finished ff16 :)

nsfw alphabet: kento nanami

warnings: i think the title is a warning in itself. lolol minors go away.

A = Aftercare (what they’re like after sex)

will always clean you up, no matter how tired the two of you are. holds a glass of water to your lips, makes you a snack.

if it’s earlier in your relationship, he’ll ask you what you liked, didn’t like. will also cuddle you till you fall asleep.

B = Body part (their favorite body part of theirs and also their partner’s)

he is an ass man!! no debate about it. even if it’s small, he doesn’t care. very much enjoys groping your ass during sex, and spanking you if you’ve been a brat!!

on himself, he likes his arms. mostly because you like them, and he works hard to maintain them. definitely inflates his ego the slightest bit when you hold onto them as he pounds into you.

C = Cum (anything to do with cum, basically)

if you’re okay with it, he prefers to cum inside you. breeding kink? perhaps. why would he want to let it go to waste :(

D = Dirty secret (pretty self explanatory, a dirty secret of theirs)

Now, Kento is fairly open about what he is into. But it took a lot to get him there!! Especially with being kinkier and rougher, it took a lot of convincing on your part but once he is in, he is in.

E = Experience (how experienced are they? do they know what they’re doing?)

He doesn’t care much for hookups, but let’s not pretend this man didn’t get it in before you. He knows what he’s doing and has no issue showing you that.

F = Favorite position (this goes without saying)

Good old missionary. He’s a simple man. Gives him access to your whole body. Mostly, he likes the intimacy, and being able to see your face.

Also likes putting you in a mating press.

G = Goofy (are they more serious in the moment? are they humorous? etc.)

very serious. sex isn’t a game for him. again with the intimacy.

he loves pillowtalk though and will definitely joke with you a bit afterwards.

H = Hair (how well groomed are they? does the carpet match the drapes? etc.)

he keeps it cleanly trimmed and maintained, duh. we're talking about nanami.

I = Intimacy (how are they during the moment? the romantic aspect)

while kento definitely has his moments of roughness, sex is always intimate with him. you can definitely expect hand-holding, i-love-you's, etc.

J = Jack off (masturbation headcanon)

he's a busy man. didn't do it much before you, and very rarely does it after meeting you.

K = Kink (one or more of their kinks)

teehee.

praise, humiliation, overstimulation, edging. probably definitely has a daddy or sir kink. into light bdsm. prefers being dominant, but might rarely sub if you convince him. would def tie your wrists with his tie, or use it to blindfold you. prefers good girls but is also one hell of a brat tamer.

L = Location (favorite places to do the do)

prefers the privacy of your own home. bedroom is his go to, but he'll bend you over the kitchen counter or spread you out on the couch if he so wishes.

M = Motivation (what turns them on, gets them going)

despite his usual exhaustion, pretty much anything you to gets him going. wearing his clothes, talking passionately about something you love. literally anything.

N = No (something they wouldn’t do, turn offs)

wouldn't want to cause you any pain, besides light spanking/groping/hair-pulling/etc. also not into degradation. he just can't bring himself to do it.

O = Oral (preference in giving or receiving, skill, etc.)

GIVERRRRR!!! this man could live and die with his tongue between your legs. it's a must for him every time the two of you have sex.

P = Pace (are they fast and rough? slow and sensual? etc.)

he's a versatile man. depends on your collective mood.

just had a really nice dinner date together? soft, slow sex for the win.

being a brat? you're not walking in the morning <3

Q = Quickie (their opinions on quickies, how often, etc.)

very rarely. he prefers to take his time but if it's been a while and you're both busy, he'll go for it.

R = Risk (are they game to experiment? do they take risks? etc.)

hmmmm. will def try just about anything you want to, but i don't see him being too risky w/ things like public sex.

S = Stamina (how many rounds can they go for? how long do they last?)

if we're being completely real, he's a working man who is constantly tired. he's probably got two good rounds in him before he's tapping out.

T = Toys (do they own toys? do they use them? on a partner or themselves?)

does kento nanami own toys? is the sky blue? is grass green? obvious answer: yes.

vibrators, dildos, rope/handcuffs, gags, probably even a leash. will also buy anything else you wanna try.

U = Unfair (how much they like to tease)

he might verbally tease you as he's fucking you, but he can't deny you for too long.

like,,,

"does that feel good? yeah? can't even speak, can you?"

"pretty girl wants to cum? you gonna beg for it?"

V = Volume (how loud they are, what sounds they make, etc.)

mostly grunts and groans, especially as he cums. absolutely talks you through it as he should.

W = Wild card (a random headcanon for the character)

wants to record the two of you having sex. (with your full consent of course)

he's away from home a lot, so it'd give him something to use when he's feeling needy

X = X-ray (let’s see what’s going on under those clothes)

i know people like to say their favorite male characters have ginormous dicks but we have to be realistic in size, right?

kento is a solid 7-ish inches, and enough girth to make you feel full. slight upwards curve so each thrusts hits your g-spot.

(i am a whore wow)

Y = Yearning (how high is their sex drive?)

very high sex drive!!! he's just too tired to act on it most of the time.

Z = Zzz (how quickly they fall asleep afterwards

can fall asleep fairly quickly, but will always wait for you to fall asleep first.

⚙️ This laptop was saved from obsolescence! [10 mins of read]

Hello!! i am making this post here to raise awareness for PC and laptop upgrades, and how it should motivate you to do that same thing to preserve yours for longer or to give it the power you need! this will feature my history with mine, as well as the steps i took to be able to make him breathe life better! this is the story of his journey, and how it went to this current day.

his name is samuel, he is an asus fx570u and i bought him back in september of 2018 after i turned 13! he was brand new during that time and priced at 800 euros, offering only 6 gb of memory and an HDD as his specs. however he does have an 8th gen core i5 as his cpu and a geforce 1050 ti for his gpu. for something marketed as a gaming pc, it's pretty low and it wouldn't allow him to run fast enough, especially for highly demanding software and causing some compatibility issues. it wasn't severe, but as i was stuck with an hdd, that meant operating systems would run pretty slow on it, also leading to long software loading times. this is made worse by the fact that its bundled system, windows 10, isn't designed to work efficiently on hdd in the first place, but at least that means i have my hands on a windows key to be able to use some windows exclusive programs..

i mainly used him to be able to use advanced video editing software and customize the games i have on it for my own taste, because back then i loved making youtube videos and it was a passion i've had for years until i've partially retired from it. i rarely bought games on it and instead opted for free-to-plays, and overall had a good time with him.

unfortunately within only 3 months, his HDD broke down and i sent him to technicians for them to replace it with another one. it was a minor accident i've had but it formatted all my data, even though it didn't matter much since i uploaded most of it to the internet. i just had to be gentle with him by trying to not moving him around too much to stop that issue from persisting... but it was still low-end in terms of system performance. i finally used him for 1 year straight before moving on to a tower pc, feeling tired about his slowness and believing i couldn't do much about it.

i used that other (unnamed) pc for almost a year, starting from 2020! they seemed to work better since it had windows 7, but embarrassingly enough that version itself stopped receiving official security updates months before i started using it, even though i was careful while accessing the internet with it. its performances were also low, but didn't really matter much since i didn't take so much advantage from the power of samuel. suddenly, i had the foolish idea of installing windows 8.1 on the latter to try to deal with the performance issues on 10, but it led to even more compatibility issues since the drivers i used were meant to be for 10 only. only by early 2021, i got win10 back on him and started using him again to get more power again.

so the low-end performance persisted for very long. back then i never knew how to upgrade pcs, so i was only used to replacing devices with others which wasn't cost-efficient. after realizing i used windows for well over 10 years, i had the idea of switching to a mac and as a result, for xmas 2021 i got myself a cute yellow silicon imac, who goes by the name of sarah! but switching to macos posed new serious challenges, such as getting used to the lack of windows compatibility and the missing features that i was used to for a long time. most of the creativity i did with her was drawings with firealpaca and krita, and cgi with blender, which wasn't really much. still, she is pretty glossy and also powerful for many of the tasks i'm performing with her. originally i also intended to sell samuel, but that never happened (i low regret that decision so much i swear).

in late 2022, samuel's performance apparently had had a big hit... he now takes approximately 20 seconds to open any program and it seemed to me like something was wrong with him. at that time i also gained interest in linux since it's a libre OS capable of much more flexibility, essentially allowing it to revive old PCs. i finally decided to get linux mint to work on him via a dual boot with win11 (what was i thinking when i "upgraded" him from 10?). the performance seemed a little better from then, but programs still took very long to open. for that reason, he had often been collecting dust as he finally became unusable.

