Genshin Impact Emote Packs: Paimon’s Paintings 24 (1/2)

Dates or Time of Year for Each Nancy Drew Game

whatamagicalplace made one of these charts last year. Those efforts gave me a starting point but I wanted to tweak it after doing my own research. I decided to share my final result since my version differs from hers in several ways. My reasoning for each game is discussed below; but if you have any evidence to add, feel free.

SCK: Nancy says in the opening letter she took a semester off school to visit Eloise in Florida. The banners for Senior Prom are still prominent throughout the school and the event is scheduled for May 23. Game takes place in a single day but that day could be any time in late spring semester prior to May 23.

SCK2: Homecoming banners are prominent and the event is scheduled for Sept 23. A flyer with Jake’s secret messages has a date of Sept 05, so let’s assume Jake was still alive then. The game says Nancy is there to investigate after Jake was murdered “last week.” That could mean three to seven days after the murder since it happened on a Thurs. Thus Remastered takes place in a single day but that day could be anywhere from Sept 08 to 22.

STFD: Nov 13 (confirmed with calendar). Game takes place for as many days and nights as player needs.

MHM: “Winter Festival” and Charlie studying for finals indicates late Nov to early Dec. Newspaper about the lost gold at the end is dated Mar 03; it could’ve been published after money settlement and the renovations completed though. Game takes place for as many days and nights as player needs.

TRT: December. The Spanish letter from Lisa’s friend is dated Nov 30 and acknowledges that Lisa is already in Wisconsin. By now, time should be well into Dec. 

FIN: Possibly Nov (game’s release) but there are no confirmed dates on anything. It’s likely during the school year since Maya is doing the interview for the student newspaper. Game takes place over three days.

SSH: Calendar on Henrik’s desk is for the month of April. The book version takes place during the DC Cherry Blossom parade which usually occurs last week of March or early April. Game takes place for as many days as player needs. (Early April timeline would match with end of game trailer and dates for DOG.)

DOG: Jeff’s calendar is open to April. Culprit’s log book says Sally is due to move in to the cabin on April 19. Sally says she spent four weeks at Moon Lake, implying the game starts May 18. But I really don’t see Jeff’s character forgetting to change the calendar, so either Sally moved in early or she means four weeks total including seeing the property, bidding, and the final sale plus moving in. And let’s remember there’s no safe water source, so it’s unlikely Sally could live there for four weeks straight. Sally says the dogs howled a full week before they attacked the house and then they appeared every night since; maybe Sally lasted 9-14 days with the ghost dogs. The game could likely begin anywhere between Apr 28 and May 18. Then continue for as many days and nights as the player needs.

CAR: Culprit’s emails with black market dealer date from May 23 through June 04. Harlan’s appt book opens to June 09-13 with the significant clue on June 10. Game is a single day, likely on June 10, but could be as early as June 05.

DDI: June 17 (confirmed with calendar). Single day of gameplay.

SHA: Sept 15 to 17. Nancy’s airline ticket confirms arrival date in AZ. Timeline of the game takes place in three days. (Tex’s b-day is Sept 16!)

CUR: This is anybody’s guess. Hugh and Linda were married Aug 22. The lawyer’s letter to Mrs. Drake states Linda must live at the manor for another three months to fulfill the “six-month-habitation-clause” and those six months must be consecutive in the first year of marriage. Game could be late Nov at the earliest. However, frogs are chirping when Nancy arrives at the manor which is a spring thing and Bess and George say they are attending sailing camp. The fact that no one is suggesting that Linda can leave due to health reasons and start the six months over when she’s well again makes me think the year is half gone already. So the game could also be taking place in April or May at the latest.

CLK: May 07 (confirmed with calendar). Single day of gameplay.

TRN: We see snow in Copper Gorge, but it’s in Colorado and snow can be any time of year there. Frank and Lori are wearing the puffy vests and everyone else has jackets and sweaters. Fatima says it’s the off-season now and summer is the busy season. Makes me think winter is my best guess.

DAN: Game takes place for as many days as player needs. The newspaper on Day 1 is dated Aug 28. Newspapers continue to appear through Sept 06, which publishes that the journalists are negotiating for raises and the sounds of the impending strike are occurring outside JJ’s apartment. Day 11 (Sept 07) and onward have no more newspapers appear on the kitchen table. Let’s say Aug 28 to Sept 07 for simplicity.

CRE: Mike’s calendar is set to March. Quigley’s tape recorder log updates as of Mar 28. Craven’s shipping records say his latest sample was sent to Aikens Biotech on Apr 09. Game takes place in a single day, probably Apr 09 or 10. (Mike just hasn’t turned over the calendar yet)

ICE: Newspaper in the lodge is dated Jan 13. Elsa’s resignation letter is dated Jan 15. Lodge computer says Lupe checked in on Jan 15 and she noticed the lack of maid services for days. Game likely takes place that same week, starting maybe Jan 18 at the earliest, and lasts over several days and nights.

CRY: May 31 (confirmed with calendar). Single day of gameplay.

VEN: Newspaper in the Ca’ terrace says chalice was stolen “this morning” and the police records say the theft happened Jan 25. When Nancy nabs Nico on the stakeout, the next day’s newspaper is dated Feb 03. Since game takes place over several days, it likely plays from Jan 25 to Feb 03.

HAU: Night of May 28. The wedding is set for June 01. The end dialogue says Kyler and Matt couldn’t stop saying “I love you” from when the rocket launched to four days later, which was their wedding day.

RAN: The float plane pilot says resorts like Dread Isle shut down in the summer for “hurricane season” in the Bahamas. And the game was released in July. Since we see the map that charts all of Nancy’s past cases (including HAU) so the game is after the wedding on Jun 01. But there is no reference to the current date aside from “summer.” Single day of gameplay.

WAC: The essay Mel receives from her teacher with the plagiarist comments is dated Nov 21. Since two more nights of sleep are required to trigger events in the game, we can figure that the game takes place from Nov 21 to 23.

TOT: Scott’s calendar is open to May and filled in with code until the 19th. The log book of precipitation is filled out until May 24. Game likely takes place from May 20 to 25.

SAW: The TE-Japan brochure in Nancy’s teacher tote says her exchange program runs from Jun 01 to Sept 15 with different durations of 2 weeks, 3-4 weeks, and 5-8 weeks. With no specific date in the game and the player taking as many days and nights as needed to solve the mystery, we have to settle for saying it takes place in “summer.”

CAP: Karl’s daily calendar is on page March 12. When Nancy finds the final forged email from “Markus” she remarks that it has tomorrow’s date, which is Mar 13. Game is a single night of play on Mar 12.

ASH: Newspaper and police report of Nancy’s arrest say the game is done in a single day of August 18. The fire took place on Aug 17.

TMB: It’s the desert and there are no dates on any clue in the game. Since Lily is a student and Abdullah and Jon are professors, perhaps the game takes place in summer between any busy semester/class schedules.

DED: Ellie’s notepad in the control booth says she gave the coil demo to Nancy on Oct 29. Nancy arrived in daylight hours but since Ellie is on the night shift, the demo could have taken place on either side of midnight which means the game could start on either Oct 28 or 29. (Nancy arrived 10/28, night fell and midnight passed, then Ellie gives demo 10/29 OR Nancy arrives 10/29, night fell and it’s not midnight yet, then Ellie gives the demo still on 10/29.) Game continues for as many days and nights as the player needs.

GTH: Jessalyn’s phone recorded her bachelorette party antics from the night of Oct 27 to early morning of Oct 28. Addison says Jess had vanished for the second time after sun-up. It is unclear how many days Jessalyn has been missing before Nancy arrives on the island. Nancy was deep asleep when Savannah calls her for help, which means Jess has been gone at least a full day. Then Nancy arrives on the island at night which either means it’s evening on the same day of Savannah’s call or another day has passed by the time Nancy gets there. Oct 29 is the earliest possibility. Game takes place over three nights. Likely set between Oct 29 and Nov 01.

SPY: The newspaper reports that July 14 is near and it will be the eighth anniversary of Revenant’s first attack. Alec’s letter documents that his sister was kidnapped on the first of the month and has not been seen since. Game takes place between Jul 02 and 14. While Nancy cannot sleep or change the time of day, it is hard to believe that traveling back and forth throughout Scotland’s towns and the different phases of the spy operation all take place in a single day.

MED: Summer in the southern hemisphere, so datewise it’s set between Dec and Feb. Again there’s no sleep or time of day transitions but the elimination rounds likely take place over several days.

LIE: Employee timecards are recorded through July 05, the artifact exchange log is filled out through July 06, and the packing slip on the open crate says received July 06. Game is a single day of play, likely on July 06 or 07.

SEA: Soren’s winter guest log says Nancy is visiting in January. Game takes place for as many days and nights as player needs.

MID: Minion’s plane ticket TO Austria where the game begins is dated Oct 26 and the game goes into Halloween.

Thoughts on Higurashi Sotsu Ep10

I’m kinda out of it due to a mix of toothache and painkillers, so bare with me on this one, lmao.

Anyway, thoughts under the cut. Also lots of Umineko spoilers, probably.

I’m genuinely kinda shocked that this arc STILL isn’t over, but at least it makes a lot more sense now why it ended up being longer than I expected, lol. I still think it probably could have been condensed by an episode or two, but still. It turns out that way more was going on with Satoko behind the scenes in this arc than I thought.

There’s also the whole possibility that Ryukishi might have intentionally laid out the script of Gou/Sotsu so that this whole sequence of Satoko definitively accepting that she’s a witch and killing her humanity happened on the cumulative 34th episode [24 from Gou and now 10 from Sotsu]. I’ve been wondering if anything could actually justify the extremely slow pacing this has had up to this point, but this might actually be dumb enough to make me think it was all worth it, lol.

Also, I’ve been trying to avoid saying it, but I looked at the whole batch of leaks from this arc when they got posted about a month ago, and it looks like we’ve officially covered everything that was in those leaks. I kinda regret looking at them, since it spoiled that Satoko would have an internal conflict that gets expressed literally in usual WTC fashion, but in a funny way I guess I ended up getting a misguided idea of what was going to happen just from looking at the leaks.

For one thing, I completely forgot about the leak of Satoko shooting Teppei until I double checked it a few days ago, so I was mostly just focused on the stuff about her two sides fighting against each other, and I guess I thought it would have made her seem a lot more redeemable than how it ended up actually working out, lol. I thought that it would basically go in the opposite direction and this would signal the start of her spiraling into regret and despair over the course of Nekodamashi, but basically the opposite happened.

I guess this probably answers the question I’ve had of what could stop Satoko from just immediately shooting Rika after the cliffhanger from Nekodamashi, since this raises the possibility of her ‘human side’ literally stopping her from doing it.

Though at this point I’m starting to seriously wonder if there’ll be some big meta twist about how Sotsu has actually been a separate set of loops to what we saw in Gou, and maybe Nekodamashi really did just end in tragedy and then everything got reset. I’ve been toying with that idea in my head for a while, mainly just as a way to try and make Sotsu feel like more than just a literal retread of Gou, but this is giving it a bit more validity as a theory.

For one thing, Eua already implied during Satokowashi that she had a history with Satoko, and going by something Ryukishi said in an interview, there’s already been a time where Satoko called her Eua, so it’s possible that Satokowashi onward is an entirely new loop where both Satoko and Rika have had their memories reset, but Eua still remembers it. Presumably the ‘Gou loop’ would have just ended with failure some way or another, and Eua decided to do it again. She’s given Satoko a pretty definitive failure state in Sotsu, but it’s possible that wasn’t always the case, and up until now she’s been willing to just do it over and over again until she gets the right outcome.

There’s also the theory some people have suggested that maybe the conflict between Satoko’s two halves represented a literal split in the timeline of some kind, with Tataridamashi maybe being a version of events where her human side won out, if only temporarily, and Teppei stayed alive to attack Keiichi at the end of the arc. That’d at least be one way to explain the weirdness of Satoko killing Teppei in this episode after we saw him attack Keiichi at the end of this arc in Gou. I’m not entirely sure I support this exact interpretation, though, even if I like the idea of these maybe being different arcs.

I think that for now my theory about the Teppei situation is that either 1: it was some kind of hallucination from Keiichi, 2: it was a fictionalized account of events that she fed to Ooishi to help trigger his L5 state, or 3: it’s the same sort of thing as the ‘Illusion of Witches’ in Umineko, and we as the audience were directly being shown a fantasy version of events by Satoko. Which is basically the same thing as the second option, but still. Considering how this seems to be barreling it’s way towards being some kind of Umineko prequel, I’ve been wondering if maybe they’d go that far with introducing narrative concepts here that get expanded upon more in Umineko. This would at least be a pretty straightforward example to use to illustrate the idea of how fantasy is used as a device in Umineko. And since there were infamously major issues with people not understanding what Ryukishi was trying to do with those scenes in Umineko ep2 which lead to him having to rewrite ep3 to explain it more clearly, I can see why he might go as far as to include an introduction to this idea in this series.

It’s possible that it’s just a hallucination, but I kinda doubt it at this point. For one thing, it’d feel kinda weird if THIS was a hallucination but not the whole fight scene between Keiichi and Rena, but it’d also just feel kinda weird since Keiichi didn’t really seem to be going L5 in this arc, so it’s kinda hard to imagine him jumping straight to that level of insanity on such short notice.

At least if we assume that this leads into the ending we saw in Tataridamashi, and not something entirely different, I think the real version of events is probably that after leading Keiichi to her house, Satoko attacks him with the bat [or she rigged some kind of trap to knock him out], and then when he wakes up he sees the aftermath of Satoko killing Teppei and he assumes he did it. Though tbh even at the end of Tataridamashi I’m not even sure if Keiichi acknowledged any memory of what happened with Teppei, so I’m not even sure if we need to explain how he’d end up convinced that that version of events happen. For all we know it might just be something that the audience alone was being shown, and from Keiichi’s POV he just gets knocked out and then wakes up in the hospital.

It’s possible that Ooishi ends up attacking him, but I kinda doubt it, at least after how this episode went. Even in the midst of HS, he seemed aware of the fact that Keiichi was at worst just being unwittingly manipulated by the villagers, and that he genuinely thought he was helping her, so I doubt that Satoko would be able to convince him to attack him. And at this point it just seems more likely that Satoko would attack Keiichi herself instead of pointlessly relying on someone else to do it for her.

We do know that he shows up at the festival with the bloody bat, but he could have just entered the house after hearing the commotion of Keiichi getting attacked, and then Satoko told her version of events to him, and he just picked up the bat from the crime scene and took it to the festival.

It’s also worth noting that apparently in the manga version of Tataridamashi, Satoko never even leads Keiichi to her house in the first place, and he just gets shot by Ooishi at the festival, which makes it seem more likely that Keiichi himself isn’t super relevant to how this arc ends. At least in the manga version of the arc, it seems like Ooishi probably just walked in on Teppei’s dead body and then picked up the bat and went on to do his killing spree.

Now I’m also wondering what’ll happen in the next episode, since it seems like they literally only have the festival left to cover before this arc ends. I guess there might just be a lot of content related to what happens with Satoko in the fragment space between this arc and Nekodamashi, but either way it feels like it shouldn’t take long at all to reach the big climax of this arc, especially since Satoko has already steeled her resolve. I mean, I doubt that human-Satoko is gone for good, but the rest of this arc is probably just gonna be witch-Satoko putting her final plans into motion, so there shouldn’t be much to cover there.

There’s a possibility that they’ll also speedrun through all of Nekodamashi from her POV in the next episode, but I kinda doubt it’d go by that fast. In spite of it mostly being a montage from Rika’s POV, and there presumably not being much worth showing about the mechanics and reasoning behind how Satoko set up the different mini-loops there, I think there’s still a fair bit to be shown from her perspective in that arc. For one thing, we’ll probably get a reveal of what was really going on behind the scenes with how Hanyuu suddenly gave Rika a new set of powers, and the whole deal with the sword. And even after the loop montage, I think that stuff will go on behind the scenes with Satoko and Takano to lead into the scene where Takano apologizes to Rika.

At this point my main question is how long it might take to get through all of that, since we only have five episodes left. At least as far as we know. There might be some kind of continuation yet to be announced, but I don’t want to bet on it.

