't Kiragi be a dirt and hunting loving GIRL? i love Shiro's supports with Kana, but his whole "boisterous laid back but also inferiority complex" deal would be much less tired if he were the Crown Princess instead of Prince. i suppose if Siegbert were Girl with Anxiety and Kingship he'd just...be Lucina, but that's not necessarily a bad thing!!! bitches love Lucina!! (i'm bitches)

the thing is all of this would be...well. not FINE, but more acceptable if they did some things to flesh out those cookie-cutter personalities. Fates didn't deliver for any of the Royals to the extent i wanted it to, but even for what we had the girls got markedly less than the boys did. the moment that made me go "hoo boy maybe i will make poast about this" was in the climax when all the Five Whatevers lit up to form the Fire Emblem and we got some nice concept art of Takumi Leo Ryoma and Xander making :O faces, while the girls...were also there! in Revelation i'm pretty sure you can cut out Camilla Hinoka Elise and Sakura and leave the plot basically unchanged. you could say they fare better in Birthright and Conquest, but you could just as easily say they fare WORSE, because what they get to do if they're NPCs in those routes are: be sad and die, be sad and be spared from dying, be sad and get even weirder before being spared from dying, or be sad.

Camilla and Hinoka feel like the most wasted potential, because we haven't had as many "female royal who is actually pretty down with murder" characters before. but the devs clearly had no idea with what to DO with that, so (outside of her daddy and mommy issues, the details of which we learn about via supports with Niles the resident sex pest and hoo boy the "queer rep" in this game is whole other can of worms) Camilla became your momsistergirlfriend with built-in innovative airbag technology, whose creepiness is played for laughs, and Hinoka was...wait which one was Hinoka again

i am partly just being glib for comic effect, but like--the underlying problems are there, no matter how seriously or generously you want to read it. Fates doesn't go out of its way to mistreat its women; it just doesn't expend any effort thinking about them, so the misogyny breaks loose and stands out anyway.

#Anonymous #fire emblem

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dorkshadows · 4 years

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It's the MaZM anon again! Sorry if you've already forgotten since it's been several days,, I just wanted to tell you that I really appreciated your insights on the game and I found myself agreeing with you once it was finished and I could finally look through your tag! Unfortunately I got a bad taste in my mouth from a lot of stuff from Fantasia-onwards (I think I took it too seriously dfkgksd) but I did really enjoy the Persian having such a prominent role in it after all, and (1/2)

really I enjoyed a lot of the expanded roles for the secondary/minor characters, and I liked some of the ways they visualized stuff I didn't quite wrap my head around from the book. (also Erik's singing as the siren was gr8) I don't want to go on and on about it in your inbox (or, too late,,) but if you ever did post an in-depth review of the game I'd love to read it! ;w; thank you for your time (2/2)

(sorry last message) I think I know what "wtf" change you're referring to now, also, and I too very much disliked it, (3/2)

orz I'm sorry, one last message from MaZM anon, I said Fantasia earlier when I meant Nocturne, I enjoyed a lot of Fantasia actually (4/2)

Hi MaZm anon! Glad to hear from you again :D And don’t be sorry- I don’t mind at all! I’m all for rambling together about the mazm game, and there is a lot to ramble about LOL.

I’m glad you agreed with my thoughts on it :) Overall, it’s quite well-done but makes some choices (you get me, anon lol) that left us justifiably upset. I think it’s fair to take the game seriously because it tried to present itself seriously. And even claimed to be accurate to the book (LMAO game devs, we have eyes!). As an individual adaptation though, it’s fantastic!

The expansion of the secondary characters was my favorite part! Even the NPCs’ that just stood around were the best XD People who don’t usually get the spotlight like the managers, Mifroid, daroga, the ballerinas, etc. had great development and characterizations (well... in the managers’ case, I just thought they were hilarious). Just too bad they couldn’t extend that development to the people already developed in canon. And I also enjoyed the visuals! Though when I saw the “floating skull,” I went “sans undertale???”

Erik’s unmasked design was 10/10. Like, he was beautiful but also “ugly” and somehow they pulled it off LOL In my full review, I’ll argue that he probably looked too good, not that I’m complaining. Thanks for the message! I don’t know when I’ll make the review, but it’s definitely something I plan to do- thank you for the interest!

I have so many positive thoughts on the pharoga vibes, Raoul, and that amazing takedown of Philippe lmao. Also have so many thoughts in the opposite direction with wtf they were trying to accomplish with Christine’s (and by default, Erik’s) character arc.

imo, the quality of the story dropped after they introduced Melek; I have a love/hate relationship with her because on one hand, she’s not a bad character in her own right. On the other, her only purpose is to make everyone else look bad (they end up looking irredeemable at worst, or hilariously uncaring at best). Like, isn’t it ?? that Christine saw Melek in the basement and still thought Erik had some goodness inside, she really went “rip to Melek but I’m different” adsfasdf Also gotta love how Raoul and the Persian met Melek too and just went “ok, but what about Christine?” GUH

It’s also ?? that Erik had no idea what he wanted from Christine at the scorpion/grasshopper scene. And they kept going back/forth in a convo that never happened in the book, which explains the awkwardness. Erik’s entire “arc” was a mess by the end and was sending some incredibly unhealthy messages about trauma and recovery. So like I said before, Raoul had to carry the entire ending ON HIS BACK because of these wtf choices.

But putting aside our fandom biases, it’s a fun game in its own right haha Thanks again for the messages!

#anon #spoilers beneath the cut #mazm phantom of the opera #raoul's shoulders must hurt from carrying the entire finale on his back #long post

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angelsfalling16 · 4 years

Text

Chapter 6 of Friends Don’t Get Engaged

Read it on ao3

Previous Chapter

Summary: Simon and Baz try to work things out and see if there is a possibility of a future for them together.

Word Count: 4243

A/N: I didn't mean to make you all wait so long for this chapter. I just got busy writing other things, and I had been hoping to have the epilogue finished before I posted this. Unfortunately, I'm not sure when/if I'll ever finish the epilogue, so for right now, I'm calling this the end of this fic. Maybe someday, I'll figure out how to get it done, but for now I am letting it go. I'm sorry, everyone.

I hope you enjoy this chapter!

Thank you @wo2ash for beta reading!

***

Simon

Penny and I have barely stepped into Dev and Niall’s flat before Dev starts questioning me.

“Hey, is this for real?”

“Is what for real?” Penny asks.

“Take a look,” he says, handing her something that I instantly recognize as the save-the-date card I sent out the other day.

“Simon!” She hisses, turning on me. “What have you done?”

“Nothing,” I say, but when she glares at me, I add, “Nothing that can’t be undone.”

“These were only meant to be templates. Who else did you send them to?”

“Just you three. And Baz. I was hoping that they hadn’t arrived yet.”

“When did you send these out?”

“Before you guys came to me with your plan. I was hoping that it would show Baz that I’m serious about him. I was trying to find a way to get him to talk to me about all of this.”

Penny shakes her head and squeezes her eyes shut while she apparently tries to process the sheer amount of stupidity of my actions.

“It’s fine,” She says after several quiet moments. “We’ll deal with it. Maybe Baz hasn’t seen it yet.”

“Let’s hope so,” Niall says, not unkindly. “Have you figured out what you’re going to say to him when he gets here?”

I shrug. “I’m just kind of hoping that something will come to me.”

“Really? That’s what you came up with yesterday,” Dev asks in a condescending tone that’s only a shadow of the way Baz used to talk to me, so it rolls off of me.

I’ve been trying to think of something to say to Baz ever since I stormed out of the flat, but I’ve still come up empty, which is exactly why I haven’t really tried to have contact with him since then.

Now, I’m kind of just hoping that when I see him, I will know what to say. I just need him to give me a chance.

“Ignore him,” Penny says, shooting him a glare that I have been on the receiving end of more times that I can count, so I feel for Dev a little as he turns away from us. “I’m sure you’ll be fine. Are you ready?”

“I’m not sure,” I admit.

I don’t think that this is something that you can really be ready for. How do you prepare for something that could possibly change your life in a big way?

Penny

I walk with Simon into the living room. He seems nervous. He keeps tugging at his clothes and running his hand through his ever-messy hair.

I don’t think that I have ever seen him this nervous. Not even when we went up against various creatures that seemed to be coming after Simon specifically for years. I wouldn’t say that he kept a level head during those times, but he did what he could, fought them to the very end.

“Are you ready?” I ask Simon, one last time.

He doesn’t hesitate this time. “Yes.”

I think maybe getting away from Dev and Niall helped him to calm down. They aren’t exactly the people I would have chosen to make plans with, but I have to admit that they aren’t bad company either.

“Okay. I’ll go let them know,” I tell him before giving his arm a reassuring squeeze. “You can do this.”

“Penny, wait,” he says quietly. For a moment, I’m worried that he’s about to back out, but then he smiles at me. It’s not the bright smile he usually has, but that’s understandable given the circumstances.

“Yeah, Simon?”

“Thank you. For your support in all of this, for accepting it so easily, and for being my best friend.”

I smile at him. “Of course. I’d do anything for you. Now, go get him.”

He nods, and I leave him alone in Dev and Niall’s living room.

We’re using their flat for this because we thought it would be easier to come up with a way to get Baz here than to get him to return to mine and Simon’s flat.

When I step inside their bedroom, I find them making out on their bed, Niall’s hands in Dev’s hair and Dev’s arms wrapped around Niall’s waist.

“Come on,” I groan. “I left for two minutes.”

“Sorry,” Niall says bashfully, pulling away, but Dev shrugs unapologetically, smiling at him.

“You two are just like Simon and Baz. Can’t keep your hands off of each other, even when there are other people around.”

“Seriously?” Dev asks. “They made out in front of you? I thought it was all pretend.”

“That’s just what they kept telling themselves.”

“They really were clueless, weren’t they?”

“No less clueless than you were before we got together,” Niall says, and the look that he gives Dev makes me worried that they might start kissing again if I don’t interrupt them.

Luckily, there’s a knock at the door then, which is Dev’s cue to leave the room.

“Don’t you think it’s weird that we’ll all just be sitting here while they’re working it out in there?” Niall asks after a minute of awkward silence between where he tries to right his clothes.

“I mean, it’s your flat, and I’m basically just here for support.”

“You mean we’ll be able to eavesdrop on them and know what they’re doing.”

“Or we’ll be able to step in if things start to go south.” It’s Dev who says this, reentering the room behind me.

That was fast, but it has to be a good thing, right? It means that he didn’t have to fight with Baz to get him to stay here.

I watch as Niall’s eyes light up, simply from seeing Dev again, and it reminds me a lot of the way that Simon looks at Baz. I don’t think that either of them realize that it happens. It’s just a reaction to be around each other. It’s like they’re almost as oblivious as Simon and Baz.

Almost. At least Niall managed to admit that he has feelings for Dev without having to go through all of these hoops.

“What’d you say to get Baz here, by the way?” Niall asks as Dev crosses the room to sit next to him.

I stay close to the door, trying to catch what Baz and Simon are saying in the other room, but I can’t hear them. I wouldn’t be surprised if Baz cast a spell so that we wouldn’t be able to hear them.

“That there was an emergency. I may have slightly implied that you were injured.”

“He’s going to be pissed.”

“I’m hoping that seeing Simon will soften some of the anger.”

“I wouldn’t count on it,” Niall says, shaking his head.

Maybe we should have come up with a way to get Baz here that wouldn’t cause him to be worried about his friend. That might make things not go well if he feels like he’s been tricked into getting here. Which he has, but I’d rather him not already be angry before Simon even gets a chance to say something.

I suppose it’s too late at this point. Now, it’s all up to Simon.

Baz

Before Dev called me, I was lying in bed, where I had been all day.

He wouldn’t give me details about what was happening, but he said that something was wrong with Niall and that I needed to get over to their flat as fast as possible.

I hurried to leave my flat even though I wasn’t completely convinced that something was really wrong with either of them. If there was, I doubt they would call me over to their flat, but they’re my friends, so I’m going. Also, it’s a good excuse to get out of the house.

I didn’t even bother slicking back my hair like I usually do. I tied it back messily into a bun and got into my car. If it is an emergency, I can’t waste time doing my hair.

Now, I’m driving over to Dev and Niall’s flat, and I don’t know what to expect when I get there.

Sometimes, I still can’t believe that they are a couple.

I mean, I can see the chemistry between them, how happy they are in each other’s presence, but I never would have guessed that there was anything romantic between them. I also can’t believe how long they managed to keep it a secret from me.

Apparently, without me there to stand between the two of them at the beginning of the year, when I had been kidnapped, they were able to come to terms with how they felt about each other.

I’m happy for the two of them, I am.

But it’s hard not to look at them and wish that it could be that way for me and Simon.

I wish that it wasn’t so hard just to talk to him.

I just want something to work between us.

I pull up in front of their building and shut off the car before reaching for my phone where it sits along with the mail that I retrieved on my way to my car. One of the envelopes catches my attention in the midst of all the junk mail.

There’s no return address on it, but the color of the envelope, a deep shade of red, looks familiar.

My curiosity piqued, I grab the envelope and open it as I make my way up the stairs to their flat. There’s a card inside, and the words “Save the Date” jump out at me.

I rarely receive invitations to anything, and when I do, it is never through the mail.

As I look closer at the care and read the rest of the writing on it, I falter on the final step and just barely manage to catch myself on the railing before I fall down the stairs.

I am going to kill Snow.

Simon

I pace nervously back and forth across Dev and Niall’s living room while I wait, and when there are three sharp taps at the door, I freeze.

My heart starts pounding in my chest, and it feels like I’m running out of air.

This was a mistake.

Baz is going to be pissed when he sees me, and it’s going to turn into a big fight. One that will result in him and I officially being done with each other.

I can’t believe I thought that this was a good idea. I have to go tell Penny that I changed mind, that I don’t want to do this.

“You okay, Simon?” Dev asks as he passes by me on his way to the door, his voice surprisingly gentle. We all agreed that it was best if Dev answered the door since there was a large possibility of Baz turning away as soon as he saw me.

He stops just beside the door, waiting for my response.

“Y-yeah,” I tell him.

“You’ll be fine,” he says reassuringly. “We’re just in the other room if you need us.”

“Okay.” I nod once at him, and he turns to open the door.

A moment later, I hear Baz’s voice.

“Where’s Niall? What’s wrong with him?”

