#its just. i saw that one post with screenshot from reddit that goes something like
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the concept of infodumping is so... alien(?) to me. I cannot bring myself to talk about something for a long time, let alone getting into details because I usually forget or don't know them. even less well do I feel when I try to rumble about something with no feedback in form of attention or understanding. I can go on about that one polish rapper or whatever concept is only known to me among the people I know and talk to, but what of it when the only thing I get is silence, a casual "cool" thrown to acknowledge my messages or a change of topic. I wonder if it's something about adults never understanding things I like and me being awful at explaining, thus preferring to just hide them or brush them off as "nothing particular" or describing them as vaguely as possible (e.g. "just a video game"); also in fear of being perceived or judged
what is the opposite of infodumping?
#feeling like my brain is definitely Not Normal™#and seeing stuff like 'ooo i could infodump about my fixations so much you would regret asking me about them lol' and like. that is not me#that cannot be me#in the end i know nothing about my special interests and cannot describe them#its just. i saw that one post with screenshot from reddit that goes something like#'people holding you hostage will let you live if you talk about something for 30 minutes'#i kept thinking about it#my dude i would probably just expect death or ask if i can pick like 3 things because no way in hell would i talk about something for#half an hour. or even quarter#i can laugh along with everyone that id throw you down a rabbit hole but honestly in my case i doubt people would even check its entrance#cloud has spoken#vent#<- ?
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Screenshotting because it's not rebloggable anymore (omitting OP's name for that reason) but this post - more specifically the replies to it - have been bothering me since I saw it a day or so ago and I finally decided to come back and engage lmao. (Source link from OP)
OP's totally right. OpenAI is a garbage company with garbage business practices but this is not the way to do this, people. I'm glad y'all have so much faith in the legal system here, but I don't, and if this goes through it's not going to harm the entities you want it to harm. believe me.
(i am not against AI when used ethically but i think that is a moot point here bc i do not believe OpenAI is an ethical developer of AI tech. anyway)
Here's the "rebuttal" that has been irritating me so much I couldn't leave it alone:
THIS IS NOT REMOTELY TRUE.
First of all, unless I've missed something big, OpenAI has never disclosed the contents of the proprietary dataset they use to train their LLMs. We have no idea whether ChatGPT was trained on George RR Martin's books or not. Presumably, neither does George RR Martin. So all we have to go on is that ChatGPT "knows" characters and details from ASOIAF. Okay.
The problem is that ASOIAF is a massively popular series with some massively popular multimedia adaptations and spinoffs, and processing the text of the novels is far from the only way ChatGPT could have learned to produce those details.
Let's try a little experiment.
GPT-2 is an open source model released by OpenAI when they were just starting out. It works more or less the same way as ChatGPT and its ilk, just on a vastly smaller scale. It's much, much more limited, but the underlying algorithms work on the same concepts. So, what would GPT-2 give us if we ask it for a summary of a hypothetical GRRM novel?
I typed up the first paragraph here, and GPT-2 gave me the rest. (GPT-2 isn't a chatbot, but works more like autocomplete, so I didn't prompt it directly.)
Okay, I have a feeling that plot doesn't make much sense as a prequel, but hey, it's AI (and an elderly one at that), it's not going to be particularly good at this left to its own devices. And look, it DID pull out a few details specific to ASOIAF - Jon Snow, the Night Watch, the Wildlings. So case closed, right? GPT-2 must have had ASOIAF novels in its training data too, just like its nasty little great-grandchild.
Except we know what was in GPT-2's dataset - it was trained on a 40GB corpus of data scraped from publicly-available web pages, specifically pages linked from Reddit. We don't have all the exact texts that were used, but we DO have the top 1000 domains contained in the dataset. All of which is a hell of a lot more information than we have on ChatGPT.
What websites are ranked #75 and #160 in the list of 1000 domains? Why, it's Fanfiction.net and AO3. Hmm, I wonder where it learned about the very popular fictional characters from George RR Martin's novels! (Certainly not just from fanfiction, either - sites like IMDB and Wikia were ranked much higher in the list of sources, and entertainment news and fan wiki articles would also contain a lot of text about ASOIAF/GoT.)
You can certainly argue that using these websites as training data is also unethical or should be illegal - but that's not what's being argued in this lawsuit. As far as I know, ChatGPT has never spat out a perfect recreation (or even a vaguely paraphrased recreation) of any of GRRM's writing, so the only evidence for violation of his copyright in this case is the generation of what is essentially a machine-created derivative work. That is really, really worrying, even if you don't think the machine should be allowed to do that. I'm not a lawyer, just a fanfic writer and software developer, so I have no idea how legitimate the legal argument here is... but it's going down a road that is very dangerous for fandom, whether you believe it is or not.
#ai#discourse#ugh#not going into my thoughts on the ethics of ai training GENERALLY here but#i think openai is shady af but i am not convinced there is anything truly illegal about how chatgpt was created#or any way to codify that into law without hurting far more people than it protects#anyway.#going to go back to trying my darnedest to ignore the ai discourse now it stresses me tf out
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This is a post on the cheating accusations around dream mostly surrounding his response video.
If you don’t want to see this or any of these posts then blacklist the tag #discourse
SO I’ve been doing a lot of digging into what dream has said in his response to Geosquare’s original video and report, which was compiled and conducted by the Minecraft Java mods on speedrun.com.
I won’t talk about that original report in detail, but basically: the mods came to the conclusion that Dream had a 1 in 7.5 trillion chance of getting the pearl bartering rates and the blaze drop odds that he did within the 6 streams he did. As in, someone would need that luck to replicate what dream got. Therefore, he cheated.
I’m going to put this into a sort of ‘point form’ in according to topic, attempting to put it in chronological order.
Dream’s Initial Tweets
Ok so first like. these are bad. these tweets are what he said (on twitter, excluding in the speedrunning discord) directly after the video was Uploaded to Geo’s channel.
worth noting he did apologize later, although i wanted to talk about these two instances so i felt the need to include it.
there’s a lot of interesting wording in the apology tweet itself too. I personally find that when he apologizes he tends to still be very subtextually angry in them with the tone, but more specifically. where he says ‘although i have reason to be upset’, that’s kinda weak and really unneeded. Alongside the ‘intense criticism’, it reads as him trying to say he’s still in the right. kind of like “im sorry i was rude even though I had reason to be rude’. Its an apology sure but he’s not saying sorry for how he really reacted; its justified to him.
Dream’s Response Video
Dream posted a response on his side channel DreamXD on the 22nd, along with the report he had a supposed astrophysicist conduct. I’m going to talk about the report separately from the video for reasons I’ll explain.
Frankly, the video doesn’t really summarize or explain the report in a meaningful way. At most, it takes some points from it but tends to twist the numbers around, misunderstand the probability and math, and also what the report itself concludes.
Essentially, dream’s video insists that the numbers found by the mods are wrong and therefore he didn’t cheat at all, yet the report concludes that the numbers found by the mods weren’t entirely accurate, however they’re still extremely unlikely. This is also all under the assumption that the report is entirely correct (ill say how its not next)
His first point is that only his 1.16 run (that was at 5th place two months ago, would have now been 16th) was deemed cheated. This is true; the mods have said that he isnt banned outright and theres no reason to question the legitimacy of his 1.15 runs.
He also concludes that Geo’s statement that Dream didn’t cooperate with them, and that he deleted 1.16 mod folders, was false. This one is a little more complicated. It could more be chalked up to a miscommunication, although it’s relevant. Geosquare posted screenshots of the specific conversation they had:
Essentially it wasn’t entirely clear, i can understand how geo and the mods interpreted it in such a way. Altho April added in a quote retweet thread that dream didn’t supply the folder she asked for, so he didn’t supply everything they asked for like he states in the video
Essentially: yeah, misleading and weird on both ends. I dont think this is really anything quantifiable, although dream talked about this in the video heavily.
Out of this though, Geo DID correct himself in the description of the mods’ video. Dream shows this in his own response, but it crops out some of what geo says. here’s from dream’s video
that Update 2 is where he corrects himself. literally why the fuck would you crop it like this and put it in the video i mean this looks so weird and genuinely doesnt provide anything. Here’s what geo actually said
Dream specifically cut it before the line where geo mentions how he said he deleted his specific 1.16 speedrun profile. This one is just so dumb to me. I’d say ‘why not include that’ but either i feel its a) so there’s no potential for people to say what he had actually said could be interpreted otherwise easily or b) doesnt want people to know he got so upset he deleted files (ego wise yknow). Again, I dont think this is definitive of anything but god. it feels scummy lmao
The Video: Incorrect Representation of His Own Report
Dream straight up doesnt present the report’s numbers properly. In fact it makes the entirety of his visuals forfeit, i.e. the gold block analogy that goes on for like 20 minutes.
The mods said his luck was 1/7.5 trillion. Dream’s report says its 1/10 million (with the addition of 5 other streams) or 1/100 million (only the 6 streams).
I’ll only consider the 1/10 mil odds, since its all dream really brings up. but Basically; there’s not much difference between 1/10 million and 1/7.5 trillion.
Dream says that the difference is 7.5 trillion minus 10 million, aka 7.4999 trillion. This is what his entire visual with the gold blocks is based on. This is absolutely incorrect, i cant stress that enough.
You can’t find the difference of fractions by subtracting only the denominators. Like. this is elementary school math. it just doesnt work.
It’d actually be calculated as: (1/10 000 000) - (1/7 500 000 000 000) = (74999/7 500 000 000 000)
If the mods are wrong, they’re only wrong by 749999/7.5 trillion. that’s literally only 0.000000099999866666667.
Dream no doubt saw the numbers, considered 10 million vs. 7.5 trillion, and used these big numbers to hold his own point. PROBABILITY DOESNT WORK LIKE THAT. I really think he was just taking advantage of the seemingly big numbers here and wrote it out in a way that favoured him. The gold block analogy in the video played throughout the entire video practically, jokes were made on it, and he made a point of it being ‘so big the game crashed’.
It’s just plain wrong. even so a difference in the odds doesnt prove shit. He’s downplaying his own odds that he found too. 1/10 million isnt a small number. Even though the legitimacy of that calculation is in question, it is still significant enough to proclaim he cheated.
Some quick points before I move onto the report; these aren’t as significant in my eyes but it adds to the picture
there’s been criticism of his joking manor throughout the entire video, very specifically the Bill Nye joke. Considering he doesnt actually have a name to provide for his astrophysicist, this joke doesnt feel right
the mod he had a voice clip from (willz) even believes that he cheated and has agreed with the mod team the whole time.
Dream never has a name for the mod who is apparently on his side (more understandable), the minecraft developer he quoted, or the astrophysicist (most damning)
Dream states that fabric is used by most speedrunners which is true, but fabric and fabric API are different; dream also had the latter installed. my knowledge of how theyre different is limited, all i really know is the API is what can enable editing of the code while fabric is more a modloader. im not entirely sure on this
Dream has said at the end of the video that all funds will go to the mod team so they can make a client that will regulate cheaters. this has been noted as feeling manipulative or like a ‘bribe’, but it definitely puts the mods in a bad position.
either they accept it and look like they ‘gave in’ to dream and therefore acknowledge him in the right
they deny it and look selfish/taking dream’s kindness for granted
geo said they would insist it goes to a charity instead
Dream constantly disregards the mods as young, inexperienced, ‘just volunteers’ etcetcetc, despite the fact that theyre analysis has been discussed by people with confirmed PhDs without much criticism
Dream’s Report
The report itself is extremely interesting, in that it’s very questionable, but even so it doesn’t come to the conclusion that dream didn’t cheat. The tone between the video and the report is drastically different.
This is from the “3. What are the goals of this document?” section:
It essentially says this isnt intended, from the very beginning, to completely exonerate dream of cheating. Also note that the author says the mods’ report was mostly correct.
This is at the end of “9 Conclussions”:
It does notably say cheating isnt the only explanation, but it doesnt actually go as far to say that it’s not possible that he cheated.
But this can be argued to not matter if we consider the validity of the report as a whole
Dream’s Report: Criticisms
Possibly the first and most known debunking of the report is by u/mfb on reddit, although there’s been much more such as this programmer criticizing the code provided at the end of the report (partially due to how the author of it stated that piglins barter 4-7 pearls, which is incorrect: it’s 4-8), Andrew Gelman, an actual statistician professor from harvard, commented on the original mods’ report as ‘impressive’ while Dream’s report is being regarded as something funny in the comments, and even analysis of dream’s behaviours and his argument by a law student
But what u/mfb posted is what i’ll focus on. Some background into the user; he’s a particle physicist, is moderator in subreddits like r/cosmology and r/astrophysics, he’s regarded as a reliable source on r/askscience and r/askreddit. Basically, multiple other people have vouched for him and before all this he had many posts in these fields.
that’s already better than the unnamed astrophysicist.
The post is better speaking for itself but here is a few exerpts from it;
Essentially, the report’s methods are debunked by u/mfb-, alongside that a moderator of r/statistics regarded the report as ‘nonsensical in its application of statistics’ and linked to u/mfb-’s comment.
i’m going to end this here. Partially because severe backpain or whatever,.
but I want to say at this point its practically definitive that dream cheated, that he lied to us, and that he continues to do so. Much more could be said on his video such as his tone, intentions, the overt emphasis on the ‘biases’ of the mods.
I havent even mentioned that the ‘astrophysicist’ themself may be a scam; they are sourced from a website that is extremely sketchy, has no names attached to it, and was created less than a year ago (with practically no traffic on it until maybe a month ago).
But i hope this is coherent. I have interest in this so if theres questions im always open.