finally we've reached 2023. this is the year i decided to take on tearing down devices to learn how to examine problems inside of them. after checking samuel's performance again, i noticed that his HDD was having extremely low writing and reading speeds compared to my tower, which made me feel disappointed. but that's when i finally decided i could be able to replace his hard disk with an ssd, a new generation which is more durable, faster, quieter and energy-efficient...

but i still had a good wait until it was possible. suddenly with my money, i found an ssd which only costed €30, and it made me happy that this would be a quick way of healing up samuel! so i rushed to get it, and finally opened him to prepare everything... unfortunately, his keyboard has to be lifted up in the process, and there are flex cables connected between it and the motherboard. but taking out the hard disk thankfully only requires a few steps; removing some screws, then inserting the SSD inside of it. after that i quickly put linux mint back into him. SO SPLENDID...

for only the price of a high budget indie game, now he can open programs very fast, close to how fast sarah can do, and just about any task works perfectly well on him with way less bugs! thanks to that fast upgrade he's become viable for daily drives again, even though i don't have other desks suitable for pcs which makes me less motivated to use him. really wish id be able to since the architecture he has (x64) means he has a lot more software he's able to handle natively...

but then, i hadn't upgraded his ram. i said before that he only had 6 gb of it, and that meant he could only work with a few programs before becoming bloated. and as i like doing power tasks on him, that obviously causes problems. so one day, i went to a pc part store out of curiosity, and became shocked when i found small ram carts that could be compatible with my laptop. after some talk with the seller, i bought 2 ddr4 carts each containing 8 gb and clocked at 2666 mhz, more than double of what i used to have. after that it was time to take on a challenge to be able to insert them myself.

when the seller asked me if i needed assistance to have the carts inserted into my laptop, i giggled internally because of my past stories with learning how to open devices and trying to troubleshoot or modify them internally. i obviously declined it which saved me money, but also meant i had to do it all myself. after an hour of painful manipulations which required me to take out the entire motherboard from samuel, while that next step was also difficult i was finally able to insert the carts into it, before placing all his components back into place. and after such a long time of waiting...

i've finally done it!

Samuel is feeling very well right now!! despite his cpu and gpu dating from over 5 years, now he can do even more tasks at a time, while also being able to read them faster, a massive improvement compared to when it was stuck with an hdd and only 6 gb of ram. i'm guessing those low specs were for the purpose of saving manufacturing costs, but until you'd find use for the components that you'd remove, they'd end up becoming waste. and with a free os like linux mint, it adds up to an even more optimized experience than windows 10, which comes with so many unwanted stuff and can't be customized very well.

have you had a similar story to mine? did that pose you challenges? i took over 40 minutes to write this entire piece of text, but it should at least be very well detailed! on the best case scenario i hope it would inspire others to do some research on upgrading PCs to preserve their lives and especially save costs. Thank you for reading the entirety of it, don't hesitate reblogging it if you think it would interest your own audience! peace for all of you 💙

To recount a twitter story, Kenny Lauderdale posted this very normcore review of the English release of Gainax VN Princess Maker 2 from the May 1996 edition of the (Michigan) Times Herald:

It includes some great quotes, like Japanese professor Etsuko Yamashita believing its existence is a step back for feminism - very amusing given how gender-equal the player base for these games is today! Time marches past us all. Sometimes for the better - it cost $140 in Japan on release!?

But what I found interesting was the art featured - because that isn't Princess Maker 2?

This is PM2, that girl above is not our player-named protagonist.

Turns out that is art is from Princess Maker 3:

You can see specific scenes like the beach as well, in case you had any doubt. This is weird though because, well, Princess Maker 3 came out in January of 1997? More than half a year after this article was published! Which means they somehow had access to promotional material for Princess Maker 3? Which to be clear absolutely did exist at the time - in fact, Princess Maker 3 was bought up by Sony as a limited release for their brand-new console the Playstation. PM3 was actually featured on the cover of the first ever volume of the Dengeki Playstation magazine, released in January of 1995 (the PS1 coming out in December 1994):

Alas I haven't found a copy of this scanned online, so I can't say what it contained. This being two years before the game's release does honestly point to some development hell drama, the timeline for a game back then should not be that lengthy. Man, wonder what was happening at Gainax in 1995 that might have been a distraction...

Still, we have a question of how this American newspaper article got their hands on them. It also seems worthwhile to note that this article is syndicated - it was published in a dozen newspapers across the country around this time, but with different titles and photos to fit each paper's needs. And other papers do have correct Princess Maker 2 screenshots on them!

I have no grand answer here or anything, sorry guys, but I think we can infer it. The article itself actually mentions that a "third one" is now in the works, which is something they would have learned from the publisher of the English version, IntraCorp (they weren't reading Japanese press magazines in 1996!). IntraCorp likely wanted them to mention it because they themselves were going to hopefully license it, assuming the first (well, second) one was successful - this was their first foray into this specific licensing niche, previously making action games like Witchaven II: Blood Vengeance. In early 1996 they sent out copies & press kits to reviewers, and I am guessing that copy almost certainly included - perhaps poorly labeled - promotional material for Princess Maker 3 as well that Gainax had provided them, so they would mention it in the article and seed hype. The harried layout editor at The Times Herald opened the wrong folder and threw them on the page by mistake - after all the author didn't work for him, he worked for the Associated Press. He had no experience with the game to know his error.

We will never know because this is a niche curiosity from almost 30 years ago, sure, but we will also never know because the game being reviewed above...was never released! IntraCorp declared bankruptcy soon after the publication of this article. They were not the localizers themselves - a team of 4 people called SoftEgg were - but their contract with them was binding enough that it left the virtually-finished translated copy in perpetual legal limbo. Eventually it was leaked onto the internet as a form of abandonware a few years later. The hard-working men of America never got to be "Sim Dad" in 1996 unless they were intrepid enough to be UseNet Forum users hunting down and running Japanese-language romhacks.

Which is not a hypothetical, that was occurring. I will leave you all with the opening quote from the rec.arts.anime group's User Manual for navigating your Nihongo copy of Princess Maker 2, preserved still in the roms you can download today:

We all know of Gainax as being the wonderful company that brought us Wings of Honneamise, Otaku no Video as well as multitudes of garage kits and other paraphenelia. However with the release of Princess Maker 2, one might think that their true calling is in computer software! This band of self described otakus which managed to lose almost all their profits in the anime business have come back by releasing several computer games (some of which were on display at Anime Con).

...written, of course, in 1994 :)

Looking at your Downloads page, I see you have a section entitled "Terms of Uses", in which you have numerous restrictions on how players may use your CC. I was wondering where you think you get the right to restrict usage of your material, since EA owns all rights to anything made for Sims games. Additionally, and in particular, the Sims 3 EULA specifically says that there can be no restrictions on how players use each others CC (section 2B4). Why do you think these laws don't apply to you?

Hey there,

First things first: I get why people ask others about this. I really do. But I think we sometimes forget that, TOUs, from a *legal* perspective, are incorrectly set up. (with other words, even with my TOU, I could technically never send a DMCA claim as the setup is incorrect).

We shouldn't forget that creator TOUs are there from a more morally correct perspective. My personal feelings on people just grabbing my items, especially meshes I meshed without asking, and then claiming as their own is just a dick move. Whether the EULA allows it or not. In the end, we're a community. Not a company.

Conversions on the other hand, that i've done (which my TOU does say) you can do all you'd like with it, as I don't own those meshes/textures at all. All rights reserved there.

Now, diving into the contract:

Section 2B4 says the following:

B. Contributing Content through The Sims 3 Launcher (Emphasis on LAUNCHER here)

(...) 4. In exchange for the right to use content contributed by other users through the Software, when you contribute content through the Software, you expressly grant to other users of the Software the non‐exclusive, perpetual, transferable, worldwide, irrevocable right to access and use, copy, modify, display, perform, and create and distribute derivative works from, your contributed content in connection with the Software, and to distribute and otherwise communicate your contributed content as a component of works that they create using the Software, for example, The Sims lots or The Sims videos, without further notice, attribution or compensation to you. You hereby waive any moral rights of paternity, publication, reputation, or attribution under applicable law with respect to EA’s and other players’ use and enjoyment of such content contributions in connection with the Software.

(SOURCE: https://media.contentapi.ea.com/content/dam/eacom/en-us/eula/eula-the-sims-3-row-pc-11-2015.pdf)

The way I, personally, understand it, and I read Copyrighting & Rights documents A LOT for my work and often confirm my findings with a third party, is:

It has to be content that's from and to the Launcher. Specifically with the exchange website in mind. We're talking Lots, Sims, Sims3pack store items. Videos recorded from TS3 > The sims 3 Launcher. Screenshots even. This is what this section specifically refers to.