“Nothing. He’s fine,” Dev says, and I watch as he ushers Baz inside the flat.

“What do you mean? When you called me, you said that there was an emergency.”

“Yeah, well, I didn’t think you would come unless you thought the situation was dire.”

“You lied so that I would come hang out with you?” He asks, sounding put out and just a smidge angry.

“Not exactly…”

That’s when they start moving closer to me, and I can see it in Baz’s eyes when his eyes finally land on me.

His expression turns stone cold, shutting out any worry that he may have had for his friend. He doesn’t look angry, but I think I would prefer that because at least if he was angry, it would mean that he cared, that he had some kind of feeling about seeing me.

“What are you doing here?” Even his voice is emotionless. I expected him to give me his best sneer when he saw me, but somehow this is worse.

“I wanted to talk to you, and I didn’t know how else to get you to see me,” I say, watching as Dev edges around us and out of the room.

“Oh, so now you want to talk?”

It’s a fair point, but it still stings. I try to respond, but Baz keeps going.

“We could have talked days ago, but you decided to storm out like a child and then ignore my phone calls.”

“That’s not fair. How could I talk to you when you were treating this like nothing but a competition?”

“You know what’s not fair? You breaking off our engagement like that without trying to talk through whatever it was that was bothering you.”

“It wasn’t a real engagement, remember?” Because I can’t help myself. Because I can feel all of this anger and pain boiling inside of me, but he is standing here, acting like he couldn’t care less.

“As if I could forget. That doesn’t explain why you did this, though.” He thrusts his hand out so that I can see what he’s holding.

It’s the save-the-date card that I sent him.

“I can explain,” I tell him.

“What explanation could you possibly have for doing this? Was it to try and upset me?”

“No, that wasn’t it at all. I was trying to show you that I care about--.”

“Some way to show you care,” he says, cutting me off, but a new emotion flickers across his face, quickly gone again before I can figure out what it is. “Sending out invitations for a fake wedding to all of our classmates.”

“That’s not what I did,” I say in a near-shout, unable to cover up my frustration. I take a deep breath and say, “I didn’t come here to fight.”

“Then, why are you here?”

It’s irritating that he can act so calm, that he can have this conversation without feeling anything. I want him to feel something. I want him to show me that I’m not making a mistake here, that there is a chance that this could work out, even if it’s a small one.

“To talk. The one thing that we can never seem to figure out how to do. I just wanted to talk about this, about everything.”

“Okay, talk.” He crosses his arms and leans against the wall, like he hasn’t got a care in the world.

I tear a hand through my hair, trying to steady myself.

I could say any number of things right now, but none of them would come out right, and Baz would find a way to twist them around. The best thing to do is to not beat around the bush, to come right out and say the one thing I’ve been dying to say for months. The one thing that scares me more than anything else to say.

“I love you, Baz.”

There. I finally said it. I love him, and I’m so afraid that I’m about to lose him for good.

His whole body goes still, then he stands up straight, back going rigid. He could kill me now, and no one would be able to stop him. (It makes me miss the Anathema for a moment.)

“That isn’t funny,” he sneers, and he sounds angry, scary angry now that he’s finally let the cold mask fall away.

“I wasn’t joking,” I tell him, resisting the urge to back away as he stalks toward me. “I mean it. I’m in love with you.”

“Why now?” He asks. He stops moving once he’s just a couple of feet away from me..

“What do you mean?”

“Why did you wait until now to tell me? We’ve been fake engaged for months. Why did you wait so long to try to talk to me?”

“Because I was afraid.” As long as I’m being honest about how I feel, I decide to tell him the truth about everything. “I thought you could never feel the same. I was supposed to break up with you back at Watford, but I couldn’t because it felt too real. I couldn’t end this thing between us, even though it was fake, because I had fallen for you, and I didn’t want to let you go. But I was so worried that you wouldn’t feel the same.”

“And now, you think I do?”

“I hope you do,” I say earnestly. “That’s all I have. Hope.”

“Hope that what? I’ll want to be with you?” He takes another step forward. I continue to stand my ground, waiting for him to hit me, either with his fist or a spell.

“Yes. I thought that maybe we could give this a real chance.”

“Really, Snow? Who’s to say that I haven’t moved on from you? Who’s to say that finding out what it’s like to actually date you didn’t make me realize that it wasn’t something that I wanted?”

I feel like I’m going to crumble to pieces at those words. He’s even gone back to calling me Snow, which shouldn’t hurt so much, but it does. It’s like there’s a wall between us again.

Was I really such a terrible boyfriend that it would make him not have feelings for me anymore? (If he ever really did.)

I thought that he liked what was happening with us, but maybe I was wrong. Maybe he’s just that great of an actor and was only playing the game.

I was wrong to get my hopes up, and I wish that I hadn’t agreed to doing this.

I have to get out of here. I can’t let Baz have the satisfaction of seeing me falling apart.

Baz

The look on Simon’s face when I say those words nearly breaks my resolve.

I don’t mean any of it, but I want him to hurt the way that I have.

What makes him think that he can just apologize, and everything will be okay? We’ve been doing this thing for months, and all of a sudden, he wants to make it real?

I realize that I’m putting all the blame on him, and that isn’t fair.

This is just as much my fault as it is his. I let it go on like this, too. I should have just come out and told him how I really felt a long time ago. I should have done it the night before he proposed.

Then maybe we could have spent all of these months dating for real, instead of tiptoeing around each other, trying to hide our true feelings for each other.

Simon looks like he’s about to bail, and I can’t let that happen. I might be angry, but I don’t want to let him get away again.

No matter how upset I am, I can’t let this opportunity slip away.

Here he is, offering me everything that I’ve ever wanted from him, and instead of being happy about it, I’m pushing him away with every cruel thing that I can think of to say.

“Okay,” he murmurs. “I’m sorry. I-I’ll just go.”

He turns away from me and steps towards the door, but I can’t let him go. I can’t let it end like this.

“Simon, wait.”

I reach out to grab his arm, and for a moment, I’m sure that he’s going to keep wrench his arm out of my grasp and keep walking, but then he freezes.

Simon

I want to walk out, be done with all of this, but I can’t.

Even if there is the slightest bit of hope that I could have something real with Baz, I have to try. I can’t let him go.

I slowly turn to face him, and he drops his hand.

“Why now?” He asks, his voice lacking the anger and distaste that it held a moment ago when he was telling me that he could be over me.

“Why do you keep asking that?”

“Because you let it go on like that for so long. How am I supposed to know for sure that this time it’s real?”

“No. You don’t get to put all of the blame on me. You were just as much a part of everything as I was. You could have told me that you wanted it to be real a long time ago too.”

“You wanted to end it. You never acted like it was anything more than a competition.”

“Because I didn’t know how you felt. You’ve liked me for years, and still, you never said anything.”

“I’m going to kill Dev.”

“At least he told me the truth.”

“You proposed to me in front of the whole school.”

“And you were supposed to end it months ago.”

We are still arguing, but it doesn’t feel as heavy as it did a moment ago.

He asked me to stay. We just need to work through all of this, work through all of our doubts about each other.

“I didn’t want to. I wanted to be with you, Simon, don’t you see that? It killed me every day to pretend to be engaged to you, but I kept telling myself that it was better than nothing. And those things you said when you proposed...it killed me to know you didn’t mean any of it.”

“I meant every word of it. I know that it was a stupid thing to do, but I meant everything I’ve said to you. I don’t want to fight. I want to spend my life with you. I don’t want to lose you. Not like this. I want a real chance to show you that I’m a good boyfriend.”

“I don’t know if I can do that, Simon. I don’t know if I can risk you changing your mind.”

“I won’t change my mind,” I tell him, but he looks like he still doesn’t believe me. “Do you want to know why I finally snapped the other day? It was because you were planning this beautiful wedding, and I so badly wanted it to be our wedding. I wanted all of it, but it wasn’t real, so I had to put an end to it. Admittedly, I could have gone about it a bit differently, but I didn’t know how to tell you how I felt. But that’s what I’m doing now. I’m telling you that I’m in this for real.”

“Wait, are you asking me to date you? Or are you asking me to marry you?”

“Just date, for now. I think we need to start this whole thing over and do it all for real. I want to be your boyfriend, Baz.” And then maybe your husband, I add inside my head.

He’s silent for a long time, and I brace myself for the ‘no’ that I know is coming, but then he surprises me.

“Yes. I want to be your boyfriend, Simon.”

“I’ll still be a better boyfriend,” I say, smiling at him.

“Actually, I’m pretty sure that I won that one.” He takes a few, slow steps towards me, and it’s obvious he’s fighting back his own smile.

“Mm,” I hum. “I gave that to you. You didn’t actually win.”

“I suppose this is our do-over.”

“And we’ve got all the time that we need to do this.”

“I’ll win.”

“We’ll see about that.” I reach up to cup the side of his face, then let my hand slide farther back, my fingers slipping through his hair. “Why are we still fighting?” I whisper.

“It’s kind of our thing.”

“I think we need a better thing.”

“Oh yeah? Like what?”

“Like this.” Then, I kiss him, and it’s the first real kiss that we’ve shared during this whole year that we’ve spent together.

Penny

“It worked!” Dev exclaims, walking into the room.

He had snuck back down the hall a couple of minutes ago to check up on Simon and Baz, make sure that they hadn’t decided to kill each other.

“We knew it would,” I say. “They just needed a bit of help getting there.”

Dev ignores me, striding across the room to Niall and kissing him, apparently caught up in the happiness of this moment.

“Ugh. Get a room.”

“This is our room,” Dev says before going back to kissing his boyfriend.

“Right. Well, I’m leaving now.”

“Goodbye,” Niall says cordially, tearing himself away from Dev long enough to wave goodbye.

I walk into the living room on my way to the door, and I find yet another couple making out.

Is this going to be life now? Watching other people kiss?

It makes me wish that my boyfriend lived closer.

I clear my throat and Simon and Baz jump apart, wearing matching goofy grins.

Simon turns to look at me, but Baz continues to stare at Simon with a sickeningly sweet expression.

“I’m leaving,” I say. “Simon, did you need a ride back to our flat, or are you good?”

He glances at Baz, and his grin widens as he says, “I’m good.”

“Alright, I’ll see you later then.”

He’s too busy staring at Baz to respond. They’ve already lost themselves in each other, and they haven’t even managed to find their way to somewhere more private.

I’m happy for them. They are finally happy.

#snowbaz #snowbaz fic #simon snow #tyrannus basilton grimm pitch #baz pitch #carry on #wayward son #rainbow rowell #snowbaz fanfiction #my writing #fdf2

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silyabeeodess · 4 years

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FusionFall: Thoughts on the Latest Update

So...guess who played through the whole update in one sitting?

I don’t usually give my thoughts on games themselves--if I do, it’s typically in regards to story and worldbuilding rather than gameplay--but there was so much to unpack with this that I feel like I want to cover some points. Some of this is just my personal thoughts, some of this will be a critique, and some of this--since I do post headcanons, stories, and a few theories--will be in regards to my approach on those now that we’ve been given new information. As this will contain spoilers, I’m leaving the info below the cut. That said, let’s begin:

To start out, I’d like to cover progression. I played with my lvl. 36 character, like I’m sure many of you have/will, and while I can’t speak for anyone playing this and receiving these missions on lower levels--when they’ll be getting other missions and the Nanos they need to level up at possibly the same time--as a result, I felt that the new World Nano missions we were given flowed really nicely. One thing that is both a gift and a curse with FusionFall is that, while it has vast areas to explore, rather than level up following a singular route like some games, you can do a bit of running around if you don’t stack your missions properly. Luckily, this doesn’t feel tedious simply because there is so much to explore and thanks to the quick travel system. However, for more experienced players who have already run through everything, I could see this being a little stale. The newer missions ran a pretty set path within a mostly singular route, so you could run from destination to destination rather than hopping from the different areas in the game. If they add updates with a similar scale, I hope they continue with this trend.

There were two new locations to explore in the game: Harada-Bridges Records and a digital world. Both are amazing!! I’m a sucker for this kind of worldbuilding anyway--I’ve made a huge list of products, stores, etc. in FusionFall and the Cartoon Networks shows just so I can pull them in to my stories rather than use generic stuff--but this took the cake. The team didn’t need to go this far, but they did. And I love them for it. The record studio had posters for bands and refs to some of the cartoons, it added more to the lore with the Gangreen gang and fleshed them out a bit, and they just looked awesome. I mean, look at this: The first words out of my mouth on seeing the digital world were literally, “Oh Mama!”

It’s not anything super complicated, but it has this awesome, almost Tron-like aesthetic that’s just beautiful. The glowing walls with shifting colors was a great touch and the enemies fit perfectly into this.

Speaking of enemies, let’s get to them and the new combat introduced. 99% of the time, unless it’s for an event, I play solo. (It’s just what I’ve always done.) And at this point, I’ve gotten pretty good handling the controls for the game if I do say so myself. Not that they’re overly complicated: Once you remember the buttons and what you need to look out for, you’re pretty golden.

Some of the combat introduced actually surprised me.

The enemies themselves weren’t anything too original, a lot of them we’ve seen before, but some of their abilities will catch you off guard if you’re unprepared. There’s a fusion monster that splits into two upon death that you have to beat, and then you later have to fight three Fusions at once, some of your Nanos abilities do nothing, and they’re constantly blasting away at you. I died once to the 3 Fusions, but handled myself pretty well: It did, however, force me to rethink my strategy in a way I never had before, which was refreshing. I couldn’t even attempt to take on one Fusion at a time in the group by luring one away because all of them reacted, so I ended up having to run around constantly as I was attacking in order to avoid getting bombed by fusion blasts. I like this experiment, as it breaks the old formula and gives the average player a new challenge without becoming frustrating. I hope the team continues this!