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“ an open letter to everyone about zac
i just found out about this a few days ago, i have looked at the twitter account that posted screenshots, i have been to the reddit. and i feel like i must still be missing something? nowhere did i see anything like f**k n******s /jews/trans people ect. i saw a lot of republican support and gun humor…that were posted on his PRIVATE ACCOUNTS .
there WILL be people in this world who do out and do and say things that offend YOU. be an adult and move on. dont stalk, shame, harass or start an online rampage on 3 websites causing the person involved to turn off comments and his wife to straight up leave. who do YOU people think you are? you think you have the right to do that because youve been a ‘fan’ since '97 so your entitled to bash him? because hes a celebrity? hes still human he has the right to privacy and makes mistakes.if your so offended they didnt post blm or anything like that guess what alot of other celebrities and bands didnt eaither. some people dont want to post anything about it because its very controversial and last i checked hanson is not about contravercy. zac stated the bitter truth him posting blm will not stop it from happening again, just like celebrities donating money wont stop it. the way this generation of kids are raised will and so will changing laws .thats it.
he didnt makes those memes he reposted them. they have been on the internet forever alot of other people reposted them too. again most of what i saw was gun humor and republican support ect. not for everyone. some people are die hard republicans and will vote for the candidate JUST because they want their party to win, does not matter who it is or what they stand for. you cant just say oh hes a trump supporter so hes racist. you sound so ignorant. people want to twist things and make things much bigger than they are.if i missed a post saying n******rs and je*s /tans gays ect suck and need to die or anything along those lines please share id love to see. and all of you saying how can kate put up with him ect and how their first few years were shaky, post proof of that too. how the hell would you know what goes on behind closed doors?do you live with them? even if they did have a rough start, every relationship has growing pains esp when you are young. everyone who is a 'fanson’ should already know blues, jazz motown-mostly black artists were huge influence on hanson. they have worked with many black aritsts. just like anyone who is a 'fanson’ should know they are DEVOUT greek orthodox christians. ie: very very oldschool stream of Christianity that follows the OLD testiment, basic Christianity follows the new testimate ie: living through the example of jesus , jesus loves everyone gay straight black white ect look into it, the believes ect. its their right to live that way if thats what they choose to do, alot of religions do look down on gays trans ect and truely belive you will go to hell for it because the way the testimate is written and translated. very duggar esq. some strains of that dont even allow the women to wear pants and you can only eat certain foods on certain days ect. again if thats his beliefs thats his beliefs.not everyone supports those lifestyles just because the internet popularized them. hell mainstream tv was sill making stereotype jokes about gays up until like 6 years ago. i saw no uproar online about celebrities that follow kabballah (the red bracelets) no half of you dont even know what that REALLY is, no you just wear the bracelet because its trendy and your fav celeb wears it. im not even gonna sit here and be all like 'well he is from oklahoma and alot of people are biggots there' because guess what? its like that everywhere. ive lived all over the country and it is like that in small towns and large citys. north south east west. and kate posting things on her ig about not supporting planned parenthood, well although they do offer many medical services they also preform abortions. again religious and republican people have a very big issue with that. and shes from ga so maybe she had family that were confederate soldiers which is why she said save the flag. im not saying this is right or not disgusting, im saying there are all kinds of people in the world and you CAN NOT hate, harass, bully ect someone because they dont believe the same stuff you do. it does not matter they are a celebrity dont even go there with them having a 'responsibility’ the ONLY thing they are responsible for is what made them famous-making music. you guys went out of your way to stalk him and invade his privacy, you had a certain image of him in your minds and put him on a pedestal and when he proved it to be wrong, now your pissed off. you all need to grow the fuck up. what are you gonna go through life bashing everyone that does not drop their beliefs for whats socially popular? posting memes does not mean hes a straight up ass in person to people that are black, gay, trans, fat ect. actions speak louder than words. i dont care for the movie american hisotry x because most of it is very racist and violent, but the MESSAGE of the movie shows that a person can be involved in a group, live a certain way, believe certain things to the point where the inflict DEATH on someone and tattoo their entire body with racist tattoos, but then change their lives and be remorseful once they break free. its like a drug addict. if you hang around the same group of people, do not change your contact info, no matter how hard your desperately want to get sober, you wont. because you need to change your lifestyle . it is absolutely no secret that walker and diana dictate all those kids lives, everything about them, including who they married. the guys and the girls. walker worked with natalies family member, not directly but they were contacts, they met they had similar beliefes, and had $$$$$ kates family also has $$$$$$ so does everyone elce that married into that family . unless your rich and have similar lifestyle you never had a chance girls. youd have to be preapproved by mom and dad. dont you think its odd zac never had a girlfriend that was the friend of one of his brothers? marrion , kate and another girl who im not even gonna mention because honestly none of you know who she is anyway lol.
it takes all kinds of people in this world. if you like their music you like their music. half the celebrities musicians youlook up to and admire have EXTREMELY different lives behind closed doors and because you dont know about it its fine. what they do at the end of the day in private is up to them . just like what you do is up to you are you people prefect? i doubt it.”
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I wonder what Growing Pains will be about..
now that’s the question, isn’t it?
So there’s a leak I saw only once, on instagram, of a screenshot of a reddit(?) post, that I still really doubt, of a storyboard where Steven is visiting Greg in the hospital and "corrupts”” but he just, gets big? Which....sounds really dumb quite frankly. It was also coupled with a “the cluster is going to come back and turn into that big monster!” which is also wrong to me, because the cluster can’t hold such a solid, coherent form like that. It’d be weird and look gross and muscle-y. So I’m not vouching for that. (also I literally never saw the “leak” anywhere else, not here, not insta, not twitter, and it’s not like I go on reddit, so really, how strong could it be?)
you could also take it at a corrupted steven theory route, as in he starts showing signs of turning into the monster himself, which I’m obviously more on board for.
But really, I have no strong ideas or opinions, just minor speculations.
Perhaps he starts having issues like in So Many Birthdays, where his age and form changes based on how he sees himself mentally? Perhaps he’ll start to see himself as a Diamond, and his body will change to match in some way? Whether that means simply growing in size, or physically changing into some kind of monster (fed by his skewed image of his mother)
Something like that could potentially fuel the following episodes, should the Yahoo titles be legit (on those: they were taken down, either due to falacy, or due to CN saying ‘hey maybe don’t release those yet’. We don’t know which, of course, but I’m leaning on the ‘you released these too early’ rather than ‘those are just wrong’).
The episode after Growing Pains is Fragments (Skipping over Mr. Universe, because I have literally no thoughts on that episode other than that maybe Steven goes to his dad for advice but finds that he can’t help). I have an idea for this one, in which Steven would have to take the “fragments” of himself, and of his mother, and try to piece them together, accurately. (I suppose you could make an argument about “fragments” referring to the shattered gem fragments of the cluster, but....I dunno. Anything involving the cluster now, to me, would just seem out of place. The cluster did its part, there’s no reason for it to unbubble itself and come back to be this huge monster. And it wouldn't line up with the “I Am My Monster” title either, or anything in actual canon right now)
which could lead to the NEXT episode, Homeworld Bound, where Steven could go to the other Diamonds to ask for help in figuring out these pieces. And of course it’s pretty obvious where it would go from there with “Everything’s Fine” and “I Am My Monster”.
But again, that’s only if those titles are true.
uuuhhh I supposed I kinda went off track here? Sorry lol
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The Art of Review: YIIK: A Postmodern RPG
I have been sitting here for about two hours with this tab open, trying to find out how to properly introduce this. At the time of writing this (May 7, 2019, 10:02 PM), I have just finished watching YIIK several hours ago. However, I have been doing just about everything to avoid actually writing about it, because I have no idea how to ease the reader into this.
YIIK is so reprehensible that I created this segment--”The Art of Review”--because I needed to talk about this game. I needed to explain just why this game fails on every single account, and is so blatantly offensive. Initially, I was going to do a piece on something creator Andrew Allanson had said about games and his protagonist, Alex. It had to do with character development, and a common criticism was Alex’s sheer lack of it; naturally, I decided to watch a walkthrough online in order to see this for myself first-hand.
I was not prepared for what I saw. I have never had to take as many breaks from any media before due to sheer anger at what I was witnessing. I have never seen a game that fails in every single sense, that is regarded as such high art by its developers. Except maybe David Cage, but he’s a topic for another day.
YIIK: A Postmodern RPG is one of the worst pieces of media I have ever had the displeasure of viewing... probably in my entire life. I wish I was exaggerating.
Before I go any further, I would like give immense credit to GrandmaParty and the others at the Something Awful forums for doing an LP of the game with commentary and cutting out the fights. GrandmaParty graciously linked the thread to me--which is full of sources that I will also be linking to throughout this piece--and made the entire game tolerable enough for me to power through. It wouldn’t have happened without you guys, so thank you very much for extending a hand to a small creator trying to get her footing in the world. <3
I will also be linking to the various episodes of GrandmaParty’s LP with timestamped links to show particular scenes or dialogue. I’ve heard that one Andrew Allanson likes to say that people doctored screenshots of his game to make him look bad. Sorry, but I don’t like being accused of forgery, so I’m going to just preemptively strike that claim down.
Now then. This is going to be a big, long review. Allow me to tell you how we’ll be separating this.
We’re going to have two main sections: a non-spoiler review, and a spoiler review. This is mainly due to the fact that a lot of the game’s issues come from its mess of a story, one that can only be understood fully if you’ve seen it through to the end (and its multiple endings).
But let me be clear here.
DO NOT BUY THIS GAME.
Don’t buy it for a laugh. Don’t buy it to see how bad it is. It’s broken, it’s offensive, and the creators and proven themselves time and time again to be genuinely awful and prejudiced people. Do not give these people money.
The non-spoiler and spoiler sections will be divided into subsections, which may also have subsections of their own.
With that said... let’s begin my review of YIIK: A Postmodern RPG.
Non-Spoiler Review
Plot:
The plot of YIIK (it’s pronounced like Y2K, but I’m going to pronounce it as ‘yick’ personally) follows Alex, a freshly-graduated college student, and the strange events that begin to occur once he returns to his hometown of Frankton. He follows a cat to an old factory/hotel, where he meets Sammy, a young woman who appears to live there. When she is taken by some mysterious creatures in front of Alex, he begins a journey to try and find out what happened to her, and begins to make discoveries that could endanger the very fabric of the universe. In theory, at least. In reality, the story is an absolute clusterfuck of vague metaphysics, and the rules of the world were never clearly established, so everything just becomes an incoherent mess.
Characters:
The characters are bare-bones at best and absolutely insufferable at worst. Alex especially is infamous among critics and detractors of the game for his arrogance, ignorance, underlying racism/sexism we’ll get to that, and lack of properly-written development. I’m not going to go into full detail with Alex just yet--there will be an entirely separate post on him. Something also to keep in mind that general consensus appears to be that Alex is an author-insert for Andrew Allanson. Whether that is or isn’t true is frankly up to the viewer, but there’s no definitive proof of it.
(Oh!!! Quick thing!! This image here keeps circulating around--this person is not Andrew! That is someone named Cr33pyDude on both Twitter and Reddit! He just so happens to look like the main character. Don’t rag on this guy, everyone, he doesn’t have anything to do with this shitshow. <3)
Most of the other characters are bland and underdeveloped, but all have potential to be better (Rory especially, in my personal opinion) if they were in the hands of a better writer. The female characters, though... either they are fawning over Alex, being written as nagging and overbearing, or having so little significance that taking them out entirely would change nothing. Don’t worry, we’ll get to that. Other NPCs are forgettable, and enemies are out-of-place monsters that hold no consequence to the story.
Writing:
And the writing--dear god the writing. The writers don’t know the phrase “show, don’t tell.” So frequently would Alex monologue about nothing. Upon coming back from seeing a woman get taken by supernatural creatures, he goes home and reflects--only to go on a tangent about his mother. Immediately after that, he goes on a rant about p/o/r/n/ when sent an email and how girls that he used to go to school with wouldn’t be doing “particularly unladylike” things. And the entire game is like this. Alex will go on pseudo-philosophical rants to himself, and they reveal nothing about his character except that he thinks he’s better than everyone else. He’ll also frequently describe things as though talking to someone--while this does get explained later, it still is completely frustrating when the narrative says “I said this and she said that” instead of just having dialogue or actions between characters. A lot of the dialogue doesn’t exactly... sound like anything a human would say. It’s stilted and unnatural.
Graphics:
The graphics are... bad. Really bad. The style is supposed to be a throwback to old-school, very polygonal games, but environments lack any and all actual texture, making them incredibly flat and uninteresting at best and painful for the eyes at worst. Everything is extremely colorful, but in the sense of neon colors. Everything is so bright and vibrant, and there is barely a place where someone’s eyes can rest--it’s balance in art. Brightness like this needs to be contrasted with darker, more muted shades, or else it just hurts to look at. The viewer’s eyes need places to rest, and the muted shades allow them that reprieve. You don’t get that with YIIK. It’s just a constant bombardment of colors and lights, to the point where if you are sensitive to these kinds of things, you may not want to look even at game footage unless you’re prepared. The character portraits are fine, even if some expressions are odd, but the in-game chibi-esque models are... bad. Really bad. They’re so uncanny and unsettling, and their expressions almost never change. (Also Alex has detailed teeth and it’s just as horrifying as you might think.)
Music/Audio:
The music is. Awful? It’s awful. It’s genuinely really bad. Case in point: one of the boss battle themes. You can hear this poor guy trying so hard to put power behind his voice, but it just sounds unnatural and strained. (Also he clips the mic at some points, and the balancing in general is. Bad.) He’s out-of-tune and occasionally off-beat, and it just makes for a very unpleasant listening experience. And a lot of the music is like this, being just an assault on the ears. The one real exception to this is the track “Into the Mind” made by one Toby Fox, presumably before he made Undertale and was doing freelance work. (He has since deleted his tweet promoting it. Screenshot of the tweet here, courtesy of @GameTheoryRejects.) The audio in general is poor, with irritating sound effects, occasional distorted audio that’s supposed to be scary but is so poorly done that it just hurts to listen to, and voice acting that’s lackluster at best and utterly emotionless at worst.
Gameplay:
Full disclosure: I did not personally play the game. But just looking at it shows how irritating, slow, clunky, and repetitive it is. Each character has a minigame that you play in order to attack, defend, use special attacks, and even run away. These minigames, unlike in something like the Mario & Luigi series, are slow, drawn-out, and completely break up the flow of the fight. And none of the other characters matter then anyway, because turns out if you max out your LUK stat, you can use a particular move that hits all enemies and completely one-shot them from critical damage. (And this move can even glitch out the game in some cases!) The menus are crowded and visually uninteresting, making everything sort of meld together. (Another minor criticism: YIIK has a tendency to put the player in unwinnable fights. You are never aware of what fights are winnable and which fights are designed to kill you. More on this later.)
