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drivingsideways · 3 years

Note

For the ship and one word thingy, of you're still doing it(and thank you!) . Seunghyo and Seunwoo, exhaustion.

Hi anon! Sorry this is a bit late, and I'm not sure this will quite be what you were looking for, but I hope you'll enjoy the snippet. Once again, I'm setting this in my "Where Your Treasure Is" 'verse, but this works as a prequel to the first part of that series and is gen or pre-slash if you squint (or have read the rest of the 'verse!)

This is set post-canon, premising that Seon-woo gets a life-saving surgery, and Gu Seung-hyo is still with Hwajeong group but in an overseas posting. He's also dating Lee No-eul.

cw: mentions of physical disability, depression

The nurse is carefully unstrapping the prosthetics when there's a knock on the door, and a quiet voice says, "May I come in?"

Seon-woo looks up, startled. In the doorway is the last person he'd expected to see this morning, or indeed, for a long while.

"Gu sajang," he says, surprised. "Good morning," he adds, belatedly remembering his manners.

"Good morning, Ye Seon-woo-ssi. Is this a bad time?" Gu Seung-hyo asks, "I can come by later."

"Almost done," Seon-woo says, gesturing for him to enter. "I've just finished my exercise round for the morning."

The second leg is off now, and the immediate lessening of the weight makes him sigh unconsciously in relief, as he leans back into the pillows. It's been a month into the physiotherapy with the prosthetics, but he's still not used to it- neither to seeing the world from a different height, nor the strain on his back. He much preferred the chair still.

"I'll see you at 4," says Nurse Jang, with a smile, and he dredges up one for her. She's his favourite: a real sweetheart, with deft hands and a wicked sense of humour. She bows politely to Gu Seung-hyo, who bows back, before he takes the chair by the bed.

"I didn't know you were in town," Seon-woo says, "I thought No-eul-ssi mentioned you were in Indonesia."

"I have some meetings here this week," Gu Seung-hyo says, "And some free time. I hope this isn't an imposition on yours."

"My time has less value than yours, Gu sajang," he finds himself saying, "It's very kind of you to come by."

He curses himself inwardly the moment the words are out of his mouth. That had been well short of the inane courtesy that he should have responded with; that kind of self-deprecation wasn't as harmless with Gu Seung-hyo, as it might have been with another, less perspicacious man.

"Kindness has little to do with it, I'm afraid. I've been given a task," Gu Seung-hyo says smoothly, "I'm merely an errand boy."

He rises, holding out a brown paper that Seon-woo hadn't noticed before, toward him.

"From No-eul-ssi," he says, "Since she's unable to visit this week."

It's cherry tomatoes, which he knows come fresh from the little vegetable garden that No-eul's got going in her backyard in Gangneung.

Seon-woo smiles.

"Please help yourself," he says, holding out the bag to Seung-hyo, who looks hesitant but then picks one out, gingerly, as he seats himself again.

"You don't like them?" Seon-woo asks, as he roots in the bag, looking for the ripest one.

"I'm don’t usually snack in between meals," says Gu Seung-hyo.

Seon-woo nods; somehow that seems entirely in character. "It's nice though," he says, "To break the rule once in a while."

"Yes," Gu Seung-hyo says, and the corners of his eyes crinkle a little as he continues, "Though, as you know I'm rather fond of keeping them."

Seon-woo can't help chuckling at that, and the crinkles get more pronounced.

Silence reigns for a few minutes as they munch on the tomatoes; sweet with just a hint of tartness beneath. Gu Seung-hyo studies the room as he takes a second tomato, when the bag is proffered. It's not very large, but there's a long window which overlooks the garden of the rehab facility, and lets in the warm sun in the afternoons. The window sill and the small desk is covered in the detritus of Seon-woo's stay: books (from Choi Seo-hyun, mostly), a stuffed toy (No-eul), board games (which he plays with Jin-woo during his daily visits, flowers and snacks (eomma), a picture of the three of them taken at a cousin's wedding three years ago.

"This is a nice place," Gu Seung-hyo says, thoughtfully. "A good location, and they have good staff and equipment, it seems."

"Yes," Seon-woo agrees, wondering if Gu Seung-hyo's ever-ticking brain was thinking of a business opportunity. "I was lucky to get a place here after the surgery, it's always full, because they're competent but not very expensive. I have Chief Joo to thank for it, he pulled strings on my behalf."

"Did he?" Seung-hyo says, neutrally. "I'm glad it worked out."

Seon-woo nods, and attempts to concentrate on the sweetness of the tomato, and not the bitter aftertaste of pity.

It's hard though, getting harder every day, to not—

Gu Seung-hyo's studying the view from the window now, peering through the glass, hands shoved in his trouser-pockets. He's dressed in his customary three-piece suit, this time a light grey with a fine pattern, over a crisp white shirt and a navy tie. Conservative, reliable. Seon-woo wonders whom he was meeting today- some oldish government type, he assumes.

"Are you in a lot of pain?" Gu Seung-hyo asks, suddenly, turning back to Seon-woo, startling him out of his thoughts. "Sorry, " he adds, taking in Seon-woo's surprised expression. "But I thought it was better to ask it straight, than attempt to infer."