One thing that is frustrating though, and it’s been a problem since before the update, has to do with the fusion matter in Fuse’s Lair. Keep in mind, while I’m fighting three teams of three Fusions one right after the other, I only see one Revive ‘Em all the way at the start on the map, which is huge. (I got a bit frustrated back when I had to battle Fuse because the Revive ‘Em for that was pretty far too, so I constantly kept having to run back to Fuse through a course of fusion monsters and ziplines even though the game was saving my progress during the fight.) I get that it’s always been a thing when you tackle a boss and it’s a reasonable penalty for the most part, but when you have to go through such a massive location it gets a little ridiculous just to have one. Especially due to the fusion matter present in the Lair. Story-wise, it makes perfect sense: You’re in the belly of the beast, so to speak, and in most likely the location with the highest concentration of pure fusion matter on Earth. However, where this fails in terms of gameplay is that, not only can you step in it and have no idea because everything looks the same, it’s right in the middle of walkways you’re forced to go through or in small patches you accidently step on because again you can’ t see it like in the rest of the game. It’s a good thing I kept my Grim Tokens for a rainy day, because one tini-tiny patch literally killed me immediately after battling the last trio of Fusions despite the fact that there was no indicator I was standing in it during the fight. It makes it hard to even find somewhere to stand to recover as you’re going through, and it’s one thing I do hope they fix even if I never have to go back to the Lair myself.

Getting to some of the story/worldbuilding stuff, again, I do love where they’re taking the game. You can tell these guys aren’t just trying to make random missions for funsies; They’re taking plot development seriously, trying to connect various dots and add a whole new chapter for us to explore. Of course, you know I already love it, but also, not gonna lie...

I’m happy that it looks like I was right on the hivemind and symbiotic nature of Fuse with Planet Fusion theories. :)

As for the Belladonna/Buttercup one, I figured I probably wouldn't be right about it back then and, sure enough, the memory-loss idea was kept. The fact that the team actually brought more to such a minor thing in the game overall pleasantly surprised me though. While I can’t say I like the take due to the plot holes remaining, it’s not something I pin on the team as it was present in the first version of the game and even one of the devs commented on it being a little off and them needing to change some of the dialogue around it in a YouTube vid. There’s only one negative that I have to say about it and that’s an additional plot hole that was made by introducing “Belladonna” with her own separate Fusion and Nano. If she and Buttercup are one and the same, then it doesn’t really make sense that there’d be another one of her. Memory loss or no, Buttercup’s still Buttercup and from the information we’ve been given on the creation of Fusions, her Fusion wouldn’t change just because of the amnesia unless maybe they’re going for a split personality route, but even that seems a little weak--especially since we’re shown during the mission that Buttercup maintains fragments of her memories and then she remembers her true identity pretty fast. I think they’re working with it the best they can without tearing away from the original material though, which I really respect. I hope we get to see where Buttercup is going in the future now that they’re doing more with her character and giving her a chance to shine. That mission in particular felt like reading the chapter of a good comic, where you’re snapping at the bit waiting for the next issue to be published.

However, as for my personal stories, I’ll probably still be keeping to the Belladonna/Buttercup ideas that I had before and I’ll still leave the theory up for the sake of that theory, even though it was wrong. There are some things I’d like to play with for stories.

Well, Fusion Fellas, looks like we’ve got a lot to look forward too and a whole new world to explore!

#silya speaks #opinion #thoughts #fusionfall #fusionfall retro #video games #buttercup #fusions #critique

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fabulousquel · 5 years

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GreedFall: Tips + My Review

So I picked up this game out of curiosity because I’m currently working on an RPG style historical fantasy that draws inspiration from a similar time period. I wanted to see how someone else handled the ‘flintlock’ genre and told a story with elements of this era. I am in no means a pro game reviewer but I completed the entire game yesterday and I have a lot I want to say.

There are some spoilers in this, so if you’d like to avoid reading them, don’t read the "Story” section.

Tips:

Do your companion quests early and as soon as they pop up. There are some incredible lore bits and development of your character as well as your companions within them. Also if you sideline a companion for too long, they might leave your party in ways that might surprise or unsurprise you.

Certain dialog options will give you more quest content. For example, you’ve caught a criminal and you are given the choice to kill them on the spot, or capture them for trial. If you kill them, your quest line ends there. If you decide to trial them, another quest line opens up and you get a lot more flavor.

You can essentially just follow the main quest line if you want to speed-finish the game, but you lose a lot of context and additional dialog options if you do so. You will also wind up fighting the final boss at a much lower level, thus making the fight harder, but not impossible. They may have made this an option for people coming back wanting a challenge or to try a different build. But in my opinion, they should’ve made the side quests a mandatory thing because it’s a huge disservice to the context of the main story without them.

Don’t forget to give your companions gear upgrades- especially if you’re playing on more challenging modes.

If you want to avoid bloodshed and sneak into a camp, make sure you put on a chest piece of that faction.

Put some skill points into Stasis no matter what build you roll with.

The Soundtrack:

It’s amazing. The snare drums going off in combat sequences create a very distinct and powerful mood. The zone music is very well orchestrated. It’s now up on spotify as well!

Combat & Talents:

Of the RPGs I’ve played, this most reminded me of a combination of Red Dead Redemption, Final Fantasy with the option to semi-turn style with spells & traps, and a very versatile talent tree system that is really...fun. It’s the first time in a while that I felt I could make an effective solid build and playstyle around what I wanted to do most. Combat takes getting used to but I set up my keybinds to be a lot like ESO and I adapted very quickly. I went shortsword / gun tactical and it was immensely satisfying.

The Story:

[SPOILS AHEAD]

The difference between historical fiction and historical fantasy is that a historical fantasy does not seek to retell history accurately, but rather take inspiration from it. How heavy this inspiration goes varies from story to story. This is how I approached interpreting the story, even in its very realistic parts. As I played through, there were several themes that became very clear to me. Keep in mind that I played through the game with De Sarde taking the Neutral Good alignment choice in most dialog options.

The Elephant in the Room: Colonialism. This is one of the big criticisms I see with the game, and truth be told, it is a point of criticism for myself. The game treats the colonizing factions exactly like colonizers of real history, and it’s a subject that still rightfully touches nerves. One faction seeks to profit, another nation seeks to convert, and another seeks to experiment on. While there are subgroups of these factions that are more extreme than their leadership- the leadership seems complacent about it until condemning evidence is brought up. While extremely problematic this is, it is very true to what has happened in history surrounding colonialism, and places you in one uncomfortable situation after another in a frighteningly realistic way. It makes your decisions as De Sarde in some instances painful but it can be satisfying to see how your actions affect justice in these matters.

Some critics have said that De Sarde’s choices do not always condemn truly objectionable events enough. I agree that more depth could have been added. But in my playthrough, De Sarde’s role starts out as a truly neutral party looking for truths, and they gradually became more adamant on stances as the game progressed. By the end, my De Sarde was about to 1v1 Theleme, and drag out the Bridge Alliance governor. So I am unsure if this is a perspective coming from those who haven’t completed the game in its entirety with all side quests which influence reputations more & seem to flesh out more dialog options.

Humanity Has a Sickness This was written both physically and metaphorically in how humans are as susceptible to committing atrocities as they are to growing ill. Throughout the story as De Sarde, you play almost a detective in uncovering the truth about the people you were raised to believe were benevolent. De Sarde does not take these accusations of corruption lightly, but they also treat it very seriously. Piece by piece, De Sarde learns more about each factions true intentions, and the lies, corruption and greed that intertwine. But at the same time, the story attempts to reveal the potential for all people to ‘do better’ and change- and some of this is seen when you use De Sarde’s charisma + intuition dialog options. This theme especially became clear in the arc when De Sarde finally gets to speak to the god of the island, En on mil Frichtimen, who expresses to him that the malicor (sickness) is a result of them poisoning their own land with their lack of care or concern for it. En on mil Frichtimen urges that the colonists need to listen and learn from the Islanders’ ways if they wish to heal the sickness.

Where to Draw the Line at “For The Greater Good” I feel like this is a theme that crops up with any story involving Utopian ideas. GreedFall does a good job of backing up each faction’s actions with their point of view, whether it is morally misguided or not. This truly emphasizes the human element in the mix, underlining that no perspective comes without its flaws. As De Sarde, one thing you are constantly faced with as a detective is defining a line of where something has gone too far. It is sobering and somewhat frustrating to watch factions step over a line that could have easily remained morally sound. But it is also equally satisfying to see how much influence you can have in swaying others to make a different choice. This theme becomes the summit of De Sarde’s character progression when he is forced to make the choice of taking your dear cousin, Constantin, out of power, or joining him. And when you’ve done all the side quests there are in the game, the decision becomes far more meaningful than this just being the final boss fight.

This theme also seems to come full circle by the end of Petrus’s quest line, when you discover your true origin- how your mother was kidnapped from the island in a rash attempt to bring a healer to the continent. This realization that everything you’ve known has been a lie and kept secret from you...all for the “greater good”.

Things I Liked:

I appreciated how much love and care went into the worldbuilding- especially with the native Islanders. From what I understand, a linguist was hired to write a language for them that was a mash-up of Flemish, Breton, Gaelic and Irish. I appreciated that they brought forth inspiration from the Gauls and Celtic nations of the Iron Age in Western Europe before they were subjected to Christian Missionary activity.

The art & atmosphere was amazing. While there are a few clipping issues with hair, even big AAA games have them. The level of detail put into the game art wise is just very visually pleasing.

The devs did a good job in making a fantasy world that was LGBTQ+ friendly, and giving us diverse character customization. Anyone from any faction had a diverse set of features.

Things I am Critical of:

While I understand that there is a point of growth to watch De Sarde go from neutral to invested in a cause, I really do think they should have been given less complacent responses earlier in the game. I understand limitations but I don’t think it helped with handling colonialism in a truly neutral way.

I wish you could start the game as someone from a faction of your choice, rather than only the Merchant Congregation, especially considering how your origin is written.

IT’S DEPRESSING. A lot of the game is depressing... which maybe makes all the little things you do that shine some shred of goodness still in humanity all the brighter. But it definitely hurt my soul in places and back to point #1, I wish I could have been more aggressive with De Sarde earlier in the game.

Recycled assets: there were quite a few of them- mostly noticeable with buildings in the main cities, which is probably what marks the difference between an AAA game and a more independent studio.

Potential Triggers:

There’s a lot of heavy subjects in this game including religious abuse, manipulation, some body horror (though it’s not super grotesque), one instance of suicide that I know of, xenophobia, and general violence.

Features I Wish it Had:

You can’t ‘jump’...but you don’t really need to. I still wish I could though.

For all this beautiful scenery, I wish they gave us better screenshot taking options.

Different fights for the different Coin Arenas and a meta achievement for completing all of them.

I wish I could play it with friends.

More armor options!

I wish the companions had better and more in-depth romance options. They fall a little flat in diversity of personalities.

Final Thoughts:

I personally enjoy diving into stories that we should be morally critical of, and I like it for what it reveals in the best and worst of humanity. Colonialism has done and continues to do irreversible damage to peace and prosperity among people and nations in real life. Spiders picked a topic that nearly everyone has been affected by in one way or another and it’s understandably a heated subject. Some folks do not want to dive into such deep subjects, just as there’s some stories I cannot stomach comfortably. So I respect and understand that.

Overall, GreedFall exceeded my expectations but there’s definitely some hiccups. It’s a fun game if you’re into a detective-style RPG, political intrigue, history, and interested in exploring this sort of setting. While I think the story could have been written better in places, I was satisfied with the outcomes I triggered, even if that satisfaction took a very slow build up to. It left me feeling hopeful? That perhaps people still have a chance at treating each other better than they do.

#greedfall #review #just thoughts #big post

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bazypitchandsimonsnow · 5 years

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Bad Hair Day

Rating: T

Genre: Humour/Mild Fluff

Word Count: 2070

Summary: Baz runs out of hair gel. Simon doesn't know how to deal with it. Based on "Simon has a gay freak out over Baz's messy hair" request.

Read on AO3

AN: This was a very specific request, and I changed a few things, but it follows the spirit of the idea. Enjoy! :)

———————————————

Baz

Snow thinks my morning routine takes too long. But he doesn’t understand how much it takes to look this good. A long shower, good products, attention to detail, it’s all necessary. I have a reputation to maintain after all. Snow doesn’t care at all about his appearance. Unfortunately, he doesn’t need to, he always looks incredible. Beautiful tosser.

I’m currently looking in the mirror, slowly combing back all my hair. It’s still wet so it’s far easier to shape, but I know it will try to puff up later. My hair has a bloody mind of its own. Without product, the top of my head will turn in ball of unruly black fluff. Thank Crowley for my-

I squeeze my gel bottle, and nothing comes out. What the fuck? I squeeze it again and again but still nothing. Merlin and Morgana, fuck it all, I’m out of hair gel. When did that happen? Has Snow been using it? I doubt it. He wouldn’t use something like this. And I don’t think any amount of hair gel could control his wild thatch of bronze curls.

Doesn’t matter. Either way, I’m out of gel, which means...my stupid hair is going to explode later. As if my life wasn’t already a complete nightmare.

———————————————

Simon

“For Crowley’s sake, Simon, slow down,” Agatha sighs, shaking her head.

I don’t listen and continue taking huge bites of my roast beef sandwich. It just tastes so good. Plus I need the energy. The Mage wants me to practice sword work later, and that takes a lot of effort. So the six slices of roast beef on a sandwich makes perfect sense in my opinion.

“Where’s Penelope?” she asks, sipping from her teacup.

I shrug. “I dunno. Something about working on an assignment through lunch. How could anyone work through lunch though?”

“Not everyone needs as much food as you.”

“Shut up,” I grumble through the bread.

“Wipe your cheek, please,” she sighs.

I wipe the bread crumbs away and grin brightly. “Thanks, Agatha.”

She smiles back, and it makes my stomach tug slightly. Not as much as it used to but it’s still there. I did think I was in love with her after all. We tried dating last year, and it just didn’t work out. Friends are better anyways. Friends aren’t as annoyed when you have food on your face.

My eyes drift around the room out of boredom. But they soon settle on a far table to my right. There’s Baz’s friends (minions? I don’t know) sitting, eating and chatting, but there’s no sign of Baz. The hell?

“Hey, where’s Baz?” I ask, and Agatha’s sighing before I’m done the second word.

“I don’t know, Simon,” she says.

“He’s not here.”

“Okay.”

“And he was taking really long in the bathroom this morning. He missed breakfast.”

“Alright.”

My eyes narrows, ideas tumbling around in my brain. Well, one idea, really. Agatha must know what I’m about to say because she puts her head in her hands. “Simon, don’t-”

“He’s plotting something.”

She groans deeply. “For Morgana’s sake, Simon.”

I lean closer to her. “I’m serious, Agatha! Why isn’t he here? Why did he take even longer in the bathroom than he already does? He must’ve been thinking of something at breakfast and now he’s skipping lunch so he can do it.”