The content needs to have come in a Sims3Pack specifically. Package files cannot be installed through the launcher, and therefore rules this part of the contract out as a potential illegal move. In fact, reading the full contract, it's a very gray area in said contract.

The "Software" (The sims 3) can't make meshes for you. It can't make textures, it can't make a script mod for you, but what it can make is the following within the game itself to share: Lots, Sims, Worlds (well, the TS3 Worlds EULA would come into play here, which is practically the same as TS3's), CASPart presets (So NOT CASparts), Patterns (again, TS3 Pattern tool EULA, assuming you didn't use a third party tool for this instead). Sharing "Objects" (in the sense of simply Presets), Pets and "Tattoos" (in the sense that, within CAS, you save your "Layered" tattoos and then share it on the exchange). With other words, the things you download OR share from/to the exhange, but not limited to third party websites, where the content also has to be installed through the Launcher. Those are the people you want to talk to, when they're complaining that people are modifying their Sims3packaged Sim/Lot. I'm the wrong target for this EULA honestly and sending this ask to.

In fact, just to do other people some favours, let's go through the whole Section B in a summarised, humanly readable way (Remember this is for the LAUNCHER)

EA/Origin account grants you the ability to download/upload from and to the launcher and it's websites (The Exchange for example)

Don't upload copyrighted stuff to the Exchange. EA has the rights to remove them then.

EA can use your lots/sims/presets of CASparts/objects in their promotion materials. As well as your images and videos even. You automatically grant permission to this once you share it to an EA website. (The Exchange)

See above.

The part that I do find interesting, and I know TS2's EULA had the same thing, is the following (I bolded the interesting part):

2. Intellectual Property Rights and Ownership. A. Reservation of Rights. You have purchased a limited license to the Software and your rights are limited to the license grant above and subject to this License. You may not otherwise copy, display, distribute, perform, publish, modify, or use the Software or any component of it. You are prohibited from making a copy of the Software available on a network where it could be used or downloaded by multiple users. Except as expressly licensed to you herein, EA and its licensors, as applicable, owns and reserves all right, title and interest in the Software, and all related data, characters, themes, objects, storyline, images, photographs, graphics, animations, video, music, text, and the associated copyrights, trademarks, moral rights and other intellectual property rights therein. This License is limited to the intellectual property rights of EA and its licensors in the Software and does not include any rights to other patents or intellectual property. Except to the extent permitted under applicable law, you may not decompile, disassemble, reverse engineer or created derivative works of the Software by any means whatsoever. You may not remove, alter, or obscure any product identification, copyright, or other intellectual property notices in the Software. All rights not expressly granted herein are reserved to EA

Now, you may think the term "Created Derivative works" must mean specifically modified meshes, but I'm guessing this was actually put in for in case someone is modifying Speed tree trees.

Besides, the meaning is:

Derivative work refers to a copyrighted work that comes from another copyrighted work. Copyrights allow their owners to decide how their works can be used, including creating new derivative works off of the original product.

Regarding the part of software modification: Third-party tools (such as S3PE) would seriously edge the line here, contract speaking. They don't have disassembled/reverse engineered code of the "Software" but they do create a copy of the content(s) in memory. (Think: meshes, textures, reading of package files)

The contract, however, is in this section extremely vague for a court to figure out whether they also mean textures/meshes taken from the game and modified as an override.

So if I have some feedback for their lawyers who wrote this, here you go :p. Though, let's be honest, the contract is only set up with EA's services in mind. I actually think those are the huge shortcomings in this contract.

Sorry this got so long. But I've had these talks SO often, that it's getting a bit tiring.

Please PLEASE PLEASE send the contract first to a third party that has a degree in law (which I have done, to someone who does international laws & Software laws), before sending asks like these. I know you mean it out of goodwill, I really do, but it's simply incorrect the way you're interpreting it.

my whb progress

as of nov. 11, 2023

i feel like i should've done this when i finished chapter 4 like weeks ago but better late than never ig

general info

lvl: 31

status: f2p

when i started: launch (10/03 my timezone)

ver: erolabs

team setup

post-halloween event my team consists of 5 light chars, 1 some other element (usually either leraye, belial, or paimon)

before that though i did use marbas before minhyeok, though sadly i'll probably rarely use marbas or any of the healers in the future since the artifacts when they work properly heal faster :')

here's my team in action!

here's everyone with their lvls and artifacts!

skill lvls: (normal attack-ultimate-passive)

mammon (cake): 4-4-4

mammon (selfie): 1-3-1

satan (selfie): 1-4-1

beelzebub (selfie): 1-3-1

leraye: 1-3

minhyeok: 1-3

secret club

i mainly focus on mammon, so i'll just be showing those here. i'm 1 story away from completing mammon (cake)'s and 2 stories away from completing mammon (selfie)'s!

materials

i do the absolute bare minimum for dailies and weeklies nowadays. since most of my chars are higher than lvl20 i've just been focusing on unholy board for most of the time i've been playing. as much as i wanna focus on skills i'm kinda held back by the game's very limited access to pies (you can only get them in shop + it's the rng boxes most of the time). hopefully there'll be more options to get pies that aren't purely dependent on rng in the future 😔🙏

i also wish candies weren't rng either, or there is rng but also an option to exchange one type of candy for another. as shown above i have absolutely way too many candies for the other kings and almost none for mammon :'))) the grind truly never ends

overall thoughts / reflection

this section is just something for me to look back on when i do a progress post again in the future. i'll break this down into sections so i can stay consistent with laying out all my thoughts. also this won't be spoiler-free

STORY

i find it somewhat interesting? i can't really put in a bunch of input since we've only explored one of the many areas of hell. i set my game to have a male mc, and there's still a lot of issues with making pronouns consistent :'). i do have a few cgs missing despite completing all the chapters that are out currently but those missing ones might be for future chapters so idk (kinda bothers me a bit to see missing cgs despite completing everything). unholy board stories are also ok? it's pretty tedious to get through so many objectives for only a little bit of story and also all the h-scenes and devil's tango bits in unholy board stories are written like they were made for wattpad lol

GAMEPLAY

tl;dr very tedious lol

addressing the elephant in the room, i'm aware there's still a lot of bugs. i won't be going too in-depth about them since they're only temporary and didn't make that much of a significance towards my overall gameplay so far (aside from the leather gloves not working, but that got fixed in the halloween patch).

i'm glad we have autoclear in resource stages but i wish we had autoclear in story stages as well (and in the future event stages too). it would also be nice if there was an autoplay feature, though that's more of a personal preference since a lot of games i play have that option and i don't get bored from doing everything manually.

the 6-7 stages in chapter 4 seemed a bit unnecessary? the story itself is rather short so i guess i can understand why they would wanna pan out as much playtime as possible, but at a certain point it does get really boring and demotivating to progress. it also sets a certain precedent for future chapters, if the battles in between each small bit of story keep slowly increasing how many stages will chapter 10 have? chapter 20? i honestly would've preferred 3 battles in between each story, or if you're gonna have 5 battles in between each story, have some of the story in those battles. aside from the tutorial, an example would be in chapter 3 right as the angels attacked the hospital and mammon took mc out with him to fight (3-73). those battles could've 1. gave a tutorial on how to use mammon and 2. talk about how strong he is like in the story right after those battles (3-79).

on a different note, i wish the "meta" wasn't so skewed towards all the l cards. as i progressed through the story i would look up guides on bilibili, only to find that most if not all the guides are heavily dependent on l cards (and levi which is the only king i don't have 💀💀), only non-l card would usually be leraye 💀. it also feels a bit unbalanced considering light and dark are usually the recommended element for every battle and can go against literally every element including their own. i wish there would be more opportunities for other elements and characters to shine and hold up well so that even if you don't have certain l cards, you can progress through the game just as well as those with the certain l cards

RESOURCES

i briefly mentioned this while going through the materials i currently have but i wish a lot of them weren't so rng heavy. it really adds to making the game tedious especially when you have to level multiple devils of the same element. having a resource stage for candies and pies would be great. it would also be great to not make everything so expensive ㅠㅠ 116 gems for one (1) candy?? a multi of red keys costing almost 2k gems?? atp i just focus on leveling up rather than getting pulls

GACHA

after the whole 'minhyeok needing yellow keys' situation i've just been hoarding keys and using gems on stuff like ap since i have nothing else to really use them for aside from pies. the gacha rates seem really,,,, sad, and the fact that the bloodshed cards banner is p2w only sucks, which kind of makes me worry for future cards being released. i got pretty lucky with getting both mammon's signature artifacts, as it's one of the requirements to progress through unholy board, but other than that i never really had the best of luck with any of my pulls. i got minhyeok at hard pity, and it took idek how long to get leraye, my conclusion is just that my luck sucks in this game lol