Speaking of gameplay, the leveling system is... bizarre and tedious. You get EXP, but you don’t gain the ability to level up (yes that is an ability you have to gain) until a couple hours into the game. Leveling up is done in the Mind Dungeon, which you access from save points, and you have to go through doors that increase the stats you assign it. There are four doors per floor, and when you go to the next floor, you and all of your teammates (even if you haven’t met them in-game) level up. Sounds simple, right? Well. It’s slow and repetitive, and NOTHING HAPPENS. You walk in a door. You walk out the door. Rinse and repeat for 70 floors. (280 doors, by the way.) Here’s GrandmaParty doing this for an hour to get an idea of the tedium that this induces. You get to play a minigame when you banish certain enemies, but that serves less as ‘spicing up the gameplay’ and more of ‘adding more steps to this already-boring section.’
So to recap: Flat characters, word-salad plot, painful prose flat-out ugly graphics, backwards gameplay and leveling system.
Tl;dr: Game bad. Don’t buy it.
... This ends the non-spoiler portion of the review. And also the section where we start to talk about some... sensitive topics.
As such, I am going to issue a legitimate trigger warning: the following pieces talk about suicide/depression in detail, as well as physical & domestic abuse situations.
And a small content warning for those who aren’t legitimately triggered by these subjects but still feel uncomfortable reading about the following: homophobia/transphobia; sexism; racism; and the actual use of a real-life woman’s death as a plot device. No I am not fucking kidding about that last one.
So. Let’s get into the real shit about YIIK.
Spoiler Review
Plot:
Let’s start with the plot. There isn’t really a driving force for this plot; initially, it’s finding Semi “Sammy” Pak (well, everyone except Rory says “Park,” even though all of the written lines say “Pak,” so that’s great) after she is taken by mysterious figures. However, as the game progresses, the search becomes less about finding Sammy until she’s just a footnote, and becomes more about... meandering around the world going from one goal to another while fighting things. (The game points this out, but self-awareness doesn’t excuse the fact that it happens. Especially considering the upcoming plot points...)
Then the metaphysics start--people have been trying to decipher this world’s rules for a while with little success, so bear with me, I’m going to try to make as much sense of what we’re given as possible.
There exists a “place between places“ known as the Soul Space. It exists between parallel realities. A person can actually will themself into the Soul Space via... depression? One character, Vella, says that another character, Rory, left his body when he “surrendered himself to his misery” following the death of his younger sister, and explained herself that she fell into a deep depression as well before entering the Soul Space... but it’s not dying? Or it can be? Here Rory asks The Essentia 2000 oh we’ll get to her don’t you worry if dying means you enter the Soul Space. She says that it’s complicated. Her explanation boils down to, “if you care only about material goods and not about your bonds, when you die, you will cease to exist. If you don’t care about materialistic goods when you die, then ehhhhh???”
Also, if your reality is destroyed but you go into the Soul Space, you can become a Soul Survivor (aka the not-Starmen, seen in the cutscene with Vella and Rory linked above) and get stuck in other’s realities as you try to find a physical body. Also, people share a Soul across parallel realities--meaning, parallel versions of yourself would share the same Soul. But they’re not the same people. They have different lives, races, genders, names, but they share the same “Soul.” Only one person with that “Soul” can exist in a reality at a time, hence the form that the Soul Survivors take if they enter a reality where another person with that “Soul” lives. If, however, that person with your “Soul” is no longer in that reality, you can retake physical form and essentially take their place--though not as them, but as you.
And if you go into the Soul Space you apparently understand the secrets of the universe and are beyond normal human follies.
Confused yet? Me too, and I wrote this damn thing. The worldbuilding is so vague, and the players aren’t given set rules that the world plays by. Even when the more surrealist elements of the game start to appear, there should still be rules. Perhaps nonsensical rules, but rules nonetheless. Instead we get talk about Souls and parallel realities, scenes of bright colors and strange imagery that never gets explained or really acknowledged (other than a mention of them being “breaks in reality” like, once), and some plot twists that imply... a lot.
Let’s talk about the characters before we get to the ending.
Characters
Besides Alex, there are five major characters in YIIK:
Michael, who is Alex’s childhood friend and who doesn’t really have much relevance between the beginning and the end of the game. No, really, for the middle portion of the game, he doesn’t really do anything. He hangs around, that’s about it. He gains relevance again during the end of the game where he goes into the Soul Space and becomes Proto-Michael, and that... happens, I guess. I think it contributes to the revelation later on about reality breaking.
Vella is... a strange character. A strange character forced to contradict herself because the plot demands it. She’s shown to be a character who takes no shit, but also bends at the first flimsy apology Alex gives her. She is compassionate to someone like Rory, but spends most of her time calling out Alex. (And yet, somehow, they fall in love???) These notes I took previously on Vella’s first appearance show how what kind of walking contradiction that Vella is as a character:
”Stop creeping on me while i’m at work”
”Okay I’ll go to the house of two strangers who i just accused of perving on me, in the middle of my work shift, to look at these pictures of me on this website i’ve never heard of that can’t go wrong”
”So let me tell you about this traumatizing experience i had with a supernatural creature, saying how emotional and painful it was without any emotion in my voice”
”also i’m not going to tell you how I got to where the supernatural creature was because it’s very personal and I don’t know you and revealing that would make me vulnerable”
”By the way I’m going to give you my number as well as this other number for a training dungeon basically because I like you two”
... yeah,
Rory is probably my favorite character out of this dreck, and he deserves so, so much better than being in this shit. He’s a quiet scene kid who initially gets roped into the plot with the disappearance of his 12-year-old sister--turns out, however, that she killed herself, and Rory struggles with the resulting grief, trauma, and depression that follows. He’s a sweet kid who’s a pacifist, is teaching himself how to make games, knows a lot of random bits of information about many things, and overall deserves so much better than this game. Sorry Allansons you’ve lost your Rory privileges he is My son now
Claudio and Chondra... are just kind of there? Claudio’s a stereotypical weeb. Chondra is the “sassy black girl”/little sister type (which is later revealed to be even stranger, because she’s apparently a graduate student). They don’t have much outside of that, and that’s a shame, since they had a lot of potential to be really good. However, they also seem a bit... tacked on and included for diversity’s sake, as both of them mention racism at some point, and... yeah. The game isn’t very graceful with that topic, as I’ll soon get into.
There is also the character of Panda, who appears out of nowhere in the factory/hotel and is never questioned. It becomes very clear that he’s a figment of Alex’s imagination, and is Alex personifying him as his sort of “conscious“ when he is, in reality, only a stuffed bear. He only talks when Alex is alone. A lot of people really don’t like him, but I will admit that I got mildly emotional when he drifted away in space near the end--but only because I myself make stuffed animals and dolls, so nearly any stuffed animal holds a place in my heart. However, I can very much see why people wouldn’t like him at all.
Anyway.
The Fucking Ending:
So everyone just kind of meanders around for the middle portion of the game until surprise! On New Years’ Eve the world is going to be destroyed. Not just the world--the entire reality. And it’s going to be Alex’s fault, somehow. Also Sammy--who Alex becomes obsessed with--Vella--who is an explicit love interest for Alex--and an android--the previously-mentioned The Essentia 2000, who Alex has a dream about and immediately becomes infatuated--with all turn out to be the same person! Why pick between love interests when they can all just turn out to be the same person?! Also, Sammy was taken by apparent demons because her Soul was in the process of going into the Soul Space, and the creatures the took her were actually the other 2/3rds of her Soul that had already gone into the Soul Space and they were just collecting the last piece. I think.
The game turns into a watered-down version of Persona 3, where you have about a month--from Thanksgiving until New Years’ Eve--to train and get strong enough to stop whatever is going to destroy reality. (The actual Y2K thing is mentioned about halfway through and serves little relevance other than to mark when the end of the world is, since Y2K isn’t actually the cause of the world ending). Then there are some weird plot twists about how reality has been breaking for a long while (this was briefly foreshadowed in Alex going to Michael’s house only to be told that Michael doesn’t live there, and then going to another house where Michael is) and it makes a lot of things really confusing?? And then New Years’ Eve comes where everything is really breaking. Turns out the end of this reality is caused by a meteor with Alex’s face on it a la the moon from Majora’s Mask, no I am not fucking kidding. And it moves around like an inflatable arm-flailing tube man, no I am not fucking kidding.
And then everyone dies. No, really, this is an unwinnable fight. You die. Your entire party dies. Their reality is destroyed.
Alex wanders around the Soul Space for a while until he finds other versions of himself, and various “dark versions” merge together to create the Proto-Comet (’proto’ being the suffix to describe the end product of parallel selves merging together to form one entity). Alex follows the comet around as it destroys reality after reality until...
He finds one that hasn’t been attacked.
And gueeeeeeess what?
You, the player, are a parallel version of Alex. So he enlists you and another party of parallels (using the names you were supposed to input in the beginning) to destroy Proto-Alex. Here, you meet a spectre who is very obviously Sammy Pak, and she says that she’s sorry that Essentia “used her to get to you,” and you hug her.
Eventually you do get to Proto-Alex, as well as a different form of Essentia. Turns out that Essentia lied to you about Sammy and Vella--turns out, Essentia IS you. Well, Essentia is part of Alex, and she tricked Alex into destroying Proto-Alex in order to free herself from the “Soul” that they share. So you can choose to fight Proto-Alex, and if you do, you lose. Again. The boss fight in unwinnable.
And then this... really weird section happens with the character of Roy from Two Brothers, Ackk Studios’ previous game that got pulled from Steam due to bugginess and crashing. Roy basically says that people were “trying to stop his quest” (aka critics) and that Alex shouldn’t give up. (Note that this is a complete non-sequitur to anyone who doesn’t know who Roy is, where he came from, or the story behind the game being pulled.)
After that, you control both the player avatar given and Alex in order to “unplug” Proto-Alex and Essentia, which will make them “whole”? It basically means that all the versions of Alex will merge together into you, the player.
Then the game ends.
At least. Kind of. There’s more than one ending.
But... we’ll get back to that in a bit.
There are many questions the game raises without answers. Why was Sammy bleeding and screaming for the Soul Survivors not to take her because “you promised you wouldn’t move me again!”? Who actually is Vella? Why did no one question Essentia and Vella being in the same space if it was already said that they couldn’t be? Who actually is Sammy? Why is she a ghost and not a Soul Survivor? Why were Proto-Alex and the other “dark Alex”-es trying to destroy realities? Why does Proto-Alex look different than the other Alex-es, who look relatively similar? Who actually was the voice on the phone--it was implied to be Proto-Michael, but he didn’t exist when those phone calls were made? Is Claudio and Chondra’s missing younger brother actually a version of Alex, as this clip implies (esp. w/ the anime shirt)?
Good luck getting answers, because we sure as hell don’t get any.
Also--glad to know that the entire month of training that you spent the latter half of the game doing was all for naught, since the last two major fights you’re in are unwinnable. There are four minibosses to fight, so it isn’t all for nothing, but still. You don’t even get the satisfaction of killing the final boss. You pull a lever and he and Essentia get weirdly electrocuted.
One more thing: the twist of “Essentia lied to you” made a metric fuckton of exposition in her Mind Dungeon utterly pointless, and also feels like a flimsy excuse to absolve Alex of blame for the shitty actions of his parallel selves--more on that later.
So let’s touch on some controversy now that we have gone over the rest of this incoherent mess of a plot.
Elisa Lam
One of the most famous controversies of YIIK is the use of Elisa Lam’s death to propel the story. This is true--the creator admits that he “was very moved” by Lam’s death.
For those not in the know, let me give you a brief summary of the case of Elisa Lam. (Yes this is going to be primarily from Wikipedia but it also has news sources cited for it.) Elisa Lam was a 21-year-old Chinese-Canadian student who was reported missing at the beginning of February 2013. On February 17th, the workers at the Cecil Hotel in Los Angeles (where Lam was visiting) discovered her nude body in one of the hotel’s water tanks after guests complained about the taste of the water. The police released footage of Lam, from the day of her disappearance, acting strangely in an elevator, appearing to be hiding from something, pressing elevator buttons, and gesturing and talking to no one. There was controversy surrounding her death, as people wondered how she could have locked herself in the water tank, and how the police could rule her death as accidental. People have suspected that it was due to paranormal activity that she was acting like that, or others said that she could have been having hallucinations (as Lam was diagnosed with bipolar and depression). Her death was quickly spread through internet circles as some paranormal myth.
YIIK incorporates this as a huge part of its starting plot.
Semi “Sammy” Pak is very clearly inspired by Elisa Lam. The two bear striking resemblance to one another, being young Asian women in their early twenties with straight black hair (even parted in the same place)--and this photo from the LA Times shows that Lam wore rounded glasses, like the ones Sammy wears. (Lam is Chinese-Canadian, while Sammy is stated to be Koren-American. Sammy is also 23 when Lam was 21.)
This photoset from JamJamJamJamuel shows the biggest criticism of YIIK: the recreation of the elevator video. It’s obvious by the angle and some of Sammy’s movements that this was, in fact, meant to emulate the elevator video of Lam. The game also shows that people are less concerned about Sammy as a person and more about the mystery of the elevator, like the internet stopped caring about Lam as a person and more of a supernatural myth.
However, there’s more than just this.
There’s a weird... almost fetishistic nature when the in-game protagonist talks about Sammy. Alex describes his meeting with her as “intimate” (they met for like. an hour), calls her “my Sammy” when comparing his story to the story of the news, says that he “misse[s] her. I didn’t know her really, but I felt like I did.” And the very next line is uh. “In the unreal twilight hours, in-between sleep and waking, she slipped into my dreams, got tangled in my thoughts, like the blankets tangled between my legs, her brain melting with mine.”
... Gross, to say the least.
And yes, by the way, Sammy basically becomes a love interest. That’s not completely disrespectful and disgusting to the actual human woman that the devs never met or anything at aaaaaaaall.
BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE.
Rory basically goes on to describe a “creepy urban myth” about the water tower near his town. You can imagine what that leads to. It’s a beat-by-beat retelling of the finding of Elisa Lam’s body, except they make it a “nameless girl,” and the writers basically insert their opinions of how it was definitely a murder and the police called it an accident.