It just feels like there’s a whole lot of stuff left to do before we end this. Like the stuff I’ve mentioned before with the OP having scenes of the club members as teenagers wearing outfits different to their ones from Satokowashi, and the scene of teenage Rika and Satoko fighting in the fragment space.

I’m also wondering at this point if we’ll get some Bernkastel origin story stuff to go with the apparent Lambda origin story. At the very least, they never really explained why she ended up being Featherine’s miko in Umineko, aside from the vague ‘Featherine is probably some version of Hanyuu’ thing. Which has been especially weird since Eua has been using Satoko as her pawn against Rika in this series. But this episode also makes it seem even more likely that Eua doesn’t even like Satoko, and is just using her as a pawn towards a greater goal of entertainment, while probably also playing both sides, so I could see this leading to a situation where she ends up working with Bernkastel instead.

There’s still the question about if this is even a Lambda origin story in the first place, but at this point I think that it’d just be a straight up waste of time if it’s not. That basically feels like the entire purpose of Gou/Sotsu’s existence right now, so if it’s all some sort of elaborate troll, then that just feels like it’d make EVERYONE pissed off. It’d obviously annoy the Umineko fans who like the idea of this being a genuine prequel or tie-in of some kind, but for the people on the opposite end who hate that idea, I don’t think they’d appreciate being told ‘I was just spending nearly 50 episodes tricking you into thinking this was something you’d hate, lol’. It just seems like the worst of both worlds.

Also, I’m pretty open to different variants of how they could pull off the specifics of this being a ‘Lambda origin story’. Like, I still think it’d count if this ends up being set after Umineko and is some kind of elaborate reenactment of how Lambda came to be, or whatever. There’s a lot of specific ways it could be executed, but it’d basically just be the same thing at the end of the day.

I know that witch Satoko right now doesn’t have the same sort of personality that Lambda had, but like with how Beatrice went through multiple design iterations that changed her personality, Satoko might just end up going through more development that makes her closer to the Lambda we know in Umineko. There’s also the fact that the end of Umineko already implied that Bernkastel was just ‘playing the villain’ for fun, so Lambda’s whole personality there might have been somewhat manufactured.

I guess at this point I just have to wonder if we’ll see Satoko come up with the name Lambdadelta for herself, lol. Even back in Higurashi we saw how Rika came up with the name Bernkastel, so if they’re really going in this direction, it’d make sense. I know Satoko is still calling herself Satoko by this point, but just a few episodes ago she denied that she was becoming a witch, and now she’s calling herself one, so these things can change, lol.

Anyway, this whole episode ended up being more Umineko-y than I expected. Even aside from the obvious stuff with them using the term witch, the whole fight between the two Satokos in the fragment space was exactly the sort of thing you’d see in Umineko, down to the fact that it was a gun fight like the love trial was. The imagery of the red cracks on the black background, and the entire screen shattering like glass, also felt like it was lifted straight out of Umineko.

Even if it might be kinda cheesy and forced, the monkey brain part of me really likes this stuff, lol.

Come to think of it, I guess this also makes it a lot more likely in hindsight that her classroom panic attack in this arc really was [at least in part] a representation of her two sides clashing. I think she always planned to do it as a recreation of that scene from Tatarigoroshi, but when it actually started her human side bled through and her genuine regret came through as well. I also assume that all the shots in this arc of her looking uncomfortable or depressed, especially around Teppei, were probably also setting up for this. Which I think is fine, but they probably should have been a little more clear about it, since it came across as her just faking everything, and this ended up feeling more sudden than it should have. I get why people would still see it as being sudden and unearned, but I don’t really think so. They probably should have included more stuff like that during the first two arcs of Sotsu, though.

I’m curious to see if I’ll end up being right about my theory that the sword will end up being used as a plot device to completely separate Satoko’s witch self, and maybe Rika’s as well, into their own beings separate from Rika and Satoko in the ‘real world’. It still feels like the only way to have this actually set up for Umineko without having things end in total tragedy for Rika and Satoko in general.

There’s probably a lot more I could say about this episode, but I think this has gone on long enough as it is, lol.

I was thinking about Goku and Krillin's friendship and it occured to me that they spent months training with Roshi together but then only saw each other for maybe a day every few years. Have you ever had a realization that tripped you out like this?

This is a really good ask, anon, and I just wanted to take a moment to say so. 

I have had a few ‘a-ha’ moments like these, but I’m kind of blanking on specific examples.  I’ll see what I can come up with.

1) For openers, there’s the whole thing where the Red Ribbon Army has a Dragon Radar, but it’s nowhere near as sophisticated as the handheld one Bulma invented.  I think the same holds true for Emperor Pilaf, but his gang is only three people.   You’d expect the RRA to have the best equipment possible, because that’s their whole deal, and by normal standards they probably do have the best possible Dragon Radar... but Bulma’s is simply that much better, because she’s on another level.   And it’s easy to overlook that, because Bulma’s supposed to be a genius teenager, like Donatello in TMNT, but the RRA’s Dragon Radar is the first hint that she’s even more special than we could have guessed. 

2) Rewatching Dragon Ball in 2019, I gained a new appreciation for the filler episodes where Mr. Popo trained Goku.  The first time I saw them, I was hoping we’d see Goku grow up and make progress over the three year gap, but instead they just focused on his early days on the Lookout, with Popo just saying things and Goku failing to understand.  It was very frustrating to watch.  

But in 2019, I noticed that all those episodes get paid off in the Piccolo Junior fight.   Popo kept telling Goku to be “quicker than lightning” and “quiet as the sky”, and Goku just couldn’t figure out how to do that, let alone fight at the same time.   He had to unlearn all the stuff that had helped him defeat King Piccolo, and he couldn’t do it... at first.    But by the time he fought Piccolo Junior, he put it all together, as demonstrated with his big finishing move.   Piccolo thought he had vaporized Goku, only for Goku to fly up into the air and crash into him.   Why didn’t Piccolo sense Goku’s presence?   Because Goku had learned to become as “quiet as the sky”.  Why couldn’t Piccolo dodge it?   Because Goku had learned to become “quicker than lightning.”  So it vindicates those filler episodes pretty nicely.   They weren’t just marking time, but they were setting up what the manga was going to do later.

3) I think last year, it hit me that Vegeta had probably never lost a fight before he went to Earth.   That alone isn’t probably any big deduction.  The only people stronger than him were all working for Frieza, and he knew to steer clear of them until he was ready.   But it explains why he was so giddy about the zenkai effect.   He had always known about it, but he never mentioned or cared about it until he experienced it for himself after losing to Goku, and then Zarbon. 

Yeah, I think this occurred to me during a conversation about Vegeta killing Nappa instead of helping him.   In theory, Nappa could have recovered and gotten a lot stronger, just like Vegeta did.   But Saiyans Saga Vegeta didn’t care about that.   He only gave his henchmen one chancemand discarded them as soon as they lost.   This attitude would also explain why he never dared to challenge anyone at a higher level.    He knew no one would show him any mercy, so the zenkai boost would have been meaningless to him. 

So he might have regretted killing Nappa after he experienced the zenkai firsthand, although he was so drunk on his own increased power that he probably never stopped to consider it.   But before Earth, Vegeta probably dismissed the zenkai as a crutch for lesser Saiyans.   In his mind, a truly great Saiyan never loses battles in the first place.  Or so he believed, until he lost a few times, and became stronger for it, and had to reconsider.

And that also explains how he warmed up to the Super Saiyan Legend over the course of one afternoon.   He and Goku made such sick gains that week that he started to wonder if you could zenkai your way to Super Saiyan, and then he was begging Krillin to shoot him just so he could get a step closer.

4) In the same vein, it occurred to me at some point that Bardock was probably stronger than King Vegeta, and neither of them realized it.   Maybe it was just a dub-ism, but I’m pretty sure “Father of Goku” has a line about Bardock’s power level being 10000.   At the time it was released, 10k wasn’t that big a deal, but in the Saiyans Saga, Vegeta was somewhere around 18-24k. Later, he would claim to have surpassed his father as a child, so I think it’s fair to assume that King Vegeta must have been in that 10,000 neighborhood. 

Which makes a nice subtle commentary on why the Saiyan Kingdom failed. They tried to breed better warriors, putting all their stock in the royal family, when the true secret lay in warriors like Bardock, who were constantly getting clobbered and healed.  Prince Vegeta only started to make real progress once he began fighting on that same regimen.

5) Also about “Father of Goku,” Frieza only wanted Planet Kanassa subjugated because of the psychic powers of its inhabitants.   I think the dub insinuated that the planet itself gave people those powers, but whatever the case, Frieza heard about these people with unusual powers and wanted them stamped out immediately.   Just like he wiped out the Saiyans over the Super Saiyan Legend, and just like he planned to destroy Namek to prevent anyone else from using the Dragon Balls. 

In short, Frieza fears and despises legends.  Why?  Because he’s so powerful that real people can’t hurt him, so his fears naturally turn to half-truths and folklore.   He chases down ghost stories and rumors, because let’s face it, what else does he have to occupy his time.   That’s why King Cold was happy to have the Saiyans working for him, while Frieza wanted them all dead.   Cold didn’t share Frieza’s hangups.   Cold barely knew what a Super Saiyan was, while Frieza thought about it all the time. 

6) One day I thought about that timeline where Cell killed Trunks and took the time machine to find the androids.    That specific timeline is pretty much empty.  The Z-fighters are all dead, and so are all of the androids and Trunks.  They don’t even have a Cell anymore because he went back in time and never returned.   There’s still a population, I guess, because the Trunks of that world wouldn’t have just stood by while Cell absorbed everyone on Earth, but that’s about it.   Bulma might have survived Cell’s attack on Trunks, but she’d be the only “name” character on the board.  It just sounds like a pretty depressing world.   Maybe this was the timeline Whis picked out to relocate Blunks and Future Mai in Dragon Ball Super.

7) It sort of blows my mind that the entire Majin Buu arc takes place over a couple of days.    Like, episode 207 through 250 all takes place over one day.   We know this because Goku only had 24 hours to be back in the living world, and that time was cut short by his use of SSJ3.  Then the Elder Kai started doing his ritual to make Gohan stronger, and that took like 25 hours, I’m pretty sure.  That wrapped up in #262, and there was no break in the action from that point onward, all the way up to the defeat of Kid Buu in #287.  So yeah, eighty episodes over two days.   It’s practically real-time footage, save for skipping over the Elder Kai’s ritual and Goten and Trunks practicing and sleeping. 

It’s hard to catch on to this, though, because so much stuff happens in the anime version that leads you to think that it’s a much longer span of time.    After Vegeta wrecks the stadium, the anime can’t decide whether or not Mr. Satan would stay there or return to his dojo.   In the Fusion Saga, Mr. Satan wanders from Buu’s house to the nearest town, then he wanders to the next town over, doing his “Last Man on Earth” bit, except this all happens during the Gotenks/Super Buu fight, which barely lasts half an hour.   In the afterlife, Chi-Chi is worried that she can’t find Gohan, but she wouldn’t have even been there that long, and wouldn’t she still be in line to meet King Yemma?  She was one of the last Earthlings to die, so how did she end up in heaven so quickly?

8) I used to think Movie 13 (the Hirudegarn one) was canon, but the last time I watched it, I noticed all these glaring problems.  They use the Dragon Balls in this one, which means it has to be set six months after the wish to make everyone forget about Majin Buum which means it’s been a year since Kid Buu was defeated.  Okay, fine, except Gohan and Videl are still in high school.   Shouldn’t they have graduated by then?   

More importantly, their high school and Bulma’s house seem to be in the same city.   I guess that’s an easy mistake to make.   It took me a long time to even notice, but Orange Star High is in Satan City, which is a totally different place from West City.   I mean, right?  They’re not terribly far apart, but they’re not the same place either.

Then again, they seemed to make the same error in Episode 287, where Bulma’s out shopping and Great Saiyaman 1 and 2 foil a robbery.   Are they in West City or Satan City?  Maybe there’s more to this...

I think this arc is the 2/3 mark of the series, just like Kamino was probably the 1/3 mark. It's what make more sense narratively. It just took longer because Horikoshi caught Oda-disease (even Oda originally wanted to end One Piece in 5 years) and started to expand the setting and the characters a lot more than he probably originally intended. So the final length will probably depend on how much the third actually takes. It could be 400 if he wants to do it quick, but I think more 500 to 600.

I agree that we’re around two-thirds of the way through the series now (although I personally feel like it’s closer to 70% done), but if that’s the case that puts the series as ultimately being closer to 420-425 chapters, not five or six hundred. I get that you’re saying the last third will be longer because the more complex the series gets the longer it takes to tell the whole story, but in a fit of nerdy curiosity I legit just now made a whole Excel spreadsheet listing each arc, what year it took place, and the number of chapters in order to see how much the average arc length has increased, and it’s surprisingly not much at all. we’ve gone from averaging about 16 chapters per arc for the first several years of the series, to averaging about 19 chapters from 2018 onward. and if you don’t include the big outlier arcs (Basement arc, and the current War arc), the average arc length has only increased from 13 to 15. still absurdly (and blessedly) short.

his pacing has barely slowed down at all in six years, and even though he’s now working with an expanded setting and cast of characters, the latest arc is a great example of how he’s adapted to the larger scale. a lot of group battles as opposed to one-on-ones, and he gives each character at least one cool moment, but otherwise focuses on the characters who are actually driving the action, so as to not waste any time. this is probably his biggest arc to date, and it’s still only 31 chapters thus far, meaning it has a good chance of being around the same length as the Basement arc (42 chapters) despite featuring a vastly greater cast of characters. he just doesn’t do that thing Oda and Kishimoto and the rest do, where his big arcs are 100+ chapters long. he can cover the same amount of ground in less than half the time.

so all in all my own estimate is still much closer to the 400 mark than it is to 500-600. my assumption is around 10-15 chapters left in this arc (potentially less but this is my conservative estimate), then the next few arcs being 12-24 chapters each (consistent with his pacing in 2018 and 2019), and then finishing with one last Big Arc of around 50 chapters or so, assuming he wants to pull out all the stops. that’s easily doable in 140 chapters or so, which would put us at 423 chapters total, which is consistent with the “two-thirds of the way done” estimate, and I think it allows plenty of time for him to wrap up the story without being rushed. that being said, right now there’s a lot of uncertainty about how much story is actually left, so this might be a discussion better left postponed until after this arc ends, when we’ll hopefully have a better idea.

Why does TXT’s “We Lost The Summer” MV work?

Hi, I’m back again to overanalyse TXT’s MV for “We Lost The Summer”. After first watching it, I was overwhelmed by sadness but didn’t know why. After all, there have been literally tons of videos and songs about COVID-19. Until 2h ago, perhaps the most heart-wrenching song I’d heard about the topic was FINNEAS’ “What They'll Say About Us". Yet I was more deeply affected by “We Lost The Summer” thanks to its combination of brutal honesty, clever cinematic juxtaposition and images of kids suffering (from first world problems, but problems all the same).

I think what makes the MV work so well are two things:

The song conveys a message of longing for the past, for the "normal". This complements all the contrasting shots of "what is" and "what could have been". It hurts to see kids who could have had a fun summer with their friends out in the warm sun be banished to self-isolation with no one but themselves (or in some cases, a soft toy or a dog) for company.

Their acting. Their facial expressions do tons in expressing the plot, especially in the scenes where they look longingly at the camera. As cheesy as that sounds, their expressions line up perfectly with the almost resentful mood of the song.

Click ‘read more’ for frame-by-frame analysis of what makes the MV work:

0:09-0:15 Taking photos as a group in front of the toilet mirror, probably in school. Bright. Just a normal day in school with ya bros, no problems hugging one another.

0:16 Cut to Yeonjun receiving a Public Safety Alert. He's using an iPhone - this feature was not available until a few months into the COVID-19 outbreak (20 May 2020). Two possibilities - 1) This marks the point at which everything changed i.e. when the pandemic became concerning enough that quarantine was necessary (note the strict warning on screen - "If you leave home, assume you were exposed to COVID-19."); 2) canon-compliant sequence of events - this was in May 2020, when there was also a spike in cases in South Korea (see: Itaewon spike). The former is more likely, considering the lyrics "left alone on the evening of an endless March 1".