"It gets better or worse," Seon-woo says, "but there's always some. It's—" he shrugs. "I'm doing as well as could be hoped, at this point."

"The prosthetics—"

Seon-woo shrugs. "They'll take time to get used to," he says, "It still feels strange. The ones I'm trying out are among the best on offer, but the cutting-edge stuff is only available if you're in some clinical trial."

"Who's doing that here, in Korea?"

"SNU, for one," Seon-woo says, "They're really out there in terms of their ongoing projects. But it's hard to say when one of those will become commercially viable."

Seung-hyo nods, thoughtfully.

He smiles at Gu Seung-hyo. "But it's boring to talk about me, you should tell me the news of the wide world."

Gu Seung-hyo's sudden smile reminds Seon-woo that he's a handsome man.

"Do I need to? Isn't that what the internet and that tablet by your bed is for?"

Seon-woo acknowledges it with a half-smile. "Then tell me stories," he says, surprising himself, "Of your adventures in the wild jungle of corporate life. I suppose the new assignment must be a relief after the drama at Sungkook."

"It's more what I'm used to," Seung-hyo acknowledges, and then easily, as if they were friends, "but I admit I miss the challenge of dealing with the eccentricities of top-notch medicos."

The crinkly-eyed expression makes a reappearance. The man was quite unfairly charming when he chose to be, Seon-woo notes; he'd forgotten that, somehow, in the year since he'd last met Gu sajang.

"Your successor isn't faring much better, I think, the last I heard."

"No doubt your brother has nothing to do with that situation," Seung-hyo says, gravely.

Seon-woo laughs, "Nothing at all."

Talk drifts from Sungkook, to other things- Seung-hyo's new role, Korean chaebols, the economy, the Blue House's current occupant and the prospects for the next elections which are less than a year away, books that they discover they're both fond of, and music, and somehow, before Seon-woo realizes it, it's lunch time. There's a knock on the door- it's the kitchen staff with a tray of food. The young woman pauses when she sees Seung-hyo and asks if they'd like another tray.

Seon-woo, mortified by the realization that he's probably upset Gu sajang's schedule irrevocably, is just going to decline, when Seung-hyo says, "It looks delicious, I think I'll have some, if that's not a bother."

"No problem at all," says Min-joo-ssi, with a pleased smile, "We have extra trays."

After she leaves, Seung-hyo says, "Do you feel like having lunch outside in the garden? It's a fine day. I noticed there are some tables set out."

"Uh," says Seon-woo, "I've already made you late."

"Not at all," says Gu Seung-hyo, blatantly lying without missing a beat- another talent that Seon-woo had forgotten he had- "I'll call someone to get a chair."

He's already at the desk phone, quickly dialing the extension after a quick check of the list tacked on the wall, and somehow, before Seon-woo can quite process it, they're outside, under the shade of a garden umbrella, watching butterflies flit, and the bees stagger, punch-drunk, among the roses that are in outrageous bloom.

Seung-hyo eats heartily, Seon-woo notices, without affectation.

He looks up at that moment, to meet Seon-woo's eyes. "You must be bored of the food here," he says, looking a bit rueful.

"They try their best to vary it," Seon-woo says, "and eomma always sends dinner or breakfast with hyung, so I don't have too much to complain about."

Seung-hyo nods, though something flashes in his eyes, that Seon-woo has no way to parse.

A silence falls between them, as they finish the meal. It's not an entirely comfortable one—and Seon-woo feels compelled to occasionally make a remark of some kind to break it, as he becomes more and more conscious of the passage of time. Gu Seung-hyo doesn't look at his watch or mobile even once.

"Do you mind showing me around the grounds?" Seung-hyo asks, after they are done.

Seon-woo looks at him in surprise. "There's not much to see," he says.

"A walk might do me some good," Seung-hyo says, "I'm afraid I might have overdone on the meal."

"You should snack more often," Seon-woo says, smiling at him, "That might prevent these situations from arising."

"Shall we?" Seung-hyo asks, rising from the chair. "Where do I put away the trays?"

So they make their way toward the rear entrance of the kitchen to hand over their trays, Seon-woo wheeling his own chair, and Seung-hyo keeping pace with him. After, Seon-woo directs him toward the southern end of the property, toward the area where there are some tennis courts and even a basketball court set up for the residents who might be able to play.

It's just after lunch, so the courts are empty.

"You used to play," Seung-hyo says.

"Yes," he says, surprised.

"No-eul-ssi mentioned it," Seung-hyo says, "She said that your brother and you made a formidable duo on court."

"Is that so?"

Seung-hyo slants a smile in his direction, "Well, her exact words may have been that you were both bastard cheaters."

"Sore loser," Seon-woo says immediately, "She hated it when she lost."

"She's surprisingly competitive about some things," Seung-hyo agrees, and the accompanying smile is a revelation, starting up an ache beneath Seon-woo's ribs.

"I hope you'll be able to play again soon," Seung-hyo says, "The next time I come by, we should have a game."

"Sure," Seon-woo says, "Next time."