Agatha’s eye roll immediately tells me she’s not taking me seriously instantly. “Sure, sounds perfectly reasonable.”

“Maybe he’s cursing my textbooks,” I mumble, sadly to myself because Agatha has stopped listening. “Or he’s doing something to my bed. Maybe pouring some sticky potion on it. Or maybe he’s going to lock me away in a tower again. Or-”

“Oh, there he is.”

I look over my shoulder, where Agatha is looking. My eyes go wide. What...what the fuck? Baz always looks nothing short of perfect. Perfect posture, perfect uniform, and most of all, annoyingly perfect hair. But not today. Today, his hair isn’t pushed back like a movie vampire, or even falling in front of his face like a lazy wave. It’s kind of...fluffy. All puffed up and pointing in lots of directions. It’s more wavy too, and a bit curly. The ends pull in and twist around. Since when does Baz have tiny curls at the end of his hair?!

I’m so distracted by his weird puffy hair that I don’t immediately notice his deep scowl. He looks ready to burn down the building. But that’s kind of offset by the way his curls bounce with his every step.

“What the fuck?” I whisper.

Baz sits with Dev and Niall with a plate of food in front of him. The look he shoots his friends/minions silently says “don’t ask”, and they’re both silent. He drinks his water while still scowling.

“Wow,” Agatha chuckles, “Baz looks a bit messy today.”

“Y-Yeah I guess. Didn’t know his hair could do that...”

I really mean that. In the five years we’ve lived together, I’ve never seen him look like this. Even when we were little he always looked so damn perfect. He was the only eleven year old I’d ever seen use two different kinds of combs. But now there he is now, with fluffy, curly hair.

“Stop staring, Simon,” Agatha says.

I rip from my eyes away from Baz and look back down at my food. “I’m not staring,” I mumble.

“What else would you call it?”

“I’m just, wondering how this is part of his plot.

Agatha sighs again. I look up to see her shaking her head. “It’s not a plot, Simon. He’s obviously just having a bad hair day.”

“But he never has a bad hair day! Why today of all days? Is he trying to distract me so I don’t notice his latest plot?”

“No, I think he’s just out of hair gel or something...”

I shake my head furiously. “No way. He always has way too much hair gel, and those fancy French products, and combs. Baz would never let his hair be mess, he cares way too much about being pretty.”

Agatha’s lip quirks up, that makes me really worried for some reason. She looks like she knows something I don’t. Which she usually does (most people do) but I’m still nervous. “You think Baz is pretty, hm?”

“Well, uh,” I sputter, “well, he is! It’s like, just true. He’s fucking perfect and it’s so annoying.”

She looks back down at her sandwich still smirking. “Mhm, alright.”

I have no idea what she’s implying. And I don’t care. My eyes wander back to Baz, like usual. He’s got some actual food now, eating tiny bites with a hand over his mouth (weird). He leans forward just slightly, and a particularly bouncy curl falls in his face. Baz doesn’t look happy with that. After a few moments, he moves his hand from his mouth and tries to tuck the hair away. It works for a second. But then it falls. Baz tucks it again, but it falls again. I watch him do try to tuck his hair over and over. It’s sort of hypnotising. Eventually he gets so frustrated he starts blowing it furiously. It’s funny, watching him huff and puff at his own unruly hair, but also...adorable? Fuck, do I actually think Basilton fucking Pitch looks adorable?! No way.

“He’s so planning something,” I mumble, once again mostly to myself. “He’s just, trying to throw me off. Like, he has to be doing this on purpose, making his hair all fluffy and shit so I don’t notice what he’s doing. Why else would he make it so, like, distracting? He’s plotting, I know it, Agatha.”

Agatha snorts. Well, that’s rude. I look at her, fully prepared to glare at her, and realise she’s not actually looking at me at all. She’s looking to where Baz is. I follow her gaze, but she’s not looking at Baz, she’s looking at Dev and Niall. They’re both laughing quietly too. Baz seems to be too occupied with his hair to notice.

“Hey, what’s so funny?” I ask.

Agatha turns to me, obviously trying to hold back her laughter. “Nothing, nothing.”

I frown at her. I’m worried it’s too close to a pout. “It’s not nothing if you’re laughing.”

“It’s just,” she sighs, “you’re really adorable, Simon.”

I frown even harder. “How am I adorable? I’m trying to figure out what Baz is plotting!”

She tilts her head slightly to the side, a tiny amused smile on her mouth. “Yes, you are, while you’re blushing so hard your entire face is red.”

I inhale sharply. What the fuck? I instinctively press a hand to my cheek. Fuck, my skin feels really hot. “I-I’m overheated,” I blurt out.

Agatha tilts her head to the other side. “It’s November, Simon.”

“It’s hot in here!”

“Mhm, sure, Si.” She takes a long sip of her tea while maintaining perfect eye contact with me. “Let’s go with that.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I huff.

She shrugs, still smiling. “I think only you can figure that out, Simon.”

I huff again. I have no idea what that’s supposed to mean. Instead of getting more cryptic answers from Agatha, I look back at Baz. He’s stopped blowing his hair and is now running his hand over it, trying to flatten it down. I’m transfixed by the way his long fingers move through the strands. The weird grey of his skin kind of works with his super night black hair. They contrast well. And the movement itself is so graceful. (He’s always graceful.) Even unruly, his hair still looks soft. I wonder if it actually is. I wonder what it would feel like if I ran my fingers thro-

Oh.

Oh shit.

———————————————

Penelope

I like to get some of my readings for next week done before a class. Watford students aren’t too loud so I can do it. I’m calmly reading at my desk when I notice the clock. Huh, there’s about three minutes until class starts, and Simon’s not here. That’s odd. He’s usually late but only by five minutes. Weird. What in Merlin’s name is keeping him? I hope he’s alright. There haven’t been rumblings from the Humdrum or the Old Families for awhile. He should be fine. But where is he?

Two minutes later, my question is answered. Simon stumbles in, completely out of breath and face red. He must’ve ran. But that doesn’t explain why his clothes and hair are such a mess. Well, more of a mess than usual. It looks like he’s been through a hurricane. But he’s still smiling.

“Hey, Pen,” he says breathlessly.

“Hey, Si,” I reply. “Sorry I missed lunch yesterday. Where were you at supper?

"Uh, got caught up in schoolwork..."

I give him a doubtful look over my glasses. "Seriously?"

He nods furiously. "Yeah, yeah, seriously..."

I put a hand on his arm. "Are you alright, Si?"

“I’m good!" He chirps with an even bigger smile. "I’m really good, actually. Super duper good.”

I blink at him. His wide grin doesn’t falter, and he doesn’t elaborate at all. He’s just staring off into space. “Okay...”

I go back to my book, but I only get one paragraph in before the Minotaur comes in and the class starts. But he only gets a few sentences into the lesson before he’s interrupted by the door opening. He turns from the board.

“Mr. Pitch,” he says flatly, “so glad you could join us.”

“Apologies, sir,” a familiar posh voice says as he goes past. Baz walks past me to take his usual seat near the front. My eyes grow wide. Baz looks even worse than Simon. His shirt is rumpled and his tie is slightly loosened. He’s extremely flush for someone so pale. Worst of all is his hair, pointing in every direction and even curling at the ends. It’s like he’s been through two hurricanes.

If that wasn’t weird enough, during the lesson, he’s not being the perfect student like usual. He seems unfocused, staring off into the distance, tugging at his collar, stuff like that. When I look at Simon, he’s unfocused too, which isn’t unusual for him. But he’s got this weird dreamy smile on his face. A few times, I swear his eyes drift to Baz, still smiling. Is...is Simon looking dreamily at Baz?

What the fuck is going on?

———————————————

Thoughts at the end: Simon: Wow, this is weird, but I'm actually really happy. I wonder what Baz is thinking. Baz: CrowleycrowleySnowsnoggedmeandmessedupmyclothesandhairlastnight, holy shit, what the fuck is going on?!

This was a lot of fun to write. I haven't done a lot of canon divergent stuff for awhile so it was a nice change. Hope you guys liked it :) So there's one request fic left that I'm going to start working. And the next chapter of Black Swan will be up soon as possible. See you guys next time :D

#snowbaz #carry on #baz pitch #simon snow #agatha wellbelove #penelope bunce #dev #niall #humour

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douchebagbrainwaves · 4 years

Text

WHAT NO ONE UNDERSTANDS ABOUT JANUARY

In January 1995, we and a couple friends started a company called Artix. The forum troll I have by now internalized doesn't even know where to begin in raising objections to this project. Unfortunately picking winners is harder than that. They certainly delivered. As it turns out, VC-backed startups are not that fearsome. In the other languages mentioned in this talk—Fortran, C, Java, and Visual Basic—it is not clear whether you can actually get work done. One difference I've noticed between great hackers and smart people in general is that hackers are more politically incorrect. College trained one to be a member of the professional classes.1 But as knowledge has grown more specialized, there are more points on the curve, and the inexorable progress of hardware would solve your problems. Maybe it's a bad idea for a company.

Whoever controls the device sets the terms. But as long as it's possible to detect bias whether those doing the selecting want them to or not.2 Of all the great programmers he wanted. Apparently when Robert first met him, Trevor had just begun a new scheme for micropayments?3 A symbol type.4 Feel free to make it big.5 If any incompatibility arises, you can be wise without being very smart. Lisp function and show that it is. It's very common for a group of founders to go through one lame idea before realizing that a startup will make it big. To some extent this was because the companies themselves had become sclerotic. Bill Gates started either.6

But rather the erosion of forces that had been pushing us together were an anomaly, a one-time combination of circumstances that's unlikely to be repeated—and indeed, that we would not want to repeat. They certainly delivered. Most of our educational traditions aim at wisdom.7 So we ditched Artix and started a new company led boldly into the future of hardware, users would follow. Microsoft shows, revenue is a lagging indicator in the technology business. And I was a Reddit user when the opposite happened there, and sitting in a coma at their desk, pretending to work.8 It seems reasonable to suppose the newest one will too.9

I might into Harvard Square or University Ave in the physical world.10 And open and good is what Macs are again, finally.11 As for libraries, their importance also depends on the application. Great hackers think of it as a book.12 Or more precisely, in Trevor's office. The technology companies are right.13 This summer, as an experiment, and an experiment in a very young field. Back in the days of fanfold, there was a correct decision in every situation, and if you couldn't switch ladders, promotion on this one was the only way to read them. But when I went looking for alternatives to fill this void, I found practically nothing.14

Besides which, art dealers are the most extreme form of fluff. They get smart people to write 99% of your code, but still keep them almost as insulated from users as they would be able to say who cares what investors think? I don't know how you'd run such a class in practice. A lot of the obstacles to ongoing diagnosis will come from the fact that the best ideas look initially like bad ideas. But ITA made it interesting by redefining the problem in a more ambitious way. Note too that Cisco is famous for doing very little product development in house. Meaning that unpleasant work pays. Most of the stuff I accumulated was worthless, because I think we can now call a startup: having brilliant people do work in which people have to invent anything.15 They have a sofa they can take a nap on when they feel the same way that not drinking anything would teach you how much you depend on water. Startups are that constrained for talent. Some switched from meat loaf to tofu, and others by playing zero-sum games.

The core of ITA's application is a 200,000 line Common Lisp program that searches many orders of magnitude more possibilities than their competitors, who apparently are still using mainframe-era programming techniques. Most of our educational traditions aim at wisdom. This is the kind of people it wants. And if we don't, the US could be seriously fucked. Cancer will show up on some sort of radar screen immediately. Microsoft seems resigned to, there will be no more great new stuff beyond whatever's currently in the pipeline. I'm so optimistic about HN. Books are more like a fluid than individual objects.16 And the use of these special, reserved field names, especially __call__, seems a bit of a hack. Perhaps the absent-minded professor is wise in his way, or wiser than he seems, but he's not wise in the way Confucius or Socrates wanted people to be.17

You can only do that if you want to really understand Lisp, or just expand your programming horizons, I would learn more about macros. Not quite so dominant as it had been. The importance of the first varies depending on whether you have control over the whole system and have the source code of all the things we could do, is this going to make it something that they themselves use.18 When we started Artix, I was still ambivalent about business. But it's all based on one unspoken assumption, and that means it has to be open and good is what Macs are again, finally. There are few corporations in which it would be suggested that executive salaries are at a maximum. Stuff used to be valuable, and now it's not. The reason the expected value is so high is web services. But for someone at the top, but unless taxes are high enough to discourage people from creating wealth, certainly.19 Symbols are effectively pointers to strings stored in a hash table. Considering how basic a red circle is, it is no surprise that the pointy-haired bosses.

Notes

The founders want the valuation is fixed at the command of the leading edge of technology. This was certainly true in the 1980s was enabled by a big VC firm wants to see it in the usual standards for truth. However, it often means the right thing. The solution is to the margin for error.

In principle you might be interested in each type of thinking, but sword thrusts.

Founders weren't celebrated in the future as barbaric, but at least once for that they don't have to track ratios by time of day, thirty years later. You also have to do it. Which is also a good idea to make people use common sense when interpreting it.

The liking you have the least experience creating it.

There are lots of search engines. Particularly since many causes of the latter.

Which OS? Com. Maybe at first you make money, in the category of people starting normal companies too.

To say anything meaningful about income trends, you won't be demoralized if they seem to have the balls to ask prospective employees if they used FreeBSD and stored their data in files too.

Obvious is an instance of a heuristic for detecting whether you realize it till I started using it out of the web.

In the early empire the price of an official authority makes all the investors agree, and this trick works so well.

The First Two Hundred Years. Org Worrying that Y Combinator to increase it, because they know you'll have to be doctors? There are many senses of the world you'd want to avoid collisions in.

But I think this is to do is form a union and renegotiate all the worse if you're measuring usage you need a meeting, then you're being starved, not because Delicious users are stupid.

So as a rule of thumb, the Patek Philippe 10 Day Tourbillon, is a good way to be secretive, because the publishers exert so much better than the don't-be poets were mistaken to be, and the Imagination by Hilbert and Cohn-Vossen. This was partly confidence, and why it's next to impossible to write great software in Lisp. Most were wrong, but except for money.

Delicious that had been with us he would have been; a vogue for conglomerates in the sale of products, because they suit investors' interests. Plus ca change. Donald J.