0:16-0:17 Back and forth shot - we first see the Public Safety Alert (with a jarring alert ringtone), then the video cuts to the group's concerned reaction, then back to the Public Safety Alert. Almost as if they cannot believe what they're seeing. Note also that the second shot of the Public Safety Alert is clearer than the first - they're paying more attention the second time around.

0:18 Cut to awkward Zoom call (with dog!).

0:19 Intro to main protagonist Yeonjun. Interesting styling choices here - Yeonjun doesn't himself have tattoos; these are fake tattoos. I see this as an effort to represent every kind of young person - it's not only the studious, clean-cut kids who choose to stay home. Now, even the stereotypical bad boys who would usually stay out are forced to stay home as well (that is, if they choose to be socially responsible).

Yeonjun is also putting on a simple singlet here. This is a clear departure from his school uniform. He's chosen to dress comfortably and looks disappointed. Perhaps he feels that nothing matters at this point. This will be a recurring theme throughout the video.

0:24 He gets up to hug his teddy bear, likely a source of comfort. He appears to be alone. Maybe the teddy bear is his only companion when he's at home. A stark contrast to the beginning of the video, when he had a squad of friends to hang out with.

0:26-0:27 Yeonjun starts to dress up for the Zoom call with his friends later. He seems to be in a much better mood with this semblance of normalcy. Or maybe he's just practicing his smile for the camera. His room is bright despite the blinds being drawn; it's the morning.

0:28 We realise that Yeonjun was smiling in the mirror. His expression changes as soon as he looks away. He's not happy about the situation; guess he's just practicing his smile for later.

0:31 The squad's coming online, just waiting for Yeonjun. Everyone is dressed up in bright colours, against their very bright and cheerily-coloured rooms. Juxtaposed with the rather dull school outfits and blue walls at the beginning of the video.

0:33-0:36 For the first time since being at home, he appears to be truly excited. He waves enthusiastically at the squad. Interestingly, his curtains are drawn and the only source of light is a neon green light in the corner of his room. It's unclear what time it is.

0:39 Classic eyes closed, close-up shot of Kai's face. Sadness. Slight increase in exposure near the end of the shot - reminiscence of a time when the surroundings were brighter.

0:41 Flashback to old times in school with the squad. The setting is brightly-lit. We'll see that this changes as the MV progresses.

0:47 Sharing earphones. Ah, the good times.

0:52 Taehyun throws a baseball across the open area. Something you won't get to do inside unless you want to break something.

0:54 Cut to Soobin lying down on the floor of his room (peak relaxing position tbh). He's just dropped his phone on his face. First world problems. Sucks that even little things like this will happen more often now that they're home alone with their phones being their only connection to the outside world.

0:56 Guess Soobin is trying to preoccupy himself by putting together a (big, may I add) puzzle. Seems like he also tried to distract himself with whack-a-mole. But he can't help but watch old videos of him and his friends - this is marked by the school uniforms. Again, reminiscing the old times.

0:58 Closer look at the video Soobin is watching.

1:00 Dude fell asleep with a puzzle piece on his face omg. Clearly bored/frustrated/tired of being stuck at home with puzzles being the most interesting thing he could possibly do alone.

1:01 Yeah, he's not happy about it.

1:03-1:08 Beomgyu is at home with his dog. I can't tell much other than that his dog doesn't hate him, which is a good thing when your dog is your closest companion at home.

1:09-1:12 I can't think of this shot of them syncing the choreo over Zoom being anything other than a cool way to transition to the dance and juxtapose with them performing the choreography together (see: 1:13~1:19).

1:20 Jamming out to the song together.

1:21, 1:24, 1:25, 1:27, 1:28: Yeonjun jamming out alone.

1:31 It's raining/snowing...

1:32 In their hideout in school (remember it's only partially covered). Also note that the colour scheme in the school setting has gotten much duller than before.

1:34 Taehyun catches a baseball. Note that he isn't in his school uniform, so we can assume he is alone here while everyone else is staying in.

1:35, 1:38, The squad escapes the rain.

1:40 Yeonjun admiring his image in the mirror while trying on a different jacket. Compare this and the previous images of him looking into the mirror, with a later shot of him looking into a mirror. Here, we can see both him and his reflection, which gives us the impression that he isn't alone.

1:44 Beomgyu is on the floor hugging his dog. Maybe he's given up lol

1:46 Beomgyu opened the blinds a little to look outside. "Want to see you again."

1:48, 1:50 I'm not sure what Kai was trying to do, but he definitely messed up that smiley face. Seems like an allusion to how everything was fine and dandy, but then this virus just had to come and ruin it for everyone.

1:51 Seems like Taehyun is playing baseball with himself.

1:56, 1:59 Repetitions show that Taehyun is going through the motions. Has nothing better to do.

2:03, 2:07 These shots confused me at first, but "I hate my face drained of expression" clears it up. Communicating online has reduced us to avatars, profile pictures and our digital versions of ourselves. A pretty digital avatar void of human emotion - that's what Soobin has become.

2:13 Beomgyu seems pretty happy creating his personal Jurassic Park...

2:15 But yeah, there could've been better things to do.

2:16 I know Beomgyu is creating an obstacle course for his dog, but his constantly changing environment (e.g. additional bowling pins in this frame) makes it seem like he's trying every possible trick in the book to occupy himself while he's alone.

2:22 Again, the introduction of Beomgyu's dog makes it seem like he's exhausting all his sources of entertainment. I'm not complaining though, it's cute to see him try.

2:25-2:26 The transition to a wide shot showing that Beomgyu's dog is leashed indoors is jarring when you think twice about it. There's no reason to leash his dog when they're indoors, but maybe he's trying to simulate being outside.

2:28 From here onwards is where the structure of the MV changes. Before this, we'd been getting shots of TXT at home interspersed with flashbacks of their time together pre-COVID. But now they're out on a large, empty road on a bright day. They would not be dancing on such a wide road if it weren't empty because no one needs/wants/is allowed to go anywhere. Also note that these are different outfits from previous cuts of them dancing, where they were dressed in their school uniforms.

2:31 Taehyun pastes a sticker of pixel ver. squad on his drone. Perhaps highlighting the fact that the only reminder he has of them while they're separated is their online presence.

2:33 Taehyun is wearing a helmet to fly his drone even though he doesn't really need to. It's not like he's travelling outside or anything. But anything to escape the feeling of being stuck at home, I guess. You do you. Also, the fact that he's flying a drone is symbolic of his wish to travel or at least wander outside. He can't do it in person, so he lets his drone do it for him.

2:33 The squad arrives on the rooftop! Note that Yeonjun is wearing the jacket he tried on the second time - this is still during COVID times. How were they able to get on the rooftop with Taehyun when they were all supposed to be at home? REBELS. Maybe this is all just a dream... unless? Last thing - it's sunset here, which links to...

2:47 It's snowing and dark outside in their usual hideout in school. Note that Yeonjun is wearing the same outfit as in the dancing on the road cuts. Clear juxtaposition between hopes and reality.

2:48 Their bench and things are covered in snow, almost as if the winter has stopped them from doing whatever they were doing before. "Endless winter."

2:53, 2:57 They're taking photos alone. Interesting upside-down shots.

2:55 They're trying to have fun in the winter but for Beomgyu it's just not the same.

3:00 The brightly-lit toilet is juxtaposed with - gasp! - not its reflection. Without his friends, Yeonjun perhaps finds that staring into a mirror alone isi like staring into a dark void, or a duller version of reality.

3:02 Also, it's snowing on the other side. Note that in all the 'winter' shots we've been getting, it's always dark.

3:09 Is Yeonjun trying to check if there's a mirror, or reach into the void?

3:11 We get confirmation that there is a mirror in reality, but to Yeonjun it feels like a void. This image of him telling his reflection that "it's all gone" is honestly heartbreaking.

3:14 The squad is together, but the winter is depressing.

3:20 The most direct reference to COVID in this entire MV. "It's all gone". The masks serve as a tangible representation of the new normal. Their expressions are all gone now ("I hate my face drained of expression") since half their faces are hidden. It no longer matters if they smile or laugh; no one can see it anyway.

3:21-3:25 Direct reference to social distancing.

3:25 The toilet gets progressively darker.

3:36 It's snowing on the road now, almost as if the bleakness of their reality has permeated through to their imagination of a brighter future.

3:39 Interestingly, compared to the past few shots of the boys in the dark winter, they seem to be slightly happier here, getting used to the new normal.

3:40 Butterfly on Beomgyu's face a representation of summer.

3:46 Cut to someone's phone on the bench, the only thing that hasn't been covered in snow, the only bright thing in the darkness. Looks like this is the last video they filmed while they were out on the road dancing.

Overall, it seems that:

bathroom, bright school hideout scenes = the past

road scene = last time they were able to see each other, transition period OR a time between strict quarantine and "new normal" where cases were low enough that people felt comfortable going outside

home scenes = quarantine period

winter scenes = new normal

Well, I deleted this original answer (and then deleted it again as a post...and then deleted it one more time after that), so here it is for a fourth time with a screenshot of the original ask, and LET US HOPE that I can manage to see it through to completion.

This ask has taken me quite a bit of time and thought, because what I’m hoping to give you is a summary that helps you to better understand without being too overwhelming/containing way too much information.

First, thank you so much for reaching out, and I’m really glad you did! The point you’re at right now (or the point you were at when you sent this anyway) is where every single one of us started, and it’s an amazing journey from here if you find yourself wanting to take it! Seeking out resources from others is absolutely the way to go about it, and I hope that you always feel free to ask me (and other tinhats) for any info/thoughts/anything you need in the future! I can’t seem to include links in-post, but I’m going to message you a link to Speak the Truth, a site documenting J2 ‘happenings’ so to speak from a tinhat’s perspective through the year 2011. And, basically, whether someone’s been a tinhat from day one or for one day, we all have different pieces of the puzzle, and that’s really why it’s so important for us to connect with each other and work together as a whole.

So, let me try to figure out where to begin.

I, like quite a few other tinhats I’ve spoken with over the years actually, didn’t put much stock into any of this when it first started to emerge. People fantasizing about two celebrities having a romantic relationship (especially two leads in a movie or a TV show and especially when those leads are of the same sex) is far from a new thing and has been going on forever, and naturally I assumed in the beginning that J2 tinhats were no different. Had I not actually looked into all of it further and eventually then started really paying attention to the comings and goings of Jared & Jensen/watching all the footage I could find/reading the interviews/seeking out candid photos etc., I might not have ever changed my views, and it still took me quite a while to fully come around to where I am now even with all that.

What caused me to start looking more deeply in the first place was the simple fact that Jared & Jensen, even during the still-fledgling days of their relationship (however you happen to define that relationship), had a very unique and pretty immediate closeness that separated them distinctly from everyone else.

***As an aside, like I always bring up, most Wincest shippers were born from that intense J2 chemistry that bled into the characters of Sam & Dean.

The Js had clearly connected on a deep level that they not only spoke about openly from the beginning but that was also more than evident in the ways they interacted with each other, looked at each other, talked to each other, and even just existed in each other’s spaces (they even shared and share clothing and have freely admitted that).

Jared: “It didn’t feel like a blind date. It felt like we were continuing a relationship. There’s no rhyme or reason to what happened.”

They’ve also frequently phrased things like that *points up,* using very couple-y terminology.

(note: speaking of couple-y terminology, they’ve been heard calling each other “babe” and “baby” on several different occasions)

They’ve always had the kind of body language with each other that you really don’t see often in non-platonic relationships and that you especially don’t see often between two actors who’s paths have crossed initially in a purely work-related setting, and it was that special intimacy between them that first sparked my curiosity.

Let’s take a very brief look at just a few of those examples (a mix of the early years and beyond):

And below I’m including an example of the clothes-sharing I mentioned:

My curiosity expanded VERY rapidly (almost explosively) from that point onward as I began to dive more heavily into ‘J2-research.’

Like I said above, I’m not going to overload this post with specifics (although I’m happy to send specifics to you by the boatload if you’re interested), but I will just wrap up this first part of my answer by saying that it was the candid J2 moments I came across that really started to sell me on the possibility of a non-platonic J2 dynamic, the pictures and footage where they didn’t know they were being recorded or photographed, largely during the earlier years when they weren’t as cautious, but certainly not limited to those years, pictures/footage in which they interacted with each other in ways that I certainly would not interact with someone I wasn’t romantically involved with or at least romantically interested in).

Here are a couple of well-known examples. Less intense than some choice video clips (that I’ll have to find a way to post in the future) but still beautiful and intimate. I actually just posted that first one a few hours ago!

-which ‘arguably’ could depict the body language of two very close platonic friends (more so than the first photo, above it, anyway), but...look more closely at the giddy, love-struck expression on Jensen’s face as he watches Jared:

It’s kinda a bit harder to call it platonic when you really see it like that....

And...gosh, I poured over so many of these moments, just...so, so many.

Even then, though, I wasn’t necessarily convinced of the fact that the two were together in any kind of serious way. I, like this blog’s first owner, co-owner (who became a tinhat almost right alongside me, actually, time-wise) felt that the Js were certainly at least not strictly straight, quite possibly that they weren’t at all straight, and that they were definitely attracted to each other, an attraction that had likely yielded physical results, but I had no reason to think at that point that they would go to the great lengths (and put themselves through the unimaginable hardships) of leading such intricately and immensely false lives, at great personal expense, if they were actually in a serious, romantic relationship with each other that they both felt would be long-term.

Not when it was almost 2008 (at the time) and being a gay celebrity wasn’t anything to even bat an eye at anymore...right?

But I still had a lot to learn back then.

The next ‘milestone’ for me, upon looking even more closely (and not just at the Js anymore but at those around them/in their circle/etc., not to mention the Js lives pre-meeting each other, just all kinds of stuff) came the discovery(discoveries) of the many inconsistencies, which I’ll explain further, that were ultimately at the heart of my transition from on-the-fence to full tinhat.

A good example to use, because most people have at least some knowledge of this, centers around the period of time that the Js publicly lived together and the many...many different stories that were told explaining their living arrangement. I actually posted a pretty humorous account detailing some of it, and I can link you to it if you’d like. That’s just one example of many, but perhaps it’s the example with the most number of slip-ups/cases of the Js forgetting the details of the lie/etc.

To briefly cover one of those “living together” slip-ups, at separate meet-and-greets, Jensen once told people that he had moved out of Jared’s house while Jared said that Jensen was very much still living with him. And that’s probably the least suspicious but the easiest to quickly explain of the slips.

Another example, from later on (that I’m using because, again, it’s one that people are generally aware of) is when Jared told a story about being out to dinner in Italy with his wife and accidentally flipping off the waiter and then Jensen retold the exact same story at another con, only that time, he was the one who’d been with Jared.

Once I knew to look for them, I was blown away by how often these kinds of inconsistencies had already occurred and continued to occur, things being covered-up or overly-explained, stories changing sometimes three or more times in ways too significant to be excused away as memory lapses, even attempts at erasing things altogether...which doesn’t work very well in the age of the interwebz.

And why...why would these cover-ups and excuses and erasures exist if there was nothing to hide?

•••••••••

Retracing my steps for a moment to talk a little about the Js lives prior to meeting each other, which was one of the other things I’d started looking into by this point and definitely played an important part in confirming my tinhat beliefs.

The first example that comes to mind is Jensen’s ex-roommate (and just ex, period, at least that’s what I personally think), Ty Vaughn, the one underneath Jensen in this photo:

And I’ve spent a good 24 hours trying to track down footage I once had of Chad Michael Murray teasing young Jared about flirting with him (to Jared’s extreme embarrassment), but I cannot find it ANYWHERE. If anyone reading this can help me out, I would be forever in your debt.

Other noteworthy things (just a few): An ex-girlfriend of Jensen’s has admitted that she used to beard for someone, and her only celebrity ex is Jensen, and a few of Jared’s teachers from high school have expressed surprise that he’s married now to a woman...so, make of that what you will!

•••••••••

Okay, back to the inconsistencies!Another big one for me has always been the Js saying “we” or “us” (and meaning each other) when, according to public knowledge, it should have been “I” or “me.”

(as well as other synonyms of the above like “our”)

“We got to spend some time with our family yesterday.”

“They were knocking on our trailer.”

etc. etc.