I'm feeling that some ppl interpretate the [man hurt → fascist] like we can't hold men and patriarchy accountable for the process. like "oh if you didn't hurt him he wouldn't have descended into fascism in the first place". and i truly need these ppl to give a closer look into the processes and institutions.

bc it's not coincidental that these men go to fascism and conservative spaces and ideologies, it's not something that happens to happen. and i feel like a lot of ppl are blaming marginalized and oppressed groups for feeling enraged and not wanting to be around others that reproduce oppression in the first place, like everything wasn't a consequence of a system that constantly sustains individuality and those behaviors towards them (marginalized groups)

like, it's kinda obvious when you see the bigger picture. but on a smaller level, some responses to, for example, barbie and ken relationship in the recent movie, or snow and lucy gray. yeah it's funny "the boy was heartbroken and became a fascist" at first bc it's so absurd, but then when a bunch of ppl start to take that seriously i get... concerned.

the barbie movie had a clear premise, yes, and the mirroring of the real world to barbieland is there. no, kens shouldn't be invisible and maybe we shouldn't focus on a capitalist and liberal society in the first place, but ken relying on patriarchy isn't supposed to be taken on a simplistic way. if we take the mirroring aspect, the way ken take patriarchy is WAY different than the way women take counterculture movements, especially considering that feminism is about equality and not matriarchy. SO it's not to be taken on a superficial level, there's a reason why men go to patriarchy in the first place bc men does not grow in a women dominant world. the way women use feminism is not the same way ken used patriarchy. feminism should be a movement that also targets capitalism, and so yes (surprise) the approach on the movie was white and neoliberal.

although you can to use your access in information (internet) to go deeper into other ways to approach the topic, the hunger games one makes me much more concerned. because a lot was very clear. other things i think should've been more clear, like the way coriolanus despised lucy and sejanus very much in the book (we know why they didn't make that more obvious tho). but essentially i think there's more discussion to have in more complex ways in this story. bc it shows how one thing is connected to the other, how the stuff do not go alone.

the way he acted towards lucy and his subsequent response to her not complying to what he wanted makes it clear how he didn't descended into conservative ideology from nowhere. since the beginning he felt like the world owned him something, like he deserved more (and I'm not talking ab just his financial situation, although that is linked too). bc his father was a great army man, and they were from a dominant space before the districts dared to rebel, and so he had this thing being reaffirmed all the time - how he didn't had what he was supposed to have, this greatness. and ppl bully him for it, they make fun of him and that makes him feel more wronged. so when lucy gray does not accept what he wanted, when she realizes what their life would be and runs away, he goes to the thing that was there all along. it wasn't a new outside thing, it was present in his life since the beginning, it was there before him, and ppl would say that it's simply human nature so... why wouldn't he go along with it?

i think the barbie movie did a good job when they showed that barbie putting ken aside wasn't right and it came connected with her alienating herself from her existence. but the movie didn't show how everything is connected to the systems and the economic, social and cultural structures, the movie does not try to show how maintaining the system will continue to do harm, or how the hierarchy system it's the problem in itself. it goes so far into saying that "someday maybe the kens will have as much influence as women have in the real world" but does not provide the first step to dismantling the culture that has been fucking everything up since 16th century (at minimum) - again, very white and neoliberal.

but THG saga shows us how everything is linked. and so seeing ppl putting it on a simplistic way makes me very concerned and confused bc... IT'S THERE. and it's not subtext, it's not implied, IT'S THERE. OPEN AND EXPLICT AND WELL EXPLAINED IN 4 BOOKS/MOVIES.

anyway that was a big rant, thanks for coming to my tedtalk

What do you think about asoryuu?

Oh boy, this one's going to be a bit loaded, so here's a bit of a preemptive apology for a ramble/word vomit/rant on my end. Suffice to say ASRY is a NoTP for me. When I was first getting into DGS all the way back in 2019/20, I was a bit ambivalent towards the ship. I had only watched a playthrough of the first game, and I had the feeling that Kazuma was going to come back, but the ship didn't really scream to me at that point, and it kind of befuddled me to see how it was so popular (and a bit of a tangent, I think people only really ship the 1-1 dynamic, but that's a convo for another day). If you even look at the header of my blog, it is no secret that I ship Ryuususa, and it is my OTP. When I had watched the fifth case on the playthrough, I was sold on that ship, and the last moments really sealed the deal for me-- there's something really compelling about the goodbye scene between Susato and Ryuunosuke at the docks, and the localization legitimately made me cry (happy tears of course!) Being a little naive, I started to post about it and I got... a LOT of harassment calling me a lot of names/accusing me of being okay with a lot of really horrible things (intrusive thoughts WHOOOOOOP). The harassment was so bad that I only recently opened up to my therapist about what had happened, and I was pulling away from servers/people I thought I was friends with/wouldn't treat me horribly. I found a lot of solace with people who were also violently harassed pre-localization (shout out to the Baroryuu community, you all were really kind to me, and I am proud to also be a Baroryuu lover <3), when I say it was drama filled pre localization, I mean it. I can even point out when my harassment started to March of 2021 when someone on twitter said not to read my dgs fics since I was a proshipper (I hadn't even called myself that at this point, and honestly I don't really use that title [idk how else to describe it lol], but I do follow that philosophy and call myself anti-harassment), and since I hadn't had a twt at that time, they linked to my ao3, and since I put my tumblr on my fics, I got a LOT of disturbing anons. Even when I made my server, I used to have a link that anyone could click on (word of the day is naive lmaooo), and I got a lot of creeps coming in trying to surveil the server and make sure their friends weren't in it (one person was even trying to get access to the nsfw section which was FUN). After reading this, you're probably thinking "what does this have to do with ASRY?". A lot of the major bullies in fandom HEAVILY shipped ASRY, and would harass people who shipped other ships (Baroryuu and Asobaro shippers were racist, Homuryuu shippers were okay with incest because of that stupid "greatest family in the world" line, etc.). All in all, it came with a lot of entitlement and anger that other peopled DARED not to ship that ship. Those sorts of people really tainted the ship for me. As for the ship itself, I can definitely see why people love it a lot (especially 1-1), but I really didn't like Kazuma in 2-4/5. I found him to be really particularly awful and obtuse (which, makes perfect sense in the story! Who wouldn't be in his position?). I was also mad that he only said ONE (1!!!) thing to Susato when he got his memories back (despite HER recognizing him and getting the ball rolling), and it was basically "Thanks for helping out my friend, bye!" (#justiceforsusato lol). Even at the end of the game, I still was mad at Kazuma and didn't really like him. It's only due to my friends (namely @leafyemeralds and her VERY GOOD TAKES in our convos) that I eventually started to warm up to him. Now he's my personal punching bag to Atone(tm) XD I suppose TL;DR I'm not a big Kazuma fan, harassment made me really dislike the ship, so I don't ship it (also, can ASRY shippers tag their stuff? this is more of a problem on twitter, but it happens on tumblr. Filters can only work if they're there =3=)

Thinking about it, fashion dreamer would have been a FANTASTIC $10 game. We're in the time of crazy inflation so really $25. I could see a greedy company pricing it at $35. Any more thought and it's just not worth it.

I love fashion dreamer, but there's not a lot of content. What is there is fun, but in like Style Savvy even without the story you'd still get to do characters hair and makeup and nails and pick out bags for them and scarves and bracelets and give them a WHOLE look. In fashion dreamer you JUST give them outfits.

The scoring system in fashion dreamer IS REALLY bad like it's not at all clear what counts for what category. Which is frustrating when it was crystal clear in style savvy.

The UI is clunky.

WTF were they thinking with "Type A" and "Type B"???? I'm not the only one to complain about this. But seriously it was done so poorly. It's clearly just men and women but late in development someone said "fuck make it gender inclusive". but they didn't change anything but the wording used. Ideally they would have not had types at all. But if they wanted to keep types they needed to make two versions of every item when modeling them. Some misinformed people are saying this isn't possible or is more work. But news flash, every item in this game was made from scratch. It was THEIR CHOICE to make completely separate items during modeling. They very well could have had their employees make two versions of each piece. Someone on the directors board didn't want it that way. Yeah they can't change it NOW but it's frustrating that they're pretending to be inclusive when it's very clear that from the games launch this wasn't in its design.

The game lags when you get more items, but also encourages you to get as many items as possible, but also has a 5000 item cap because of the lag.