More tasteless than a fucking saltine.
OH BUT WAIT THERE’S EVEN MORE.
Near the end of the game, you find the ghost of Sammy Pak. Since she’s not a part of Essentia, it seems that Essentia used her form to get to Alex. She says that she’s sorry and that she’s going to go back ‘home’ now, and you hug her.
But that’s not even the worst of it.
Allow me to tell you about the second ending.
Second Ending:
YIIK has more than one ending--both are considered canon. Ending 1 is the one described above.
Ending 2, however...
Just before leaving the house for the last time, in order to get this second ending, you have to look at the computer in Alex’s house and read this post. It implies that you need to go find Sammy. (It also has some things to say about postmodernism but that’s for another day.)
You go outside... and she’s hiding behind a tree outside your house. No I’m not kidding. (Granted, this is the part of the game where reality is beginning to break apart, so.) She also says “I love you” which, given her “inspiration” by Elisa Lam... yeah. That’s not creepy and tasteless at all. And it also doesn’t make any FUCKING SENSE BECAUSE ALEX KNEW HER FOR AN HOUR AND NEVER SAW HER AGAIN.
Okay, okay, anyway, if you go back into the house and leave through the back entrance, you’ll be taken to the world map. Your destination is the KNN--the Korean News Network, where Sammy had been employed before she vanished. The faceless NPCs only refer to Alex as the name you put in at the beginning of the game, so presumably, everyone from this point forward is now talking to you, the player. (Also everything is pink. Really pink. For no real reason unless it’s “””symbolic””” of something?) You wander around for a bit, doing menial tasks, until you finally get to a pink version of the room you first met Sammy in. She calls you on a phone and tells you that she’s sorry for dragging you into this mess (because Alex/the player went looking for Sammy in the first place), and that she “has a solution” to prevent Essentia from using Alex any more.
You find yourself in front of an elevator, the same elevator that you rode with Sammy when she disappeared. She calls you on the phone again and says that if you go through the elevator doors, there’s no turning back. If you step through, you see the spectre of Sammy again, and she wants to show you where she’s been. You hug her, and she says that she’s so glad that she met you, “even if it was just a game. We’ll be together in your waking reality one day, I’m sure of it. For all I know, we may already be.”
... Roll credits!
No. Seriously. That’s the second ending. You, the player, (presumably) go into the Soul Space with Sammy for eternity, and Sammy basically gives you a love confession (after all she says “I love you” before anyway).
Need I remind you all that she is based off of a REAL-LIFE WOMAN WHO DIED THAT NEITHER OF THE ALLANSONS KNEW?!
Hi, yes, sorry, I’m fucking livid about this. Not just because of the disgusting use of a real-life woman’s death in your game, not just because they fetishized her and turned her into a love interest, not just one of the endings--which is a canon ending--had her telling you she loves you and having you go off with her...
... but because this game has been in development since 2013.
Elisa Lam wasn’t even dead for a fucking year.
Yes, other media has cropped up about Lam’s death, and I think it’s just as tacky and tasteless as this. But these guys had so much time to change it, to have someone say “hey maybe you shouldn’t do that,” and it happened anyway. The sheer lack of respect that the Allansons have for not just Lam but also her still-grieving family is astonishing, and it genuinely makes me sick. My thoughts and condolences to the family of Elisa Lam, having to deal with the press, internet conspirators, and people like this. I hope that they all can still find some sense of peace, even with all of this going on.
Racism:
So this game can be really, really fucking racist sometimes. Let’s start with the more explicit dialogue.
In the very beginning, Sammy calls Alex a ginger, and he says “that’s our word.” He’s equating “ginger” to a derogatory slur.
Here’s the next instance, with Alex referring to Vella--an Asian woman--as “vaguely ethnic” and “exotic.” (He doesn’t face consequences for this, either. Just a slap on the wrist of “don’t talk about race.”)
Later on, Chondra talks about race in an actually not that bad rant about how “I bet if [my brother] had been a beautiful white woman, everyone would have cared that he vanished.” This actually is somewhat insightful, as... well, it’s rather true. POC, when it comes to investigations, are often pushed aside, ignored, or given the least amount of effort. And then Chondra also calls out Alex’s lowkey racist fantasy of “being the white knight swooping in and saving the exotic Korean girl.” However... that’s it. Alex doesn’t get any insight from that, or rethink his reasons on why he wants to save Sammy.
And that’s where we get into Claudio and Chondra and the more implicit racism in the game. Neither of them have much in terms of personality--Claudio likes anime, Chondra is there for quips. Neither of them have any significant arcs, nor do they serve much story purpose beyond being extra party members and talking about race--which feels racist in and of itself, just to have characters of color there to talk about race. (Claudio even goes into an extensive rant about how it’d be racist to think that he knows how to pick locks, but he does know how to pick locks, just not the type that they need open. It comes out of nowhere, is utterly unwarranted, and is completely against the rather chill persona that Claudio has had up until then.) Their characters had a lot of potential to be good! However, much like every other character, they’re very underdeveloped.
(Also, if you have either Claudio or Chondra in your party when you get attacked by cop enemies, they will only shoot at either of them, you know, the only black characters in the main party, and my god I wish I was kidding.)
And then... the love interests.
Sammy is a Korean woman. Vella is an Asian woman of unknown descent. The Essentia 2000 has shown that many of her parallel lives are women of color. All of them are love interests for Alex, the white hero. Yeah. And the game calls it out, but no actual repercussions are given!
Speaking of these ladies...
Sexism
This game is really fucking sexist. Like, genuinely, it’s really sexist.
I think a lot of Vella’s contradictory character comes from this sexism and seeing her as a love interest rather than a character. Though she calls out Alex and is upset with him most of the time, she still accepts his weak apologies very easily--apologies that seem very manipulative and insincere when almost immediately after, Alex tries to convince her to let him into her Mind Dungeon, and if you take that as a metaphor than it gets even worse.
As well, Vella’s backstory includes her being used by a much-older man. What can you do after she tells this traumatic story about her being used by a man? Kiss her. And she doesn’t even get upset or angry with you; she just blushes and says to head back to the others. Because that’s not gross and manipulative or anything. That’s not taking advantage of a vulnerable woman at ALL.
The only female characters of importance that aren’t lusting after Alex are his mom and Chondra--I’ve already mentioned that Chondra has little story importance and personality, and Alex sees his mom as nagging for asking him to get groceries, gets angry at her when she says that she lost her job and asks him to get one to support the house (please note that she paid for his and his sister’s college educations in full, including semesters she didn’t plan for), and gets annoyed with her freaking out when he went missing for five days.
So yeah. The game doesn’t have the highest view of women.
But let’s talk specifically about Essentia. Essentia mentions that Alex has hurt her in parallel realities--but it’s okay, because they’re parallel versions, not actually him! And Essentia reveals that Alex’s parallel was the person who hurt Vella! But it’s okay, because she’ll love him unconditionally no matter how much he hurts her. It’s... really reminiscent of domestic abuse. And it frankly doesn’t matter that Essentia turns out to be a part of Alex and that any of the story of Vella or Sammy isn’t true; the game frames it as perfectly okay that it might have happened. It’s okay that parallel versions of Alex have hurt parallel versions of Essentia, because she loves him. It’s incredibly twisted, and it’s honestly a dangerous message to be sending.
(Also, in a very weird instance of sexism against men, out of all of the parallel selves that Essentia shows Alex, the only man is extremely hostile and violent towards Alex. It’s... kind of weird, honestly.)
Depression/Suicide:
Oh boy. Oh fucking boy.
A little background on myself.
I’m two years into my undergrad for a Psychology/Criminology double major. Classes I have taken include classes about pathologies of the mind and mental health (Psychopathology of Childhood, Developmental Psychology, Personality Psychology, Seminar on Positive Psychology, and of course Basic Psychology to be specific). I have also been clinically diagnosed with anxiety/depression, and both of these are genetically based, meaning that I have lived with them my whole life and will continue to live with them. (I am medicated, for anyone wondering. The meds are the only way I can function at a normal level.) I have felt suicidal before, I have had friends who have been suicidal before, and I have talked others down from self-harm or suicide. I’m not an expert, but I know a thing or two about mental health, depression, and suicide.
This game... this game doesn’t fucking get it at all.
(Just a quick thing: the game makes an OCD joke. Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder jokes aren’t funny, folks, since people who have it are affected by it all the time to the point of it often being debilitating. Just wanted to mention it a) to give you an idea on how the game handles mental health and b) because it really doesn’t fit anywhere else.)
Most of this surrounds the character of Rory, as he clearly suffers from depression and suicidal thoughts, as well as feeling grief surrounding his sister’s own suicide. When this is revealed, you know what Vella says to “comfort” him? “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional. I understand what you were feeling. 'This depression is unbearable.' 'I can't take it anymore.' The 'depression/pain' part is an unavoidable reality, but whether or not you can overcome it is up to you. You decide if you're going to keep going. Your sister is dead. Nothing can change that. [...] You can't help but feel the pain, but you can get through the suffering. That will go away. Look, I understand that it's easy for me to say. I'm not the one whose sister is dead. But you have to understand that I am telling you the true reality of the situation. You're playing with some otherworldly dangers here!“
Let me break this down to show you why this is not something to say to someone who is traumatized and in a deep depression due to the loss of a loved one.
“[W]hether or not you can overcome it is up to you.” This puts full responsibility of overcoming grief and depression onto the person suffering from it, which is not okay, and not true. Rory lost his 12-year-old sister to suicide! Very recently in the game’s timeline, as well!
Vella is basically telling him “it’s your job to get over your grief and depression.” Putting full responsibility on someone for feeling depression and grief is disgusting. If someone is grieving, what they should do is reach out. If they aren’t, reach out to them. Don’t let them suffer alone. Suffering like this is not a choice. People don’t choose to suffer.
By saying that suffering is “optional,” it subtly blames the person suffering for their own suffering, which makes their chances of getting better plummet. So frequently will people suffering from mental disorders put the blame on themselves for “not trying hard enough” or “being broken” or “not being good enough” because they think that this is all their own fault, and they won’t seek help, because “it’s all my fault.”
Now, when someone is in recovery? Yes, they should definitely try--even if it’s in small bits at a time--to to learn to cope with their disorders in healthy ways. However, when in recovery, the person is assisted by therapists, friends, family, and possibly medications. They aren’t alone. They aren’t alone, and are often guided by those who know how to help them and want to help them. The responsibility isn’t pushed solely onto them. One doesn’t “get over” being depressed. They learn to cope. They learn to accept it as a part of them, rather than all of them, and learn that they are more than their depression. The suffering never truly goes away; it can lessen, though, and a person can learn to live with it.
Some people may defend this by saying that the Allansons lost their mother very recently, and this is how they handle their grief. I lost my father in February of last year. I know this type of grief. And just because that’s how they handle their grief, that doesn’t mean it’s a healthy way of coping, nor the type of coping mechanism you should promote in your game. (I will admit that my own methods of coping weren’t great, and that I’m trying to improve on that now.) There’s a quote that I heard somewhere that goes something like, “grief never really goes away. We just learn to live with it.” That suffering doesn’t ‘go away.’ It ebbs and flows, some days being bearable, and other days not.
But that’s not the end, friends. Oh, far from it.
At one point, you can flat-out tell Rory to “stop being depressed. Being depressed is a choice.” It is noted to be the “wrong” choice, however, Rory barely reacts to it, making it not seem like the wrong decision. I don’t feel like I need to explain why “depression is a choice” is a take colder than the depths of space. Depression’s not a choice, folks. Hell, I would love it if it was, I would love to stop the fatigue, the emptiness, the lethargy, the lack of motivation, the irritability, the messed-up appetite, the fucked-up sleep patterns, the fits of crying. That would be fucking great. But I can’t. BECAUSE IT’S NOT A CHOICE, YOU WALNUT.
Okay, okay, sorry, back on topic. So let’s say you’re mean to Rory. You wanna know what happens?
He kills himself. And according to this user, the story doesn’t change and barely acknowledges Rory after his death. (Obviously there’s not footage out there of the characters mentioning that Rory committed suicide. However, the developers themselves commented on the previously-linked Steam forum post confirming its legitimacy. This is so unbelievably fucked up. Suicide is already a topic that should be handled with care, but having a main character commit suicide and have that death have no impact on the story? I don’t even have words for how deplorable that is. (Doesn’t help that the game basically pushes whether Rory lives or dies onto the player, which is also disgusting, because I don’t think the developers had the insight into suicidal ideation to know that it’s a multitude of factors that lead to suicide, and not just one person being )
(Sidenote: here are the links to the National Suicide Prevention Line and the Crisis Text Line in case anyone needs them. Please take care, friends. <3)
[Addendum: as I was working on this review and listened to the podcast linked a little further down, Andrew Allanson had this to say at 2:08:47: "When you make an unlikable character, people expect Sherlock Holmes or Dr. House. They want flawed heroes, but only to the extent that they’re beautiful and intelligent and slightly Asperger-y."
Thank you for basically saying that having Asperger’s Syndrome is an unlikable trait or makes people unlikable.]
Anti-LGBTQ+
So let’s talk about the prejudice against non-straight and non-cis people!
Andrew Allanson has been rather fucking clear about his prejudice against trans people and non-straight people. In the “The Dick Show” podcast, starting at 1:45:45, Andrew Allanson was interviewed by the commentators. I will be providing timestamps of quotes since I can’t directly link to them.
(Sidenote: I was listening to this podcast and waiting for Andrew’s pa rt to start, and one of the commentators was talking about Women’s History Month, and saying “If a woman doesn’t have a man, she’s going to expect the government to be her man. That’s just the way they’re wired.” [1:44:24 - 1:44:31]. Yeah. That tells you the type of people who run this podcast and the type of people that Andrew decides to associate himself with.)
[1:52:15 - 1:52:] “... we made the mistake of asking the player, ‘what name did your parents give you?’ And it turns out that that is a very offensive question. Because some people, um, are trans, and don’t use the name their parents gave them. So immediately the game is targeted as being transphobic. [...] So we wanted to basically create a character off of the player in the game, the first thing we ask you ‘are you a boy or a girl,’ ‘what’s your name’, and people were so bent out of shape over this. Look, I’m sympathetic to trans people, I understand why it upset them. But the problem was when we apologized, that wasn’t good enough. People then took it and said ‘what else can we find in this game to prove that it’s offensive?’”