And on the exact opposite end of the spectrum...also ironically what continues to fuel my certainty that the Js are together even more than the “we”-and-“us”-isms: the separation-of-the-Js tactic (varying in severity/frequency), sometimes for an evening or even a single event, sometimes for lonnng stretches of time, but always very suspicious, because, like I’ve been saying for this entire time, everyone knows that Jensen and Jared are extremely close, even those who believe that their closeness isn’t sexual or romantic. What I’m referencing with ‘separation of the Js,’ by the way, is what many tinhats believe to be the PR tactic used to paint pictures of the Js as being much less involved in each other’s lives to (in theory) control rumors. But the Js’ are and always have been intrinsically interconnected, so the reason that J2 separate narratives feel so forced and unnatural, often cringingly so, is because they kinda directly violate who Jensen and Jared are as people with each other, and if anything, that’s likely caused some new tinhats to come aboard, but it certainly hasn’t succeeded in convincing anyone who’s already a believer that they must have just been mistaken all along.

And I should definitely mention the suuuper-duper weirdness surrounding Jensen and Jared’s respective engagements and then weddings, as well as the information, or lack of information in Jared and Genevieve’s case, that was presented to the public about both ‘courtships,’ because almost every single aspect of all of that was drenched in tinhatty suspiciousness right from the start and all the way through. Again, I can link you to posts that detail the topic thoroughly, but to summarize very generally: Jared and Jensen, in leu of increasing rumors about the nature of their relationship, even more so in recent months than had previously been the case, were most likely counseled to straight-en up their images drastically, and fast...the only real way people can do that, by marrying members of the opposite sex (pretty much simultaneously, by the way, & much to the startled disbelief of many, including a very-public-about-his-skepticism Ted Casablanca).

Ted: “Jensen and Jared would sooner marry each other than who they’re currently rumored to be getting hitched to.”

Alright. Yikes. I’m really slipping here with my “not too many details” plan. I’ll start reigning it in again, I promise.

So, around the same same time as the weddings was when I started researching the practice of bearding (fauxmances) in the entertainment business in general, although not as heavily as I’ve researched the topic in recent years, and what I discovered and continue to discover was and is both eye-opening and heart-breaking. I actually just posted about this a couple of days ago, so instead of rambling on about it again, I’ll refer you to that (under the tag ‘toxic industry stuff’ for anyone reading this in the future). A quick summary: the reality that Jensen & Jared face every day and the decisions they’ve made to enter into false marriages are tragically common in the industry....yes, even and especially in today’s age, and for many gay actors and actresses specifically, the choice can really come down to either living honestly or protecting their careers/livelihoods/even their true relationships should they have them.

Since then, I’ve come across a lot of information as well about personal reasons, alongside industry reasons, that might have played a role in the decision to go the route of bearding for Jensen and Jared, like family history, their relationships with/views on/obstacles surmounted to succeed in (etc.) acting as a career, past experiences that have been hinted at, parental influence and sacrifice, not to mention the significant detail of who they happen to play on SPN...brothers (far too many ignorant people out there wouldn’t be able to move past the incest connotation, if a romantic relationship between the Js had been revealed).

By about midway through 2009, I was 100% convinced of the fact that Jared and Jensen were absolutely in a long term relationship that I would guess began around season two of Supernatural but had been on its way since the end of season one and during the hiatus between seasons one and two (want to know why I think that? I’ll do a separate post on it), and that the relationship was, of course, being hidden from the public.

The things that ultimately convinced me as they kept adding up are what continue to convince people today, the same things I’ve been going over at length (too much length) in this answer: intimacy between Jared & Jensen that extends beyond friendship-

-inconsistency in the information presented to the public that revolves around J2 and their time together/circumstances relating to both of them/etc., Jared and Jensen’s respective pasts before meeting each other, and even what some people believe to be hints dropped by Jared and Jensen themselves about their true relationship.

A well-known example (again, among many) that I’ve talked about pretty extensively is Jensen posting a photo in front of a mural that reads “love is love,” a well-known LGBT slogan, and then Jared posting a photo of himself in front of a mural that reads “love will win” on the very same day and captioning it “every time.”

This did turn out to be pretty overwhelming *sighs* but I hope at the very least I’ve succeeded in giving you a somewhat clearer idea of why us tinhats feel the way we do about Jared and Jensen, and I want to encourage you again to reach out whenever you like about anything you’d like to know!

There’s no such thing as a dumb question, and there’s no such thing as too many questions.

Just remember that! ❤️

               ☆ﾟ*・ﾟWoah is that NATHAN MEYER ? I’ve heard they’re a witch ( Dark ) originally from North Carolina. They came here because of the death of their father and they’ve been here for one year. As a 24 year-old, I’m sure they’re skilled. Someone told me they’re disinterested and scrutinizing but I think they’re calm and adaptive. I can’t help but think of wispy cigarette smoke, photos faded at the edges and half burnt letters never sent when I look at them.

                            [Intro] [Wanted Connections] [Blackwater Coven]

[History]

Childhood was chaos for Nathan. The first years of it were spent tucked away within the confines of his mother’s coven; a strange mix of hedge witches and those who practiced far bloodier dark arts in the shadowy cover of the deep Appalachian mountains. There eeriness of the place, of the people, was something that ingrained itself into Nathan himself, his eccentric nature is grounded in the oddity of the world he was born into. And within it his mother and father were always at war with each other, he really has no idea how they managed to accomplish having three children before his mother disappeared entirely from his life and took his younger sister with her. Truthfully he was raised more by his grandmother, a strange old woman with an uneasy amount of secrets and conviction that Nathan was certainly more like his mother than the rest of the Meyers’ brood.

Shortly after his mother left the family his father also decided he wanted nothing more to do with the coven as he had always been an outsider to it for marrying into the family. A witch whose power was cultivated in turning luck in his favor he settled himself and the boys on the west coast. It was a good fit for him and Nathan’s older brother, the family certainly found fortune there through gambling. Life became excess, wanting for nothing, and while they thrived, somehow, Nathan didn’t. His disinterest remained, gradually become a sort of venom between himself and his father until he was constantly earning the vicious reprimand and anger of the man. Nothing felt right to him, or real, not the world he’d left behind nor the one he had come to live in where magic was hidden away and life revolved around status he found incredibly bland.

The life of a rich socialite had some benefits, true, but nothing that ever lasted out long in stirring Nathan’s interest. With his father’s temper growing shorter as the years passed harsh words became the norm and he distanced himself more and more. With his older brother already absent much of the time in chasing his own vices there was no more buffer from the battlefield that was home. Nathan kept himself entertained with his camera, the only real grounding point in his life, with distraction and ghosted in around expectations until the day his father fell ill. As life became an endless blur of medical terms and treatments that always fell short of working Nathan skirted the edges while the best doctors and nurses could buy failed. It was a perplexing thing to witness, the man who had been the childhood monster in his own life wasting away. Something about it felt almost like vindication. His efforts to care for the man were an endless round of accusations, it seemed the bad blood was meant to carry until the very end and finally Nathan simply left, unable to stomach being there anymore.  

His early twenties found Nathan wandering, gravitating back towards the hills and the secrets held there. His grandmother welcomed him back warmly and even if he didn’t feel as though he belonged in that place anymore it was a needed escape. Her lessons were perplexing, at times seemingly nonsensical, but there was a truth to them that dug under his skin. Magic, she insisted, was a great deal of intention and power came from places that were not always sound. Some of the secrets she told him were straight out of a nightmare, unfair and chilly.

Nathan still isn’t sure if his own hatred of his father was partly to blame for the illness that slowly killed the man, surely it couldn’t have been. But that was something of a turning point for him with the news that he had finally died, the funeral, the wall that had come between himself and his brother over his absence in the final months of their father’s illness, so much had dissolved around him.

When he left that time it was with no intention of coming back, the nagging knowledge shared by his grandmother tormenting him and lost in the idea that maybe he would find what he needed.

Headcanons

[Personal]

Nathan is a creature of vices, he practically has an ever-changing list of them. Some of the constants tend to be his terrible habit of chain smoking, his interest in bad horror movies and watching them all night rather than sleeping, spending more time with his camera than he does actual people, and collecting the sort of oddities that most people consider macabre or bizarre. He is entirely unaffected by how other people view his habits, unless they purposely push his buttons. In those cases it’s entirely fair game to purposely make them uncomfortable in his presence.

He has absolutely no desire to live on campus but since he has no choice in the matter, and he certainly did try to bribe the staff to let him live alone, he has attempted to make the best of sharing his space with other people. Which of course means he tends to keep to his own room, he’s not exactly unfriendly, just solitary by nature and it’s still a habit.

Don’t touch his camera, he gets a little moody when it comes to that. It’s an old, fickle beast and deserves a certain amount of respect, obviously. Along the same lines his roommates, assuming they ever venture past his bedroom door, will get something thrown at them if they try to mess with any of the literal dozens of photos that amass on his walls. Again, that’s a very personal matter.

While it really didn’t endear him to his father with the news, Nathan came out as gay in his latter teens. Needless to say he spent most of his formative years sexually testing the waters under the glow of the city lights well outside the scrutiny of people who knew him otherwise. His scattering of relationships reads fairly typical, breakups and shattered attempts mostly due to his own lack of desire to  

He really isn’t the looming (seriously, he’s 6′4″), unsettling presence that seems to be most peoples’ first impression. Usually because he spends a great deal of time studying people around him more than directly interacting with them; it doesn’t mean he lacks any desire to be around people though. Actually, quite the opposite in that Nathan wants connections with others to help him stay grounded, but he’s never really had much in the way of healthy interactions with people aside from his brother and grandmother most of his life.

Generally he’s fairly even natured about most things, nearly to the point of being disconnected. His morality isn’t cut and dry, he views good and evil as purely circumstantial rather than anything set just the same as he thinks the idea that any one person is truly one or the other as ridiculous.

[Magic]

Nathan didn’t attend college to decipher what his magic is and where that power lies, he’s well aware of it and knows its’ rooted in decay and ruin. He enrolled to gain a better grasp of magic outside his own, hunting for the means to both control his unpredictable power and undo some of the bindings to old spells that were placed in his childhood. Said magic works on both organic and inorganic materials but he doesn’t test it much if avoidable; decay is a vicious and unforgiving element by design and as much as he knows how powerful it could make him the idea of the effects of those spells is a bit unnerving.

The coven he was born into, Blackwater, was one with very old traditions and rites, some of which would be very questionable by the standards of most witches. Obviously not information he shares with others because of this fact. Nathan was educated, to a degree, by his grandmother who was somewhat of an elder leader within the coven. When he returned there later in his twenties he discovered the reason why she stepped in to teach him.

There are two specific rites within the coven that Nathan was part of early in his life without being aware of until he discovered later one;

Binding Power Rite

Within the Blackwater coven power is something that is widely believed to be connected to intent and the life of a witch themselves. So any very promising children, or specifically ones who also were subject to Blood Binding rites, are linked to their own magic on a deeper level than many witches. It grants them an early and stronger connection to the well of power but at a trade of sorts. The same magic requires a sacrifice, one of the witch themselves. Their lives are shorter than expected, their own magic taking more than the usual burden in use and the expectation is that eventually the magic will drive the witch to either pass the rite one to their next generation or suffer it driving them to the point of destroying themselves.

Nathan’s magic, very much like his mother’s power, will likely cause his sanity to decay with time. He is aware of this, it is a nagging fear in the back of his thoughts after seeing the wild changes and strange actions of his mother growing up and knowing the woman likely was nearly lost of madness by the time his younger sister was born. He’s hopeful that learning more about magic as a whole will give him the key to avoid that fate himself.

Blood Binding Rite

One of the darker rites of the coven involves the burden of an old trade for magic being passed onward. It is a rite that involves the children of a witch, specifically one who they choose to carry that connection to the coven’s initial pace for magic from darker arcane forces. Nathan’s mother was already suffering some of the madness of her own magic by the time she gave birth to him and picked him for the rite. It was a point of argument between his parents, and ultimately part of the reason his father always kept him at a distance, but a necessity of sorts. The only known way to keep a witch from an elder line within the coven from being slowly devoured by their own magic, the burden is passed onward to the child then to carry. In turn the expectation is that the child will grow to be one of the more valued members of the coven, held in high regard, and one day continue the rite with children of their own blood.

Being fully aware of the rite and having no intention of doing the same, Nathan knows it only furthers his chances of losing his sanity but he cannot see himself having children. It was a bitter discovery to make, something that outside of his control, but one he can do little about.

The Stravaganza Series: An attempt at in-universe timeline (1/3)

PART 2 [X]

Eh, I know that the Stravaganza fandom on Tumblr (and pretty much anywhere else tbh) is quite non-existent, but, nevertheless, I wanted to share this surely excessive and probably unnecessary ramble/analysis concerning the actual timeline of the show, based on a series of notes I wrote last year, that where then conveniently forgotten in my HD until i remembered about them the other day.

I was inspired to write them down after noticing that events seems to be happening at a way faster pace in later books than in the first ones, so I wanted to verify it this was really the case (spoiler: it is). I also added information about various character’s birthdays and age during the series, as stated or implied from a variety of sources*.

Please note that my estimations are based on several fundamental assumptions, such as:

The day in which a saint is celebrated is the same in both worlds;

Easter is calculated with the same criteria (implying that moon phases are the same in both universes)

People in Talia are already using the Gregorian Calendar (despite the fact that it was adopted only in 1582, while the series ends in 1580). 

This said, let’s get started with the first part, covering the first two books!

CITY OF MASKS

Our universe time: from May 2002 to March 2003 (approx. 10 months).

Talian time: from May 16, 1577 (Marriage with the Sea) to March 8, 1588 (Last day of Carnevale) (approx. 10 months).

Ok, Let’s start with the years: Rodolfo tells Lucien that they are in 1577 during their first meeting, so that’s pretty much set. I don’t remember if the year in our universe is actually mentioned, but it can be inferred from what is said in latter books (it also matches the time the book was published).

Given that Lucien and Arianna are both 15 at the start of the book (turning 16** during the time gap between Arianna’s election and the Epilogue), we can deduce their birth year are, respectively, 1986 and 1561.

As for the exact days, we know that Marriage with the sea is celebrated on Ascension day, so 40 days after Easter. If we calculate Easter 1577 on the base of the aforementioned assumption, we get  7 April, so Ascension day is May 16. May 17 is the forbidden day, and it is also the day of Lucien’s first Stravagation to Talia (the last person to do so before him was Dr. Deathridge himself, who arrived in Bellona 24 years before, so around 1553).

Another important day is the Feast of the Maddalena, which we can assume takes place in the same day Mary Magdalene is  remembered in the saint calendar, 22 July. This makes sense if we take into account that the Maddalena is supposed to be reminiscent of Venice’s Redentore, which is celebrated in July as well. So, by the time the celebration rolls in, Lucien has at least two months of experience regarding Bellezza and its surroundings.

Now, I do  not have exact information about what happens next (i need to read CoM again), but I believe it is safe to say that all the other events from Maddalena onward (Lucien’s trip to Venice, Arianna’s incarceration, the murder in the Sala di Vetro, etc.) take place in at least three weeks/a month. In this case, Lucien’s death falls around late august/early September, and thus the main  plot of CoM takes about three months and a half to unfold. I know that there is a two-week time shift around Lucien’s death due to the gate instability, but I won’t go into detail as A) this would make things even more  complicated, and B) the phase shift eventually gets corrected, so let’s just forget about it.

CITY OF STARS (where things get complicated, thank you Falco -.-)

Our universe time: from late spring/early summer 2003 to 15/16*** September 2004 (approx. 1 year and 2-3 months).

Talian time: from early summer 1578 (Merla’s birth) to 15/16 September 1578 (Stellata di Falco) (approx. 3 months).

See  that huge-ass incongruence in the dates? Yeah, this time it won’t be easy.

Well, we know that the time shift happens right after Falco’s death,which in turn happens the day after the Stellata, on 16August 1578 (the day of Stellata is fixed, and is 15 August). As for when the book starts, we don’t have a precise date, but I believe we can safely put Merla’s  birth at least two months before the Stellata (this would still make her growth exceptional, if we consider that a horse’s weaning doesn’t happen before the fourth month).

So,what does this implies for the characters, age-wise?