I hate the online component lol I wasn't expecting this to be a 100% social game where you're missing content if you're not online ig. I just do notttttt want to interact with strangers in a game like this.

At the same time customers are currently pissed because the first event broke the servers so they took it down and it's been weeks and it's not back up. IMO limited events in a full price game like this is FUCKED, but they're ALSO online mode exclusive (that's so fucked!) so I can't even access the content.

It kinda seems like the reason it's not back is because staff went on Christmas break. If so ..... ooof

ALSO items from the event are fucking SINGLE USE. ?????????? this is a paid game what the fuck. Why are their single use anything? Why are events time limited? If you buy the game late you'll never get these items despite PAYING for them.

I wasn't really expecting much from the updates but really we should treat them like they don't exist. The first one just had two QOL features that should have been at launch. And with that in mind this is not a full priced game. It's not worth more than $25. This isn't the first time we've gotten a shallow, unfinished, and presumablypresumably rushed game from marvelous. and it probably won't be the last. I officially do not trust that team whatsoever. I doubt synsophia provided anything for the game other than the fashion itself, and maybe the NPCs, because the rest of it doesn't feel like their product in the way style savvy or PriMagi arcade does. I wish they didn't partner with them.

Like obviously me and everyone else wishes this was a style savvy game instead. But even without that, I wish this game had more soul. I also wished it felt finished? The actual gameplay loop feels finished but the UI does not. Not having all of the basic sort functions from Style Savvy (color / Item type / style) makes the game feel like a beta test. I stopped playing because someone will ask for red shoes and I have to scroll for 45 seconds to find them while I watch everything slowly pop in.

The removal of money and buying items in quantities is a blow to depth too, because in Style Savvy someone would ask for a cool shirt and you have to hope you still have one in stock. Meanwhile in fashion dreamer this is only a problem for the first hour before you have enough of everything.

Like style savvy had more AND had a story. frustrating. Again I don't mind no story, I get that that's better for modern audiences. But they lost me because of lack of depth everywhere else. ugh

I don't hate this game! I think it's a cute small play once a week or once a month pickup for 2 minutes game. But that's NOT how it's priced. I also think they're REALLY REALLY REALLY fumbling how they're handling events. If they wanted to handle events the way they are right now they game needed to be free to play.

Author's Notes: Chapter 37 (Swing and a Miss)

And I'm back! Again, this chapter took a little bit longer to come out due to other commitments. But I'm pretty proud of how this one turned out nonetheless.

While I always planned on having Hol Horse have an inner monologue about intending to ditch the group at Chicago IX, some of the context of this scene had to be redone from my initial outline because, as discussed previously, him leaving here wasn't part of my original plan. That being said, it did end up going well with the golf setting.

Okay, for some context. About a year ago while I was still planning this arc, @allshaftsfall played Five Nights at Freddy's: Security Breach on stream with the intent of 100%ing the game. One of the game's achievements calls for you to get a low score on the minigolf minigame, centered around the alligator animatronic Monty. Shaft lost his mind trying to get this achievement. "Gator Golf" has since become something of a meme between us and our friends (most of which are probably reading this right now; hi!), and I knew I had to incorporate it into Iron Touch somehow. This informed several different things about the chapter, like Screaming Jay's appearance, Mr. Williams' golf clubs, and the moment where Mr. Williams is disappointed he didn't get a hole in one. I mean, hey, I was already doing a resort/beach arc anyways. Those places usually have golf courses.

That being said, the golf course itself did end up changing a bit from start to finish. I originally planned on having it be a glow in the dark putt putt course like Gator Golf (which is, in my objectively correct opinion, the superior form of golf), but decided against it because I liked the visual of the sun setting as the chapter progresses, symbolizing Hol Horse losing all his options to go out with someone else (and drawing us closer to the next chapter). My next thought was to make the golf course feel "alive" somehow; like maybe slopes would form in the ground that would guide the ball to the hole or something. I decided against that because I felt like it made it seem like I was trying to hard to make Chicago IX feel like this weird, cryptid location that bends the rules of reality. We already have the giant spider car wash portal, we don't need a living golf course. I considered making this Mr. Williams' Stand ability instead, but I couldn't think of a good "mechanism" for how it would activate. The physicality of Stands is very important to me; the Stand can't just "do thing" because the user wants them to. There's gotta be something the Stand does that makes it work, or have it be part of the Stand's design. Plus, I wanted Mr. Williams' Stand to be less obviously tied to golf. Eventually I just settled on having it be a plain old golf course.

Mr. Williams' half-afro hairstyle was inspired by a picture of a real person I found online (where someone was arrested mid haircut), but is also meant to symbolize how the stress of running Chicago IX is causing him to lose his hair. I also liked how it split down the middle, like how his Stand does.

"What kind of a person just walks around with cough drops in their pocket?" Me. I'm person.

Here's a video of what the club flip would look like, if you're curious.

I rewrote the paragraph where Screaming Jay activates like two times in order to really sell the gross out factor of it. Iron Touch needs more body horror in it! I mean...not like this is the last bit of body horror we'll see this arc. Teehee.

Originally I was very hesitant on adding an animal Stand user to Iron Touch because I didn't know what else I could do with the idea that Araki hadn't already done himself. I didn't want to make an animal Stand user just because, I wanted the fact that the character is an animal be relevant to the story. While I suppose you could replace Lucky with an old and or terminally ill human, I think the narrative of Mr. Williams restructuring Chicago IX around Random Access Memories works much better when it's his pet and not another human. I also didn't want Chicago IX's owner to be Random Access Memories' user because I thought the narrative of seeking out supernatural abilities for personal gain was too similar to Depeche.

I had to fight every fiber in my body to not have Hol Horse say "Do me a favor and shut the fuck up" instead of "Do me a favor and shut the hell up." Even in a post Stone Ocean-dub society, I'm still only allowing myself one F-bomb in the fic, and I shan't waste it here!

Shit's gonna start going down next chapter :)

Music references:

Brackish, the resident brainwasher that Mr. Williams mentions, is named after a song of the same name by Canadian heavy metal band Kittie. Originally this character had a generic name; making it a music reference was a last minute change made literally as I wrote these author's notes. I like the implication of Brackish being important enough to warrant a music reference.

Mr. Williams is a weird one. Two of the collaborators on the album Random Access Memories were Pharrell Williams and Paul Williams (not related to each other). They're "co-references" of sorts. I'll add a Pharrell song to the playlist just to prevent things from getting too cluttered, but think of them both when you listen. Plus, I felt that the name William would be very fitting for a Fnaf inspired chapter.

Mr. Williams' beta name was Screaming Jay. My initial idea for him was for him to constantly be whispering despite his name, maybe have him lash out into a yelling fit when he starts rambling, but I decided against it because that wouldn't show up well in the prose.

Screaming Jay was named after American singer Screamin' Jay Hawkins. Honestly, I just wanted to put I Put a Spell On You on the playlist. Sadly, the Hocus Pocus version isn't on Spotify.

Screaming Jay's beta name was The Romantic, after the American rock band The Romantics. This was another Fnaf reference; since their song Talking In Your Sleep was used extensively during promotional material for the movie. However, once I actually got to writing the chapter, I realized that I hated the sound of the name and decided to change it to something else.

Lucky was named after the song Get Lucky from the album Random Access Memories.

Witchy Timez: Origins

Part Five & the art-style so good it's supernatural

Welp I finally got to playing Origins a while back. Finished it a week or two ago. I wanted to add it to my other Bayonetta rambles (listed at the end) but I wasn't sure what to add really.

I found the game good and very pretty. It's art-style is genuinely it's greatest asset. They wanted to portray it like it was a storybook and they did it so well that it's hard to put into words.

Gameplay was fine too. I had a few personal issues at most.

Game-Play(ed)

My biggest complaint was the lack of a mini-map. I felt the game needed one badly. I was opening the menus to view the map every few minutes and got lost more than once.

Which, yes, is a bit funny because the purpose of the Avalon Forest is to be a maze but it can leave you frustrated if you plan to track down all the items and Wisps.

My second issue was a very personal and nitpicky one. I didn't like Cheshire's forms by the end of the game. It got a tad annoying to swap repeatedly when I'm having to control both he and Cereza at once.

Had I no experience with TWEWY in my youth I imagine I'd be even more annoyed with the set up there. That said, I do like the abilities so rather than forms I wish Cheshire had abilities rather than forms.

Something to streamline the annoyance of color-coded enemies regardless of how lite they are used.

Hell, I wouldn't even have this complaint at all if I had free access to unbound Cheshire after you complete the game. His unbound form is what I would prefer in this situation.