"Seon-woo-ssi," says Gu Seung-hyo, "You can say no, if you don't want to."

Seon-woo looks up, startled.

Seung-hyo is smiling wryly. "I'm quite good at it, so I should warn you it won't be an easy game. You should consider it carefully."

"Is there anything you aren't good at?" Seon-woo says, a trifle acerbic.

"Cooking," Seung-hyo says, immediately, and then adds, reflectively, "And the care of tiny creatures."

"What happened to the dog?" Seon-woo asks, immediately concerned. He's seen enough photos of the creature thanks to No-eul to justify the feeling.

"Oh nothing, Nighty is, as the kids say these days, living his best life. He's eomma's dog now, barely acknowledges me."

Was that a hint of petulance? That was unexpectedly amusing. But there was something a little wistful in it, as well.

"You aren't home," Seon-woo finds himself- consoling- the man. "It's quite natural."

"I'm aware," Seung-hyo says, "And it's fine. It's good, actually. Like I said, caretaking isn't one of my talents."

Unlike compartmentalization, Seon-woo thinks. I wish I had that.

"Shall we head back?" Seung-hyo's voice breaks in. He hadn't realized that they'd been standing there in silence for a while. "You seem tired."

There's something oddly gentle about the way he says it, something that makes Seon-woo both want to punch a wall, and break down crying.

It takes him a minute to gather himself, before he nods.

"Seon-woo-ssi," says Gu Seung-hyo, "Is there something you want to say?"

Seon-woo looks up at him.

Gu Seung-hyo's face is watchful, cautious, but not closed off.

Seon-woo looks away, across the empty basketball court.

"I regret the surgery," Seon-woo says, aloud, for the first time. "I wish I had never let myself be talked into it. I should have had the courage to—let go."

Seung-hyo doesn't respond for a long minute. Then, with a sigh, he says, "But there's so much to let go of. And why should you?"

Seon-woo turns to him, but Seung-hyo isn't looking at him either. Instead, he squats, running his hands over the rough grass at the sidelines.

"I don't suppose you could understand," Seon-woo says, softly.

"No," says Seung-hyo, "You're right, I don't. But it's not your disability or its consequences that I don't understand. It's that I've always wanted everything that this world could offer, and I'm determined to have it. Whatever it takes. I don't accept any other possibility."

He turns to Seon-woo after a minute of silence.

"An uncle of mine once told me that it was better to be alive than dead, and to be born than not at all," he offers.

"Was your uncle a priest?"

"A foreman in a factory that made precision tools. He worked forty years there for the same company, before he retired to a fishing village."

"Close," notes Seon-woo, and Gu Seung-hyo gives him one of his genuinely warm smiles, that he's only seen in photographs No-eul had sometimes shared.

"I'm selfish," he says, "about the world, and my place in it. I have an outsized ego, perhaps, to insist on my significance in the face of the vast unknown. But I am convinced that there's one thing only I can do, and that is to live my life to the fullest."

"The universe has been benevolent to you," Seon-woo says, "You're her favourite. You know, as a pep talk this is remarkably bad."

Seung-hyo smiles, a quicksilver flash of amusement.

"If you wanted a pep talk, you'd talk to your psych," he observes. "Or someone who's invested in keeping you alive, for one reason or the other."

"I'm exhausted by people trying to fix me," Seon-woo admits. "You're a nice change."

"I don't think you need fixing," says Gu Seung-hyo, "I suspect you have problems that need to be fixed. Like the rest of us."

"Is that how you see yourself?" Seon-woo asks, diverted. "As a problem solver?"

Seung-hyo shrugs. "It helps me to think of the world that way," he admits. "A series of problems that I can apply my mind to."

"Sounds exhausting," Seon-woo says, not quite kindly.

Gu sajang seems unperturbed. He shrugs out of his jacket and spreads it on the grass, before sitting down on it.

"It is, sometimes," he responds. "But there's that ineffable component called luck," he adds, "Sometimes the problems sort themselves out."

"Hashtag blessed," says Seon-woo, "Do you have a social media account?"

"I've hired a very competent firm to run my PR," Seung-hyo says, "Though they insist that I post at least one cute picture of my dog or my mother every day. I believe I have a respectable number of followers."

Seon-woo laughs.

Seung-hyo looks up at him, with a raised eyebrow.

"Likeability is a problem that's not too difficult to solve these days," he remarks.

"Another win for the universe's favourite," Seon-woo murmurs, "Hurrah."

The silence that follows lasts a while, but oddly enough, doesn't feel awkward.

"Thank you," Seon-woo says, finally. "For your time today. I'm afraid I've messed up your schedule."

"You were the only meeting on my list."

"You're dressed to meet a government bureaucrat type—" Seon-woo starts, incredulously- and then stops, outraged.

And this smile- pure mischief, that makes him look ten years younger- is something he didn't even know Gu Seung-hyo was capable of, he thinks, and close on the heel of that, he looks like someone I could be friends with.

"You didn't mess up my schedule," Gu Seung-hyo says again, "I don't have those kinds of luxuries in my life."