For starters, we know from chapter 9 that Georgia is a Gemini. This means her birthday is between 21 May and 21 June. Given that we didn’t get any mention of her birthday since she started stravagating, we can assume**** she already celebrated it before going to Remora, and thus her  being 15 would mean that her birth year is 1988. This means that she is finishing year 10 at the start of the book, and that she is 16 and starting year 12 in the epilogue (which should be the case if the “exams” mentioned in the aforementioned epilogue are the GCSE, which is taken at the end of year 11).

For Arianna and Luciano, they are both 16, turning 17 after the epilogue. This means that, after the time shift, the age gap between Luciano and Georgia is less than a year, around 5/6 months (!). (So much for spending half of the remaining books fawning over Luciano-Senpai)

For the two di Chimici, Falco and Gaetano, we can play  it safe thanks to the dates on their family tree, as provided in the afterword. So, Flaco is 13/14 (we don’t know the exact birthday, but I sort of headcanon him as a Scorpio*****, so that would make him 13 at the time of the main events, and 14-soon-to-be-15 in the Epilogue). Gaetano is 17/18. We know from Falco’s story that his birthday is in summer, so we can assume that he just turned 18, or that he does so before the end of the book.

We also know that Benedetta, the brothers’ mom, died in 1577******, while Falco’s accident happened the year before, in 1576. Poor Falco, talk about traumas. 

this said, the vast majority of the plot takes place is about a couple of months, and,  again, this is sort of a reasonable time for the events to unfold (especially if you take into account that the whole, beautiful mess that is City of Flowers takes place in barely 6 weeks. But we’ll deal with it in part 2)

FOOTNOTES

*: most of which are now  basically gone, in particular: the official site and the promotional Facebook and Twitter accounts created to promote books 4-6.  Unfortunately, only part of said  page is retrievable via The Wayback Machine.

**: Arianna’s and Luciano’s birthdays were actually revealed in the aforementioned Facebook/Twitter pages,which are now unfortunately gone. As the only proof I have is my notes and my memories, I am pondering about trying to contact Mary Hoffmann herself and ask her about said dates, so to have a reliable  sources for my fanwanks. Btw, Arianna was born on  12 October 1561, while Luciano  was born on 22 november 1986.

***: I don’t think it was explicitly stated, but I believe that the time phase that happened after Falco’s death was completely cancelled by the time of the second Stellata. This would also make sense if we consider how Falco, now Nick, felt that he had to stravagate back once again, as if it was now safe for him to move across time and return to Talia in the day dedicated to his remembrance.

****: I know this is a bit of a stretch, but Hoffman is usually really coherent and precise on the  chronological integrity of her works , so I  refuse to believe that she intentionally had Georgia said she was a Gemini without mentioning any eventual upcoming birthday in a paragraph that was all about births and zodiac signs. I mean, that would be extra poor™️ writing and Hoffman can do better than that.

*****: look, we all know that there is only one sign who can realistically believe that dying twice and hopping through dimension is the way-to-go solution to all of your problems, together with “pretending to be a ghost to stop your murdeous parent by scaring the life out of them”. Gaetano is also totally a sweetheart Cancer, btw.

******: this would also  explain why we barely get to hear about the big powers in Giglia for most of City of Masks. They were busy mourning the death of their Duchess.

ANYWAY I LOVE THIS SERIES AND EVEN IF THIS TOOK ME FOREVER YOU SHOULD READ IT AND ALSO READ THE BOOKS!!

The French Mistake

Part 1/? - A Visitor Part 2/? - The Kulturhistorisk Museum Heist Part 3/? - Cutscene Part 4/? - The Marvel Cinematic Universe Part 5/? - Breathless Part 6/? - Escape at Last Part 7/? - Fox in Socks Part 8/? - Things Go Wrong Part 9/? - Downey and Out Part 10/? - Road Trip Part 11/? - Temptation Part 12/? - An Awful Reunion Part 13/? - Unreality Intrudes Part 14/? - A Call for Help Part 15/? - Loki’s Guests Part 16/? - Stan Lee Cameo Part 17/? - Reassessment Part 18/? - Midnight Invasion Part 19/? - Elevator Fight Part 20/? - Courage Part 21/? - Unwelcome Back Part 22/? - Darkest Hour Part 23/? - They Are Here Part 24/? - The Jet Propulsion Laboratory Part 25/? - Word of God Part 26/? - Avengers Assembled Part 27/? - The Houston Underground Part 28/? - Houston has a Problem Part 29/? - Onward and Upward Part 30/? - The Chi’Tauri Queen Part 31/? - Through the Wormhole Part 32/? - Prisoners Part 33/? - Arm’s Length Part 34/? - A Moment’s Respite Part 35/? - Ravagers to the Rescue

Because there’s no way that trusting your life to a bunch of pirates can possibly go horribly wrong.

Natasha breathed a sigh of relief as Evans climbed back down again, then thought for a moment before going to join him.  “I better make sure he doesn’t try to do something dumb,” she said.  “You still think he doesn’t understand you, Steve?” her voice floated up the tunnel as she climbed.

“No comment,” said Steve.  Leaning on the edge of the console, he turned to see what Thor was doing.

Thor had redoubled his efforts to try to get the Leviathan going, now that he knew the tesseract was at stake.  He had taken a panel off the far right of the control surface, and was shining Natasha’s flashlight into it, frowning as he examined what was underneath.

“Any progress?” Steve asked him.

“It may be,” said Thor.  “Fetch Hemsworth for me, if you could.”

Steve hobbled over to one of the tunnels.  “Hemsworth!” he shouted.  “Can you come up here?”

“I could have done that,” said Thor.

“I don’t want to do any more climbing on this ankle,” Steve protested.  Great. Now on top of everything else, he was whining about it.

Hemsworth’s head appeared in the opening, along with a hand swatting long blond hair out of his face.  “I hate the hair,” he grumbled.  “Next movie, I’m cutting the hair.”

“A warrior’s hair is a symbol of his strength and nobility!” said Thor.  “It must not be cut.”

“Watch me,” said Hemsworth.  He gathered it back at the nape of his neck and tucked it under his cape to keep it contained.  “What do you need?”

Thor guided him to the open panel.  “Here.”  He took Hemsworth’s hand and guided it to a particular place.  “Do you feel that two-pronged connector?  The one I have removed the casing from?”

“Yeah,” said Hemsworth.

“Apply a spark just there,” said Thor.  “A small spark.  Too much will melt and destroy the delicate parts.”

“And too little will do nothing, I assume. Okay,” said Hemsworth.  He shut his eyes and gritted his teeth, as if about to get a needle at the doctor’s office.  For a moment, nothing happened.

Then there was a tremendous snap that set Steve’s hair standing up all over again. Lightning sizzled over the equipment, screens came on, and controls lit up, all of them flickering and fizzling. The inside of the cockpit was like a pink and purple disco for a moment as static scrolled over all the displays, and light was much too bright for people who’d been sitting around in the dark for twenty minutes.  Steve had to close his eyes, and when he opened them again, there were spots dancing in his vision.

It had worked, though.  The Leviathan’s systems were on.  The big guidance display was up, showing a diagram of how they were docked in the mother ship by a variety of hooks and probes.  Steve reached up and tapped one.  There was a dull clunk and the pink image flickered blue before coming back, but the probe did not disengage.  The Chi’Tauri weren’t going to let them get away that easily.

Natasha re-appeared in one tunnel, and Evans in the other.  “You got it working?” Nat asked.

“Sort of,” said Steve.  He tried another of the docking probes.  Again, it made a noise and the Leviathan shook, but the machinery did not detract.  They were still locked to the mother ship.

Maybe they could just activate the wormhole right here, and take part of the mother ship with them if they had to.  Steve found the starfield screen, but the circle icon in the corner was no longer pulsing or spinning.  When he touched it, it twitched, but nothing happened.  Maybe the wormhole could not be used as long as the Leviathan was docked.

“All right.”  Steve gripped the controls.  “We’ll just have to bust our way out.”

“Wait,” Thor put out a hand.

From down below came a hissing noise, and a panicked woman’s voice.  Nat was with them, so it must have been Johansson.  “Guys!” she shouted.  “Guys, they’re cutting the door open!”

And she was alone down there with two unconscious men, Steve thought.  “Go move Loki and Hiddleston,” Steve said to Evans and Hemsworth.  “I don’t think there’s room for eight of us up here so find somewhere else to hide them.”  He hoped there was somewhere else on this vessel. From what he’d seen the inside was pretty utilitarian.

The two men hurried to do so.  Steve gripped the controls again, then his eyes went to another view showing on one of the side screens.  It showed down the side of the mother ship, and what had drawn his attention was the fact that things were moving.  Above the row of openings where the Leviathans could dock, smaller sets of doors were sliding open, and lights coming on inside them.  They were being watched.

“If we bust out, they’ll fire on us,” Steve realized.

“It is a surprise they have not already blasted their way in,” said Thor.  “I believe they are reluctant to damage the mother ship in the process.”

They would be much less reluctant once the Leviathan was in space.  “What do we do?” asked Steve.

Thor found another screen and enlarged it to fill the main viewing area.  His hands flew over the controls.  “If I understand their system of numerals correctly… our allies in the brig were the Ravagers.  Let us try one of their frequencies.”  Another image appeared in the corner, showing Thor and Steve looking at the screen.

There was a response almost immediately.  The larger screen flickered, and there was the crystalline captain, with Miss Alpha-Eleven-Three on one side of him and the giant crocodile-like creature on the other.  Miss Alpha was missing an arm and Steve didn’t recall the crocodile having an eyepatch before, but it had three eyes so it could probably spare one.  The captain saw who was calling, and smiled.

“You made it!” he said.

“Yes, we did!” Steve agreed.  “Sort of.  Where are you?”

“On board our ship,” the crystal captain replied. “We’re still in the loading bay but we’ve hunkered down in fortress mode – should be able to hold out six, seven days until help can arrive.”

“Well… we can’t do that,” said Steve.  “We made it back to the stolen Leviathan we came in by, but I don’t think we can use our wormhole until we’re at least a certain distance from the mother ship.”

“The moment we leave, though, every weapon in the fleet will fire upon us,” Thor added.  “Do you know of anything we might do to distract them?”

The crystal captain cocked his head, thinking about it.  Miss Alpha leaned down to whisper something in his ear, and he grinned.  “Sounds like fun.  All right, folks – Miss Alpha’s got you covered.  Nobody’s yet built the system she can’t hack.”  The screen went dark.

For a couple of minutes, nothing seemed to happen. Then there was a faint sound from somewhere outside, an electrical whirr like an entire room full of computers starting up at the same moment. The ship began to vibrate.  The side screen Steve had been watching a moment ago began to show motion again, so he enlarged it and saw that one after the other, all down the side of the mother ship, not one but three rows of docked Leviathans were disengaging and floating out into space.  The first few were fired upon, but then the shooting stopped as the Chi’Tauri realized it was a computer error, not a mass escape.

The wave of moving ships got closer and closer, until the one two spaces down floated out, then the one next door… and then there was a series of mechanical noises, Steve’s stomach lurched as the gravity turned off, and they were free.

Steve grabbed the control column, both to fly the ship and as a way to keep himself from rattling around in the cockpit.  The other Leviathans were floating inertly, unpowered and unpiloted, making for a dangerous-looking debris field.  As Steve watched, two of the ones further down the line scraped against each other, giving off sparks.  He hooked his knees under the panel again and very gently turned the nose down, trying to make it look like they were drifting randomly while also avoiding a collision with any of the other vessels.

Nat was still in the cockpit with them, and pushed herself off a wall to join Steve.  “Where is… there it is.”  She found the starfield screen.  “How do I know when it’s ready?”

“The little circle will start to pulse,” Steve told her.  “That’s what it was doing before.”

They drifted a little further.  It was very difficult to judge the distances in space. Steve kept his eyes on the various outside views, and saw that some of the other ships in the fleet were starting to launch little delta-winged vessels, that looked rather like skates or rays, which would dock with the mouths of the Leviathans and allow a couple of crew on board to fly them back to the mother ship.  This was clearly a laborious process, and one that would take some time. Steve tried to move them up relative to the plane the mother ship was on, to get more distance between them and it without looking like their vessel was under intelligent control.  “Anything yet?”

“It’s not moving.”  Nat poked at the circle.  Again, it twitched, but the wormhole didn’t activate.  “It must have turned off when everything else did.  Thor, can you…?”

“I will look.”  Thor grabbed a handle in the floor to pull himself down, and removed a panel from underneath the main console.

“Look fast,” said Steve, as more and more of the little skates flew out of bays on the mother ship.  The Chi’Tauri might have lost track now of which Leviathan was which, but as soon as they tried to dock with this one they’d find the mouth welded shut, and know it had their prisoners inside it.  Would they tow it back to throw them in the brig again?  Or just blow them to smithereens?

“Ah, I know what the problem is!” said Thor. He pulled an octahedral object, made of what looked like splintered crystal in a metal bracket, out from under the console.  “There is no power!  Like the rune stone itself, this device runs on the tesseract.  They filled this storage unit before sending the troops after us, and it must have contained enough power for only two trips, one out and one back.”

Steve cursed.  Every time they thought they were almost out of this, things got worse! “What do we do, then?”  They were back in their own universe, presumably, but not in their own bodies.  They could switch back when Loki came to, but then the actors would be trapped here, the Chi’Tauri would still have the tesseract, and they didn’t even know where in this universe they were!  Earth might be on the other side of the galaxy!

Thor touched the communications screen again. “Our friends!” he said.  “We thank you, but it seems our escape is not yet complete.  We cannot activate our wormhole and must refuel it.  Have you any more tricks up your sleeves that might assist us?”

The captain of the Ravagers sat back in his seat and stroked his chin, thinking.  “Well, now,” he said.  “I think we’ve already thanked you for getting us out of those cells, and for knocking down the first wave of rats so we could take their guns.  If we’re gonna do any more for you, we’ll need something in return.”

“I am a prince of Asgard,” said Thor.  “You will have your reward.”

The crystal being snorted.  “You’re no Asgardian!  You’re too short and too ugly.  You had a couple of them, though.  What were you gonna do with them?  Ransom them?  Asgard’s not big on paying ransoms.  They prefer to beat the shit out of you and then make you apologize.”

“They are our allies, not our prisoners,” said Thor. “Natasha, since Stephen cannot climb, bring Hemsworth.”

Nat went to one of the tunnels.  “Hemsworth!” she shouted.

Thor rolled his eyes.  “And what is your excuse?” he asked.

Hemsworth scrambled up a moment later.  “Now what?”

“Here.”  Thor patted Hemsworth on the shoulder.  “Here is your Asgardian prince!  He shall see that you are rewarded for assisting us.”

“Oh, yes!” Hemsworth nodded, mimicking Thor’s accent and inflections perfectly.  “My, uh, my Midgardian doppelganger speaks the truth!  You shall all be handsomely paid for assisting the son of Odin!”

Thor leaned back a little to catch Steve’s eye behind Hemsworth’s back.  “Do I sound like that?  Truly?” he whispered.

Steve nodded, and wondered what he might discover if Evans tried to imitate him.

“The son of Odin, eh?  You are big people,” said the crystal being.  He looked at Miss Alpha, then at the crocodile, and waved them to lean in. There was a short conversation.

“What’s going on now?” asked Hemsworth.

“I think we’re about to make a very one-sided deal with some pirates,” said Steve.

“Very well,” the crystal captain said.  “Sit tight. We’re coming to get you.”