They'd have to nerf it compared to the unbound form naturally but it would be a welcome idea....watch someone comment that you can unlock unbound Cheshire as soon as I post this.

Dat Story

I don't even know what to say on a base level here. The story was solid given what we've seen of young Cereza in Bayonetta 1. Watching her befriend a newborn demon is cute even if their squabble arc could be seen a mile ahead.

It also makes you genuinely curious about the fairies as a facet of the Bayonetta universe. Several things in this game make you more curious about the Bayo-verse in fact.

Such as Prince Lukaon, Morgana, and the whole unseen backstory of the fairy kings. The whole nature of the mischievous creatures is fascinating and they offer an odd parallel to humanity.

Hell, let's just dive into the broader strokes of that multiverse.

The magical & non-magical

As we learned in Bayonetta 1 & 2, humanity itself is weak. They lack magic and die easily. They only gained a semblance of power through Aesir's mercy but even then they couldn't do much.

The whole reason Lumen Sages & Umbra Witches form pacts with Heaven & Hell is to gain power. Their magic is tied to that and their soul is the cost they pay.

But like I mentioned in a previous post, the world of chaos is fittingly full of parallel timelines and pocket dimensions because it is, by definition, without solid order.

There is a future for every human there is to shape that future. Purgatory itself only exists as a pocket space between Chaos, Heaven, and Hell.

However, as if to exist in counterbalance, Chaos does have it's own form of magical being, the Fae. We don't know where they came from nor do we know which timeline they hide in.

Going by Bayo 3 and Origins they seem to pick specific worlds to hide in implying they have a means to jump them. It's possible that Avalon Forest itself branches into more than one world given how it feels as if it's a world unto itself when you play Origins.

Vast enough to have warring kingdoms and kings. Countries hidden in illusions. It's all very fascinating stuff and I find myself hoping to see more of it....well with caveats.

Baoynetta 3's Shadow

You know I would have to bring it up when it's shown that this Cereza is the younger version of Bayo 3. If you complete the Jeanne chapter you even see ol' Singularity himself. We also see that this Jeanne is the one that'll die in the third game.

This...did not sit right with me. Many others praise this reveal because they feel it fixed some of Bayonetta 3's story but I had the opposite impression. It felt like patch work, a band-aid.

Just like Bayo 3 it also opens up other cans of multiverse worms. Such as Prince Lukaon and his relationship with King Lukaon and every version of Luka to exist ever.

How can the king of Fae be Luka's variant if the prince Lukaon died? There's several ways theorize theorize that question of course but it's the question existing at all that kind annoys me.

Is Luka the prince's reincarnation? The game does make a note to point out the unknown destination of fairies when they die. Is King Lukaon a version of the prince that lived to adulthood? Probably.

Then there's the question of this backstory. The extra chapter makes it explicit that this is bayonetta 3 Cereza as she's referred to by the 3rd games villain via the name "Arch-Eve Origin".

Yet, the issue of Bayo 3's ending splitting the previous titles crops up. Sure, we know that young Cereza in Bayo 1, this Cereza from Origins, and the Bayo 3 Cereza are the same person.

But what about Cheshire? Why does Viola have Cheshire when it's made clear she's not this specific Cereza's daughter. Does Cheshire have variants due to being a young demon or is he just a single demon that's partial to Bayonetta in all forms due to his experiences?

Hell, does this backstory also apply to the Cereza of Bayo 1 & 2? Does it apply to even more such as Beta Cereza (viola's mother)?

From what I can tell the devs are being smart enough not to clarify but I do think this makes Bayo 3 messier in ways. It doesn't harm this games story or fun to me.

These questions only really pop up if you've played Bayo 3 and the Jeanne chapter....

THEN THERE WAS THE FUCKING EYES

I was trying to ignore it but I can't. I had a whole separate post for these eyes because it's a personal irk of mine. Do they still exist? Don't they?!

Sure, this is in the past. We saw Baldur regain his right eye once he was thrown back to his proper time but that just amplifies the headache!

On the one hand, her having the eye still explains how she defeated a fully matured witch BUT ON THE OTHER WHY IS IT STILL HERE?

To hell with arch-eve's. If the eyes still exist then Singularity is a fucking fool for not trying to claim them. Arch-Eve's & Adams may be a way to collapse the timelines but by hell the eyes are the objects of a god.

They MADE that world of Chaos. They briefly gave it order. He could find a timeline, steal the eyes, and be done. The eyes and eves existing in tandem adds to the headache. I don't understand if they were erased from one timeline or all of them.

Do they just cease to exist in the present due to Bayo 2? If they persist regardless then why have this stupid Arch-eye plot? Just go for the fucking eyes.

The worst part is that I'm unsure I even want an answer. The multiverse as presented in Bayonetta 3 hasn't been that well done and even this mini tangent I've added at the end is mostly my nitpicks.

But I do worry they will double down. If you can't construct it well or at least pass off the paradoxes with levity then don't try it. Please.

Conclusion

All in all a good game. Love the art-style, love little Cereza's story, I even love how the game goes from this new thing to full on Bayonetta in the final battle.

You can quite literally feel the shift from beating up fairies to kicking a witches ass as soon as Cereza says her iconic "let's dance" line.

It's just the minor things that annoyed me at worst. No mini-map, lite color-coded enemies, all the multiverse sh*t t hey snuck in with Jeanne's chapter.

As with any Bayo game it's very good as is. It's only someone like me who'd be bothered by what's mentioned. Not for story consistency so much as character consistency.

Action game stories tend to be less serious and more setting so any time you see someone mad at a Bayonetta or Devil May Cry type of game it's usually because it's really bad to play or a character was just did wrong.

Anywho, bye now~

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For the rest of the Witchy Timez Ramblings go here: https://derekscorner.tumblr.com/tagged/Witchy-Timed

A New Bear Spirit Guest

-- Ever watched that movie called Brother Bear? It was an all time favorite as a kid -- Phil Collins' phenomenal music and the valuable lesson in that movie where the antagonist wasn't a person dressed in a black cape about to break into his villain score. It lived inside Kenai himself, and he underwent the journey to become what he hated (a bear) to understand them, acknowledge his wrong doings while understanding the journey to becoming the man he needs to be, and embodying love and its messages.

Anyways... I remember the scene where Kenai was boasting on what kind of totem he was going to get. He said something like, "I am expecting a sabretooth tiger for strength, greatness, you know, something that fits me." -- and he ended up disappointed when he got the bear of love totem as his step in becoming a man. He despised what he got saying "love isn't what it takes to be a man." ... ... While it may not be that way in particular with my situation, I had a spirit that has been following me for several months that looked like a bear. Even other readers saw him and commented what I saw too. I didn't think much of it at the time. I will say that the bear spirit didn't look like a normal bear, but this giant anthropomorphic beast trying to make itself look unassuming. ... Suddenly, a few weeks ago, I suddenly got an big head pressure and a voice asking me about this location on where he found himself. It was the bear spirit. I assume it was going to start out majestic or mythical as some make spirit work out to be at times. Nope, he was a very extroverted creature with a "himbo" mentality who wanted companionship. If anything he reminded me of that Security Breach game with Glamrock Freddy, or Perrito from Puss and Boots.

Even worse, he claims he doesn't like his real form very much due to some bad history, so he decided to shift into that form here and there which made me feel second hand embarrassment. (Nothing against it, I just personally found it awkward) (I'm also going to leave our personal details of his of course) (Just to be perfectly clear on this, I never cared about the characters/no hyperfixations, and I don't get hyperfixations unless it's my own work. Which adds to my confusion...) I wasn't the friendliest person to him because I was very cautious and territorial of my space, and so was my Family. But they ended up not minding his presence later which...shocked me. They'd usually attack anything that comes too close they deemed as an uninvited guest. But. I gave him every reason to just move on as I was acting annoyed and disinterested. Then the image of Kenai disliking the bear of love totem came to mind and I was mirroring his attitude about it. -------- The huge part of me really disapproving this at first was because of the use of using a fictional character as a form to approach me. About 95% of that happening is because the entity/spirit is a malicious/toxic type that uses that to take advantage of a host's interests and comforts, and uses that to get closer to prey on their energy at a better accessibility. I've seen it a lot happening and it's disturbing to say the least. I mean, it's not that far-fetched considering tales of malicious entities taking on the form of something innocent or a past loved one to get closer to their victim and undergo infestation in their lives. It's just been modernized. ... The reason I am letting him around me is because he feels familiar. That strange sense of deja vu. My energy knowing him and feeling alarmingly comfortable. That's honestly how I had made connections with my Family for the most part. He seems to have a sweet disposition and he ... well ... let's say mirrors some things that does remind me of Glamrock Freddy, much to my embarrassment. My pride was cringing. Despite me disapproving of this approach, I still drew him something based off of what he likes, and he turned into that form in the drawing...because he said, "It's specially made for me from you and that means a lot. I'll wear it and cherish it." ...Yuck. Sappy affection. (Family does this to me too though in their own way, and I actually appreciate it)

-- The one thing I noticed in particular about him is his sense of being overprotective, when he has absolutely no reason to be. I checked and vetted many times to see how consistent this is. I am honestly still vetting and this will continue for maybe several months to even a couple of years. (I'm distrustful as heck by nature with foreign spirits and entities, but I'm getting better?) I'm still getting second hand embarrassment about this and I might delete this post later if I feel like it. His name here will be F. (Not what you think) I'm still doing the vetting process intensely until I can debunk this experience or confirm what is happening. Anybody had a spirit/entity taking the form of a modern day fictional being? (Not Randy Stair style) I only had one experience where a current Family member I will call Shad here, took on the form of an existing character when I was a child...mainly to comfort me and not traumatizing me with is real form that I can handle now. But that's really it. He was a rare case. I find this spirit work really unorthodox and just...well...strange.