So here’s the thing: that... is lowkey transphobic? Because it’s like you said, these people don’t use the names that their parents gave them. You’re asking them, intentionally or not, to deadname themselves. There’s a reason they call it a “deadname.”
Later on they ask, “which of these do you identify with?” and show a male figure and a female figure. Which frankly, is alright.
And then they changed it in an update to “what do you look like?” which feels like a very direct jab at trans people, especially the ones who were upset by the initial question relating to names.
Oh, and then there’s this part (I only know DIck and Andrew’s voices, I’m afraid I don’t know the third, sorry m8).
[1:54:35 - 1:55:10]
Andrew: So you play as this guy, Alex, you just come home from [college, audio cut out here], you’re an entitled asshole--
Dick: You get points for stomping queers, as I understand it, that’s the game, right? You go around and--
Andrew: The goal is to establish the white ethnostate.
[unintelligible as others laugh and talk over each other]
Dick: --you have a little ‘gaydar’ in the corner and it points you to the nearest homosexual, and then you go, y‘know, “Hammer [X]”
Andrew: It’s - it’s - yeah, it’s a hack-and-slash.
Dick: If you buy the game they send you a special overlay you can put on your controller that turns all the buttons into ‘K.’ So it’s not ‘A’--
Andrew: Yes!
Dick: --Just ‘K,’ ‘K,’ and ‘K.’
Andrew: Just ‘K,’ ‘K’--yeah, exactly, exactly.
So we not only have the mockery of gay folk, but also mention of murdering them (whether in a joking fashion or not, this still isn’t fucking funny and not something to joke about, especially if you are not LGBTQ+ yourself. And to my knowledge, none of these men are).
And that’s just from the creator himself, as well as the first few minutes of the game.
Let’s talk bout The Scene.
What is The Scene? Well, it’s the scene where Alex and Rory talk, where you can tell Rory that “depression is a choice.” Should you be kind and supportive to him, you know what you can do? “Try to kiss [him.]” And there’s art for it. There is literally no reason for this to be here other than “haha it’s a guy trying to kiss another guy, gay people are funny!” It seems to be an attempt at humor, but it fails... rather miserably.
The Legendary Third Ending
I call it “legendary” because no one knows if it actually exists or not, because people can’t find it, regardless of the hints given by the developers.
Andrew, while doing “The Dick Show” interview, mentions that he put DIck Masterson (the host of the show) into the game in the third update [1:45:56] , and that you have to give Dick a pair of aviator glasses, where he will give you a red pill [1:47:15 - 1:47:33]. Dick is also found in Chapter 4 of the game [1:47:40].
The devs also tease it on Twitter, saying that it’s “sad and challenging to complete”, and they give vague and unclear hints that don’t seem to help even the fans of the game--after all, no one has found it, apparently. Even the YIIK Discord (though this is just hearsay) has been losing steam in trying to find this ending.
I think it’s a testament to the quality of the game when one of your major three endings is nigh-impossible to find. (For the record, I feel the same way about how PT went about its ending, and how arbitrary it felt to do these very specific things that the game barely tells you about.)
Miscellaneous Other Things That Don’t Fit In The Above
There are a couple other things that irk me about this game, so time for a rapid-fire round!
You can kiss Rory, who’s implied to be a senior in high school (due to this talk of college). So he’s, at best, 18. Alex had 5 and a half years of college (the game says “five and a quarter” but unless I’m mistaken colleges work in semesters not quarters,), so he’s probably 23-24. Yeah. (There’s also the issue of consent--when you kiss Vella she just blushes and acts more docile, while with Rory, he rather vehemently rejects it. So women just accept an unwanted kiss? Hm.)
You fight a flasher as a miniboss. Because sexual harassment is hilarious. (And if neither Michael nor Rory are 18 yet, then there’s the possibility of minors being involved. YEAH.)
The title card is intentionally glitchy af and it hurts the eyes, honestly.
If you go through New Game+ and go to the 70th floor of the Mind Dungeon, Alex will basically talk to himself about some things:
It mentions that “crows are ugly.” You fool. You absolute buffoon. Crows? Excellent. Very intelligent birbs.
This is basically “hey we suck, but so does everyone around us, it’s fine”
This game unironically uses Wonderwall lyrics in an emotional scene, like I know it was popular and not a meme in the 90s but my guy, you gotta think about the connotations with the audience you’re releasing this for,
“I sighed as the elevator began to shake, vibrating with motion.” Thank you for using three words to describe the elevator shaking,
The One Thing That I Liked
Surprisingly, there is something I liked about this game. Not solely in concept, not in its potential, but in its actual execution.
It starts on the day of New Years’ Eve. It’s dark outside and inside. Alex suddenly starts getting many random calls, some from people he knows, others he doesn’t. Some voices are distorted, some aren’t. Some are talking to him, some aren’t. And they’re quick little calls before they hang up, and Alex barely says a word. He can’t leave the house, and keeps getting phone calls that get more and more distorted as time goes on.
That? I think that actually really works.
It’s a more subtle way of showing reality breaking: getting calls from people, both friends and strangers, that are slowly getting more and more broken, and you can’t do anything. You’re trapped in your house, you can’t see outside, you don’t know what’s going on. You can’t help your friends, even when Michael screams for your help. The slowly deteriorating stability of the calls are your only indication of what’s going on outside.
And for me, that works. It was the one section of the game that I felt legitimately invested in. So, kudos to the devs for that one.
Conclusion
YIIK isn’t just bad. It’s offensive. It’s ignorant, it handles serious topics incredibly clumsily, and the worst of it is that Andrew Allanson considers it to be ‘art.’ (If you’re wondering why I didn’t talk about the “video games aren’t art” quote, don’t worry. That’s going to be its own essay.)
YIIK fails on every level, from technical to storytelling. Please, I beg of you, don’t give this game money. Just go watch the LP.
You may have noticed that I didn’t talk much about the “postmodern” aspect of the game, nor much about Alex as a protagonist.
Both of those are going to be their own separate essays.
This wild ride still ain’t over, folks. Hang on.
#yiik a postmodern rpg#yiik: a postmodern rpg#yiik#andrew allanson#yeehaw#holy shit this one is SO LONG but im so proud of it
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I know my blog has been pretty negative lately
With everything going on in the simblr community that is shitty, I thought it would be nice to get away from that and send out some love to my favorite simblrs. This is by no means a complete list-- I love everyone I follow and all of my followers. This is just simblrs I've talked to a lot or am close with, or those whose stories or posts I follow closely.
@camisimblr is one of the most friendly, funny, and down to earth person I’ve ever met, and the first person I truly talked to regularly on here. She’s working through her Not So Berry challenge and is currently on Gen 3. I really recommend checking it out, especially as the captions on her gameplay are always class. If that’s not your thing, no worries! She also has a new simblr game going on where she presents a sim and gives clues as to the parents for anyone to guess! If that’s not your thing, follow her anyways because shes an amazing person!
@simvanglade is AN ABSOLUTE RIOT. She is so funny and so kind to everyone (except Peppa.) She’s currently working through the Not So Berry challenge and is on Gen 1, so now’s the perfect time to quickly catch up since there’s so much more good stuff to come! Her gameplay is ace and her captions are so funny and relatable. She also has some new stuff on the way that I’M SUPER EXCITED FOR. 👀👀👀 Go drop this lady a follow (or else Peppa will come for you 🔪)
@simmingkatie is the SWEETEST human being, and she just has this natural aura of happiness around her that makes you feel right at home when you’re talking! She just finished her Pancake’s Rerun story, so it’s a great time to binge read that ABSOLUTE MASTERPIECE. (honestly, go read it. It’s super good.) She’s also about to start posting her Bachelorette challenge with Alexis which is sure to be a great time, and is also working on Gen 2 of the Not So Berry Challenge! Also it looks like there might be some youtube videos coming 👀 Just like the other two above, if you’re looking for humorous captions and relatable down-to-earth commentary, look no further!
@fataleromeo is one of the most caring people I’ve ever met, and spreads love wherever she goes; Her writing is phenomenal, and her commentary is witty as hell. One of the many things she’s working on currently is her Fatale legacy. Having just finished Phoenix’s generation, it’s a fantastic opportunity for new followers to go back and catch up before she starts posting Ezra. (and from her amazing writing of the past two generations, it’s obvious that she’s going to absolutely SMASH this next one!) Alongside that, she too is about to start posting her Bachelor Challenge with Gabe AND has gameplay posts of the Not So Berry challenge (she’s up to the third generation!) With so many projects going (I honestly don’t know how she does it) you’re sure to never go long without some great content from her! I also saw a post about her making a sim for the human enough challenge and saying she probably won’t get around to it, but we can all hope, right? 👀
@weicyn / @cyanidelegacy I swear one of these days I’m going to go back to and read your stories from the beginning. This girl has SUCH GOOD STORY POSTS and if you’re looking for something to binge read, the Cyanide Legacy should definitely be a go-to! Along with her phenomenal writing, Cyn also has such a good and caring heart, and will help you wherever she possibly can! Go follow her!
@erosims is so supportive and helpful, I don’t know what I’d do without them if I have issues with either things in my day to day life or my cc. They’re also an amazing mod and cc creator themselves, along with reblogging others’ creations! If you’re looking for practical and incredibly useful mods and cc with a user who is incredibly caring and supportive, you’ve found the blog you’re seeking!
@skullysimblr is a blogger I look up to immensely. They’ve made it to !generation 9! in the Not So Berry challenge, and have hilarious captions to boot! If you have some time and want to binge some awesome content, I recommend going and showing them some love-- trust me, they’ll return it!
@toffeetip super kind and funny, and has amazing screenshots and gameplay posts, as well as releasing amazing cc! Just a very well-rounded blog that has everything you could ask for, tbh, along with a blogger that spreads love like crazy!
@starry-eyed-simss is currently writing Iorie Hills in her legacy challenge, as well as an AU for Strangerville. If you haven’t yet seen enough gameplay for the pack, I RECOMMEND IT HIGHLY (even if you have seen enough, you really won’t regret checking this out.) Iorie is an incredibly interesting and fun character and if you haven’t yet started reading that legacy-- oof. get over the their blog and catch up. I admit unashamed that I wait for the updates because I am THAT into both of these stories.
@liliumpixels is so sweet and so supportive to everyone she comes in contact with, and it’s the perfect time to follow her since she’s just starting out! I can’t wait to see everything she does!
@airedalerd is super funny, super nice, and super empathetic. This girl has so much heart in her. She’s just starting Secret’s of Brimwater, a mystery story that I’m so excited to see unfold. If you aren’t already, go follow; you definitely don’t want to miss anything she posts!
@liliithvatore really funny, stands up for what she believes in, and has a great story going with the vatores! her posts are so pretty and it makes following the story even better. also runs a great storytellers discord which is very helpful and friendly if thats your thing! If you are going to follow her, make sure you read the byf on the right side of her blog!
@carpakoi is honestly someone I look up to a lot. She takes everything that gets thrown her way in stride and stands up for what she believes in. She has great gameplays, great edits, and great storylines. The editing this girl can do? Stunning. Follow her!
@leafvy is a LIFESAVER with her name lists, and is so supportive of people in this community. Also, her edits? Fire. She’s going to start posting the Human Enough challenge soon, so follow her to keep on top of that!
@ounl is honestly just one of my favorite blogs? such a strong person who showers the community with love, makes great edits, makes AMAZING sims, and is just really true to himself which makes me really look up to him.
@cassgoths get it while its hot, who knows when this blog will be wrongfully terminated again 🔪staff🔪 But in all seriousness, they have such great story posts and you can tell they really put love into everything they do.
@roseiio has an amazing style of blog and editing, and has made quite a few challenges (my fave is obvs the reddit one) that bring the community together. also, they react to anon hate in the best ways, and just seem like a really funny person in general?? 10/10 blog
@toskasims-cc hilarious and so nice, I’m really glad we’ve recently begun talking no matter what drama it came from. makes really awesome and unique cc, go check out all they have to offer!
@alexaarr always so helpful whenever i reach out for help with wips! has AWESOME cc and is a genuinely nice person with a great sense of humor!
@glammoose is really kind and has great posts. knows a lot about music and is really fun to talk to. his sims have so much character which makes them incredibly lovable!!! also makes amazing cc! go check it out!
okay... i think ive rounded all of you up but I’m blanking right now, so I might (probably am going to) reblog with more people I love in the community!
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Camelot: What Makes Us Unique
This particular Camelot character has probably never existed before or since.
Back in 2004, I was meeting a friend at a bar in Boston. I opened the door to look in for him, saw that he wasn’t there, and backed out, elbowing in the stomach the man behind me. I turned around and saw that it was the governor of Massachusetts. Since then, I’ve liked to think that I’m the only person to have ever elbowed Mitt Romney in the stomach while he was walking into a bar. I’m sure plenty of people have elbowed him in the stomach on other occasions.
This is the kind of story I like, because it’s an assemblage of circumstances that has probably never occurred to anyone else. I look for those in life. I may not be the world record holder in any sport or hobby, but there’s a decent chance that by the end of my life, I will have published more blog articles on CRPGs than anyone else alive. If that turns out not to be true, I’ll only need one other modest qualifier (“than any other Mainer”) to make it true. I guarantee that I’m the only person in the world to have my particular combination of jobs (if you include CRPG blogging as one of them). I don’t hold the record for the number of airline miles flown between 2010 and 2018, but I’ve got to be within the top 10%, and when you’re in the top 10%, you only need one or two additional circumstances to make yourself unique. It’s possible that I’m the record-holder out of Bangor, Maine, for instance.
My enthusiasm for unique experiences filters into CRPGs and probably explains why I like open-world sandbox games so much. I don’t like the idea that I’ve reached the end of a game in the exact same position and circumstances as everyone else who has ever played the game. When you can’t even name your character, this is particularly infuriating. Look at my recent review of Deadly Towers, for instance. How do you really know it was me playing that game? I could have taken those screen shots from anyone. At least Dragon Warrior displayed the first four letters of “Chester.”