Genshin Impact Emote Packs: Paimon’s Paintings 24 (2/2)

MySQL NDB Cluster Installation Through Docker

In this post, we will see how to setup MySQL NDB Cluster from a docker image. I assume that the reader has some basic understanding of docker and its terminology.Steps to install MySQL NDB Cluster:Let's create a MySQL NDB Cluster with the following environment:MySQL NDB Cluster version (Latest GA version)1 Management Node4 Data Nodes1 Mysqld ServerConfiguration slots for upto 4 additional API nodes Note: Docker software must be installed and running on the same host where we are planning to install MySQL NDB Cluster. Also make sure we have enough resources allocated to docker so that we shouldn’t face any issues later on.Step 1: Get the MySQL NDB Cluster docker image on your hostUsers can get the MySQL NDB Cluster image from github site (link). Then select your required cluster version for download.Note: By default MySQL NDB Cluster 8.0 GA version image docker will pull or by mentioning tag:latest also point to latest cluster image which is 8.0 at the moment. If user wants to pull older versions of cluster images i.e. 7.5, 7.6 then mention that older version in tag (tag:7.5). Cluster version 7.5 onwards supported on docker.Let's run below command to get the latest cluster image:    host > docker pull mysql/mysql-cluster:latestOR:    host > docker pull mysql/mysql-cluster    host> docker pull mysql/mysql-cluster:7.5Let's wait for the download to finish.Cluster image has been pulled successfully by docker. Its always good to check if any older images of same version is also exist. In that case, while pulling the same cluster image, docker will prompt that “Image is up to date ... (look for below image)”.Step 2: Create a docker networkNext step is to create an internal docker network so that all the containers will use it to communicate each other.Host> docker network create cluster_8.0 --subnet=192.168.0.0/16Here, cluster_8.0 is the new internal docker network domain. You can assign any name to it.Let's check whether the above network is created or not:    Host> docker network lsThis will list out all the networks exist in the docker. One can see that our network ‘cluster_8.0’ is also listing.Step 3: Prepare the cluster specific configuration files (config.ini, my.cnf)By default docker image will have a minimal configuration files called my.cnf (/etc/my.cnf) and mysql-cluster.cnf (/etc/mysql-cluster.cnf). Let's create our own cluster configuration file (mysql-cluster.cnf) and let docker used it when we start our cluster.A sample custom mysql-cluster.cnf file looks like below:[ndbd default]NoOfReplicas = 2DataMemory= 1G#Below LogLevel settings will help in debugging an issueLogLevelStartup = 15LogLevelShutdown = 15LogLevelConnection = 15LogLevelInfo = 15LogLevelError = 15LogLevelNodeRestart = 15LogLevelCheckpoint = 15[ndb_mgmd]#Management node 1NodeId = 254HostName = 192.168.0.2[ndbd]#Data node 1NodeId = 33HostName = 192.168.0.3[ndbd]#Data node 2NodeId = 34HostName = 192.168.0.4[ndbd]#Data node 3NodeId = 35HostName = 192.168.0.5[ndbd]#Data node 4NodeId = 36HostName = 192.168.0.6[mysqld]#API node 1NodeId = 24[mysqld]#API node 2NodeId = 25[mysqld]#API node 3NodeId = 26[mysqld]#API node 4NodeId = 27Note: One should carefully allocate all memory related configuration parameters like DataMemory, TransactionMemory, SharedGlobalMemory etc based on your host availability free memory (RAM), excessive memory allocation might cause issues in starting cluster. If we are not sure about which config params we should use then we should run cluster with default configuration cluster file, but then it would be a 2 node cluster. Each configuration parameters have some default value so upon doubt, we should just mention the required HostName and NodeId in the cluster config file and leave others parameters as it is (default).Step 4: Start the management server with custom cluster configuration file (mysql-cluster.cnf)Next step is to start the management server (mgmt1). From the below command, HOST_PATH is path of required files on host that are mapped with container files. On my host, HOST_PATH= /Users/sarojtripathy/docker/mysql-tree/8.0HOST> docker run -d --net=cluster_8.0 –ip=192.168.0.2 --volume=HOST_PATH/mysql-cluster.cnf:/etc/mysql-cluster.cnf --volume=HOST_PATH/ndb/node1/mgmt1/ndb_254_cluster.log:/ndb_254_cluster.log --name=mgmt1 mysql/mysql-cluster ndb_mgmd --initialFrom the above image:mysql-cluster.cnf: This is the custom cluster configuration file and is mapped to default cluster configuration file (/etc/mysql-cluster.cnf)ndb_254_cluster.log: This is the file we have to create on the required path (empty file) and then map to internal cluster log file. The idea is to get all the cluster log messages to outside the container so that we can look at the logs during any issues that occurs in cluster. Alternatively we can look at the cluster logs thru docker command:    HOST> docker logs -f mgmt_container_nameLet's check the status of the management node from below command:    HOST> docker ps -a | grep -i mgmt1We can see that management node container is up. Also we can start the mgmt client (ndb_mgm) to see if management node is up and running or not.HOST> docker run -it --net=cluster_8.0 mysql/mysql-cluster ndb_mgmWe can see that management node (ID:254) is up and running and 4 data nodes are yet to start.Let's open the log file (ndb_254_cluster.log) and check if we can see the cluster logs. I have created a file (ndb_254_cluster.log) on my host to capture cluster logs.Step 5: Start all the data nodesRun the below command in each data node. Make sure we have changed the node id, name for each data node.Data Node 1:HOST> docker run -d --net=cluster_8.0 --name=ndbmtd1 -e '--ndb-connectstring=192.168.0.2:1186' mysql/mysql-cluster ndbmtd --nostart --nodaemonData Node 2:HOST>docker run -d --net=cluster_8.0 --name=ndbmtd2 -e '--ndb-connectstring=192.168.0.2:1186' mysql/mysql-cluster ndbmtd --nostart --nodaemonData Node 3:HOST>docker run -d --net=cluster_8.0 --name=ndbmtd3 -e '--ndb-connectstring=192.168.0.2:1186' mysql/mysql-cluster ndbmtd --nostart --nodaemonData Node 4:HOST>docker run -d --net=cluster_8.0 --name=ndbmtd4 -e '--ndb-connectstring=192.168.0.2:1186' mysql/mysql-cluster ndbmtd --nostart --nodaemonIt is necessary to run all the data nodes with –nodaemon option as running data nodes with daemon option in a docker container is currently not supported. So all the logs generated from data nodes are redirected to stdout. To gather these logs, we have to use docker command:    HOST> docker logs -f ndbmtd_container_nameLet's check the status of data nodes from the management client (ndb_mgm).HOST> docker run -it --net=cluster_8.0 mysql/mysql-cluster ndb_mgmThe status ‘not started’, shows that data node processes are running, but are not attempting to start yet. To start a data node process, issue a ‘start’ command from the management client. We can also issue ‘all start’ command to start all the data nodes.We can see that all data nodes are in ‘starting’ state and then its changed to ‘Started’ state. Let's look at the cluster status once again.As data nodes are started with ---nodaemon option so the logs won’t accumulate on any files rather it will redirect to stdout. So the only way to gather these logs into a file is to use docker command.HOST> docker logs -f ndbmtd1 | tee ndbmtd1_logThe above command will create a file called ‘ndbmtd1_log and redirect all the logs into it and at the same time, displays the same logs on the stdout i.e. in host terminal. So we can do the same for all the data nodes that are running. This will help during debugging any issues while cluster is up and running.Step 6: Start the Mysqld ServerRun the below command for the mysqld node(s). Make sure we have changed the ip, name for each mysqld node(s). On my host, HOST_PATH= /Users/sarojtripathy/docker/mysql-tree/8.0/HOST> docker run -d --net=cluster_8.0 -v HOST_PATH/ndb/node1/mysqld_data1:/var/lib/mysql -v HOST_PATH/ndb/node1/mysqld.log:/var/log/mysqld.log --name=mysqld1 --ip=192.168.0.10 -e mysql_random_root_password=true mysql/mysql-cluster mysqld --log-error=/var/log/mysqld.logLike management log file, here I have also created an empty mysqld.log file on my local host and mapped into mysqld container internal log file (/var/log/mysqld.log). Also I have mapped mysql data files ‘/var/lib/mysql’ to local file ‘mysqld_data1’. Let's verify the mysqld logs from the host.Let's check the status of mysqld node(s) from the management client (ndb_mgm):From the above image, we can see that our new cluster is now up and running ...  :)Step 7: Start the mysql clientBefore starting the mysql client, we need to get the password that has already generated during mysqld initialisation phase. Then copy this password and pass it to connect the server.HOST> docker logs mysqld1 2>&1 | grep PASSWORDThe above command will show you the password.Then enter above password to connect to the mysqld server.HOST> docker exec -it mysqld1 mysql -uroot -pEnter password:  ALTER USER 'root'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'root123';mysql> exit;Now start the mysql client by logging with new password.Step 8: Create database, table, rows transactions on MySQL NDB ClusterLet's create a database, a table and insert few rows into the table.Let's insert few rows into the table ‘t1’ and then check the rows count.Let's delete one row from the table and check the rows count again.So from the above image, we see that we are able to perform transactions on a table that is reside in MySQL NDB Cluster.At the end, let's check the cluster status after doing all the table operations.We can see that cluster is up and running. This concludes our discussion of MySQL NDB Cluster installation through docker. https://clustertesting.blogspot.com/2021/04/mysql-ndb-cluster-installation-through.html

So with the dawn of the choose your CYL we now know the skills, or at least enough information on the heroes. Which are all doing this theme of taking stuff from another generation in their families but anyway. The choice seems to be impossible, and you may be struggling so this guide aims to highlight the strengths and weakness of each hero and if its worth it.

Note: If you have a certain affinity for any one of these heroes by all mean pull for them, don’t miss the chance for your favourite unless you want to pull for them.

Note two: This is assuming they will all be neutral ivs when pulled as free stuff is normally neutral.

Roy

Roy is one of the units we know the stats for or at least a potential set. 38/51/34/26/24 seems impressive but theres a few things to take into account. 51 attack is - 3 from his weapon, -16 from the MT so his base attack seems to be 32 so luckily his weapon makes up for it. However Blazing durandal essentially works so if you have 1 more attack over the foes for that turn you accelerate your cooldown which for galeforce is great. Essentially its a worse version of heavy blade but the weapons boosts his attack and he can still have a A slot skill which seems to be a unnamed +4 to defence/speed on initiation which will help him use desperation which appears to be his B skill. He’s essentially meant to be a fast hard hitting cavalry unit however you may find on horse emblem you want Xander to be your bulky red. His main flaw is competition from other red cavalry units, or even red sword units. 

Reasons to pick

Skills synergies nicely

Cavalry unit

Great weapon

Decent speed

Saves you the pain of pulling through all the red 5 stars.

Reasons not to pick

Low hp

Faces stiff competition in the red department as a whole

Galeforce is niche in usage.

Xander is arguably better for horse teams

You may have enough reds already

Ike

Ike is a very interesting unit. We don’t know his stats but if he’s like normal ike expect high attack and defence with low res and mediocre speed. However his weapon Urvan is somewhat broken. Or at least it is a counter to quad sets. As damage from the second hit onwards by 80%, implying each hit gets 80% less. Or at least this is what is implied. Either way its a great effect to have and allows him to tank more. Giving him renewal or something could pair nicely. Its also has a inbuilt killer weapon effect which is nice. He also has Aether which was a given. Finally we know he has Beorcs blessing which makes his weapon, whatever he ends up using, effective against fliers and cavalry (link attatched it might not be the case and just only works against the unit types)and nullifies buffs from fortifys and rallys.  Making him a solid check against horse emblem or other buff teams. However it does take up the B slot. Also as a free unit he can actually use neutral ivs unlike some of the other choices.

Reasons to pick

If like Ike he’ll be incredible on offence

A great weapon defensively

Beorcs blessing is great for stopping buff teams

Can work nicely with neutral ivs

Reasons not to pick

green pool of 5* is very small and forgiving if you get someone not Ike

Maybe outclassed for the green slot by the use of green mages

will probably have very weak res

To use Beorcs blessing you have to use your B slot

Lucina

Lucina is looking to be a great support unit while being offensive as well, with claims of her having high attack and speed, which will mean she’ll probably be a glass canon. Being a Lance unit also means Lucina emblem is a thing now so theres that. She really wants ivs though to make her great but can function without if her stats are good enough. Her weapon gives her defence + 3 which might patch up her defence a tad but also grants allies who weild Sword, Lance, Axe, Bow or dagger +3atk/+3 spd in a two tile radius making her a great support unit, especially with her drive speed which stacks another 3 speed on it so its effectively +3atk +6 spd which is a great boost. She also has Aether too. However considering in the footage we we’re shown she might not be as fast as we think. Oh and her art is amazing.

Reasons to pick

A great support unit especially if given a rally skill.

If similar to standard Lucina will have great stats

Lucina emblem is not a bad idea if given a dancer

Blue is a great colour to be

Reasons not to pick

You may have enough good blues already

Likely to be fragile 

Likely will wants ivs specifically +spd or +atk

If you have Delthea she’s a very similar buffer except focuses on spurring rather than honing.

Lyn

AHAHAHAHAHAHAH BOW ARCHER IS BROKEN, first her base looks to be 35/47/38/18/28 which is very good but no joke, If on horse emblem with all stats at +6 she can OHKO every unit in the game, bar Amelia, Zephiel, Effie, Gray, Summer robin and Lukas with neutral ivs..... thats if she runs the brave bow set SO SAVE THOSE FEATHERS. On top of this if every unit has fury, she still OHKO them all except the extra Henry who lives on 1hp, camus, saizo and summer frederick.. (This is with draconic aura, Luna takes care of Amelia) But anyway her base kit yes erm.... Her weapon grants +3 speed and ignores buffs. Which is still solid. She also comes with Sacaes blessing which stops counters from... sword, lance and axe... Basically its a counter to distant counter weapons..... This is good and bad as it’ll end up being a useless space on her unless fighting specific units. Finally she has 3 extra skills, she has Draconic aura which is great for her, Swift sparrow which is amazing for her and better than life and death, and finally a new c skill which seems like a seal after combat but in a radius? Still its likely she won’t come with one of these my guess being Draconic Aura, or my hope. Also shes the most sceptical to ivs, even though the results look great youll face more complex builds and she’ll wants a +atk or +spd iv badly. Neutral is still good

Reasons to pick

INCREDIBLE UNIT TYPE

HAS A HORSE

Could possibly be the better archer than Cordelia

Great skills for the majority

You won’t have to pull through colourless hell to get her

Reasons not to pick

If you have bride Cordelia already she’ll do the same role essentially

May rely on Ivs to be truly good so neutral is kinda a damper.

Sacaes blessing is useless 7/10

May need heavy investment

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Honestly if I rated these units myself I’d go Lyn, Lucina, Ike and Roy last but they are all great. Hopefully this lets you pick a little bit easier or gives you insight, but who are you picking regardless for comeptitive or because you love em. Let me know here

http://www.strawpoll.me/13811667/r

November 21st, 2017

This is the second of two new entries, which were at one point slated to be one entry. I’m glad they weren’t, since both of them got long as hell. I blame the fact that I’m also chipping my way through a 7 hour video essay on Pokemon for my long windedness. If you don’t remember the one where I caught a Drowzee, I recommend scrolling down. Now’s also a good time to remind you that it’s possible to read the entire thing chronologically, by clicking... well, any word in this sentence, how about. Also the Pokedex in the sidebar.

Now seems as good a time as any to mention what I forgot to in my admitted rush to finish the prior entry - while grinding up Baku, I was also hanging out with friends, and finally actually did the damn thing: Moschops was traded for a Kakuna, and then traded back, evolving it to its final form. This is the second time in my lifetime of playing Pokemon that I've actually used the evolved form of a trade evolution, and the first is my Alolan Golem in Sun which I am still not actually finished with yet, largely due to this playthrough superceding it as a priority in my mind, and also because, maybe it's just me but that game's pacing really falls off by the time you're on Poni Island. Not that it was really well paced to begin with, but-- oh, bugger, I'll save this all for when I nuzlocke that game. Uh. If I get there. Maybe I'll be so put off by how much I hate 2nd Gen that I'll simply not get to 3rd. (That's probably not true, I love 3rd Gen so much, I'll slog through garbage to get to it.)

Anyway yeah, I have rad friends and I love them very much and so I have a Machamp now. Weird! I've used Machoke before, but never actually Machamp.

Blaine's gym is the next one, and I actualy have notes on it beyond "the gym trainers were easy." As the series progresses, gyms will become more elaborate - here, they're just. Walk in a straight line, walk in a straight line and then turn left, rifle through some garbage, cut some trees, follow an "invisible" path, just choose a teleport tile and pray, and the two I'm about to knock out back to back.