Seon-woo huffs, looking away. He feels hot under his collar, and it has nothing to do with the afternoon heat. He wishes he had more experience in dealing with this kind of thing- the kindness of strangers was one thing, but Gu Seung-hyo's place in his life was ill-defined.

What rot, says a voice in his head, he's the enemy.

It sounds suspiciously like Jin-woo hyung.

But Seon-woo doesn't have that kind of luxury in his life, either, or the inclination for it. Whatever lay between them- Gu Seung-hyo's time at Sungkook, his ongoing relationship with the love of Seon-woo's life- that was a past perhaps best laid to rest. Life was constant turmoil, and to fight against the current of it in this matter seemed a pointless waste of energy he didn't have.

"Tell me more about this research they're doing at SNU," Seung-hyo says after a minute, and Seon-woo takes the out offered. Sooner than Seon-woo had thought, it's almost time for his second round of physiotherapy.

"I have to get back," he says, "I don't want to make Nurse Jang wait."

"Of course not," says Seung-hyo, as he rises, folding his jacket neatly over his arm. "Shall we?"

They head back, slower than strictly warranted, as the conversation continues.

Nurse Jang is waiting for them at the door.

"Ah, Ye Seon-woo-ssi, I hope you had a good day today," she says, "with your friend."

It seems pointlessly rude to correct her; what was he going to say anyway—

"Yes," he says, not looking at Seung-hyo, "I did."

But he can't resist a glance, and catches quietly pleased look on his face, though, perhaps, to a stranger, it wouldn't look any different than his normal expression.

Somewhere between strangers and friends, he thinks, that's where they were.

As Seung-hyo makes his farewell, Seon-woo says, impulsively, "Next time, we'll play a game."

"Sure," says Seung-hyo easily, "Basketball?"

"Hmm, I prefer strategy games."

There's a glint in Gu Seung-hyo's eyes that Seon-woo finds highly entertaining.

"Loser pays for a meal," he says, recklessly.

But there was something, Seon-woo thinks, to be said for making plans for an unknown tomorrow.

'Deal," says Gu Seung-hyo, holding out his hand, " I'll be seeing you then, Seon-woo-ssi."

"Yes," says Seon-woo, as he shakes the proffered hand, "See you soon."

#jtbc life #writing things

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thelocalmuffin · 3 years

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Hey everyone, as you know, I have Gnosia brainrot, so if you aren't really interested in hearing my thoughts on it, I put a readmore on this post. This is not spoiler free, unfortunately, but I will try to avoid as much as I can but I do recommend giving it a chance. It's twenty five dollars and has an extremely high replay value.

Overall thoughts:

Gnosia is a visual novel/strategy game that relies on tact, deduction skills, and stealth. It tells the engaging story of a crew being infected with Gnosia after a mission goes horribly wrong. Gnosia is a parasite that wants to destroy the crew. You are one of these crew members, trying to help your comrade, Setsu as you end up solving the mysteries of the Gnosia together. To do that, you must become close with the crew, but at the same time, be wary. They may be your enemy.

This is honestly one of the best games I've ever played. It's all I ever wanted in a game and that's not even an exaggeration. There is a lot of heart and love for each element of the game, and it shows. This isn't just some triple A title, but a rare treat that many will enjoy, if given the chance. Fans of visual novels will like the story and art, people who like strategy games will like the deductive skills they need to use since this game will not hold your hand.

Gameplay

Excellent, engaging gameplay that keeps you on your toes, regardless its repetitive ways.

There's a leveling up system to help with your skills and though the game is trickier at first, as most games are, you will soon find out when your crewmates are acting far too out of character, you can start catching lies, and point out contradictions. Though, to my personal delight, unlike most visual novels, that's not enough. You need to build up your charisma and pair up with the right people to win, regardless of which side you've been assigned. As I mentioned, this game will not hold your hand. It does not question your intelligence, though, and you will feel satisfied when your crewmates actually start to take your side.

Unfortunately, if you do struggle with repetition, I do suggest to take the game slow so you don't get burn out. There are loops that will sometimes take forever for a story plot to be addressed, but if you talk to others, you will learn little tidbits about them and there are some loops that are just a regular game without any new information. Don't get too discouraged, it will pick up its pace if you give it a bit of time.

Writing

This is what I'm going to gush most about. Writing is sturdy and fulfilling. and I honestly recommend anyone writing a timeloop/paradox story to take some notes from this story because it does it correctly.

You will not feel unsatisfied when you finish the game. Every question is answered and there is next to no contradictions in the plot, which is almost unheard in this genre. You get the answers you seek, but enough to make you have questions that aren't necessary to have answered, but would like just a morsel more of details on. I only played once before making this review, so there's a possibility that these small details are addressed.

For those who like darker visual novels, you will enjoy the plots they explore but not feel like they push the limits just to see what they can get away with, like Danganrompa is so guilty of. Murder, backstabbing, and little girls being creepy is all part of the package, but it doesn't feel like it's out of place.