These issues got me thinking about the peculiar trade-off that exists between player and character. Think of a game like Pac-Man. When a champion like Billy Mitchell achieves a perfect score, we don’t say, “Wow, you created a great character there. You put a lot into him.” The very statement is absurd; every player’s Pac-Man is the same as everyone else’s. Instead, all praise goes to the hands and eyes of the player himself. In contrast, when we watch the ways that various players have won the Mulmaster Beholder Corps battle in Curse of the Azure Bonds, we look for clues in the characters–their levels, their spells, their weapons, their movements. We’re aware that there’s a player behind it all, of course–perhaps a very intelligent and strategic one. But his success is slightly diffused by the imposition of the characters. We are aware that his strategy only “works” because of the allowances of the game. Perhaps most important, we are aware that we could have done the same thing, whereas no studying of his technique is likely to make most of us like Billy Mitchell.
It is for these reasons that I don’t think it’s really possible to be “good at” a game like Skyrim. Experienced, sure. Patient, definitely. But “good”–what does that even mean? Early in its existence, some players proudly posted images on Reddit of their characters clad in leather armor and wielding pick-axes (possibly the worst weapon in the game) killing dragons. I thought it was silly. Either the game has enough flexibility to allow you to do such a thing or it doesn’t. It says nothing about your skill as a player that you were able to do it except that you were willing to use the game’s resources to grind, or enchant that pick-axe, or improve that armor, or carry and drink a hundred potions, or whatever you did to make it possible.
I just bought Irene the Myst 25th anniversary collection for Christmas. That is a “good at” game. A player that possesses the strength of puzzle-solving to blaze his way to the end without any spoilers is an impressive player. But his end-game screenshot is the same as everyone else and the “character” of the game is essentially invisible, a no-one, a ghost.
In many modern games, “uniqueness” extends quite literally to the character’s appearance.
In case it’s not clear, I’m not particularly interested in being “good at” CRPGs. I don’t play them for competitive reasons. I play them to enjoy the strategy, tactics, world-building, plots, and sense of character development. I like a challenge, but only a modest one–a temporary bump in a game that, because of its very nature (particularly because of reloading), you’re almost certain to eventually overcome.
Many people prize the opposite. I suppose even I do, in different circumstances. The value of most competitive games is that everyone’s playing the same game under the same circumstances, with no real imposition of “character” between the player and the performance. A king in chess isn’t a “character”; he’s just a piece. You don’t give him a name, and he doesn’t acquire new abilities as he defeats pawns and levels up. When he moves to take a rook, there are no probabilities associated with the encounter. When he wins, all glory goes to the player who moves him.
When my king reaches the end of a game, on the other hand, I want him to be my king–a unique character that no other player has won with. I want my endgame screenshots to look different from everyone else’s. And in those screenshots you should be able to tell something about how I played the game. Was I careful or daring? Did I rely on brains or brawn? Did I favor equipment or skills? What role-playing choices did I make along the way?
To me, some of the worst RPGs are closer to chess. Your “character” is just a gambit that you’ve moving across the screen, offering you no sense of connection or identity. These are essentially arcade games with a few nods to RPG mechanics. We’ve seen a million of them: Caverns of Freitag, Gateway to Apshai, Sword of Kadash, Sword of Fargoal. Even worse is when the game offers RPG-style inventory and leveling, but at fixed intervals along a linear plot, so that “character development” is just an illusion and everyone does reach the end the same as everyone else.
The best RPGs, however, offer plenty of opportunities to make your character your own:
Name
Selection of race, sex, alignment, and class
Attributes
Skills and talents
Inventories, especially those with multiple slots
NPC interaction, dialogue, and role-playing choices
Choice of what order in which to do quests and side-quests
Ability to grind, or not (only meaningful without artificially low level caps)
Customization of character appearance
Statistics, achievements, and trophies
The multiplication of these various factors means that many modern RPGs feature characters as unique as the humans who create them, finally achieving some of the sense of ownership and identification that tabletop RPGs allowed from the outset.
Every player may have had to do exactly what I did to win Ultima IV, but at least my name and the number of turns are unique.
Camelot is an early game, and thus not as advanced in the originality of its characters. But of the single-player PLATO games, it comes the furthest. When I play it, I do not feel as if I am feeding so many characters into a meat grinder, as I did with The Dungeon, The Game of Dungeons, and Orthanc. Its allowances for stealth, magic, and multiple fighting styles, paired with the strategic nature by which you must explore dungeon exploration, create as close to a unique experience as anything we’re going to get for many years. If nothing else, the combination of items in the 13 inventory slots likely creates characters for each player that no one else has ever played.
I’ve put about 12 hours into the game since the last Camelot entry and I’ve gotten a lot more powerful–enough to take on dungeon Level 5 with relative ease–but it’s still slightly frustrating how long its’ taking to finish the game, much more so because I keep dying and resetting my score back to -99,999. But I recognize that it was designed for different players in different circumstances.
There was an interesting moment the other night where creator Josh Tabin happened to be logged into the system at a moment that I got stuck. I had teleported into a section of Level 4 that offered only one exit: a downward chute. Unfortunately, I had taken a Potion of Levitation upon beginning the expedition (you always want to use Scrolls of Protection, Potions of Cepacol, and Potions of Levitation at the outset of each expedition if you have them). It turns out that Levitation stops you from using chutes, even deliberately. The condition doesn’t wear off until you return to town. There were no other exits from the area, and I was out of Scrolls of Recall. The only solution I could come up with is to wait until the turn of every hour, when the dungeon levels respawn, and kill everything in the half-dozen rooms I had access to, hoping to get a Scroll of Recall at some point. But since Josh was there, I informed him of my trouble and he opened a secret door for me, then spent some time patching the game so that even if you’re under the effect of levitation, you can manually choose to take a chute.
Other things about the game since I last wrote:
As I previously mentioned, the game occasionally gives you a specific monster to kill before it will let you level up. It’s very erratic. I had a period from roughly Level 10 to 20 where I got a quest every level. Then I didn’t get any at all between Levels 20 and 29.
A “Palantir” tells you at what level you can find the object of your quest. If you’re already on that level, it tells you the specific coordinates. Of course, if the hour turns while you’re still seeking the quest creature, everything resets.
As you move downward, enemies get harder but rewards get better. Some of the magic item rewards are awesome. I’ve had a couple of Wands of Fire that completely clear out rooms in one turn. The problem is how frequently they require recharging and the expense thereof. The game’s economy is still excellent. I make a lot of tough choices between leveling up, recharging, and purchasing new items.
It turns out that items don’t have a fixed number of charges but rather a small probability of running out within any given use. High intelligence seems to lower this chance.
Some of the best items that you can find increase your attributes. Manuals and tomes increase them permanently by one point while various potions increase them temporarily for several points. I have maxed out my strength, intelligence, and constitution with these items, and I must be close on the other two.
A Manual of Bodily Health raises my constitution.
Scrolls of Taming, Orbs of Entrapment, and Wands of Charming all work on different creatures. I’ve learned that when I lose a companion (or one leaves), I want to head down to the lowest dungeon level on which I can survive to start hunting for another. About six hours into this session, I was able to charm a succubus, and it’s remained with me ever since–an extremely powerful ally.
I probably mentioned this earlier, but there are special rooms on each level that the creator calls “stud rooms.” They feature enemies 2-3 levels harder than the normal ones on the same level, but with rewards 2-3 times greater. Any new expedition needs to begin with clearly the stud rooms that you know you can clear.
In one of the “stud rooms.” Seven green dragons are a little much for me. The Scroll of Identification gives grim odds.
There’s a magic item called a “Tardis” that resets the dungeon in between the normal hourly resets. It allows you to quickly hit the stud rooms multiple times in a row until it runs out of magic. It’s incredibly useful but back in the day when there were multiple players hitting the dungeon at the same time, it must have been very annoying for some of them.
The two players on the leaderboard who have won the game both have Level 60 characters, so I assume that’s the game’s level cap. Thus, I’m halfway there. I probably won’t have much more to say about Camelot until I win, so hopefully I can get it done this week while I also wrap up Challenge of the Five Realms. I’ll say this for Camelot: it’s the first PLATO game that I’ve enjoyed lingering with, rather than blasting through it just to document its historical value.
Time so far: 40 hours
source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/camelot-what-makes-us-unique/
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Long Post on Screenshots
Coincidentally, I had glimpsed the twitter thread in question (or something similar) before I saw a post about it and had some thoughts™ as well
I was going to straight up reply but it got out of hand and I ended up blabbing a lot about taking screenshots, mods and ReShade.
Mods. Literally just an aesthetic client-side change. I can't believe people are up in arms about this. Let people have their fun and ignore it if it's not to your taste. There's absolutely no need to shit on someone else's definition of fun. Your values for what comprises a good screenshot made with effort should not be imposed as the standard. (Unless you're holding a screenshot contest, it literally doesn't matter.)
I don't use mods personally, out of laziness and I cannot be bothered messing with my files. Partly because I don't have characters that have a particular appearance that I really want. But that's my reason, and if other people are happy with their mods, so be it. I'm happy with my own thing. Even a walk home next to a world-famous monument just gets dull when you see it so often. It's not a crime to appreciate it through a different lens.
I'm going to preface this by saying no one has to defend what they want to do for fun. And even if your reasons for using mods/ReShade etc doesn't fall in line with any of the ones offered below, it literally doesn't matter and you should have your fun.
Contrary to what some negative folks think, people are still fully capable of doing some really good glamour without mods. Although it makes sense when you play around with FFXIV's glams/character creator enough, you'll quickly realize that there are particular limitations (certain gloves don't show up with certain tops, some bottoms lose the pants/skirt when you wear certain things over them, etc) and some people simply want to portray the details of their characters accurately to their vision. I have seen a lot of really good designs that don't exactly match their in-game sprites. Some people might want to do an easy cosplay. Some people might just want to look pretty and sometimes it doesn't get deeper than that.
Nevermind that there are ordinary people behind modding, creating these for use. They didn’t spawn out of nowhere. They’re a product of someone’s hard work and skill too. Shout out to @keeperofthelilacs for the posts & a glimpse into the grueling, painstaking process just to make a deceptively simple mod and apply changes to each model. I cannot fathom people creating things that are not even in-game.
But obviously, with modding being the new shiny thing, there would be an influx of pretty pictures with people using them. The majority out there still does some creative things without the use of these programs. But their use isn’t indicative of a lack of creativity in taking screenshots.
Yes, the game is intrinsically beautiful and the sights are breathtaking, and there's no shortage of unmodded, unretouched, unReShaded screenshots littered about. I know there are more than a handful of reddit threads with such screenshots up. But, even with the built-in /gpose, the options can be limited and the vivid colors don't always show up the way people intend them to. This is why ‘different’ draws attention. Since we all have the same washed out color palette (suitable for actually playing the game. try raiding with an Aesthetic ReShade setting with Depth of Field on, it is agony.) it’s easier to pick out brighter looking, unusual colored screenshots. Moreso if they’re beautifully composed.
The improvement of colors from ReShade are only one aspect of it, as a lot of people who use them could tell you.
This screenshot has ReShade on and some /gpose settings, and it’s whatever. It’s meh.
It’s poorly lit, tilted to one side for some reason, the background lantern is grabbing all the attention, but the scenery is somehow cut off, my character is awkwardly posed, the colors, while MORE vivid, aren’t really inspiring the ‘hey this outfit is awesome and unique’ feeling. You have no idea what you’re meant to pay attention to.
Now, before you say I took a bad one on purpose, this was actually from the time I first got the diamond coat so I was ACTUALLY trying to show it off. This was one of many screenshots I’d taken, trying to nail down what I wanted to do.
It just goes to show even if you have the tools, you can still produce some pretty underwhelming stuff. And you could easily take a better one if you know what you’re doing.
It may be beyond the provisions of the game, but it’s not an easy task taking good screens with ReShade. Like said, it takes time and skill.
You have to know when to use angles and tilts and how to frame photos. Composition does SO much. The word gets used a lot but there’s a lot involved, whether you do it consciously or not. Do I zoom in up close or far out? How far? Do I want to put my subject in the center or a little to the right? How much of the background should I show? Do I blur? Do I use dutch angles? Do I take a high angle shot? Daytime? Nighttime? /gpose which filter? How much can I crop? Do I need the feet in the frame? Do I add special effects? Lighting setting 3 2 or 1? More green or more red? Those are basic questions people think about, but these are settings you use to tell a story. Then there’s questions like, how do I frame the photo to draw more attention to the feeling of being trapped? How do I use lighting to create a feeling of dread? How do I use the environment to help me tell the story and not just take a dull photo of my character?
And that’s just taking the photo. It’s easy to be tempted by all the shiny stuff you can pile onto a photo, but if it doesn’t serve a purpose other than “ooh”, then the intense sparkles floating around a photo can distract more than contribute.
So you have everything set. You switch ReShade on. You picked out a good preset. But when it comes to stuff like this one size does not fit all, in order to make it work beyond what a preset provides (as night can be pitch black, and daytime is a complete bloom-filled eyesore) you have to get your hands dirty. Presets can be pretty for sightseeing, and for most it’s enough and they work well enough to use consistently in screenshots. And that’s perfectly fine. The settings are very technical and have numerical values. I don’t understand all the values and effects myself, and finding the sweet spot to produce is an arduous process.
The same goes for Photoshop. There’s no magic button to make your art look good. You need a good eye for adjusting saturation, color balance, lighting, cropping, framing etc. to improve ANY photo. More than that, you need to be good at making believable visual effects for fancier edits. If you drag a brush randomly, no one’s going to be immersed in the way those hair extensions were made. Nope, people study the native look of a photo to make changes. Otherwise you just end up with spaghetti hair.
[it’s the same ugly photo but with spaghetti hair]
I literally used the color dropper. It’s not enough to do that!! Like GIRL I’m a fuckin digital painter and I don’t know how all those people paint/edit hair, it’s a SKILL they learned and not one I have LOL. You have to care about lighting and getting the right width and all that. It’s not that simple.
Photoshop’s got a magic wand but it’s not that easy!