To get a low valuation, that you can't easily get a good open-source projects now that VCs may begin to conserve board seats for shorter periods. Bureaucrats manage to think of it, by Courant and Robbins; Geometry and the leading scholars of that. The existence of people like numbers.

It's like the application of math to real problems, and on the aspect they see of piracy is simply what they said. PR firm admittedly the best case. Miyazaki, Ichisada Conrad Schirokauer trans. When I talk about humans being meant or designed to live a certain threshold.

We have no trouble getting hired by these companies substitute progress for revenue growth with retained earnings was one firm that wanted to have them soon. Perhaps it would not be true that being part of your identity. The philosophers whose works they cover would be investors who say no to science as well.

By all means crack down on these. Acquisitions fall into in the former.

Particularly since many causes of the fake.

On the other meanings. Many of these titles vary too much to suggest that we don't have to talk to corp dev guys should be working to help SCO sue them.

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onegirllis · 5 years

Note

Have you really gone through episode 2 of LIS2? I really wonder what you think about it. Better, of course, the full answer.

I finished it indeed. The episode is about 3-4h long, depending on how much you want to explore and how much time it would take for you to find a way out. I was battling with the idea of sharing my thoughts because it’s very hard to judge just a slice of the story, instead of the whole season, but why the hell not. Maybe I will read it when episode 5 comes out and see how wrong I was.

So, without further ado, here’s my review of episode 2, but please be aware it includes a lot of spoilers. It’s also as honest as possible, although it’s my personal opinion only. And yes, it may be harsh, not sugarcoated, but sincere.

MY REVIEW OF EPISODE 2 OF LIFE IS STRANGE 2

Call me naive, but I really had hopes. I really did. I didn’t like ep1, it was way too slow for my taste, with some dramatic moments that felt off, but overall I assumed that it might be just an exposition, an introduction to the world, the characters and their problems, and that the game would elaborate on everything else later. Sometimes the beginnings feel off and it gets better later, so that’s why I had some hopes (not super high) that ep2 of LIS2 will remind me of why this game even belongs to LIS franchise and why I should play the whole season.

Well, it didn’t work out.

Characters

Again, It’s my opinion only but I don’t feel that there are any character developments whatsoever. Daniel and Sean didn’t learn anything freezing their asses off in the mountains. They didn’t change their ways, not learning patience nor being careful. There is no tension between them or any quarrel about the events. The acceptance of their fate is understandable, but not helping with the lack of overall tension. The moments of calm, that usually gave the player the opportunity to know more about the main character’s inner thoughts, instead serve the purpose of a summary of the few previous scenes and nothing more. It almost feels like the writers don’t like the PC and don’t want to tell us more about Sean, because there is absolutely nothing worth telling. Remember the girl Sean was in love with in ep1? Never mentioned again. Remember his friends, his boss, his job, school, or sports he was interested in? He doesn’t mention them either. There is nothing in the journal or in the dialogues that would show us anything we don’t already know or wouldn’t assume by ourselves, and Sean’s insights seem more like repetitive whinings than anything impactful. In episode 1 I could wave off the fact that they decided to walk to Mexico being shocked, traumatized and lost. In episode 2, when they notoriously risk their lives or reject any other solution not learning from experience just to run away, you start questioning their sanity. I know the reason behind it - “oh plot” but “oh plot” is not good enough.

The boys miss their dad, but don’t feel much upset or don’t present any sign of emotional trauma. There are no breakdowns and the brothers are more or less in good spirits staying optimistic, not asking themselves a single question about the future. Comparing to Chloe who was repeating “I wish Rachel was here” over and over and was living in this trauma the whole time, they don’t seem very much impacted by the events, but on the other hand, they place the dad’s photo on the table, so his death can be conveniently mentioned. The dog died (yes, it’s true, Mushroom is killed off in the first 20 minutes), and even if Daniel is supposedly devastated, it takes him only 5 minutes to shake it off and never mentions this dog again (oh ok, maybe once). If the characters don’t freaking care about this animal, why should I?

It also seems that the characters keep forgetting what the objective is here. Maybe it’s on purpose, but they recall certain friends only when it’s convenient for the plot. “I’m gonna call Lyla” says Sean towards the end of the episode, even if he hadn’t mentioned her for 2 hours of gameplay. And even when getting devastating news about her, he is not really concerned, shrugs and sighs deeply. Yeah, we sigh with him.

When it comes to Sean himself, I really don’t mind the PC being a guy, really. If I had a problem with it, I wouldn’t be able to play 90% of video games. The thing I do have a problem with though, is Sean being an utter asshole. Yeah, he takes care of his brother and all, but he is freaking mean to his grandparents, showing lack of empathy and acceptance of a different point of view. Calling the grandma, a woman who opened her house to them “an old bat” is just a bit too much, especially after a month spent in an abandoned house without food or heating. There is no reason for him to judge those people so much and if there is a reason, we don’t know the details. How can I emotionally invest in a character that is not opening up to me, the player? Or maybe there is nothing more about Sean, and that’s even worse.

There is a big mystery regarding why their mother left her sons but if you expect any answer while the boys are visiting their grandparents and can snoop around in Karen’s old room, you’d be mistaken. The devs are building the mystery in the typical David Cage style, that one of the characters is about to tell you something “Oh, I will tell you what your mother did..~” and then something happens and we’re left in the dark again. At this point, I expect some explosive explanation of why their mother left the family, but it’s ether drugs, a religious cult or some relationship stuff.

Tragedy Porn

Dear devs, the fact that a lot of people in the fandom are familiar with this term and use it regularly, doesn’t mean you should take it literally. I know that the LIS franchise is about hard choices or difficult situations, but killing kids and small animals left and right is just cheap and really unnecessary. It quickly gets old, just like “the boy who cried wolf” (pun intended) that as some point I don’t even blink when witnessing another digital death. I can’t be devastated by Mushroom’s death, because the dog had less screen time than Sean’s skateboard. I can’t feel sorry for every character (human or not) that you didn’t even give me a chance to feel connected to. I know that you want me to “feel something” but at this point the “feel” changes into “yawn”. Chris AKA Captain Spirit being dead (or almost dead) AGAIN - so I helped the boy just to see him die 1 hour later (I know it’s optional but still)? Lyla in the hospital, the family from the abandoned house being wiped out of the face of the earth because of cancer (at least not a car accident this time), Chris’s mom dead, the boys’ father dead, grandpa almost dying because of the accident… It’s too much. It feels cheap and not impactful. At this point, I will be surprised if you won’t just kill everybody. Who needs people on the West Coast anyway, huh?

I don’t even know if I want to learn more about the boys’ mother since you probably will kill her too.

Politics and Religion

In this episode, politics have been toned down, still visible though and there are a few moments when I literally rolled my eyes. This time the devs decided to say something more about religion since it’s a significant part of life if you live in a small town in America. Maybe it’s just me, but it seems that the power of prayer is being mocked rather than actually shown as somebody’s way of life. Acceptance and tolerance go both ways though.

The boys surprisingly identify themselves as Mexicans, even though they are half Irish and have never been to their father’s homeland. There are a few moments when you are wondering whether they had ever really liked to live in the US, questioning everything around them. Sean, who spent a decent amount of time with his dad on “the road trips” as stated in ep1, seems genuinely surprised that in his country people keep the Bible by their beds, as if he had never been in any motel whatsoever where the Bible is always present, placed on the nightstand or in a drawer. If being religious bothers him, boy, oh boy, you will be hella surprised in Mexico. They also don’t know how to pray, which I find extremely hard to believe. It almost feels like a scene from “Anne of Green Gables” but damn, the girl had a valid reason not to know. They don’t, especially if they identify themselves as Mexicans. We could assume that they were also part of Mexican-American communities and I cannot believe that in THIS WORLD the immigrants from this particular part of the world don’t know how to pray. Although if you expect some deep conversation about God or religion in general, forget it. It’s just there to be there and that’s it.

I don’t want to discuss the articles in the newspaper about “the gentle police officer” that was killed by immigrants because it makes my blood boil.

Against the logic, the brothers are still planning to escape to Mexico and no grown-up is really trying to talk them out of this idea. There are no alternatives provided or discussed except a pat on the back and an offer for a quick stop if even. Even the grandparents are a bit concerned but no one really gives them any real advice, which I find unlikely. The problem is that if anybody would actually give them a piece of real advice, we wouldn’t have a game.

And that’s a problem, isn’t it?

Gameplay

We have a few mini-games and fetch quests like finding bottles in the abandoned house (why always freaking bottles?), the pirate version of dice poker (never brought back again) and drawing. None of those serve any purpose except a filler that you might enjoy but it doesn’t matter if you succeed in them or not, unless the game forces you to succeed. Don’t get me wrong, I’m aware that this particular genre doesn’t usually provide a set of complex challenges in its gameplay, but it seriously looks like LIS2 is throwing us a bone, remembering from time to time that uh, it’s a game, not a movie. Those mini games are not really engaging, not really connected to the plot, but just for… whatever reason, as part of the daily chores.

But it’s a game about choices, you say! Yes, it is, but only some of them really matter and I’m not sure for how long. If you give me a choice to do something or NOT to do it, please consider that I might pick the latter and don’t force me into your favorite path. It happens from time to time and it’s utterly annoying. If you want me to do something, just don’t give me the illusion that I can refuse.

It almost seems that LIS2 turned into a dark alley where you are rewarded for picking the “good, canonical path” and punished for playing it differently than the devs indented. I loved LIS1 for ambiguous choices that I might pick, depending on my personal preferences, not to mention that those choices are made during an emotional moment. I don’t feel I have that opportunity here, just as if somebody who constructed it forgot why LIS was so great and is so loved.

When it comes to dialogue, it is way better than LIS1, regarding how people actually speak. On the other hand, the lines are just there to be there and I can’t recall a single line that would be worth quoting.

And one more thing. Cutscenes. So many cutscenes. The moment when I actually could do something with my controller was a celebration. I don’t mind cutscenes in general, but it almost feels like a movie. A long, boring, super slow movie.

Superpower

 The superpower is mentioned, mostly in rules that Sean is lecturing Daniel about, but it’s non-existent in the gameplay almost at all. It’s drastically different comparing to LIS1, when Max was using her power almost all the time or was a challenge not to use it. Here we know that Daniel can do things but most of the time he conveniently forgets about it or uses it in the wrong moment. I know the game is about education but the superpower itself seems like a plot device, an additional reason to run to Mexico than anything else. They talk more about it than use it. It sounds like a good idea in general and it probably looked great on paper, but at some point I didn’t care about the superpower at all, forgetting that this secret even exists.

Season 1

When it comes to references to season 1, Arcadia Bay, or any character that we know from LIS1, there is almost nothing. Yes, you can find a drawing of ”door to another world” instead of hole to another universe, or graffiti on the wall that Sean and Daniel were here, similar to the famous junkyard thing, but it won’t give you any insight about what had happened to the favorite characters or any glimpse of their fate. There was more about Arcadia Bay in Captain Spirit than the whole LIS2 so far. The devs were damn serious, showing us Arcadia Bay in episode 1, destroyed or not, saying that this is the past. It seems that they don’t want to even refer to this past much and it’s fine, but if you’re hoping for anything, just anything related to LIS1, forget it.

Technical problems

Oh, boy. I’m aware that creating games is not an easy job and a team sport. I know that it’s almost a miracle that some of the titles even got shipped, but episode 2 of LIS2 is probably the MOST BUGGED EPISODE in the history of this franchise. Glitches, problems with sound, teleportation of objects, animations that didn’t work or songs being cut off… I’m not talking about a few mistakes here and there, but it happens all the time. It’s so common it’s an epidemic and you face some technical challenge almost in every scene as if Bethesda was putting this episode together. This episode looks like advanced beta, not a finished product that had been delayed for months. It seems ironic when recalling the posts from the Life is Strange blog about QA teams, one in France and one in Canada, carefully checking every detail and describing how quality was important. Especially in that context, this is really a disaster, however, I didn’t face any technical problem that would make this episode impossible to finish.

What worked

So what’s great about this episode? Does everything suck? Well, of course not. On the upside, the locations are absolutely stunning. You want to explore the town, the houses, play in the snow, dive into the world, even if you don’t expect anything groundbreaking to happen. The level design, in my opinion, is better than in LIS1, more consistent and intriguing. I know a lot of people might disagree with me but somebody put their heart and soul building this environment, creating something really beautiful. Except for the locations, I liked some songs and the music, way more than in ep1, but it’s not as good as in LIS1 or BTS. Better, but not great.

Cassidy

Oh, somebody was reading “Preacher”, weren’t ya? Or is ia reference to “On the road”? A lot of people seem excited about her finally showing up. I have mixed feelings about this character since I’m not sure if I want to discover the world from her perspective. A stoned, hippie-rasta girl, who takes pride in being free and “not owned by any corporation” (except Square Enix hehehe), is maybe a realistic character and I’m not saying that people like her don’t exist here, but I’m on the fence, to be honest. It seems that the devs are trying to establish the next canon ship or something with her being interested in Sean and him actually “liking her” after exchanging 3 sentences, but that really feels off. She seems more like Chloe 2.0 than anything else, but we shall see (in the next 6 months or whenever they will fucking publish the next ep). Plus for fuck’s sake, Sean was into Jenn (I don’t remember her name exactly), and there was Lyla, and then this girl. Dude!

Summary

It was boring. It was extremely freaking boring to the point that I lost my patience to check every single detail or examine every object. I don’t feel any need to replay it, even if the consequences of my choices weren’t great. I’m not curious about different outcomes nor do I want to check if I missed anything. There is not a single scene I want to see or experience again. In my game, Chris died and I don’t really feel the need to replay it and change the outcome since I will never meet him again or even deal with the consequences of his death. The whole road trip setting is intriguing but drastically different to what I loved about Life is Strange - learning more about each character, dwelling deeper into the situation, uncovering a hidden mystery. We won’t learn more about most of those characters (or it doesn’t seem possible) since we just pass them and move on, exchanging a dialogue or two like with a pedestrian on the street. There is a charm to the road trip idea, but then I would have to be extremely interested in the main characters, including the PC, to actually follow their journey closely. In LIS1 I didn’t have to like Max to play the whole thing, curious about Chloe or Rachels’ disappearance. In a road trip setting the two brothers are the core of the story and if you’re not fond of them, it won’t work.

So far it’s not working for me.