Though, there was something that really surprised me they explored, especially with the game's official T rating. They do explore sexual assault/sexual themes. I know the rating says suggestive themes, but honestly, I think they should have gone with a sexual themes warning instead and slapped an M rating. I'm trying to not get into too many spoilers in this, but let's just say some characters are motivated by sex and lust. Hell, I'd argue it's an important plot point that isn't unwelcomed. I just think an accurate ESRB rating would have been appreciated especially to those trigged by that content.

I do love the writing, but I do need to bring up a glaring flaw. Some of the characters do fall flat. I really felt like a few characters were barely explored, like Gina and Chipie, and honestly, it's a shame. There was something there, I could tell, but they just didn't add enough with them. For as long as the game is, they really could have fleshed out all of fifteen characters equally. Keep in mind I have only played one run, so perhaps I haven't spent enough time with them, but I did beat the game, so I was expecting a bit more.

I do wish they explored the characters a bit more and added a few more things to learn about these characters. Yes, I know this would have made the game longer than it already is, but it would have helped with some of the repetition issues and made them more whole.

About the romance scenes I keep seeing critique on: the only canon option is Setsu that's confirmed and honestly...it's a bit of a shame. I do like Setsu a lot and ended up accepting their confession, but I wonder what would have happened if they allowed other romanceable options?

With that being said...I think they did most of it correctly by not adding in love interests. It would have detracted from the suspense of Gnosia, and I'm not going to lie...Remnan got me a few times when he was Gnosia because I did think there was a possibility of a romance. (Yes, you are allowed to call me out on that.)

I'm going to go off on my favorite part of the game's writing: there is no worship the protagonist trope. You know how delightful that is in a world where other games have characters exist to pander to the protagonist and the player's very existence? No? Well, I’m going to tell you why.

Characters react to you as one of their own: not a sore thumb that needs to be worshipped (i.e like Fire Emblem does), but rather, you are one of them and you are as suspicious as anyone else on board. Sure, characters like Setsu will give you natural praise, but that's because you are their friend and that is what close friends do.

With that being said, there's great representation with Raqio and Setsu, and they/them pronouns are used accurately and not in a demeaning way. With that...they do screw up a bit with Raqio. It's not perfect, and it's a bit of a shame, because they were so close to getting that down. With that being said, it's the best I've seen in media in a really long time.

Soundtrack

I will admit that the soundtrack was the weakest part of the game to me. It's not bad by any stretch of the means, but I think a few more songs would have really helped bring more mood into it and help the repetition issues. It does feel a bit out of place, and honestly, part of me wonders if that was the point? I am a huge fan of video game soundtracks, so I will admit, I was a bit bummed, though it's not bad enough to where it's a deal breaker. I think some will enjoy it, but I did start playing with the volume down about half way through.

Style

I have to talk about this since it does apply to the writing. I have one word to describe the artwork. Breathtaking. It looks so perfect for the setting. It's a bit surreal, but it's perfect for the story it is trying to tell. It's got gorgeous backgrounds. Not to mention the designs for each character. The designs for each character have sci-fi tropes that many will love but with enough uniqueness to stand out. Style and substance work hand in hand in this game and that is a rarity for me.

Overall thoughts

Overall rating 9.8/10, mainly because the soundtrack does take away from the scene for a bit. Variety in music would have really helped it be that much more engrossing. This is what visual novels should be, and honestly, sci-fi writers should take some notes, too. It's a timeless game that has immersive gameplay, a legendary story that doesn't hold back, and for a game about paradoxes and timeloops, it feels complete. With the very small flaws it has that I pointed out, I think it will appeal to the right audience and I encourage everyone to play it. It's twenty five dollars on the switch, and I hope it it gets a PC release because it would do really well on there.

Any thoughts of your own I didn't mention? Just want to go off on the game with me? Let's talk! Thanks for reading, much love, and see you all soon.

#gnosia #gnosia review #muffin reviews #muffin writes

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adhoption · 3 years

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Game Theory

Being the kind of relaxed, easy-going guy I am, over the years of playing them I have developed a few theories over what makes a board or card game fun (because everyone loved inviting Socrates to parties).

Ability and chance

The first point is that there needs to be a balance between skill and luck. If a game is all about ability, the person who is best at that game will win it every time, and it becomes no fun for the rest. These games are then only good for pure competition, for people who each think they are the best and want to arm-wrestle it out. But like an arm-wrestle, they don’t have much repeat value. If I meet you and we wrestle, one of us will win, and then that question is settled. There is no real excitement in a rematch.

Chess is an example of this sort of game. If I want to be the best at chess, I can put the effort into training my ability, just as I could hit the weights for my arms, and eventually I could become better than more people, but that’s not really a game for casuals to enjoy. It only really works where you are competitive and evenly matched, which isn’t usually the case for a group of friends looking to have fun (after the fun of the first time). Games which just test knowledge or speed or whatever are the same. They aren’t open to everyone. There are games we play where I know I will always win, and games where I know I will never win, and neither are particularly compelling.