People who edit photos are familiar with these... and each one has its own settings and values :,^) that can change the mood of a photo by making only certain colors be more muted or even making everything look a little lighter and brighter.
It’s not that easyyyy look at one of these windows if I didn’t do this for a living I’d be so confused
So going back to showing off my coat. After I saw the lineup of photos I’d taken, I was pretty dissatisfied, especially because I knew I could take better photos.
I identified the problems I saw:
1.Even though I wanted to showcase my outfit, I didn’t have to take a photo straight on. The photo earlier had her facing completely straight into the camera. And it felt very flat.
2. It’s zoomed too far out, you can’t really see the details on the coat.
3. I tweaked my ReShade settings. I worked on the lighting. When I realized my settings and the lighting in game (and on gpose) were not cooperating, I decided to wait for daytime. Kugane at night was distracting as hell with all the lanterns in the background. My clothes were the star.
Here’s another screenshot I took wearing the Far Eastern stuff.
I wasn’t showing off the details of the glamour here. Kugane at night has a lot of personality, lights and colors. When I looked at this old screenshot, I realized that it wasn’t a good setting for a simple photo that said “hey check my glam”. This photo told a story. My clothes weren’t the focus, it was the fact that Proxi was in Far Eastern clothes in Kugane. All of those facts were of equal importance, so she was a figure immersed in her surroundings.I didn’t need to capture the details of her dress, just show enough for it to be recognized. That’s why this photo worked. And only one of the many reasons why the badly lit one didn’t work. Contrary to the urge to do so, I didn’t need to tilt the camera angle to make it look interesting. I used her body language, paused an emote at the right second to get something more relaxed, her over-the-shoulder look gives an inviting feeling. I let the color contrast separate her from the background as a figure, but I kept her a part of that warm Kugane vibe with bits of red lighting. There’s a lot of thought that goes into this. How color and mood tie together. Knowing what is essential and what isn’t helps a lot, and sometimes it’s trial and error and you don’t really actually know what you want.
Here’s the final image of the Coat screenshot that I posted a couple months ago
The problem with the Diamond Coat is that I dyed it a dark blue color and I wanted to keep that sense of dark blue without shining a bright light on it, or lightening the color. I used stronger contrasts to bring out the blues, fiddled with settings I didn’t understand but it made details shaper lol. I used angles and some blur to add a little more dynamicity (being a more static photo) and focus on Proxi. While she is still mostly facing forward, I played with her pose more, to get more of a ~random well-dressed elezen on a stroll~ feel. And!! look at all the details on her coat, you can see them!!
But wait, you ask, aren’t you just proving that ReShade is a crutch wELL IT’S NOT. It’s a TOOL. You use. If it makes your life easier and more efficient and it makes you happier, like, honestly it doesn’t matter.
But here’s a non g-pose, non-ReShade screenshot I took during a Zurvan EX run early last year. My PC froze for a second lol. I was going to have a heart attack doing this but as a SMN I’m obligated to RELISH Teraflare. This is ONE lucky screenshot I got and you know what, even if the colors aren’t super vivid, this screenshot feels SO right. The explosions aren’t overwhelmingly bright, the arena is surprisingly a fitting background, and she’s got her leggy up but she didn’t give me a panty flash and I am fortunate this turned out to be a great photo I could put in a church mural.
Another non-gpose one. See! framing, contrast and all that. This was from my old blog circa 2016 and it got one note! LOL gpose didn’t even exist yet as we know it, and I don’t think ReShade was widespread or even a thing yet and I was super proud of this one. The trees gave her a soft background without making it too blindingly bright so she stands out and I love it.
So there’s’ your normal screenshot look, without excessive flash and eyesore while still being pretty.
But yeah anyway
TL;DR
1. Don’t be bitter about other people using tools and adding steps to enhance their aesthetic experiences or to create screenshots that are more faithful to their vision. If it’s not harming you, live and let live.
2. There’s more thought that goes into pretty screenshots than you think. Just because they don’t pick up a brush and draw, does not disqualify these screenshot posters as skilled artists in their own right.
(ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ'✿ That’s all!
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He’s a Dogecoin Millionaire. And He’s Not Selling. Last February, when Glauber Contessoto decided to invest his life savings in Dogecoin, his friends had concerns. “They were all like, you’re crazy,” he said. “It’s a joke coin. It’s a meme. It’s going to crash.” Their skepticism was warranted. After all, Dogecoin is a joke — a digital currency started in 2013 by a pair of programmers who decided to spoof the cryptocurrency craze by creating their own virtual money based on a meme about Doge, a talking Shiba Inu puppy. And investing money in obscure cryptocurrencies has, historically, been akin to tossing it onto a bonfire. But Mr. Contessoto, 33, who works at a Los Angeles hip-hop media company, is no ordinary buy-and-hold investor. He is among the many thrill-seeking amateurs who have leapt headfirst into the markets in recent months, using stock-trading apps like Robinhood to chase outsize gains on risky, speculative bets. In February, after reading a Reddit thread about Dogecoin’s potential, Mr. Contessoto decided to go all in. He maxed out his credit cards, borrowed money using Robinhood’s margin trading feature and spent everything he had on the digital currency — investing about $250,000 in all. Then, he watched his phone obsessively as Dogecoin became an internet phenomenon whose value eclipsed that of blue-chip companies like Twitter and General Motors. The value of his Dogecoin holdings today? Roughly $2 million. On the surface, Mr. Contessoto — who dropped out of college and has no formal financial training — seems no different from a lucky gambler who walks into a casino, bets all his chips on a single roulette spin and walks out a millionaire. But he is also emblematic of a new kind of hyper-online investor who is winning by applying the skills of the digital attention economy — sharing memes, cultivating buzz, producing endless streams of content for social media — to the financial markets. These investors, mostly young men, don’t behave rationally in the old-fashioned, Homo economicus sense. They pick investments not based on their underlying fundamentals or the estimates of Wall Street analysts, but on looser criteria, such as how funny they are, how futuristic they seem or how many celebrities are tweeting about them. Their philosophy is that in today’s media-saturated world, attention is the most valuable commodity of all, and that anything that is attracting a great deal of it must be worth something. “Memes are the language of the millennials,” Mr. Contessoto said. “Now we’re going to have a meme matched with a currency.” Mr. Contessoto, an affable, bearded hip-hop fan who goes by the nickname Jaysn Prolifiq, is a first-generation immigrant whose parents came to the United States from Brazil when he was 6. As a child in suburban Maryland, he saw his family struggling with money, and he vowed to become rich. He discovered a love of hip-hop music as a teenager, and after school, he moved to Los Angeles, where he took a job making $36,000 a year as an entry-level video editor while trying to book gigs for an up-and-coming rapper he knew. His dream was to save up enough money to buy a house — one where he and his hip-hop friends could live while making music together. But that kind of cash was elusive, and he spent several years crashing on couches while trying to save enough for a down payment. In 2019, he started buying stocks on Robinhood, the commission-free trading app. He stuck to big, well-known companies like Tesla and Uber, and when those trades made money, he bought more. And in January 2021, he watched in fascination as a group of traders on Reddit successfully boosted the stock price of GameStop, squeezing the hedge funds that had bet against the video game retailer and making millions for themselves in the process. (He tried to get in on the GameStop trade but he was too late, and he ended up losing most of his stake.) Shortly after the GameStop saga, Mr. Contessoto was browsing Reddit when he saw a post about Dogecoin. He’d heard of the currency before. (Elon Musk, who is to Dogecoin fans roughly what Pope Francis is to Catholics, had called it the “people’s crypto.”) But as he did more research, he became convinced that Dogecoin’s jokey, approachable image might make it the next GameStop. “Dogecoin has the best branding of all cryptocurrency,” he said. “If you put in front of me all the symbols of Ethereum, Bitcoin, Litecoin — everything just looks super high tech and futuristic. And Dogecoin just looks like: Hey, guys, what’s up?” He imagines that newbies investing in cryptocurrency for the first time might gravitate toward something fun and recognizable, and that Dogecoin might eventually become a kind of on-ramp to the larger world of virtual money. “I feel like eventually we’re all going to be buying and selling things with memes, and Dogecoin is going to lead the way,” he said. Strange as his investment thesis might seem, it’s hard to argue with the results. Even after a recent crash following Mr. Musk’s appearance on “Saturday Night Live” (in which he joked about Dogecoin being a “hustle”), Dogecoin remains a very lucrative trade. A dollar invested in Dogecoin on Jan. 1 would be worth $203 today — much more than a comparable investment in Bitcoin, Ethereum or any stock in the S&P 500. Dogecoin’s stratospheric rise has also fueled plenty of grumbling among cryptocurrency buffs, who see it as a tacky sideshow that overshadows more serious uses of cryptocurrency. One of Dogecoin’s original creators has disavowed the coin, and even Mr. Musk has warned investors not to over-speculate in cryptocurrency. (Mr. Musk recently sent the crypto markets into upheaval again, after he announced that Tesla would no longer accept Bitcoin.) What explains Dogecoin’s durability, then? There’s no doubt that Dogecoin mania, like GameStop mania before it, is at least partly attributable to some combination of pandemic-era boredom and the eternal appeal of get-rich-quick schemes. But there may be more structural forces at work. Over the past few years, soaring housing costs, record student loan debt and historically low interest rates have made it harder for some young people to imagine achieving financial stability by slowly working their way up the career ladder and saving money paycheck by paycheck, the way their parents did. Instead of ladders, these people are looking for trampolines — risky, volatile investments that could either result in a life-changing windfall or send them right back to where they started. Mr. Contessoto is a prime case study. He makes $60,000 a year at his job now — a decent living, but nowhere near enough to afford a home in Los Angeles, where the median home costs nearly $1 million. He drives a beat-up Toyota, and spent years living frugally. But in his 30s, still with no house to his name, he decided to go looking for something that could change his fortunes overnight, and ended up at Dogecoin’s door. When Mr. Contessoto recalls the way he used to pursue wealth — working hard, cutting back on expenses, saving some money from every paycheck — he sees evidence of a system that is rigged against regular people. “I feel like those experts on TV, the older generation of old money and wealth, they try to scare people into staying safe so nobody gets too rich,” he told me. His new motto, he said, is “scared money don’t make money.” Many things about Mr. Contessoto’s investing philosophy would turn a traditional financial adviser’s stomach. But wildest of all is that despite his spectacular gains, he has not yet cashed out his Dogecoin millions. He thinks the currency’s price will continue to rise, and he doesn’t want to miss out on future profits by selling too soon. (He does plan to sell 10 percent of his stake next year, once his earnings will be classified as long-term capital gains and taxed at a lower rate.) Instead, he is branding himself as a Dogecoin expert, adopting nicknames like “the Dogefather” and “Slumdoge Millionaire” and making YouTube videos promoting Dogecoin to others. “I’m bullish as they come in the Dogecoin community,” he said. “If this exceeded my expectations of Dogecoin, and I only hit it in two months, imagine where it’ll be in a year.” Of course, as with any volatile investment, there is a real chance that Mr. Contessoto’s Dogecoin holdings could lose most or all of their value, and that his dream of homeownership could again be out of reach. Already, the price of Dogecoin has fallen nearly 50 percent from its all-time high, shaving hundreds of thousands of dollars off Mr. Contessoto’s portfolio. But gamblers rarely leave the table the first time they lose, and Mr. Contessoto’s commitment to “HODLing” — an acronym favored by cryptocurrency traders that stands for “hold on for dear life” — is buoying him through the recent market turbulence. Earlier this week, he posted a screenshot of his cryptocurrency trading app, showing that he’d bought more. And on Thursday, when the value of his Dogecoin holdings fell to $1.5 million, roughly half what it was at the peak, he posted another screenshot of his account on Reddit. “If I can hodl, you can HODL!” the caption read. Source link Orbem News #Dogecoin #hes #Millionaire #Selling
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Dream Daddy Cult ending.
So from looking up sources, refreshing twitter, tumblr, and reddit in search for what is going on, i have a pretty good understanding of what this secret ending with Joseph is about.
I believe how it started was someone trying to find out if there was a good ending with Joseph. As of now, (7/23/17) all i know is that there is a ending where Joseph has sex with you, and then goes back to his wife. I heard that there was a second ending where you stay his side hoe, but i haven’t gotten that ending nor seen anyone else get it. I guess while data mining someone had found and posted the dialog where you wake up after having sex with Joseph, you are in a underground ‘dungeon’.
The dialog goes on to show that Joseph is not human at all, but some sort of demon. He calls his kids ‘vessels’ that are apart of him. Joseph tells your dad that you are underground below the cul-de-sac and anyone who has ever seen this place has died. Joseph then says:
“…Just think of it as the real Margarita Zone.”
Then Joseph admits that the reason why all the dads in the area are single is because he hunted them down and was using their power to fuel this entity(?)
It doesn’t stop there, Joseph goes on to say:
“Now you’ll excuse me, there’s some other business I need to attend to. Your dear friend Robert has been awfully worried about you.
I think it’s about time that miserable drunk gets one last visit from the Dover Ghost.’’
After this Mary shows up and sets you free, you run and run and make it back home somehow. Once you get in Amanda greets you and things seem normal…until you ask her when he birthday is and you realize that Joseph made a fake Amanda. The “demon” Amanda turns to ash and this is followed by you trying to stab Joseph with the knife that Robert gave you. You drop the knife in the struggle, where Mary grabs the knife and stabs Joseph. His children attack him and possibly eat him(?). You end up waking up in bed and told by Amanda that the yacht you were on sank. Joseph was found to be taking money from the church and was no where to be found.
Detective Saul Graves comes in and tells you he saw the underground dungeon himself and that his own wife died mysteriously.
http://pfl-washington.tumblr.com/post/163265622355/ddadds-spoilers
Looking deeper into the game, people started to find sprites that go along with this storyline.
To Mary holding the bloody knife she stabbed Joseph with.
Joseph being stabbed in the shoulder.
Detective Saul Graves. (possibly voiced by Ross or Jacob Anderson: https://notsodreamydaddy.tumblr.com/post/163309240604/saulcalldanger04 )
“demon” Amanda.