Blaine's gym is really weird. I definitely understand what they were going for, but it turned out super strange. So Blaine is like, this researcher professor guy, like not quite Pokemon Professor but he knows his shit and wears a lab coat sometimes and the works. So his gym is a quiz. There's these quiz machines that ask you a question that varies from bafflingly simple, such as "does Caterpie evolve into Butterfree", to just plain baffling, either due to strange wording or ambiguous wording. Like... on the one hand they are clearly meant to test your knowledge that you've gained as you adventured, since you're essentially at endgame territory here. But Blaine isn't the kind of professor that seems to legitimately want to test your knowledge, oh no, his questions seem purposely worded to confuse. For example, the first one, "Caterpie evolves into Butterfree?" On the one hand, yes, one of Caterpie's evolutions is Butterfree... but at the same time, Caterpie DOESN'T evolve into Butterfree. Caterpie evolves into Metapod, and Metapod evolves into Butterfree. The correct answer is yes, but it's not technically accurate. Another question asks if Poliwag evolves thrice, which is false, it evolves twice, but it's easy to count each form - Poliwag, Poliwhirl and Poliwrath - and assume that that matches up with the "3" in the question. Also, in what I can only assume to be translation error, one question manages to not only refer to the Electric type as "Thunder", but also refers to types as "element-types". Super weird.

Anyway, I did all the trivia and also fought all the trainers. Used to Firered, I find the lack of unique overworld sprites for the gym leaders interesting. I didn't even realize it was Blaine I was next to until I saw that there was no quiz machine behind him. Of course, with my Nessie and Cingu, the gym is no issue at all. I brink Moschops in too for his rock move, and Wakinyan just in case things got hairy, which they did not - I beat him handily.

Speaking of being beaten handily, the final gym has this mystery behind it, but I appreciate that before you are face to face with his widow's peaked mug, you have every opportunity to guess that the final gym leader is Giovanni of Team Rocket. The "Champ in the making!" dude tells you he uses ground types - and Giovanni, excepting his Kangaskhan, uses Nidoqueens and Rhyhorns and such consistently. That, and the puzzle here is the same pushing tiles that were used in the Rocket Hideout - I guess he likes those things? I know we encounter them in the hideout before the gym, but I like to think that it's the other way around. We don't get as much backstory on Giovanni as I'd like, but I like to imagine that he was a perfectly legitimate gym leader before starting Team Rocket, and he used the puzzle tiles the Pokemon League provided for him in his top secret casino hideout just cause they were the same kind of puzzle he liked enough to put in his gym.

As for fighting him... it's a joke. I was a little nervous going in about his powerful last 'mon and its Fissure, but... it's got 30% accuracy and I outspeed it anyway. Giovanni is defeated, this time for the last time. In this game - and this was removed in the remakes since it is counter to his characterization in his later appearances - if you speak to him after beating him, he says he is giving up on crime for good in order to research Pokemon. I think that's compelling and, again, hints at something a little more earnest in his past and in his motivations. Allow me to extrapolate for a moment here: Team Rocket's goals, in the anime and in the games, are consistent: find and capture rare Pokemon by any means necessary. In this game, they are first found in Mt. Moon, where rare Pokemon fossils can be found that can be resurrected at Cinnabar Island; then, the Silph Scope is recovered from them in Celadon, which is used primarily to be able to observe Ghost Pokemon in the Pokemon Tower, where they can also be found holding one of the region's well known Pokemon caretakers hostage. After that, they are in Silph Co., a powerful organization that has manufactured the Master Ball, which can be used to catch any Pokemon with perfect success. While the grunts may be using common Pokemon like Zubat and Rattata, the big boss has typically got Rhyhorn, Kangaskhan, and Nidoqueen, all Pokemon that are either only or most commonly accessible by way of the Safari Zone, where rarer Pokemon are sequestered for preservation.

What if Giovanni's real purpose is to study these rare Pokemon? Not money, nor pride, but simply the pursuit of knowledge? Taken to extremes, sure, but perhaps from his perspective, the real crime is holding these creatures away from researchers (which, as seen in Silph Co., Team Rocket also employs) that can learn more about them. Bam. There's my wild theory of the week.

Anyway yeah I went in without Wakinyan and just wrecked up his face. Hard not to, with Lapras and Penthes and Moschops and Baku. Cingu didn't do much, nor did he need to.

Speaking of Cingu, I then taught him Fissure. Now, normally, I would pretty much ignore OHKO moves. I mean, it'd be fun to give it to Moschops, but since all transferred Pokemon have their hidden abilities, it still would not be a Fissure/No Guard Machamp, so there's no point to that - instead, I gave it to the faster Cingu, after a bit of research. You see, I did not realize until around 24 hours prior to the time of this writing when I has beaten Giovanni's gym that the X Accuracy was changed in Gen 3. In Gen 3 onwards, which are the only generations I've played extensively, the X Accuracy is a very situationally useful item in a set of items that are essentially like Hardens, Howls, and Focus Energys that you can pay for. Those same moves aren't really that useful either, since far better moves like Swords Dance and Agility are just plain better versions of them. X Accuracy is probably the best of the set since it actually increases your own accuracy by a stage, allowing the effects of moves like the obnoxious Sand Attack or Minimize to be negated or at least mitigated... but since the overwhelming majority of attacks hit 100% of the time, and if you've been sand attacked then using the X Accuracy only gives them another chance to fling sand in your face, the usefulness is not exactly on the level of say, Potions and Pokeballs.

Except, things are a little different in Gen 1. You see, when an X Accuracy is used on a Pokemon in battle in Gen 1, it makes all of its moves hit perfectly every time until it is switched out or fainted. All of them, bypassing accuracy checks a la Swift, which I believe means it isn't even able to fall prey to the dreaded 1/256 glitch, which makes 100% accuracy moves miss one out of every 256 times. Including one hit KO moves like Fissure. (As a side note, this may also be handy with Thunder, which has only 70% accuracy - if it becomes a perfect hit then I'm far more confident of Wakinyan's ability to sweep Lorelei, at the least.)

Which, obviously, is ridiculous. Of course, Fissure only has 5 PP... but I've also not used a single one of the limited Ethers, Elixirs, etc. that the game provides. And with the exception of Dingus, every member of the Elite 4 has 5 Pokemon. (Of course, almost all of them also have a Flying type, and I'm sure SOME of them will outspeed Cingu, which should make Fissure fail regardless.) So like... basically, it's completely busted but fuck me if I'm not gonna take advantage of it. I'm already taking advantage of how busted Slash is. Honestly I'm gonna be sad to push Cingu through the Bank, since it's gonna go from utterly disgustingly broken to like... a normal Pokemon, basically.

Anyway then I slept, woke up, and played more Pokemon.

Now, at this point, I could go to Victory Road. But. Some unfinished business first! The Seafoam Islands are a fairly simple dungeon, with a Strength boulder dropping puzzle that's fairly memorable. Also there's a bird at the end. I murdered this bird, since I couldn't catch it. It actually brought Moschops to fairly low health. Serves me right for trying to use my 4x effective move that just happens to be on my "weak to flying" Pokemon.

NOW I'm ready for Victory Road, except for the fact that I absolutely forgot that there was a rival fight on Route 22 as you're headed for the Pokemon League. I was all healed up anyway, and I don't need to box anyone since he's got 6 Pokemon by now (but apparently no Fire Stones, lol - really, still Growlithe?), but I was still caught off guard, which I'm sure is the point.

Moschops handles Pidgeot and Rhyhorn, which hurts bad enough to switch him for Wakinyan, who, not gonna lie, is basically literally only here to OHKO this Gyarados. Nessie beats Growlithe but Alakazam puts it to 40 health, the lowest any of my Pokemon has been in a long while. Baku has the psychic resistance, so he finishes off Alakazam and then hits Venusaur for super effective damage, but I switch back to Wakinyan to finish him off.

I heal at home and NOW I'm actually going towards Victory Road.

First though, I run around in the grass on Route 23 for a wee bit before realizing that the only Pokemon I can find there are Sandslash/shrew, Sp/Fearow, or Ditto, all of which I still have living. I then think to fish, but I don't have my rod with me. Ah well, can't be arsed.

Victory Road! It's a road made of victory!! Let's see what EXCITING NEW POKEMON await us in this, our final dungeon of the-- oh. Zubat. It's a Zubat. I just caught another Zubat. ts name is Desmod, but it might as well be... Box 1. Cause that's where it'll be living. (Actually Box 2 though, I think.)

The dungeon here isn't actually that tough. The encounter rate is high enough that I got annoyed and put up some repels, but all that'll do is make grinding go a bit faster because you KNOW I'm not gonna fight the Elite 4 until everyone's AT LEAST Level 50. The trainers in here, to their credit, are reasonably tough. One Tamer in particular hurt me pretty bad with his sequence of Psychic types. I tried not to leave too often, since, at the very least, doing so would reset puzzle progress and drain max repels, but I did after this dude. Dig still takes me near Rock Tunnel. I literally haven't healed anywhere other than home since Rock Tunnel, lol. That'll change soon, I bet.

While here, I battled Moltres, the last of three legendary birds. As promised, I'll now discuss my thoughts on legendaries, because I quite frankly think that they're ruddy genius... in this game, and less so increasingly as the series progresses.

In this game, there are 4 legendary Pokemon - the three legendary birds and Mewtwo. Mew is a mythical and I'll talk about those another time, but legendaries are a distinct thing. In this game, despite all being birds except for the edgy one for whatever dumb reason, they are absolutely fantastically executed. Pokemon is a game that revels in boss fights - most routes have the strongest trainer strategically positioned last in a route, sometimes actively obstructing progress. Your rival shows up to fight you a total of eight times counting his final fight, which comes as a surprise at the end of the long foreshadowed gauntlet of four big bosses fought one after another with no Pokemon Centers inbetween, Team Rocket's leader fights you twice before being the last of eight town-based bosses themed around the elements, and that's not even counting optional bosses like the Karate King. However, all of these fights have something in common - they're all trainer fights.

While the distinction between trainer battles and wild Pokemon battles is not one that DRASTICALLY effects gameplay, it is one that exists. While the core principles are the same, two integral things about wild battles that are core to how they are approached are simply not options in trainer battles: running, and throwing Poke Balls. You can't steal people's Pokemon, but you can catch wild ones, and on occasion that capture is harder than most battles.

As such, legendary Pokemon are essentially the "wild Pokemon" answer to gym leaders. While gym leaders are a tough fight against a smart(ish) trainer with strong Pokemon, a legendary Pokemon is strong and, more importantly, very very hard to capture. I want to be clear, defeating these legendaries is not the hard part. I didn't actually do these bosses as they are intended to be fought, since I killed Moltres and Articuno and I used my Master Ball on Zapdos. But, had I gone the traditional route, I could have been spending 30+ Ultra Balls on EACH of them, and having to be so careful not to kill it or let it kill itself, or to let it kill any of my Pokemon. And this is a serious challenge! And THIS is what legendary Pokemon are for. They are out of the way, optional, very challenging, but rewarding intrinsically, because if you DO do the hard thing and catch them, then you have a powerful Pokemon you can use now. This is in opposition to the extrinsic reward of defeating a gym leader for a badge that allows you to train traded Pokemon to a higher level, to use HMs out of battle, to slightly increase stat growth, or whatever else. Getting handed something for winning a fight is great and makes sense... but with the legendaries, the fight is getting the damn things to stay in a ball, and the reward is the same as the reward for throwing a Poke Ball at a Rattata on Route 1: now you HAVE IT.

Of course... nothing stays good forever. In Gen 2, they introduce roaming legendaries. This is a different type of boss fight that takes place over the course of several fights, and is generally agreed to be way more of an obnoxious pain in the ass without actually being that innovative or fun. Instead of doing a cool dungeon that's hidden away and then fighting through your increasing worry to press onwards rather than resetting... an event flag happens in the story, and then you get to run aroung and do chip damage to a big cat or dog or something.

In Gen 3, for the first time, legendary Pokemon, rather than being hidden and out of the way, are thrust firmly in your face. This is the beginning of a change but, at least it's still a big lump of pain to actually capture Kyogre, Groudon or Rayquaza. While this gen also starts the trend of having more legendaries than it knows what to do with, it also makes up for it by having the most esoteric, "Mew is under the truck" type garbage puzzles in the whole series to get the golem-based Regis.

After this, things go bad quick. Starting in Gen 5 and continuing onwards, even being awkwardly shoehorned into the remakes of Gen 3, legendaries go from something you can seek out if you fancy a challenge or are a collector or want the power that comes with them... to being something that's literally handed to you on a silver platter, and that the game will not progress unless you acquire. This is bad and sucks. We'll get to it later.

Speaking of getting to things later. Next time, I guess... will be the Elite Four. After that, assuming I succeed, I'm gonna do some wrap up stuff. I do want to make some posts on here that aren't simply entries, talking about my overall opinion of Gen 1, my experience with nuzlocking it, and also discussing my opinions on some of the Pokemon found therein, which I will generally try to keep positive, since every Pokemon is someone's favorite and it's better to praise something that someone else might not have thought twice about than it is to criticize something that someone else might love. I may give a passing mention to which Pokemon appeal to me the least, but I would say that there are no Pokemon that I think are completely awful or unworthy of Being A Pokemon. (Also that gap will give me the time to finish Sun and buy an Ultra game which, given that MOST people I know who bought Moon were boring and then also bought Ultra Moon rather than buying Ultra Sun which I would think to make sense, will probably be Ultra Sun cause like, then I can trade my Blacephalon for their Stakataka or whatevs.) And then after that... Gen 2.

So, yeah. This has been an experiment so far and I'm really happy with how it has turned out. I look forward, not just to playing but also to writing each installment, and ideally, you look forward to reading them, even if they are uploaded at really weird times.

I'm gonna update the sidebar when I wake up in the... afternoon. Working overnights weirds time.

25th May 2020 - Orff

Carl Orff (1895-1982)

Gisei, Das Opfer (1913) https://open.spotify.com/album/74d2v19w4fuI8aPcRkVi99?si=MqdFYt9VRIuezbY-YEqMGg

‘O’ is another letter that doesn’t have huge amounts to offer in terms of composers. I’ve chosen Orff because I’m genuinely intrigued to see what else this composer has put out apart from Carmina Burana. I wonder if Orff suspected that his magnum opus would be used in every single ‘dramatic’ moment in reality TV for the intellectually challenged from now until presumably the end of time. You’ve all heard Camrina Burana, but what else did Orff do? I’ve chosen a fairly early work of his, written at just 18 years of age. It’s a story of a Japanese calligraphy teacher who kills one of his pupils, but not the right one, and his parents are sad, basically. Apparently heavily influenced (perhaps pillaged) from Debussy, it was not performed until 2010. Also, Orf is a viral skin infection passed to humans by infected sheep and goats, colloquially known as scabby mouth in the farming community. And who said I couldn’t get music and medicine into the same blog?

Get ready, this is a long one!

Above - do we think this might me set in Japan?

1.       Vorspiel: introduction. A very quiet and tender opening by the eerie female voices. Also with some windy noises. A few lines spread around the woodwind, and then things begin to get a bit more exciting with the introduction of the tune in the cello part (maybe viola). I think the choir are humming. I don’t know about Debussy, but the section from 1:35 sounds exactly like Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloe. Not quite as nice though. I mean, there’s no denying this overture is nice to listen to, and quite interesting, but it doesn’t sound new. Interesting trombone solo with wind machine. Aren’t they synonymous? Ehhhhh. 3:35 is a shock. Is this where the boy gets killed? No idea.

2.       Vorspiel: No demo yama. Right, so this is still the overture. The section with strings harp and female voices from about 0:56 is really cool, atmospheric. 1:36 sounds a bit ominous again, with tremolos, then some brass, then hahaha that tuba solo at the end is cracking me up. Firstly, is that all people think tubas can do. Plod plod bitch. Secondly, what happens to the sound at the end of the last note?? Is it a weird vibrato? Is it running out of air? It sounds like such a wispy sound considering the instrument it’s coming from.

3.       Vorspiel: Die Gottheit nahm das Opfer am. This means ‘the deity accepted the sacrifice’. That seems like a big plot point considering we’re still apparently in the overture. Or as google translate calls it: foreplay. Scary baritone and interesting textures with the brass in the next section, both muted and un-. Oh the singing sounds German, at least he used a real language in this opera. The accompaniment sounds like accompaniment, and by that I mean, I feel like there should be some singing over the top a lot of the time when there isn’t. Lots of lovely tuba. Ooooh 2:24 could be more in tune I think…it does sound quite high to be fair. Actually, the rest of the singing so far has been pretty good. Lots of hard Ts. 3:35 is a really interesting section, it’s very grand but then diminishes into being pretty scary again very well.