Lists of my theories and thoughts during my lost future playthrough (maybe not in the right order because my files are a mess and also this is way too long).

Spoilers for the first three games and also for the movie Patema Inverted :

- Hmm, ok no I'm not buying this, this can't be future London. It's never curses, it's never vampires, so it can't be the future. But then...What is it ? Can't be hallucinogenic gas, they've done it already. Maybe a massive underground thing like in Patema with a fake sky and fake stars and everything but that seems far-fetched. Like, in Patema they had hundreds of years to build the whole thing so yeah no too much work. WAIT WAIT WAIT I KNOW. What if it's actually MIRROR LONDON ?! Like, some rich guy built an entire district and hid it behind the horlogy wich can probably rotate on itself. That would explain why the ground is shaking when the "time machine" operates. And they tell us to take the subway, so I guess we can't access much more without it, probably because even the richest guy can't hide that much of an entire district in such a big city so had to built the rest somewhere else. Now why even bother building a mirror London... I don't know. And who are the people who lives here ? Actors ? Robots ? Massively mentally manipulated people ? And why does it look like a post apocalyptic thing ? Maybe it was a part of London where they accidentally threw a toxic bomb or something and now the place looks miserable and that's why whoever the antagonist of this opus will be managed to buy it, because London didn't want it anyway. And Maybe the politic guy who died at the beginning was actually murdered because he knew too much (like, hey, you sold me this abandoned part of London, thanks, now you may die or Layton will find everything out after asking you two questions). No wait the scientist guy died too. I've only started the game and there's two dead guys already what the heck.

-That kid with the tiny eyes is DEFINITELY a robot.

-I can't believe the Professor actually decided to just go with it. If I'm right and it's not future London but mirror London, then there's no future Luke and someone is trying to trick them. The Professor proved himself able to make an awful lot of enemies based on misunderstandings (and whatever Don Paolo has going on), so I wouldn't be surprised if we met someone who hates him or something for some mysterious reasons. I don't know where this is going exactly but apparently there's the mafia and honestly the only thing I can think of right now is Layton having troubles with Team Rocket and I want a pokemon crossover now.

-list of questions : Who sent us the letter ? What the heck is this place exactly ? Is there a tiny chance that we're really in the future ? (Won't believe it until I've seen future Luke) ? How does this relate to the incident with the time machine presentation? Are the watchmakers involved in this ? They have to. But who are they and why would they take part in this ? What even is this ?

-FUTURE LUKE IS REAL, AND WE HAVE EVIL FUTURE LAYTON I'M HYPED.

-Ok so why and how Layton could have turn evil ? Well, it's defenitely related to the woman in the flashback. Who is very probably supposed to be dead (I mean common, the Professor was literally shaking when he saw her in the street. That's the reaction of someone who have just seen a ghost.) Love+grief+obsessive behavior+no therapy = polite and evil mafia boss trying to change time to save a loved one. It could happen to anyone, honestly, as long as you're under circumstances that blurrs your sens of reality (feelings can do that).

But then, if the lady is supposed to be dead, who was the person we met in the street ? And why is she here ? Maybe we have a Katia thing going on, and it's, in fact, his hidden daughter or something? I'm getting more and more confused about the timeline, but if they've met in their twenties, and if Layton is in its 40-something, it could track (Layton strikes me more as a 35-ish man but he has dots as eyes so it's kinda tricky to tell. I don't remember if he ever told his age in the two previous games.)

Anyway, whoever is the woman we actually met in the streets, this whole "Layton becomes evil" thing is probably related to the woman he seemed to be in love with in the flashback. Maybe he saw the presentation, and his brain went " Hey I could cheat grief with this" and decided to use time travel as a way to save his first love from whatever tragedy has (very probably because come on what else could it be )killed her. The more he worked on it, the more he became desperate, and despair slowly made him fall into madness. Love has the weird power to turn people into monsters when on an unhealthy level and nobody, not even Hershel Layton can be 100% sure they'll never get trapped in the spiral of pain and destruction that ensue. Basically Anakin Skywalker. (And then we can have Layton telling his future-self "this is not what love looks like" because that line from Centaurworld is cool and would fit so damn well in this scenario)

Now... the implications of this : Him deceiving Luke, our boy spent 10 years spying and scheming against the Family apparently (I want a swordfight between future Luke and future Layton now because come on it would be cool. Layton can't risk fighting himself after all. It could be so damn cool. Imagine evil Layton ending up threatening to hurt our Luke so future Luke can't fight back but future Layton take a weirdly long time to actually harm Luke (because he can't) then our Layton makes a long reveal speech about whatever the heck this plot is hiding, and reminds his future self that he loves his apprentice *cough*son*cough* too, and he loves London too, and none of them should pay the price of his grief and boom problem solved. With some trauma but still. Swordfight. )

Also Flora probably flew away to her hometown OR is either held captive by/actively working with future Layton. I want to see Flora more in this game so I'm hoping for one of the later.

- Wait, Luke has parents ?! Well... there dies my found family headcanons. I thought he was a stray kid sleeping in the university's library or something.

-Sooo... Future Luke is getting waaaay too suspicious. Everything seems too... easy. Like we went to China Town. A supposedly very dangerous place. And just went back without much trouble. I don't know... I think Future Luke is definitely lying to us. 100% he never really left Layton's side and is actually working for him. Maybe he's the one who's going to realise the craziness of all of this and switch side in the climax ? But yeah, for now... He's definitely working against us. Maybe that's why he seems to still hold our professor in great esteem despite what he'll become : He followed his mentor in the dark side.

-Excuse my language professor, but breaking a promise you've just made to a teen you swore to take care of with a known past of abandonment and loneliness issues is a fucking bullshit move. Flora deserves better, come on.

-YES FLORA YOU GO GIRL. And Chemley and Barton too, triple win !

- SOOOOOoooo, turns out there's no future Layton, it was Dimitri all along ! The dead scientist guy who is in fact not dead (and Bill isn't dead either, he's just an hostage) And also Don Paulo is there, and actually he's named Paul, and has a backstory know

(and wants to protect Flora for some reasons ? Where does this come from ?). I'm starting to doubt this whole "time travel" thing... since I've known that future Layton was actually Dimitri.

Besides Luke, the two other people we saw as "aged up" were actually Paul in disguise. So in fact... Luke is the only aged up person we've met. And it seems... rather strange ? Why haven't we crossed path with at least one person we would have known from our time ? It's... Yeah. Future Luke is definitely hiding something. Maybe he's not even from the future. Perhaps he's not even Luke. However... Everyone here lives as if they were real people living here, they seem real.

They already did the robots thing, the illusion thing, so it can't be that. What if this place exists in our time after all. I'm back on the mirror London theory because honestly I can't think of anything else and after the Dimitri and Don Paolo reveal it's definitely not time travel.

Oh wait wait. Remember the bunny ? Number 3 ? He said that one of experiments consisted of "transferring " him in a different room. So there's also the possibility that its not time travel, but teleportation.

.... Nah, it doesn't make sense. The dragon tower had a secret exit. Who need to build an emergency exit when you have teleportation technology. Definitely Mirror London.

But what about the whole "saving Claire" thing then ? Well... Just because time travel doesn't exist yet doesn't mean that Dimitri can't be working on it.

Anyway... I'm starting to wonder who "Future Luke " really is. He do look like an older version of Luke... But this game taught me to be wary of conclusions when the only proof is a face. In a world where a thirty-ish guy can disguise himself as a convincing late-teen girl, faces lie.