But I also can’t stand the opposite, where luck plays too large a part. Then you might as well just roll dice and cheer whoever gets the highest number. Games like Uno fall too far over this line for me: there is little choice to be made, little strategy, and your part could easily be played by a flow chart. You’re not playing a game, you’re just a vehicle for the cards to flow through on their pre-ordained path. You may as well all sit back and just have a dice-rolling or card-circulating machine and no players and watch it whirring on, as there is no connection between you and the points which have been arbitrarily assigned to your name.

Remaining competitive

The game also needs to remain open. This is one of the main reasons that I think Monopoly is broken as a game, other than the fact that it runs far too long: after a couple goes around the board, it’s often clear who is set up to win and who is set up to lose, because all of the good assets are assigned and it’s just a painful wait for the capital-rich players to generate enough rent to crush the capital-poor players into bankruptcy.

If you miss out on the good properties, you already know that you can’t possibly win after a few rolls of the dice, but you have to keep playing for hours anyway, each turn going around the board of pain and giving away a little bit more of your money, then getting £200 back, then giving it away again, then getting another £200, and so on so you never quite go bankrupt and just limp out a pathetic existence just clinging on for survival turn after turn.

That’s not fun. But neither is when I’ve played and ended up scooping a good portfolio of properties from a lucky first few rolls, and knowing fairly early on that I’ve won the game, but need to go through the whole process of counting out my money as I wait hours for their spirits to break and agree to forfeit the same. It just does not work. It was literally designed as a model demonstrate the despair of capitalism in that way, that those dealt a poor hand can never win, but it became marketed as a fun game for some reason.

This is linked to the above, because luck has played too large a part in the distribution of resources, which shapes the whole rest of the game. But you can also have this problem at the other end of the scale: games with too much strategy and ability are inevitable from the start. So you need an element of randomness in there, chess-with-dice, to keep it open, and an element of skill (because Monopoly is largely just rolling the dice, and Uno is largely just dealing the cards) to keep it engaging.

But there is a difference between that openness (anyone can win!) from the start, and then keeping the game open throughout (it isn’t over until it’s over!), like the same principle over two different axes. You need mechanisms built into the game to keep things alive and scupper even the best strategies. Monopoly fails on both axes, whereas at least Uno can be a rollercoaster: you are stuck on a track you can’t change, but you can go down to one card early on but still lose, which keeps it at least interesting as an observer.

Free will

The weird thing about strategy is that it bothers me even if it is hypothetical. In chess, it feels like there is an objectively correct move to make, which weirdly then takes us to being stuck on the track, where you aren’t really required. To give another example, there is a game called Camel Up which is a world apart from chess, but shares the same problems. It’s a gambling game based on shifting probabilities, and there is therefore an objectively correct move to make each turn.

If you worked it out, it would be easy to ‘solve’ the game and almost always win. But that takes too long to be fun for the other people, who will always pressure you to make your move before you can do the maths, and rightly so. That means you’re either rushed into doing some you know in your gut is wrong, which is frustrating, or you take so long that it ceases to be fun and just becomes an exercise in arithmetic where you each make the logical move and luck decides who wins. But just having the possibility of that option takes the fun away for me, because I know there is an answer, just beyond my reach, but have to pretend that I don’t.

There is some overlap with the above, but this is an area where the pure-strategy games become as bad as the pure-luck games, because they become too computerised and a 'you may as well sit back and watch a machine process the turns’ situation again. You need to have some element of choice, where you don’t know what the right choice to make is, because you have options which affect the game and their success is dependent on random elements and other people’s choices down the line.

The Goldilocks zone

I think that games like Pictionary or Cluedo are good under these metrics because they strike the right balance. There is an element of ability, but also luck, so you can’t over-strategise and can just relax and have fun, but you are still rewarded for playing well, and the game is kept exciting by that randomness until the end, as anyone could still overtake you even if you take the lead, even if they are worse, because of that nicely measured dose of luck.

Chess has more ability than luck, so you can over-strategise and someone worse than you is unlikely to have a chance. Uno has more luck than ability, so you can’t really play well and there is no reward for your choices. Monopoly is the same, except with the added failure that you know whoever takes the lead is probably going to win, because there is a mechanism where success builds success (like exponential growth or compound interest) which doesn’t make for a good game. Good games are open to everyone, are open throughout, and actually need you to play them to earn the win (with a small helping of chance).

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ledenews · 4 years

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Sam Amico - Finally on Top, Writing What He Loves

Sam Amico is a self-professed basketball junkie whose lengthy career in sports journalism now finds the Akron, Ohio native covering the NBA for Sports Illustrated. Yes, that Sports Illustrated. The one most young men and woman growing up in the 1980s and 1990s waited patiently by the mailbox for, only to quickly tear threw the pages and digest the stories within. While magazines and subscriptions aren’t what they used to be, SI is still one of the biggest players in the sports media game, especially for those gifted with the ability to tell a tale via the written word and not relying solely on hot takes and video footage. It’s fitting, as Amico grew up near an NBA city during a time when the Showtime Lakers and the Boston Celtics dominated the scene. There was Larry and Magic, Kareem and Robert. The Bad Boys in Detroit came into their own and a man named Michael took the league, and the world, by storm. The young Amico didn’t have a chance.