#life is strange 2 #review #sean diaz #daniel diaz #life is strange

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quietdaysco · 5 years

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Primrose Path - Devlog #006

Hey, it’s us again—two indie devs with fresh dirt on our visual novel progress. Ready?

Behind the Scenes

Playtesting Feedback

Last month we closed the pre-alpha Ink build of Primrose Path’s common route outline. It met its purpose of proving the basic concepts of our game were viable and that it interested players in our target demographic. In fact, playtesters gave us overwhelmingly positive feedback in our post-test form about the characters and story. Here are a few quotes from their responses:

“The number of elements of the MC's [main character’s] life added in to the story in increments helped me not only relate to the MC but also stay interested.”

“There's a good variety of calmer moments and more outlandish/exciting/otherwise more high tension moment [sic], no issues for me.”

“[T]he clients are a rainbow of people with a few that [sic] very much stand out [to me]”

“By the end, I was definitely considering who I was going to chose as my client and was sad the pre-alpha ended even though I knew it was going to.”

“I 100% would dance [in a mini-game similar to] DDR [Dance Dance Revolution]”

As you can see, the beginnings of Primrose Path went over well and players definitely had a lot of interesting things to say about our mischievous clients! We can’t spoil them here, but you may be able to see for yourself when alpha testing comes to our server in the future!

Now, for all the good we received, it’s not to say the pre-alpha went without its criticisms:

“This might be silly, but I wish there were an option that weren't a dress for her outfit to the party.”

It’s not silly at all, playtester! It had us thinking about the different ways our protagonist, Lynn Austen, could express herself. This concern lead to one outfit redesign and introduced a number of new ones!

“The beginning was a little slow, but I love Priya, so all of her scenes brought my attention back instantly.”

We love co-worker and bestie, Priya, too, but she can’t be an exception for pacing. We’ve since reevaluated and tweaked Part 1: Work Day. Plenty of visual changes and cutting scenes entirely were discussed in order to tighten up the overall pacing.

“Harper seems harsh but has pressure on her to make her harsh, but then you see her and shes [sic] just straight up scary.”

While all playtesters understood Harper’s role as Lynn’s no-slack boss, a few found her consequentially unapproachable. We have a lot in store for her in later routes, but acknowledge she was sparse during the common route. We’ve since taken this concern and made her more available in new scenes, adjusted her tone in some of the older ones, and had other characters—who have a very different relationship with her than Lynn does—reflect more openly on her. We think this humanizes Harper much more.

“Unfortunately [Bellarmino] feels like a snobbier, more irritating Matt. [...] I personally don't find him very likable but I'm looking forward to being proven wrong.”

In our feedback form, we asked about character impressions. We also polled if players didn’t have to play all routes at least once, which clients they’d pick. While character impression responses expressed a willingness to give our model and fashion designer, Bellarmino LaFauci, a chance, he was our least popular choice in the poll. We figured it may have been that his personality wasn’t differentiated enough against the company with whom Lynn encounters him, so we’ve made adjustments to contrast him more against his judgmental cabal.

So as we went through and addressed feedback, we had some ideas of our own to implement, which leads us to...

Updated Revised Outline

Double the wordcount! Yep, we’re just shy of 32,000 words for the revised common route outline. How could this be? Look: don’t mistake Primrose Path for a linear narrative. Your choices affect the world from day one.

Beyond changes from playtester feedback, other new content includes:

New Characters! We work to make sure our side characters leave an impression. We’ve added a few more with the means to salvage or devastate Lynn’s career. Until you yourself can meet them, look out for future Lore snippets on our Twitter!

New Events! Lynn has more opportunities than before, and under different states of mind, to navigate and impact the world around her. Depending on what Lynn did, where, and when can completely change an encounter within that same space and time.

New Key Items! There are a couple of items Lynn can collect if she meets the right people and takes certain actions. These items can reveal some important information in client routes later on—and some hints for others, too!

New Areas! A few more places have been added to the common route, including whole new scenes. What could possibly lie behind these doors?

So how’s that sound? If you said “Damn, that’s hella rad,” well you just took the words right out of our mouths. But we’re not done yet; we take feedback seriously. When we can’t decide on what our audience may want, we leave no room for speculation. There’s really only one way to settle that.

VN Protagonist Sprite Survey

We run a survey! We wanted to know how visual novel fans preferred to see a customizable MC represented as a sprite, if at all. It’s tough for us because as much as we want to make Lynn as visually present as her sense of self, we also acknowledge that “immersion” for many players also means different levels of “intrusion” from MC’s sprite—down to none at all, for folks wanting to self-insert despite taking on another character’s existing backstory. While we think we’ve come to a happy medium that serves our purposes and would appeal to a good number of players, we’ll be sharing with you all in a separate post our findings.

Two things are for certain:

Visual novel players are an incredibly dedicated base, having turned out over 100 responses to our form! Thank you so much for helping us see your side on the matter!

The communities we frequent overwhelmingly take issue with one specific manner of MC representation—one that seems to plague the industry. If you’re not an avid consumer of visual novels, this begrudged answer may surprise you!

But hey, we haven’t closed it yet: you can contribute your opinion too until August 5th, 11:59 PM EDT. Stay tuned for our detailed write-up on the results, next time. We’ve got another survey in the works too (sounds like we’ve got a few hard decisions, huh?) so keep tabs on our Twitter when we release that form.

Greyson’s Twitter

Greyson’s been taking a break from Twitter for a minute. Working Saturday, Sunday, and Wednesday overheated him, and in that vulnerable time, he caught a virus! So now he’s on sick leave and we’ve promised him an easier schedule of one day a week when he gets better. His posting schedule will be announced soon. You can still send him some love on his Twitter account. He’ll be sure to respond when he’s feeling up to it. He’s always there for you. Will you return the favor?

Main Game Progress

Common Route:

Rough Outline: 100% ✔

Revised Outline: 100% ✔

Draft Script: --%

The Artist: Matthias Barousse

Rough Outline: 100% ✔

Revised Outline: --%

Progress on the main game has primarily been on the common route outline. Some interesting things to note are that last time we reported our revision to be at 90%. After implementing feedback, our clean outline doubled in word count and we’ve reviewed it entirely since then. So now we’re thoroughly at 100%!

The breakdown of that is:

We finished up the common route’s Part 3: The Interviews, in which Lynn meets all her clients whom she may or may not have stumbled upon at a legendary bash.

We elaborated on Part 2: The Party encounters and added more variations which subsequently trickle over into alternate interactions in The Interviews.

We added an interactive, portent dream sequence the night of The Interviews, right when Lynn hits the bed after evaluating all potential clients at work.

... and a few other additions. Also among other things, we’ve actually started work on the draft script already, but we’ve not had time to properly calculate the percentage. It’ll be updated accordingly in our next log.

What’s Next For Us

We’re going to finish up our script draft and start focusing our efforts into creating a playable, visual alpha build of Primrose Path. Yes, we want to play our game as much as you do and that’s motivation enough!

We’re focusing on monthly devlogs for our Tumblr, but we have to ask:

Are there other kinds of content and updates you folks would like to see here? We want to know! Shoot us a message in our Ask the Devs inbox here on Tumblr, or hit us up on Twitter, Discord, and Lemma Soft!

Thanks for reading! Keep up and remember to enjoy your Quiet Days. ♥

Socials

- Micro-updates on Twitter!

♦ Factoids with Greyson!

- Live art development on Twitch!

- Art logging on Instagram!

- Ask us anything here!

- Continue the discussion on Discord!

- Master thread on Lemma Soft!

#devlog #primrosepath #visual novel #otome #english otome #indiedev #gamedev #otomedev

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theonyxpath · 5 years

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This week is indeed a sequel of sorts, as I follow up on a variety of topics I mentioned last week. Sometimes as clarification, sometimes to give you more info, and sometimes because I just want to mention it again.

Like the Trinity Continuum: Aberrant Kickstarter that is kicking butt and taking names and is over 200% funded as we approach the end of week two. Like I said last week, it is just so great that our existing long-time fans are as excited about bringing back this legendary game as we are!

Of course, I do want to mention this week a couple of things about the KS, and maybe more the KS process that I think backers and potential backers might find it worth considering.

First, this is a reboot or re-imagining of the Aberrant setting as well as using the Storypath rules. It’s not a sequel or just a port of the old stuff onto Storypath. The designers had several goals they needed to hit, like making the system actually work this time, advancing the setting in both time and relevancy to where we are now (not the 90s), and to make sure it fit into the Trinity Continuum concept.

As more and more of the text is released to backers, you’ll be able to judge yourself how well they hit those marks – but I think they accomplished all that and a lot more!

But please, bear in mind that excerpts and previews are still just sections of the greater whole, and so you are reading something that isn’t connected to the remaining sections of the book in ways that may illuminate aspects hard to see with what is available right then.

We provide the text as we do to enable conversation and fun speculation. If you find yourself gnashing your teeth and swearing eternal vengeance over an excerpt, then the method we’re revealing things might not work for you. You’re not a jerk because of that, and we’re not jerks because we’ve found a method we use in our KSs that works really well for us. (We’re jerks for other reasons, though.)

Dystopia Rising: Evolution art by Mark Kelly

Another thing to consider about the KS preview process is that it’s not the Errata phase. We do have one of those for pretty much all of our projects, and it grew out of our Kickstarter process, funnily enough, so we definitely will give backers a chance to let us know what mistakes they find.

In fact, depending on the KS, the text may or may not have made it through editing when it is previewed. So, while the previews are great for seeing and discussing the overall concepts and details, it’s during the errata phase that we need feedback on things that don’t make sense, add up, or contradict themselves.

In much the same way, just to get this out there, we don’t do PageXXs re-errata. We do them after all the tweaks have been made, in case the text referenced in the XX moves off the page due to a change we found we needed to do because of the errata.

Eddy has a post describing why it is really important for us to keep these feedback opportunities tied to the moments in the process we need them connected to in our Pugmire Forums on this website. The gist is: it ain’t arbitrary on our parts.

Coincidentally, (?), the Onyx Pathcast crew just posted an episode devoted to this very topic: the errata/playtest/editing process and the care and feeding of the creators involved. They have a great time breaking the process down into very clear segments here: https://onyxpathcast.podbean.com/

M20 Book of the Fallen art by Oliver Specht

Following up on the Storypath Nexus Community Content site for Scion 2nd Edition, and I just want to say how thrilled we have been with the response so far. There’s already a handful of Scion products up there, with a surprisingly wide range of subject matter, size, and pricing. Good for all of you who have put together your projects and posted and let’s cheer on the creators working on their Scion projects even as I type this!

Bravo folks! It’s a great way to share your ideas, make a little money if you price it that way, let us here at Onyx Path see what you can do, and help jump-start an awesome community with awesome content.

And, of course, here’s some clarification items.

First, Storypath Nexus is the community content site for all the games powered by the Storypath rules set. So while we have started with Scion, the Trinity Continuum, Dystopia Rising: Evolution, and They Came From Beneath the Sea! game lines will also appear as they are released. Each of these will have different allowable content guidelines, and any of them may add or subtract from those guidelines as we see what works for that line.

For example, one Storypath gameline may allow fiction books to be posted, another may not. Then, some time later, fiction may be added to where it was previously not part of the allowable content. So, the Nexus is for Storypath game lines, not for Storypath as a system.

Much in the same way as White Wolf‘s Storytellers Vault is for all the White Wolf game lines.

Second, Storypath Nexus is not an Open Game License, but a community content site. Just like every other community content site, there are guidelines like I mentioned above and limits to what can be posted on the site. Maybe at some time in the future we’ll look at ways to license the system, but right now the community content site that is Storypath Nexus is what we are experimenting with.

Trinity Continuum: Aeon – Distant Worlds art by Sam Denmark

Speaking of community content, we also have a lot of projects available (and what seems like several new ones every week) on Canis Minor for the Realms of Pugmire, and the Slarecian Vault for Scarred Lands – including the epic campaign Vengeance of the Shunned (5e) starting with Part 1 – A Mishap of Ill Portent and Part 2 – A Scholarly Schism. All on DriveThruRPG!

And keep your eyes out for the annual Xmas in July Sale blowout on DTRPG, too, where you can get wild discounts on the PDFs of our:

Many Worlds, One Path!

BLURBS!

Kickstarter!

The Trinity Continuum: Aberrant Kickstarter funded in less than a day and is now over 200% funded! We’ve already passed Stretch Goals that are enabling us to recreate missing first edition books, a compilation of the web comic, three sections of a book statting out the characters, digital wallpaper and dice, a backer-only T-Shirt, and:

N!WE N!TERNATIONAL WRESTLING ENTERTAINMENT – A new PDF product discussing the N!WE, the performers and industry personnel, and various elements of professional wrestling in the world of Aberrant!

At $88,000 and climbing, we’ve got many more fantastic Stretch Goal rewards to come, so come check it out! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/200664283/trinity-continuum-aberrant

ONYX PATH MEDIA

Onyx Pathcast art by Michael Gaydos

This Friday’s Onyx Pathcast features an interview with Onyx Path Operations Manager and DTRPG guru Matt McElroy who will be mercilessly grilled by our corespondents as to the inner workings and secrets of Onyx Path: https://onyxpathcast.podbean.com/

And Here’s More Media About Our Worlds:

We broadcast a live edition of the Onyx Path News today! Check out https://www.youtube.com/user/TheOnyxPath for the footage!

Matthew started up his Wraith: The Oblivion chronicle with prologues for each of the characters while they’re still alive. Here’s video one https://youtu.be/TaMIrvGDZPM and here’s video two https://youtu.be/0qCc183IF9U

The Story Told Podcast is publishing a review of The Realm for Exalted 3rd: http://thestorytold.libsyn.com/episode-32-exalted-the-realm-book-review

Caffeinated Conquests continue with their fumbling, bumbling, hilarious playthrough of The Gauntlet of Spiragos for Scarred Lands: https://youtu.be/BKb3fLWFlKE

A challenger appears! New on our blog is http://307rpg.com/, a fantastic podcast which has covered all kinds of games, including (but not limited to) Vampire, Scarred Lands, and Pathfinder!