4.      Vorspiel: Dann…tiefste Nacht. Then deepest night. 0:13 onwards all feels a bit familiar as well, from other composers works. I have to say it doesn’t sounds very ‘deepest night’. The last movement did more. I had a heart attack at 1:21. There’s lots of variation over the next few minutes. I’d love to see what’s meant to be happening on stage. Without that, it does feel a little disjointed. The little harp scale up to 3:55 brings us to a really lovely section actually. That harmony’s interesting, as is the instrumentation. Laughed again at 5:05. How else would we know we were in japan if not for some exposed gong/tamtam notes? It’s tuned for the singer to come in at least! “Doot Doot Doot” is fun. Then the shit hits the fan.  The orchestral accompaniment does sounds at times a little like a concerto for orchestra, with solos from bassoon, tuba, double basses. It’s nicely written. Again the end of this part feels like I need to be watching something alongside it. The texture at the end is fantastic. I don’t know what’s playing but I like it.

Above - Cut the vorspiel, I’m ready for the main event. Also, if you look closely you can see the TV I’m thinking of buying. 

5.       Oper: introduction. Ok so we’re into the actual opera now. Well, nearly, we’ve finished foreplay anyway. Nice controlled accelerando, and the clarinet part’s pretty cool, before we’re back to the first section. I like this so far. A great introduction to the meat of the work.

6.       Oper: Wollt ihr Ruhe halten. Or as my other half often says to me when they’ve run out of my favourite dim sum at Ping Pong: ‘Do you want to keep calm?’. Solo violin pretending to be a butterfly (Schmetterling) isn’t very nice. I’ve never heard a butterfly sound like that. The duet from 1:15 is lovely, however brief.

7.       Oper: Sakura! Sakura! I’m hoping this is how star of Rupaul’s Drag Race Season 12; Rock M Sakura got her name, but I feel like the reference may be a little niche. Starts off with the waily woman from the last movement. Now she’s wailing ‘Sakura’ though. Who is Sakura? I feel like actually this could do with a little more accompaniment than just harp. The singer is a little overpowering at times, although her pianos are really soft and well done.

Above - life imitating art.

8.       Oper: Ist’s erlaubt? It’s allowed. What’s allowed? A synopsis would really ameliorate my listening experience I’m sure, but that’s effort, and I can’t read, type, and listen at the same time. Another excellent tuba demonstration at 0:25. There’s a nice cough at 0:59. Is this a live recording? Maybe this is the only time it’s ever been performed. Are trombone chords every in tune? Not according to 1:53 of this. 2:33 all gets a bit exciting briefly. The string entry at 3:15 is very inaccurate. That must be the violas. More out of tune trombone at 4:03. I feel like the orchestra are maybe sight-reading because they know this isn’t going to be a roaring success…Again 5:00 onwards is very directionless. All jokes aside, the tamtam playing is great, and the sound is dampened at exactly the right time. It’s really effective. At 6:02 what is happening? Is that two tubas? Or a tuba and something else being badly played, out of tune on top. I can’t tell, but it’s bad. HA that dramatic ending is then followed by one solitary note on the tamtam which sounds very much like an accident.

9.       Oper: Sei nicht mehr Traurig. Don’t be sad any more. Or, what Alex says to me 2 weeks after we went out for that dim sum-less meal. Interesting harmony. Quite waily again though.

10.       Oper: Oh! Bauerngeischter. Oh! Peasant hunt!!! That is not what I was expecting. Oh wait, it’s actually Bauerngesichter – peasant faces, much better. Fanfare central. Maybe it is a peasant hunt too? Bassoon trills are fun. I have absolutely no clue what that is 0:38. If anyone could enlighten me, I would be very grateful. Is it a contrabassoon played high? I honestly have no clue; it could even be stringed at a push. Beefy last note though. I mostly spend the rest of this movement wondering what that instrument was. I can’t find the bloody instrumentation anywhere. Snapped out of my stupor by laughing at the random extra tuba note at 3:11. HERE IT IS AGAIN at 3:46. So weird, so out of tune in the higher portions. That’s why it’s on its own I think.

Above - Orf; why you should wash your hands at the petting zoo!!

11.       Oper: Hinter uns lag die Stadt. The city was behind us. If you listen carefully at 0:02 you can hear the tuba player stick his hand in a crisp packet. Nice combination of the bass, and high register of the harp, I like that quite a lot. It’s more interesting than the bass and tuba duet afterwards. 2:00 is straight out of Daphnis again for 2 seconds. The trombone chord at 3:22 is eventually in tune, but it doesn’t start that way.

12.       Oper: Ihr wart doch heut’ beim Mahl des Bonzen? If you had given me 1,000 goes at guessing this translation, I would never have come out with the correct answer: You were eating the fat cat today? This seems to be a rather rude question judging by the bloke’s reaction. This baritone bit is quite recitative-y, I just wish I could understand what they were saying. From 2:00, the orchestral parts are exciting, if a little forced. 2:50, we see this weird tuba vibe again. And the chord at 3:06 is actually really nice, as Roxxxy Andrews would say: thick and juicy. String entry at 3:30 is very messy again. Another heart attack at 4:48. So screechy. More of the same until the end.

13.       Oper: Entlasst nun eure Schuler, Genzo. Now release your students Genzo. Heard across the country in March, when money-grabbing boarding schools tried to keep their students during the pandemic for ‘safety’ reasons. More tuba. 0:14 – what is this person playing at. The entry of this mysterious companion of the half decent tuba sounds like they flutter-tongue that entry. I often joke “Oh I could do a better job” but in this case, I think I actually could. IS it just a low horn? I can’t tell. Lots of to-and-fro between a couple of the men now, but I don’t know what about. One sounds much angrier than the other. I assume the calligrapher is the friendly sounding one, but that’s a very stereotypical assumption.

14.       Oper: Hm! Seltsam! Hm! Strange! You’re telling me. Nice little bit of spoken word. It’s actually nicer than hearing them belting all the time. There’s a glass harmonium or some glasses being played at 0:50, sounds quite cool. Probably not worth the expense of renting one. Christ, calm down at 1:08. They briefly switch to English at 1:53, but ‘can shoe size’ doesn’t make much sense, or is at least very cryptic. Someone undoes their Velcro shoe at 3:09, maybe that’s what it’s referring to. 3:34 is nice, and I get the Debussy vibes here. Again at 4:00.

15.       Oper: Macht auf! Macht auf! Open Up! X2. Orff does love whacking two very low instruments next to each other and just hoping they can play in tune. Spoiler alert, they can’t. I like the dramatic knocking on the door. Just sing, love, it’s louder. The lady sounds worried about something. If only I knew what. 2:09 is fun. The chord at 3:23 sounds exactly like what you would hear in a film set in Transylvania when the camera pans to Dracula’s house. More shit low playing at several more points in the next section. 4:50 to the end is great actually.

16.       Oper: Die Sonne sinkt! The sun is setting (I assume, I didn’t actually look that one up). The tuba and miscellaneous other instrument’s last hurrah before a random piano plays 3 chords, someone coughs and the strings forget to come in; all before 1:00. Why is there now a piano? Wouldn’t the harp have done the same job? The end is quite simple, but it sounds nice. Although the last chord is uncomfortable and sounds very unfinished. Deliberately I’m sure.

Overall – 6/10. Well that was a couple of hours of my life I will never get back. I’m perhaps being harsh because opera obviously isn’t meant to be just heard, and with the right staging, and acting and me being able to understand the plot, it might be a nice little work. A lot of the problems I have with this are actually with the playing rather than the writing, although many of the tuning issues may be attributable to weird instrumentation. Either way, it’s certainly got areas of interest, but there’s lots of weak parts too. It’s not going to be accompanying the talentless droves on the X-Factor any time soon, put it that way.

Below is what Orff intended for his music, in its purest form:

Final Fantasy 14’s Naoki Yoshida on the next generation and the challenges of future-proofing MMOs • Eurogamer.net

It’s been six years since the successful relaunch of Final Fantasy 14 and almost an entire generation of consoles has passed in that time. With over 16 Million players and its most recent expansion, Shadowbringers, being critically acclaimed the game has never been in better health, but with a new wave of tech on the horizon, how do aging MMOs stay relevant?

Director and producer Naoki Yoshida is no stranger to being able to turn things around having successfully destroyed the previous disastrous iteration of FF14 and completely remaking it. I was recently able to sit down and talk to him about what’s in store for the next generation, some secrets of development and what the future of MMOs might look like.

What are your plans for PS5 and the next Xbox?

Naoki Yoshida: So we’re not at a stage where we can make any official announcements. It’s too early to make that kind of announcement at this time. You can safely assume that we are taking it in a really positive way for the next generation.The biggest policy that we cannot give up on for FF14 is to make sure that cross platform play is available for any device possible. Having the discussion with Microsoft, of course we have different sets of policies and conditions on our end and their end as well. So there actually has been a lot of conflict but for the last one year, Mr Phil Spencer himself took a little bit of time to talk to any section team within Microsoft to remove all the roadblocks so now on Xbox, we feel that our path is clear. You can think positively.

FF14 has far more going for it in the cute creatures department than Moogles and Chocobos (but it has plenty of cute creatures too).

When you were making the jump from PS3 to PS4, what lessons did you learn that you’ll take with you for the next generation?

Naoki Yoshida: Talking about this particular aspect of hopping from the older console to the newer one, it’s been the case from PS3 to PS4 that upgrading the specs is easier for us to accommodate. What is difficult for us to do is making sure that the game works on the lower spec console. It’s also this natural thing that the specs evolve and become greater for the console to evolve. It’s easy for us to accommodate. When the new console is out it takes a lot of manpower to make ourselves ready and upgrade the graphics side of things. The reason is that the graphics engine pipeline is different so we need to upgrade our end as well. It was the case for the PS3 to PS4 upgrade so when PS5 is out we’ll update our game with major patch updates and then we’ll gradually release the function that is compatible for PS5. It may not be the case. It’s not as hard as people may expect.

In what ways does FF14 compensate for its tech aging over time?

Naoki Yoshida: So by hearing your question, probably our basic understanding is different. Your understanding is a different perspective to what we have. There’s a big difference. When we’re looking back about the time when PS2 was out and PS3 was out in the market, they have specific unique characteristics to those consoles back then. But after any console released after Xbox 360 – so Xbox One, PS4, PS5 and Scarlett in the future – you can see them more as a PC. There might be a difference in memory size or GPU or CPU but we can safely assume that they are kind of PC. We are working on the PC version of Final Fantasy 14 as well. They have different names of course – some say Xbox One, PS4, PS5 – but they are all the same with different names. It’s more like a reiterating thing. But also we have to make sure there’s a minimum requirement for FF14 for the game to run on console or any machine. As long as we can keep that threshold, it’s easy to scale up and down within that limit. It’s easy to make it dynamic in an upgrade.

FF14 has changed a lot over the last three expansions to the point where it’s starting section (A Realm Reborn) feels old and misrepresentative to new players. What kind of revisions can we expect to keep new players interested?

Naoki Yoshida: Speaking about the development of A Realm Reborn, normally when you create an MMORPG title you would need to spend four to five years but our development team crammed and did that work within two-and-a-half years. The dev team is fully aware that there would be some functions that were missing or that the storyline was forced to look like a sequence from the 1.0 ,so there was a glitch here and there as well. That’s how it was created. Because we know it might not be in perfect shape, we’re really torn. Even the battle content team wishes they could recreate all the dungeons that were there it came out because they are not 100 per cent happy with how the current situation is.

The latest expansion, Shadowbringers, launched earlier this year

Just looking back at the development timeframe, the original objective was to start with one city state but because there’s this link from the original FF14, we needed to use the resources from that older version. The starting city needed to be three city states in order to recreate that and to rework that we would need to use another meteor and hit the world to break everything. We don’t want to do that again! What we can do is change it gradually. It might not be drastic changes, though. That’s why we are aiming for the changes happening from 5.3 onwards to improve player experience, especially for new players.

How much work is involved in adding jobs and upgrading classes with every expansion, and do you think you’ll be able to keep adding two jobs each time?

Naoki Yoshida: The current jobs class available for FF14 is a lot compared to other MMOs out there in the market. As you said, there’s a lot of work involved. The work the team is putting in to adjusting jobs is really mathematical – handling 0.1 per cent, 0.5 per cent… it’s a mark of detail to make sure that the balance is there. To tell you the truth, frankly speaking, the dev team doesn’t want to add any new jobs because it’s so hard! But because players and the community and everyone is expecting new jobs, that keeps them going forward. You can safely assume and expect new jobs in the future for a while.

You make a lot of quality of life changes with each patch but I don’t think players understand what’s involved and what a big project that is. Can you talk us through what’s involved on your side of things?

Naoki Yoshida: From a player or community perspective, just increasing the inventory space might sound like a simple thing but from the technical side of things, it’s quite complicated. What is happening in the backend is because we cannot lose any items or anything that the player owns, we’re continuously monitoring what they have and if necessary they move those items from one place to another depending on the contents and where the character is. That’s what’s happening on the backend. Just looking at one character and what they have, you might think that the data is light but it’s not as there are hundreds of thousands of characters. And also the game is live 24/7, 365 days a year, so the server needs to watch and monitor their movement and data. That means that consistently there is a communication data transmission back and forth there. Even if we increase the communication, it could be dangerous. This could lead to causing lag or higher ping. We need to closely monitor that.

We can’t do any tests while players are in the world, so what we do is have another world set up as a test server and we do this load test for a month. We also use bots to create the peak timing when a character all of a sudden, a connection can be this amount of characters in-game and there you can move about changing fields and zones. We keep doing the test for almost a few months and make sure there’s no lag or issues. We really seriously care about that. This requires a massive amount of time and resources. When we can finally warrant that it will be safe then we can finally move it onto live servers. We actually take a lot of time to make sure there’s no issues.

The sheer amount of work is a complicated process for us. Players may feel that increasing the inventory size is an easy thing to do but it’s actually not. You may feel that the inventory doesn’t increase because Square Enix wants to make money from extra storage but that is not the case. Even though it may look easy, we need to tread very, very carefully, especially for quality of life improvements of any functions that require such serious care. Each expansion seems to be the only time when we can actually improve the quality of life. But as I said, we are totally aware that probably the weapons space and the rings space in the armoured chest is also hitting the limit. I feel we need to do something about it.

Games like Fortnite and Overwatch are vying for dedicated, online audiences like MMOs do – as a traditional MMO creator how does that make you feel?

Naoki Yoshida: This is happening because the video game industry continuously evolves. Just taking this example, traditional JRPGs are based on turn-based games. and especially for the youth, they feel that it’s quite outdated, they don’t really understand.. Talking about the younger generation, someone up to the age of 25, because prior to the time they were born, there was relatively high-spec hardware for their gaming experiences – their character is rendered very realistically and they can actually control the characters directly – by pressing one button, the character will punch the enemies or fire the gun…

That’s why we don’t feel those types of games are a threat because the basic game is designed completely differently. Because the audience that’s playing Overwatch and Fortnite are probably in their 20s, they’re a younger audience. If that younger audience becomes our main audience for FF14 or our current MMORPG, then we may need to cater to that new audience and create the excitement that they want from a game. We feel that FF14 doesn’t really need to play that role. It should be the next generation of MMOs. But if we want to make an MMO which doesn’t require targeting, that would be really difficult. We’d probably need to make some drastic changes to the game where there are text chats, but people are using voice chat and you can choose your play style, you can quit anything, you can come back any time… That kind of generation and time will definitely come, but personally speaking it looks very difficult so I don’t want to do it!

from EnterGamingXP https://entergamingxp.com/2019/12/final-fantasy-14s-naoki-yoshida-on-the-next-generation-and-the-challenges-of-future-proofing-mmos-%e2%80%a2-eurogamer-net/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=final-fantasy-14s-naoki-yoshida-on-the-next-generation-and-the-challenges-of-future-proofing-mmos-%25e2%2580%25a2-eurogamer-net