Played the Game

He grew into a 5-foot-9 sweet-shooting guard at nearby Cuyahoga Valley Christian Academy in nearby Cuyahoga Falls. He parlayed that success into a two-year stint playing for Northeastern Christian Academy across the street from Villanova in Pennsylvania. While there, he set the school record for most 3-pointers in a game, a mark he’s quick to point out lasted all of there seasons. The school later combined with Ohio Valley College in Parkersburg, W.Va. to become Ohio Valley University. Amico’s old coach, Bill McGee, stayed on board to coach. Amico, meanwhile, turned his attention to his own career. Originally wanting to get into coaching, he quickly realized that he could utilize his best assets, a great sense of humor and even better gift of written gab and combine that with his love of basketball. He quickly said hello to the world of journalism which initially took him out west to Wyoming and a one-man show at a paper in Rawlins, Utah.

The Report

He still feels his proudest moment came two years later, when he wrote a 14-part series on the history of the Wyoming state basketball tournament while working at a paper in Casper. Additional stops including the Bluefield Daily Telegraph, Observer-Reporter in Washington, among others, eventually landed Amico at the Sports Editor at The Intelligencer in Wheeling. Amico experienced success with both the readers and staff. It’s here he began his well-circulated Amico Report, a free newsletter at the time dealing with all things NBA. It was that digital newsletter that eventually catapulted Amico to his current path. He's also a published author, with his first book, "A Basketball Summer" hitting the shelves in 2002, later followed by three more: "Dribbles of Champions," "The Ultimate Basketball Trivia Book," and 'Three-Ball: The History of Basketball's Three Point Shot." He later lost his job in Wheeling due to an incident he takes full responsibility for and worked his way back north to the Cleveland Area, eventually catching on with Fox Sports and Fox Sports Ohio. It was there Amico experienced a renewal not only in his professional life, but also his personal one. Lessons were learned, but Amico found happiness again with a second marriage, as and his new wife brought together their blended family and eventually added a third son to the mix soon after. The Amicos now live in Medina, Ohio. Naturally, basketball is still a big part of their lives.

What got you into sports journalism in the first place? You did seem to gravitate to basketball more so than other sports. Was that just an extension of your playing days and your love for basketball as a whole?

It was indeed my love of basketball that led to my career choice. I never set out to become a writer. At first, I wanted to be a coach. I envisioned myself coaching high school basketball while teaching health or typing or some other fairly mundane course. But I also loved to write. I did it in my free time, just as a hobby. My best friend is several years older and became a sports television anchor, and I'd sometimes tag along with him to work. I was fascinated that you could make a career out of this. I loved basketball and writing always came easiest for me in terms of schoolwork. My roommate in college would stay up all night sweating over his essay for English class and bring back a C-minus. I'd crank something out in an hour, maybe less, and always aced it. (As an aside, he got considerably better grades in every other subject.) So, about my junior year of college, it finally dawned on me—why not put together my passion for basketball with the one thing I seemed to do moderately well? When I figured it out, writing about basketball as a career became my mission.

A billboard advertising the Amico Report for Fox Sports, a report that started as a free newsletter Sam Amico sent out during his days at The Intelligencer in Wheeling.

You eventually became an editor at multiple places. But neither was in a basketball-heavy community in terms of the pro game. Did you have a sense deep down that you’d need to get closer to home, or to a major market, to get to where you wanted to be? Was leaving the Wheeling paper a blessing in disguise in that respect?

To be honest, when I took my first newspaper job in a tiny little Wyoming town, I had no clue what I was doing. I showed up for the first day of work and was immediately told to interview the high school swimming coach. I didn't know anything about swimming, had no idea what to ask. I could barely swim myself. That was the start of a long journey of covering things I had very little knowledge of. In Rawlins, I was a one-man staff. I shot my own photos, wrote 3-5 stories a day, designed my own pages, came up with all the headlines and at times, even helped deliver the paper. Little did I know, it would be great practice for running my own website close to 20 years later. But all the while, yes, I dreamed of getting to an NBA market to cover the NBA. I wasn't obsessed with it, but it was always in the back of my mind, pushing me to work harder and get better. I never had a sense that it would actually happen. My goal once I started writing a lot was to just to do the best job I could and let the chips fall where they may. Eventually, when I landed in Wheeling, I decided to start an NBA email newsletter as a hobby on the side. Writing an email cost nothing and receiving it cost nothing. So, I made nothing. But if I remember correctly, we eventually started running it in the sports section, too. That little newsletter is the very reason I am where I am today, in my 12th year covering the NBA on a full-time basis. I will always be grateful for my time in Wheeling and I look back fondly on it today. Ownership, management, the editors and my co-workers allowed me the freedom to write what I wanted and tackle some interesting topics. It was there that I developed a strong work ethic, and it is one I still try to carry into my assignments today. I learned in Wheeling that there was no place for excuses—just do the job. When I lost my job there, deservedly so, it reminded me about the value of integrity. It was an important reminder and lesson I have not forgotten.

You’d previously written “Basketball Summer” and also kept people up to date with League knowledge via the Amico Report. But once covering the NBA was your full-time job, what was it like being that involved, especially given the Cavaliers were your hometown team? As a journalist, you remain impartial, but growing up a fan, was it difficult to keep the two sides of you separate at first?