Twin Cities by Night have just started a new Chronicles of Darkness series, named “The Ultimate Evil”. Please check it out! https://twincitiebynight.podbean.com/

Devil’s Luck Gaming continue with their absolutely superb Scarred Lands campaign. We can’t recommend this one enough: https://www.twitch.tv/DEVILSLUCKGAMING

Just to show you that V20 is still going strong, The Cult of Tea and Dice has started up a new V20 campaign for all your Vampire needs: https://thecultofteaanddice.net/

If written chronicle reports are your jam, check out GMorts Chaotica as they play a V5 chronicle and utilize elements from the upcoming V5 Chicago by Night: https://gmortschaotica.blogspot.com/

Occultists Anonymous continue their superb Mage: The Awakening chronicle here! Episode 28: A Spot of Bad Luck – Atratus, Mammon, and Wyrd the Seer investigate the large suburban home where the Spider had wanted to first meet. This is just as the cabal remembers that Web of Life only reveals the living. Songbird continues to fall… https://youtu.be/sHjba91g73I

Drop Matthew a message via the contact button on matthewdawkins.com if you have actual plays, reviews, or game overviews you want us to profile on the blog!

Please check any of these out and let us know if you find or produce any actual plays of our games!

ELECTRONIC GAMING

As we find ways to enable our community to more easily play our games, the Onyx Dice Rolling App is now live! Our dev team has been doing updates since we launched based on the excellent use-case comments by our community, and this thing is awesome! (Seriously, you need to roll 100 dice for Exalted? This app has you covered.)

ON AMAZON AND BARNES & NOBLE:

You can now read our fiction from the comfort and convenience of your Kindle (from Amazon) and Nook (from Barnes & Noble).

If you enjoy these or any other of our books, please help us by writing reviews on the site of the sales venue from which you bought it. Reviews really, really help us get folks interested in our amazing fiction!

Our selection includes these fiction books:

OUR SALES PARTNERS:

We’re working with Studio2 to get Pugmire and Monarchies of Mau out into stores, as well as to individuals through their online store. You can pick up the traditionally printed main book, the screen, and the official Pugmire dice through our friends there! https://studio2publishing.com/search?q=pugmire

We’ve added Prince’s Gambit to our Studio2 catalog: https://studio2publishing.com/products/prince-s-gambit-card-game

Now, we’ve added Changeling: The Lost 2nd Edition products to Studio2‘s store! See them here: https://studio2publishing.com/collections/all-products/changeling-the-lost

Scarred Lands (Pathfinder) books are also on sale at Studio2, and they have the 5e version, supplements, and dice as well!: https://studio2publishing.com/collections/scarred-lands

Scion 2e books and other products are available now at Studio2: https://studio2publishing.com/blogs/new-releases/scion-second-edition-book-one-origin-now-available-at-your-local-retailer-or-online

Looking for our Deluxe or Prestige Edition books? Try this link! http://www.indiepressrevolution.com/xcart/Onyx-Path-Publishing/

And you can order Pugmire, Monarchies of Mau, Cavaliers of Mars, and Changeling: The Lost 2e at the same link! And NOW Scion Origin and Scion Hero are available to order!

On Sale This Week!

This Wednesday, we are offering The Realm in PDF and physical book PoD versions on DTRPG!

CONVENTIONS!

Gen Con: August 1st – 4th Save Against Fear: October 12th – 14th GameHoleCon: October 31st – November 3rd We’ll also be back at PAX Unplugged later this year!

And now, the new project status updates!

DEVELOPMENT STATUS FROM EDDY WEBB (projects in bold have changed status since last week):

First Draft (The first phase of a project that is about the work being done by writers, not dev prep)

M20 Victorian Mage (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)

Exalted Essay Collection (Exalted)

Trinity Continuum Jumpstart (Trinity Continuum Core)

Wraith20 Fiction Anthology (Wraith: The Oblivion 20th Anniversary Edition)

Dragon-Blooded Novella #2 (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Exigents (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Terra Firma (Trinity Continuum: Aeon) Titanomachy (Scion 2nd Edition)

Crucible of Legends (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Many-Faced Strangers – Lunars Companion (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Contagion Chronicle: Global Outbreaks (Chronicles of Darkness)

W20 Shattered Dreams Gift Cards (Werewolf: The Apocalypse 20th)

W20 Art Book (Werewolf: The Apocalypse 20th)

Yugman’s Guide to Ghelspad (Scarred Lands)

Vigil Watch (Scarred Lands)

Pirates of Pugmire KS-Added Adventure (Realms of Pugmire)

Redlines

Monsters of the Deep (They Came From Beneath the Sea!)

Tales of Aquatic Terror (They Came From Beneath the Sea!)

Kith and Kin (Changeling: The Lost 2e)

Scion: Demigod (Scion 2nd Edition)

One Foot in the Grave Jumpstart (Geist: The Sin-Eaters 2e)

Second Draft

Tales of Good Dogs – Pugmire Fiction Anthology (Pugmire)

Dragon-Blooded Novella #1 (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Across the Eight Directions (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Scion: Dragon (Scion 2nd Edition)

Geist 2e Fiction Anthology (Geist: The Sin-Eaters 2nd Edition)

Development

Oak, Ash, and Thorn: Changeling: The Lost 2nd Companion (Changeling: The Lost 2nd)

M20 The Technocracy Reloaded (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)

Creatures of the World Bestiary (Scion 2nd Edition)

Heirs to the Shogunate (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Scion Companion: Mysteries of the World (Scion 2nd Edition)

Cults of the Blood Gods (Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition)

Legendlore core book (Legendlore)

City of the Towered Tombs (Cavaliers of Mars)

TC: Aeon Jumpstart (Trinity Continuum: Aeon)

Mummy: The Curse 2nd Edition core rulebook (Mummy: The Curse 2nd Edition)

Masks of the Mythos (Scion 2nd Edition)

Manuscript Approval

Trinity Continuum: Aberrant core (Trinity Continuum: Aberrant)

Hunter: The Vigil 2e core (Hunter: The Vigil 2nd Edition)

Chicago Folio/Dossier (Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition)

Deviant: The Renegades (Deviant: The Renegades)

Let the Streets Run Red (Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition)

WoD Ghost Hunters (World of Darkness)

Editing

Memento Mori: the GtSE 2e Companion (Geist: The Sin-Eaters 2nd Edition)

Night Horrors: Nameless and Accursed (Mage: the Awakening Second Edition)

Lunars: Fangs at the Gate (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Heroic Land Dwellers (They Came From Beneath the Sea!)

DR:E Threat Guide – Helnau’s Guide to Wasteland Beasties (Dystopia Rising: Evolution)

DR:E Jumpstart (Dystopia Rising: Evolution)

Pirates of Pugmire (Realms of Pugmire)

TC: Aeon Ready-Made Characters (Trinity Continuum: Aeon)

Post-Editing Development

M20 Book of the Fallen (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)

V5 Chicago By Night (Vampire: The Masquerade)

V5 Chicago By Night Screen (Vampire: The Masquerade)

CofD Contagion Chronicle (Chronicles of Darkness)

Distant Worlds (Trinity Continuum: Aeon)

Dark Eras 2 (Chronicles of Darkness)

Spilled Blood (Vampire: The Requiem 2nd Edition)

Indexing

ART DIRECTION FROM MIRTHFUL MIKE!

In Art Direction

Contagion Chronicle

VtR Spilled Blood

Trinity Continuum Aeon: Distant Worlds – Sketches coming in.

Trinity Continuum Aberrant

Hunter: The Vigil 2e

Ex3 Lunars

They Came From Beneath the Sea

TCFBtS!: Heroic Land Dwellers

Night Horrors: Nameless and Accursed

Ex3 Monthly Stuff

In Layout

M20 Book of the Fallen

Trinity Core – Getting cover specs from printer.

Trinity Aeon – Getting cover specs from printer.

CoM – Witch Queen of the Shadowed Citadel

Dark Eras 2

Proofing

DR: E – final PDF off for approval

Aeon Aexpansion

C20 Cup of Dreams – This week.

V5: Chicago – Inputting 2nd proof comments.

Geist 2e – Inputting Page XXs, then Indexing.

Signs of Sorcery – Implementing Errata.

At Press

Dragon Blooded – Deluxe at Studio2.

Dragon-Blooded Cloth Map – At Studio2.

Dragon-Blooded Screen – Shipped to Studio2.

The Realm – PDF and PoD versions on Sale Weds at DTRPG!

Trinity Core Screen – Shipping to Studio2.

TC Aeon Screen – Shipping to Studio2.

Book of Oblivion – PoD proofs ordered.

Trinity: In Media Res – PoD proofs ordered.

Scion Jumpstart – PoD proofs ordered.

Scion Ready-Made Characters – Waiting to order PoD proofs.

Blood Sea – PoD file uploaded, waiting to order proof.

Today’s Reason to Celebrate!

Today in 1834 – The Spanish Inquisition is officially disbanded after nearly 356 years. Or were they?…

#Onyx Path Publishing

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retphienix · 5 years

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(Random) Game Recommendations

It’s a new year (or a few days prior as I type this and prepare it for new years) and completely unprompted here’s some game recommendations because I want to mention some games.

No rules really, just some random games I’ve either played for the blog or outside of the blog- heck- it’s not even all games I played this year and it’s definitely not games exclusively released this year.

The last one, for reference, was a little over a year ago on 7/29/2017 with this aiming for new years 2018 into 2019. Also I would change a few things about that due to Bamco not knowing how to stop themselves from ruining a game for microtransaction greedy money grabbing, but I digress.

Hamtaro Ham-Ham’s Unite! for the game boy color

This one is a game from my childhood that I’m so glad I completed through this blog.

If I were to sum it up I’d say it’s a game about learning hamster words and solving simple puzzles (usually making use of these words to interact with characters / the environment) to gather up Hamtaro’s friends for a meeting.

It’s too cute for its own good, it made me shout “THIS IS ON A GAME BOY COLOR” many many times because it looks too good in my opinion and is overflowing with adorable animations, and it’s just makes you feel good.

Ham-Ham’s Unite is a really relaxing and uplifting game, and it certainly left me in a better mood throughout my entire playthrough.

I hear Ham-Ham Heartbreak is even better, so I’ll be keeping that in mind the next time I want to revisit Hamtaro and friends.

Clickpocalypse 2 for android/iOS and apparently even in your browser (news to me)

Yes yes, an idle game. And one I haven’t played in months at that- but then again I haven’t played Hamtaro in a long time as well so I don’t see that as discrediting what I saw in it.

I, usually at least, just don’t enjoy phone games. Not for the bull crap “It’s not real games!” rhetoric, but because as time as gone on phone games have gone further and further from what makes a game good and instead have mostly become manipulative Skinner boxes. Even if they don’t SUCCESSFULLY drain your wallet, heck, even if they don’t have direct monetization and only use ads- they always seem to fail to balance the ‘game’ and the ‘greed’ and you’re left with no game.

You turn it on, play it for a little while, and then you realize you’re almost exclusively being used and you’re not actually getting anything out of the game.

This isn’t an incredible example of directly countering that mentality- it’s just one of a few games I’ve found in the previous years that successfully balance the other way for me at least. I’ll mention another arguably more successful- but inarguably more messy example for the next game.

The reason I mention Clickpocalypse 2 is because, well, it’s a good idle game that hit a very specific aesthetic and enjoyment for me. This is a VERY idle game, you did VERY little- you can’t even “click” to increase speed as the name might suggest. Your input is exclusively “Pick the party. Choose when to use potions or spell scrolls. Equip equipment (it’s simpler than that sounds, it auto lists the best found loot and you tap to equip). Tap to level up when you get the xp etc.

It’s really really hands off- but it felt great to me.

The aesthetic it lands on is classic RPG goodness and the party does as you’d expect, clearing out dungeons and grinding while you check in to equip and level them choosing what skills they learn.

It’s a game I enjoyed because it’s, well, a good idle game. It doesn’t bury you in “You should be tapping this non stop or else” gameplay. It carries enough enjoyable mental tricks like stronger gear and leveling up to make it fun, and the monetization is, well, the most optional thing I’ve seen in a long while.

I’ve played so many games that rely on ads and they all feel highly necessary. This has a similar idea- there are optional ads for buffs like double achievement points (used for permanent buffs across multiple adventures) or tempoary allies- and these are helpful as heck, but man.

Because this is SUCH an idle game, they honestly feel like the most optional ads around. I watched plenty because I enjoyed the game and less because I felt like I needed them in any way.

But there’s not much to say that would convince someone this is a great game. I just think it’s a good idle game for messing around on your phone. It gave me that feeling of watching a friend grind through an old FF game- a very specific feeling, but that’s what I got out of it. A chill idle with a nostalgic feel and the balance of “game” vs “phone bull crap” was tilted heavily towards the game side for me.

Buriedbornes for android

Lord that image is larger than I planned for, my mistake.

Buriedbornes was nothing but a surprise to me. I’ve played a few games I enjoyed on the phone in recent times. Idle Apocalypse and Clickpocalpyse 2 being high up there (not sure how Idle is now, but pre-beta was alright). Even fell into Dokkan for a little while. But this?

I downloaded this because I thought “Oh my god it’s trying to pretend it’s dark souls or bloodborne, what on earth is this.”

And you know what it is?

A REALLY good roguelike with traditional turn based combat!

Like a REALLY good one. It has that feature I adore in good roguelikes where things can seem impossibly difficult, but then you get a couple good drops, you tweak your character to emphasize a certain playstyle, and BOOM! You just beat the entire game in one run deep into the endless mode on a character that seems unkillable due to strategies you built from the drops you found.

And it has the foresight to tell you at a certain point “Score stops at this point so you’re just playing to collect things in your beastiary of items so you might as well stop” along with ways to end a run, though my preferred way to end a god run is to keep making deals with various demons until I end up with a curse that is guaranteed to kill me on the next boss that way I feel like I gambled to death.

Look, I know the last game might have seemed a little floaty on merits, but try this game.

It’s simply fantastic. Dive in, die, dive in, die, and then stumble onto a perma stun build or an infinite shield build or a barrier regen build- you can stumble unto so many unique ways to play and I honestly had a lot of fun breaking and being broken by this title.

Wasteland 2 for PS4/Xbone/PC/Switch

Let’s get away from phone games and handhelds in general.

Wasteland 2 is a game I was looking forward to ages before release. I remember stumbling across news of it being kickstarted or something similar- and bookmarking it for future reference and promptly forgot until I saw it in stores and started berating myself for not getting it at release.

Now it took me a long while to get around to Wasteland 2; Long enough to hear from some that it wasn’t as good as they wanted and others that it was too complicated. Long enough to build doubts.

But my god.