There’s even more, including Joseph’s vessel children, the background to the dungeon, different facial features for characters…ect
https://notsodreamydaddy.tumblr.com/
Then even more was found…Background music, voice clips for Mary, Saul, creepy footsteps, and very disturbing background music.
https://notsodreamydaddy.tumblr.com/post/163259217464/synthcult
Now, for the speculation. Everything above was found IN THE GAME.
People started to make some connections to Robert and Joseph. Robert has a odd looking tattoo that he doesn’t want to talk about. Joseph has the same tattoo, and that symbol keeps showing up in the game.
On Joseph’s walls…
This is the cult’s symbol. Its all through the game, and in the actual dungeon.
The symbol is even on the build your dad clothing options…
Not to mention the times robert warns you about joseph and how they had some twisted past together.
People having been saying that this ending was a Halloween DLC.
I would like an answer as to: 1.) Who said it was a DLC and were the screenshot proof is. 2.) If it is a Halloween DLC, why is the cult symbol EVERYWHERE IN GAME. 3.) Why would they have a DLC for a game that just came out a few days ago..
I’ve seen people also say that it was something the game devs wanted to take out, thinking it was too much for a silly queer dating sim. This is more believable. I heard that one of the devs is into the horror genre, but this isn’t confirmed. Even so, why would they leave so much code in for data miners to find and cause people to get upset over. If they didn’t want to upset anyone why did they leave so much in for people to find?
As what I've seen and heard, at the moment there is no way of getting this ending. The code is apparently broken and wont start like the other endings.
These could all could be possible ideas….If there wasn’t a steam achievement out for “Escape from Margarita Zone” that no one has gotten.
Along with that achievement, there’s “World’s okayest Dad” which no one out of the thousands of people playing can unlock. ( sidenote: someone on reddit said they got the achievement and wouldn’t say how, but looking deeper into it they seemed to have hacked the achievement and not gotten it ‘naturally’)
Ending notes:
I think that you can get the achievement and this chapter 18, cult ending. It might be a “true” ending, but that’s up to the person playing to decide.
HoodiePanda hosted a stream where he said himself that there is a possible Mary bug that the devs have confirmed which might be the reason we cant unlock this ending. This guy has played 24+ hours on this game and i think i can agree.
maybe we’ll never know…
#dream daddy cult ending#spoilers#dream daddy spoilers#i'm using this post to put together everything i know and all the evidence#this is mostly for me because i am obsessive and won't stop until i find the answer i want
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Thess vs Break Time
This has thus far been a very much needed bank holiday. The last couple of weeks have been unadulterated hell, and I needed an extra day to recoup, pretty clearly. Thus far I have had it, and thus far it has met and in fact exceeded expectations.
One thing that took up my time this weekend was the Apparently Unending Search For A New MMO. Look, I know I’ve been recommending TSW and I still love TSW. The thing is that TSW is currently in maintenance mode as Secret World Legends goes through its beta testing phase. I was actually in the beta. I had to stop playing after a couple of hours. To keep it to stuff that’s actually common knowledge because I’m not going to be like those jackholes who were posting screenshots and detailed shit about the beta on Reddit in violation of their NDA ... they are moving to ‘action RPG’, which has a significant impact on the actual control. I think a lot of this actually made it through to the devstream awhile ago, so ... y’know, if you saw that? Maybe you get an idea of what I’m talking about. Thing is, a lot of stuff may change but that core element of how they’re doing combat now isn’t going to. That’s been pretty clear. And for me personally, it’s a deal-breaker. Other issues aside (and those would probably violate the NDA so I’m not going to go there yet), it kicks off my migraines. Like, badly. I didn’t get through two minutes pain-free, and by the half-hour mark just mostly running around the zones, I had to stop because I could barely see from the pain. And that migraine lasted two weeks.
Now, keep in mind that I am particularly prone to migraine and that kind of thing is one of my primary triggers. It’s why I have issues with a lot of movies. Remember the LOTR movies where they had those sweeping 360-degree panoramic shots of the Fellowship marching across open fields to show ‘The Majesty Of The Landscape’ and all that? Leave us simply say that I learned my lesson about going to the movies with my mother and stepfather because they do not understand “I would prefer make my own way home separate from you because it is generally good manners to talk to your conversational companions and I would not be able to because my migraine is so bad that I cannot string a sentence together”. Anyway, all that to say that other people might not have those issues. They might (and some I know did, and some even had a hard time watching the devstream as a result), but they might not. You might not. I ... just can’t play it anymore. The combat as they’ve set it up causes me too much pain, and they won’t change it. So I have to go find something else.
I’ve resubbed to FFXIV for the time being. I mean, I haven’t got very far. Conjuror / White Mage at level 39 (I R still Healbabe enough to get all the commendations when we hit Brayflox’s Longstop, our tank opens proceedings with, “New to DRK, sorry in advance!”, aggro is bouncing around like a racquetball in a tumble dryer and I’m having to throw out Esuna more often than Cure II because Aiatar is flinging poison fucking EVERYWHERE - oh gods I hate that dungeon although not quite as much as Toto-Rak OH HELL NEVER MAKE ME GO THERE AGAIN ... sorry, I’m done now), Arcanist about to hit 24, Thaumaturge at 21, Rogue 12, Lancer 11, Archer 10. Lancer has been great fun. Particularly when you consider that I play a Lalafell. Well. A Lirafell, my friends call her. So teeny tiny lalafell beating the almighty SNOT out of you with a polearm nearly twice as long as she is tall is just hysterical.
Of course, I have been considering going Paladin, so marvel at Jallira the Gladiator for, like, thirty levels. Bwahaha.
Yeah, basically I want to unlock all the base jobs at least for my teeny tiny lalafell. Just for shiggles. Though I am starting to significantly run out of inventory space. That’s partly down to the fact that when I get bored or can’t decide what I want to do, I tend towards what I refer to as ‘zen crafting’. I can spend literally hours going Botanist and harvesting everything that isn’t nailed down. Mostly in aid of upping my Culinarian skill. Yes, all Liras cook. It’s a thing.
So that’s basically been my weekend. Bit of Port Knowhere shenaniganry, occasional runs to the shops and mostly just vegging out. Oh, and Critical Role episode 44. Ouch. OUCH. Anyway. Fact being that while it’s a pity, maybe it’s a good thing that Short Story Sunday tanked. I needed the break.
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Cryptocurrency is About To EXPLODE As Reddit Releases the Crypto Bulls! [AMAZING]
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
All right. Welcome back, everybody. Mine is Austin Read it is finally adding a cryptocurrency. We have leaked screenshots and leaked video to prove it. So in what way will this crypto be integrated into Reddit? Well, read. It already has a point system, meaning you like posts, you like content and that content that you like flows to the top. So what that video and what these screenshots show is a new design implementation from Reddit of a blockchain-based point system. That’s huge because Reddit is not only the third most popular, the third most trafficked Web site in the United States, but also Reddit pulls over eleven million active users per day. So if what we’re seeing is true, which it has to be, this is a direct screenshot video from a recently updated Reddit app on the Android showing a wallet which now has a recovery phrase, meaning for Reddit users. Your information, your tokens are now stored on the blockchain. This is huge. This was originally broken by Reddit or Magoo Crypto, which appears to show a beta implementation of the system. If this goes past Beda, this will introduce so many more people into cryptocurrency. Now my question is, yes, Reddit appears to be implementing a blockchain, but really, why does Reddit need a blockchain? What advantages to a blockchain bring? That’s the big question. Is this just a buzz word? Will we be getting mutable karma? Now, there are so many more questions I have. Like, will there be an old coin? If so, Reddit will have to register that old coin with the SCC. Or maybe this will be closer to 49 bucks, meaning that they’ll stay on the platform. There’s no offramp. You can never really cash out. Time will tell. All we know right now is that they are testing it. It appears to be in beta in a direct quote from that red. I open my app up yesterday morning and sell the wallet menu option, went through it, saw blockchain and got super excited to share with the rest of you all from guy crypto. Let me know what you think. Down below in the comments section. Huge news coming out of REPL. Coming out of Catano, coming out of Beinart’s huge news. Watch today’s entire video. But next piece of news, we retweeted this foaled announcing the first-ever bitcoin rewards card from foaled and Visa. So what does this mean for you? Well, this is the first-ever credit card where you can earn bitcoin, not points every time you swipe the folded card. You get a percentage of your purchase back in Bitcoin. It’s a real bitcoin that goes right into your fold account. Watch this. A brave new world deserves a brave new card. Introducing the world’s first bitcoin rewards card from full spend dollars earned bitcoin on every purchase. Tear the folded card of the full path to super taxi experience. Protect your privacy and keep your personal data safe. Toll puts you in control, not the things. Welcome to the Bitcoin Privacy-Preserving Card of the future. Welcome to fold. I love it. I mean, I use a credit card almost every day. Credit cards are not going away anytime soon. And if I’m going to use a credit card, which I do. I would much rather earn some bitcoin back on each purchase. I have joined the waitlist if you want to join the waitlist. I put a link down below in the description. Check it out. Now, keep in mind, foaled did choose to support today’s video, but I already use fold. There’s a referral link in every single one of our videos because we actually use it. You know, I’m buying you play. I’m using Uber anyway. Mei’s will earn bitcoin with every single purchase I can if I can. Links down below. Check it out. Next piece of news before we get to Cardno. A ripple partnership is being discussed by a Bank of America. Exact. Keep in mind right now this is ripple to company. This has nothing to do with SRP at the moment, but this is all coming from an interview. In an interview discussing emerging digital payments technology, a lead executive at the Bank of America praised REPL as a partner. Well, what exactly did she say? Julie Harris, head of Global Banking Digital Strategy, made the comments on a podcast published by the Bank of America. The conversation centred around the emerging payment options available for businesses and the increasing need for faster, more efficient methods. Here is the direct quote. It’s not about our platform or our capabilities, meaning it’s not about the Bank of America’s capabilities. It’s about you. If you own a small business, it’s about you as a client and infrastructure that you have and the ability for us to integrate with you. Now, where does REPL come into this? Whether that’s with platforms and capabilities that we built, meaning the Bank of America is built or partnerships that we have with the likes of REPL or Swift. These are FinTechs that we’re partnering with. They’ve come through all of our rigour of legal compliance and we’re able to leverage our banking as a platform to deliver that to you. So this is. A little bit of praise for our Swift and REPL coming out of the Bank of America. Keep in mind this statement adds to the rumour that their software REPL software REPL Net maybe used REPL is being praised for its potential to integrate with bank services. So right now this is just a mention, but this does bode well for using ripple software from Bank of America. Let me know what you think. Is this the big deal? Is this no big deal? Comment below. Next up, we have major news involving finance being charged with embezzlement. Before that, just something personal I want to share with you about me and Aaron. We have officially signed on to participate in a covered 19 at a charity poker tournament. Now, what are the details? This is tonight. Aaron and I will be there playing. Hopefully, you can play with us, but the event will be capped at two thousand players with 50 percent of all proceeds being donated to the participating non-profits for COVA 19 relief and 50 percent of the winnings being split at the final table. This is really the crypto community coming together to support relief for Koven, 19. Now, Aaron and I were gonna be a featured player. We just signed on today. We’re not listed on the picture as yet, but we will be there. I want to invite you to play with us. Now does cost one hundred dollars per ticket. Again, this goes to charity. So it’s your call. Either keep it for you, invest in bitcoin or good cause. Good event. See if you can bust me or my brother out. But I plan to win. There’s a link down below. The Cardno Foundation has endorsed the South African Blockchain Alliance establishment to boost adoption so big collaboration between Catano and South African Blockchain Alliance, the Cardona Foundation praised the establishment of the South African National Blockchain Alliance Essay NBA on April 7th, and this cooperation endeavours to explore further ways to strengthen technology’s adoption through South Africa. So this is a little insight on where Cano is setting their sights for the adoption of Catano. Why did they choose South Africa? Well, according to the official announcement, the Cardenal Foundation praised the use of blockchain technology to boost socio-economic growth. They also have a goal of increasing blockchain adoption in that region. So, again, to me, this just kind of shows Cardno is playing the long game, setting up their roots in poorer socioeconomic areas like South Africa. In a direct quote from the announcement, Cardon’s believes in empowering individuals and enterprises by putting them in direct control of their information, wealth and value. Blockchain technology lets developing nations break ties with legacy banking systems, costly middlemen and entrenched political structures. So this quite possibly could be South Africa’s way to opt-out of corruption and centralization. Next piece of news finance has been charged with embezzling almost a million dollars worth of crypto. What are the details? Well, actually, in November of 2018, finance blocked an account that had almost a million eight hundred and fifty thousand dollars worth of crypto funds. Now, the owner of that account claims that the exchange led by Ceecee stole his money. And this money, it wasn’t just Bitcoin. There was a bitcoin. And a theory, M-theory classic like one iota yo’s Tauron. The point is, it wasn’t a single transaction. His account got shut down and finance is being charged with embezzlement. Now we’ll see. This is just the accusation. Innocent until proven guilty. In my opinion. But Sisi has clapped back and said Sisi says that because by NANS requires KYC AML, which is knowing your customer anti-money-laundering verification from each person, that they had a right to seize that guy’s money because there was a question regarding the origins of that guy’s funds. Wow. Huge invasion of privacy, in my opinion. Although I guess it is in the terms of service. They have a right to know the origin of your funds. And according to finance, the exchange said that the account was blocked at the request of the South Korean police, though the user claims that he had not received any complaints from the South Korean authorities himself. Take your money off the exchange. Keep it for yourself. Not your keys, not your coins. I’ll keep you updated on how this turns out. But again, by NANCE. Just like a bank, they could seize it if they want to. That is the video for today. My name’s Austin again. If it intrigues you, defers to a bitcoin rewards card. Join the waitlist. I did hop on the card, earn some bitcoin back on daily purchases, and if you had the means and you wanna give back, donate to a good cause. Come play poker with us again. If the first two thousand people. I would love to see the altcoin daily army represent next to me, next to Aaron. Let’s bust some people out for charity. That’s the video like always. See you tomorrow.
source https://www.cryptosharks.net/cryptocurrency-is-about-to-explode-crypto-bulls-amazing/
source https://cryptosharks1.tumblr.com/post/615259263046172672
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