But wether he's Luke or not... What does he want ? For someone who seemed to have spent years trying to stop his mentor, in an attempt to get his friend back and change the course of time, he's weirdly unfazed when Dimitri reveals that he has been a fraud the whole time. Future Luke should have shown more concern like"but then what happened to my mentor ?". And yet... he didn't. Who the heck is he.

-Not mirror London, but underground London. Come on, I was close. At least I got that the time travel was bullshit.

-Haven't seen the mass murder terrorist thing coming though.

...sitting still in minecraft to get mmd background is so smart i was over here teaching myself to export chunks through mininator to blender to pmd fighting for my life getting textures to look right. god.

so, it really depends what you want from your background. if you don't care about like. the small animations like candles and torches then you can literally just take a screenshot. or you can sit and record for the background. but that severely limits your camera options. you cannot move the camera, and you need to make sure that the mmd camera matches the minecraft one's angle or it'll look weird.

i used this strategy for one of my first minecraft mmds (and actually probably my first public mmd akjshdsda) but actually instead of importing it directly into mmd as a background .avi i chromakeyed out the background, as i did with my most recent one. the first time was because of hijinks where i didn't save the motion edits after exporting, but then decided to change the background. and i didn't want to redo them.

this time was because i couldn't figure out how to use a background image with raymmd.

however, using an image does have the benefits of "i don't actually have access to this world right now but i do have a screenshot from a youtube video!" which i did here.

I use mineways to export portions of minecraft worlds to blender, but i've only used it like twice. it was. a bit of an ordeal because the materials weren't linked to the textures properly so i just. ported the mmd model and motion to blender. and rendered it there. you can see the results of that here, but it's not grreat. because i didn't know blender as well as i knew mmd. which honestly wasn't even that much at the time.

the second time i tried to use mineways i bit the bullet and figured out what the issue was. i had to go through each block and fix the texture paths. one by one. it had the issue of the textures being blurry but i think it was very much worth it. fancy camera movements really added to the fun, and by this point i'd learnt raymmd well enough to get some decent looking shading

now the reason i chose to go with the stationary camera method this time was partially i don't wanna fix all the textures again,,,,, but also the fact that it was a fully enclosed space. i wasn't certain how well mmd would respond to that, and it seemed like it was more effort than it was worth to try and fight the lighting. and i wanted to emulate lizzie's lighting as closely as possible, so i figured that'd be easiest in minecraft itself. even if the amethysts are considered?? emissive in my game but not hers?? so they're WAY brighter in my shader. i don't know. how to fix it without turning out all emissive light. which she CLEARLY has on with the lava and lanterns. so. rip me ig.

sorry this is kind of rambly haha. i just have many thoughts on the matter

fic title game: going home to the ashes

(This is a spinoff drabble from my fic The Coding Conundrum bc with this title how could I not haha. But warnings for spoilers from ch14 and ch18 below the cut (though you strictly don’t need to know the fic to understand), and trigger warning for mentions of death.)

(Fic title game)

When the Watchers destroy a world, they leave behind Ash.

Grian knows more about the process than he really likes to admit. How the Watchers take a world and pull up the Void through the very bedrock of a server, using the burning, black nothing to make the air unbreathable, to kill the plants and dissolve anything that remained into a snowy ash. To thin the very air itself, to fill it with poison and suffocate any player lucky enough to survive Macan's swinging broadsword.

Usually, you need to combine the powers of both a natural-born admin and a Watcher to cause this level of destruction, one use their commands to break the bedrock, and one to pull and manipulate the void itself.

Grian had thought, now that he'd escaped, that Exae wouldn't have been able to destroy Evo. Apparently, he was wrong.

There had been many things that had been changed, deep inside him, when he'd been taken. The mask, the clothes, even the wings, once he'd been accepted. In the past few weeks, he'd shed them all; left the mask behind, burned his robes, cut off his wings.

But he cannot rid himself of the ability to breathe the poison, End-filled air of Evo. It is a burning reminder of what he cannot destroy.

Burying the bodies is backbreaking work. It looks like Macan had gotten to at least half the server, in their attack. He counts them as he finds them, closes their eyes and whispers their names. Mini Muka. Tomahawk. Salem. Zee.

Taurtis.

He finds their corpses scattered about the server, half-buried in the falling ash. The code of the world is broken, the chunks glitching in an out of reality at times, but Grian knows his creation, knows it well enough to find them from their lasted dredges of ones and zeroes.

He buries them at spawn.

Mumbo helps him.

Grian has never been more grateful for the existence of a single man in the entirety of his life. From noticing his disappearance, to getting Xisuma's help, to rescuing him and offering him a home and a shoulder to cry on and helping to find Evo and never ever expecting anything but friendship in return. Nothing but what Grian himself is willing to offer.

They bury the bodies together.

He doesn't know where the others are. Perhaps they escaped, made it out before Exae destroyed spawn. That's what Mumbo says, through the mask he needs to breathe here, optimistic comforts about Netty, his second-in-command, his replacement as admin, being among the missing. But it's also possible that their code is so destroyed that the trails that led him to the confirmed dead simply didn't remain for them.

It's hard to be optimistic, so Grian lets Mumbo do it for him, lets him whisper comforts about better places and escape. And then he lets him return to Xisuma's side, whispering something about plans as Hermitcraft's admin keeps his communicator open, practiced fingers throwing up protections to keep them from Exae's prying eyes.

He holds Taurtis' headphones in his hands, broken and frail in his hands, and grieves. He does not cry, but he stands there, looks out across these rudimentary graves, and grieves.

He'd let himself hope. Hermitcraft had been so extraordinarily kind to him, let him stay in their exclusive little server even though he'd only expected it to last a few weeks. He'd thought, that even though Exae had known about Evo, that his server would still exist, or that it would be intact enough for him to access the exit logs and find where they had gone.

Luck is not on his side, today.

Domrao had messaged him, back when he'd first escaped. An offer of refuge, a place to stay. They could go and live in his old creative worlds, or hide in the crowds of Wynncraft--Jumla or Salted had made it clear that he would always be welcomed there with open arms.

It's tempting. He might take him up on it. Maybe he'll stay on Hermitcraft. Or go off on his own. He's not sure.

Ash dusts the headphones, lands on his eyelashes and billows about with his breath. His home, once so vibrant and happy, is ash.

One thing I'm quite fascinated by is how writers can fuck up the morality of their story. Or, rather, where we're clearly supposed to see one side as "good" and another as "evil," but because of a variety of in-story details, they're either both "evil," the "evil" side is a lesser evil, or the reverse is true, depending on the interpretations and details one uses.

I think it's interesting from the perspective of both authorial intent/lack thereof, where the author fucked up their implications on accident. Or where the author is like "yup, this is fine" because of their own blind spots. Like, the ultimate implication can vary, like the idea of "might makes right" being incredibly common as a possible reading, or else the writer's a space cadet, or they wrote themselves into a corner. Or they were blitzed on drugs at the time, like Stephen King's The Stand. Or stuff simply didn't age well.

IDK, I'm very into "Death of the Author," so intent is only useful to see how close they got to to what they intended and how that might vary from what's actually in the text. And, even then, you might not have access to that information. After all, we don't actually know what the writer was thinking unless they tell us, and not everyone is gonna have access to that information like interviews or information about the author's religious background or whatever. They thus can only use the text itself for interpretation of said text, except insofar as they might be able to draw parallels to other concepts and assumptions. (Like, even if you didn't know Tolkien was Catholic, you can understand that the setup of his setting of Arda is very much Catholic in structure.)

At least some conflicts in narrative interpretation can also come from people using it vs people not. It's a problem I see with SU discourse, since some people just look at the show itself to criticize its structure, while other people use details about the creator's background like her being Jewish to defend the work as intending a different message.

The Gollum game and so on reminded me of this, since my interpretation of LotR is very much "Evil of Eru Iluvatar and the Valar vs lesser evil of Melkor/Sauron" post-reading the Silmarillion. Since, you know, Eru and the Valar commit genocide and infinite torture, while Sauron and Melkor's actions are far more... limited in scope. Was this intended? Probably not. Part of it is because Tolkien was Catholic and the larger setting assumes a very Catholic framework of its religious stuff (single god, angels, a fallen angel who does bad stuff and wrecks shit). But that "good" god and angels also commit genocide and infinitely torture people who offend them. It's an unspoken assumption of being justified within that belief system as being part of some greater good/just punishment, which then leeches into the work that used it as the bones of its' structure. Naturally, if you don't agree, it gets... far messier than as simple good vs evil conflict that was intended.