This is a game that I highly recommend you come in with a quick start guide of some sort. Seriously. No it’s not impossible or anything- and I’m sure fans of the original will scoff at me for saying as much- but no, really. It’s “Fallout before Fallout” except now it’s well after Fallout (obviously) releasing in 2014, and it takes that oldschool complexity seriously.

Mostly.

Basically, just read up a quickstart guide, I found a wonderful one for my purposes (pretty sure that’s the exact one I used) because character creation at the start pretty much dictates what your first impressions are gonna be- ranging from “Oh, okay, this is pretty neat, I’m hyped to dive into this” to “OH MY GOD THIS IS TERRIBLE AND EVERYONE SUCKS AT EVERYTHING AND I’M NOT A FAN”.

If your reaction is the latter, I recommend restarting and fiddling with your team composition. You can play however you like- but this is a game that kind of expects your first run to be “mostly diverse” before you attempt a less specialized team in the future.

Enough of that. Wasteland 2 is a newschool fallout game. That’s what you need to know. It’s got a ton of post apocalyptic fun, plenty of moral moments ranging in quality from “Oh heck that’s good” to “.... not good enough” but there’s a lot more good than bad.

The first half of the game is simply better put together than the second half, to be honest, due to budget and deadlines or some other dev level nonsense, but that doesn’t make the rest of the game throwaway- it just sorta simplifies towards the end and then culminates in a massive boss encounter, which isn’t terrible by any means.

Combat’s great if you enjoy oldschool fallout and want some nice squad x-com style battles. Death is scary (very scary). And, heck I don’t know, it’s just a fantastic fallout game. Like a REALLY fantastic fallout game.

I made characters I grew attached to and it felt so natural to do as much because (thanks to the quickstart guide) my team was VERY diverse so I began to associate each of them with their skills and the playstyles those skills dictated.

Seriously, with a short read on what skills do what this is a fantastic game that I’m very glad I got to play through. Oh, and if you’re on console the text is stupid small- go into the options and change that. Also, don’t do what I did which made me sad to notice- don’t type up a large Bio for your characters (at least on console) because a bug prevents the Bio box from scrolling, meaning you will forever lose access to your long backstory ;-; Don’t do that.

Wario Land: Shake It! for the Wii

God I love this game. This goes up with Hamtaro as another feel good game and in a similar way it left me feeling in a much more optimistic and generally positive mood as I finished it.

I am a huge fan of the older Wario Land titles, the first one is one of my favorite games on the game boy- but I never really kept up with Wario until recent years. I didn’t play the later games, didn’t try his mini game compilations, and didn’t look at console releases at all until much later.

I heard of this game from a Wario marathon stream setup someone was doing years ago and took note only for one fact “It’s got good graphics”.

Like that was it. I saw this and went “Pretty” so I took note to get it later on.

I had no idea it’d end up being one of my favorite games, but here we are. This game hit like a truck with quality. You can easily coast through the game if you’re struggling with the harder challenges, but my god, there are SO many challenges hidden all around for treasures. The gameplay is FANTASTIC, the motion controls are SMART (come at me) and that aesthetic! MY GOD, that aesthetic! The entire game looks like a fox kids cartoon or something similar and I adore it.

This goes down as one of those games I’d recommend to just about anyone. You have a wii, find a way to play this. Truly, one of, if not my absolute favorite platformers of all time.

Well I’m dropping this a little early because I don’t mind being off season.

12/28/2018.

There are a metric ton of games I could talk about or recommend, but I had some oddballs I wanted to say and a couple feelgood games I wanted shown as well.

Quick bonus titles would be EDF 5 (a ton of quality of life changes and it’s EDF!!! SHOOT BUGS!), Play Yakuza you dinguses, if my whole emotional sputter and that whole side blog I made didn’t give a hint- Doki Doki Literature Club is worth a play, Dragon Warrior Monsters is the best pokemon game, The Fall was very interesting and enjoyable, Nioh is Bloodborne done right, and God Hand is great.

Have a great new year, everyone~

#Hamtaro #Clickpocalypse II #Buriedbornes #Wario #wasteland 2 #Retphienix

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imaginaryelle · 7 years

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dipsykoo replied to your post “There are days that I’m grateful that I started writing on paper, for...”

I don't entirely understand what happened based on this post. But I agree a lot on learning to know oneself or other people better. I believe it's important! However, I hope everything is okay for you. If you need someone to talk to and you're comfortable with it, I'm always here! Well at least when I'm awake!

It wasn’t really one thing, it’s a pattern of behavior I’ve been seeing played out over and over again these last few months. I know there’s a lot of fear and anger in the world today, and I absolutely believe that we should acknowledge problematic and harmful aspects of the media we consume, but I have seen a lot of attacks on both fandom and professional creators, always with the expectation that the creator should have known better and shouldn’t even try to do something unless they are able to execute it to someone else’s standards.

It’s like we forget that it’s possible to be critical of something and still enjoy it. It’s possible to recognize problems and use them to educate yourself and others without a judgement of someone’s worth as a person. “Problematic” only means that something is complicated and prone to problems. That’s a very human thing. That is all of us. And I see it waved around as a banner of justice, a label that says another person or their work is wrongwrongwrong and implies that the person doing the waving is entirely in the right. And that’s just not how humans work. We are all flawed, complex beings. It’s possible to be disgusted by something and still recognize that there is a human being on the other end of it. And sometimes we have to acknowledge that problems for us are not problems for other people. That they have their own problems they’re working through.

An example would be the reaction to ME:A’s number of mlm romance option available in-game, or the trans npc deadnaming to a stranger, or Gil’s storyarc. Are there problems in these things? Yes. Absolutely. Bioware and EA are big established companies, and they have the resources to spend time on these things, and they have the ability to do better. They have done better in the past, at least a little bit. But there were attacks against individual programmers and writers. I’ve seen blanket statements that Bioware is trash because of one character, that Bioware hates mlm. And I understand people’s rage. It’s disheartening to see these misrepresentations and mistakes in something many of us have spent a decade loving. But I think it’s important to remember that media is not a punch-card machine. We can’t click buttons that say we want men loving men, we want it in space, we want it to be 100% healthy, we want it to reflect our personal lived experience, we want it to treat trauma seriously, we want sarcasm and banter, and oh, throw in a bit of on-screen sex for good measure, and just get a game or a story or a piece of art handed to us that meets all of these desires. Media is created by humans, and informed by the creator’s own perceptions. Someone, somewhere, will create that thing, but they will do it because it’s important to them, personally. Not because someone else demanded it. Consuming media responsibly means that we all have to practice both examining it critically and allowing that media to exist with flaws. And I say this because:

What I very rarely see is people acknowledging that we are in a period of change. That all of us, consumers and creators alike, are learning to redefine how we see the world, and what we deem is acceptable and what is not. We can only work with what each of us has seen, experienced and consumed, and especially on a mainstream level I think it’s important to acknowledge that none of us has a wealth of good representations of, for example, healthy, fully-fleshed-out gay and bi men, to draw from. We don’t have a wealth of fiction that treats heavy topics like rape and child abuse with a sensitive hand. We don’t have generations of books and music and videos that regularly allow women to be complex human characters and not markedly different from their male counterparts. We don’t have a decades-long stretch of Hollywood movies and mainstream western television shows that depict the stories of non-white people as important on their own merits, or that are told in their voices. Instead what we have is pretty much the opposite of these things. And we have all consumed it since infancy. Being a professional writer, artist or game dev does not automatically grant someone access to some new utopia of media and resources to draw from in creating new works. We all have things to unlearn, or to reframe in our minds. And that’s going to be a process. Everyone is going to be in a different place in that process, professional and fan alike. And as part of that process, we’re going to create things that are flawed.

That’s okay. That’s literally how we learn. We have to try. Even rich old white men have to try in order to learn, no matter how much power they have. And if we spend all of our time yelling at creators for their attempts, we will never get the media we want. It won’t happen. We’ll just beat those creators down until they get resentful, and then they’ll stop trying.

Big companies can take that beating. They have the PR machines, they already have respected outlets for communication, they can respond and be heard. They can change their product and be respected for that change. Or, they can essentially press the mute button and keep creating things with exactly the same flaws, and because other people don’t see them yet, they’ll still make money. I don’t think it’s good to give them the beating (I think constructive criticism that lays out several options for improvement will always get us further than angry yelling), but what is most disheartening for me is when I see exactly the same behaviors--the yelling, the declaration that a creator must hate a certain group, etc, directed at fan creators. People who are not making any money, who are creating because they love a thing so much they want to share, and sharing is literally the only reward they get, and who are often very new to the entire process of creating.

There are a few reasons this upsets me. One is, as I said in the previous post, that it spreads fear and doesn’t allow people to learn, and turns new creators away from creating. Holding fans to the same or higher standards as professional media completely devalues them as a person who is in their own process, and it puts the power of deciding what is right and acceptable into the hands of the fan who has the biggest following. It’s not about the quality of their arguments, or the morality of their judgement, it’s about how many friends or hangers-on they have who are completely willing to jump in and bash at someone without even stopping for a moment to consider whether they should. And nowhere in all that gatekeeping do I see people allowed to grow, on either side. Nowhere do I see anyone acknowledge the hypocrisy inherent in hitting someone else for their inability to prepare for every possible audience expectation while never doing any self-examination to acknowledge that person’s point of view or context. Either the attacked party complies and acknowledges that they are the scum of the universe and apologizes, or they are deemed trash, and likely attacked further just to drive the point home. Most of the time no one even tries to just talk to the creator privately first, to resolve things quickly, calmly, and quietly, with mutual respect. Instead I see vagueblogging, or worse, named call-out posts, that villify someone for something they may not even realize is a problem, or that they may know is a probem but have no idea how to fix. I’ve seen it in a few different fandoms for rape and pain-porn stories in the past three weeks. And every time I want to say: “Yes, I get it. These are difficult topics. They affect real people. But. Do you know how long it took me to recognize the rape in Anne McCaffrey’s work? Do you know how long it took me to recognize the toxicity of some of the power dynamics in Tamora Pierce’s work? These are stories I read as a child and loved because they had dragons and magic and kickass women and just enough romance. I had to live more to realize that they had problems, too. Do you remember how long it took you to first recognize the flaws in something you loved? Do you remember how hard it was to look at your own mistakes in your own creations?” Because we can only ever work from what we’ve been exposed to, and if the majority of society and media we’ve been immersed in glorifies rape and devalues women, if it tells us pain is secondary to pleasure, if it tells us that the abused fall in love with their abusers and that makes it okay, that is what we are going to create. Is that a problem? Yes. But it’s a problem created by a culture, not an individual. An individual can change, and as enough of us do, we reshape culture. That’s how society works. And yet, I almost never see anyone in fandom offering resources to help people change to create the culture we want. I don’t see posts that say “hey, if you’re writing about rape, here are some articles that can help you address the physical and psychological effects of it” or “I’ve noticed people writing abusive relationships lately, and I want to offer some notes on both short-term and long-term effects that those relationships can have on people” or “If you’re wanting to write about a POC character, here are some great blogs to check out so you can avoid making caricatures and be respectful of POC’s lived experience” or “here’s a resource list for writers who want to write mlm stories that aren’t based on stereotypes.” I know these things exist. I have seen them in original fiction communities. I’ve written some of them. But in fandom? I just see posts attacking people because they should know better, and telling them not to try until they fit the attacker’s idea of acceptable content. Has everyone just forgotten that they have the power to not engage with content they think is terrible? To cut it out of their experience without drama?

Another reason this whole pattern upsets me is that when I joined fandom, part of its generally acknowledged purpose was to address things that the canon did wrong, or poorly, and to create the content we wanted to see. For example: this is why I write Gil. Because there are many, many problems with his presentation in-game, but I want a story where he has more content, I want more interactions between him and Ryder and him and literally anyone. I want there to be a fun sci-fi story about a gay guy who wants bio-kids and gets to raise them. I want there to be a story about a gay man who has a best friend who’s a woman and to have that not be a potentially abusive and toxic relationship. So I’m writing it. Because I learned pretty early that I couldn’t just wait for the world to hand me the perfect story, and because I know that being shouted at only makes me want to ball up and ignore the whole world somewhere safe. And yet, most of what I see in any fandom these days has more to do with policing than content creation. I see people spending more time shouting at professional writers and each other than they do on making their own content or even supporting content that is what they want to see. Why aren’t we building each other up? Why aren’t we setting examples? Why don’t we offer help? Why aren’t we creating the space we want to live in, instead of expecting others to create it for us? This isn’t just limited to fandom, this is all forms of media. Instead of creating or celebrating good things, a lot of people seem to spend the majority of their time tearing others down. And I’m just left sad and confused, because I don’t understand how anyone thinks that destructive behaviors like fandom policing and gatekeeping and hate-mail are going to result in more cool fun things to enjoy for anyone. Isn’t it exactly the sort of behavior we abhor with things like GamerGate? Why do we emulate this? Do people really think that screaming at someone they know nothing about for a piece of fiction is the best avenue to change things? I can’t imagine that anyone actually finds it fun, and aren’t we here in fandom to have fun? To enjoy ourselves?

Apologies for the wall of text. I thought I was done with this last night, but apparently not. I appreciate the offer, but I’m really okay. Also, @nalufaraday, thank you for your kind comments :) @retro-sci-fi-songbird, I’m sorry to hear that you’ve been so discouraged in your writing. If you ever want someone to look something over for you in private, you’re welcome to contact me. I’ve been there. I hope you do keep writing, because I really do believe that doing more and trying new things is the only way any of us can get better.

And because I know I’m writing this in this very climate, I will say again: I do think people should be notified of problematic behaviors, and why it’s a problem. I just think they should also be offered avenues of change, and granted basic, fallible humanity in the process, and I think that if someone feels the need to call someone else out, they should also be willing to engage in some self-examination of their own. Shaming a writer or artist on the internet about their fictional creation is not the same as punching a nazi who has literally advocated for the death of millions of people. The lone creator on the internet is not a threat unless you make them one, and their flaws do not make the person who attacks them an intrinsically better person. If you cannot be part of a process of learning and growing, in a positive way, the simplest and easiest way to deny power to people you disagree with is to deny them a platform. Block them, warn others that there might be something triggering in their work if you’re feeling especially strongly, and disengage.

And then go make something that reflects the world you want to see.

#dipsykoo #tw: rape mention #tw: child abuse mention #tw: nazi mention #text post #long post

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