Actually, while I grew up outside of Akron, I liked the Cavaliers but never considered myself a huge fan by any stretch. Sadly, I lived and died with the Browns, a lost cause of a franchise that remains near and dear to my heart today. I just happened to like the NBA as a total product, growing up in what I still consider the golden era of Magic, Michael and Larry. By the time I finally became a full-time NBA writer covering my "hometown" team, I had learned how to be impartial. That's one of about 200 reasons why it was a good thing I didn't get the job straight out of college. I had so much to learn about journalism. I had to spend time in the minors before getting to the big leagues. But I also realize that I am sort of an extension of the fans. I didn't celebrate in print when the Cavs won the title in 2016, for instance, but I did write with more enthusiasm and the stories were just more positive by nature. It's always easier to write about a winner. Quite honestly, though, it makes no difference to me. I try to cover the Cavs and NBA with as much fairness and passion as I did when I first got the job. The success and failures of the local team honestly have no bearing on how I approach the job, or even my enjoyment of the job. Sometimes, it's even better when they're bad. When LeBron James is in town, so are about 100 other reporters. When he's not, I'm generally one of about five or six full-time people covering the team.

Sami Amico sits courtside in Cleveland, offering analysis during a Cavaliers game. While still doing some on-air work, his TV time has lessened some since makine the move from FSN to Sports Illustrated.

You wrote for both Fox Sports and Fox Sports Ohio, and on occasion got to do some on-air analysis and interviews. How did that differ from what you were used to and did your public profile blow up further from that? What was the experience like for your sons and wife to see dad on television, talking basketball? Could you foresee a career path that leads to commentary either courtside or in-studio on a full-time basis?

I've been doing television since 2010, less now than most years, but still some. It's quite a bit different because unlike writing, you don't have time to sit down and assemble a thought. The lights come on and you just ... GO. You also don't have a delete key, so whatever you say is out there for forever, especially now in the day of social media. The first time I did it, I was terrified. The second time, I was also terrified. The third time, I didn't even think about it. It just felt natural. My best buddy in TV gave me some good advice: "Look two places, either at the person you're talking to or at the camera. Sit up. Smile. And for the love of Pete, put your hands on the desk and not below it." That was a start. I have also done some stand-up reporting for TV, in which I look at nothing but the camera, hold the mic with one hand and still have no idea what to do with the other. As for my public profile, yes, it did go up a notch locally. The biggest differences I noticed were that total strangers occasionally began asking me for selfies at Cavs games (as opposed to just yelling that I'm a hack), and mostly, the players and coaches and front-office types began calling me by my first name before I had even introduced myself. Earned or not, there's a level respect that you're granted with simply being on TV. That said, it's always been my least favorite part of the job. You have to worry about your hair, about your tie, about how you dress and about not doing natural things like sneezing or yawning. But they ask me to do it and promise a check, so I shut up and make the best of it. It's never been what I set out to do, though. My family thought it was cool at first, but those days are long gone. Unless I take them to the studio, they don't watch. Sometimes even then I'll look over at them during a commercial break and they're staring at their phones. The good news is I have a toddler who is fairly animated when I come on the screen. I figure I have another three or four years before he too finds that part of my job to be old news.

The Amico family, prior to the birth of the third son, is an image of a blended family that can find success in coming together.

Finally, like most kids into sports, you probably grew up reading Sports Illustrated. It was the go-to for sports reporting and feature stories. Working for them now, does the image you might have had in your head match the reality and how has the Amico Report morphed into Amico News in terms of content and readership?

Well, let's put it this way -- when I call a potential source for a story and say I'm from Sports Illustrated, they almost always give me a lot of time, say more interesting things, and are overall just more polite. Between the time I worked for FOX and SI, I launched my own NBA website. Fortunately, my time at FOX provided an audience, and enough of those readers followed me to AmicoHoops to turn it into a full-time job. I actually started to earn more on the website than I did at FOX. Problem was, when you factor in TV work, I was putting in 12-14 hours a day on the website during the season, and that included weekends. It's always nice to run your own thing and be your own boss. I did it for four years with a surprising degree of success. But Sports Illustrated made the decision easy for me. They basically wanted me to move what I had been doing on my site and put their brand behind it. I can also say I have never had more readers. That's not because of anything I'm doing or because I've suddenly reinvented the wheel. It's because everyone knows the name "Sports Illustrated." Overall, I really like their modern direction. They have moved away from the longform pieces (though plenty still remain in the magazine), and have assigned or are in the process off assigning a writer to every team in the country -- NFL, NBA, MLB, the NCAA power conference programs, and even NHL I believe. Readership has increased significantly for SI across all platforms. Not long ago, I started to suspect the brand was dying, but it feels like it's become a player again. My role is actually to cover the entire NBA, while also focusing on the Cavs, much like I did for FOX before they pivoted to video-only in 2015. It's a great role and one I've been comfortable in for at least a decade now. Mostly, I feel very blessed to be where I am in my career and am extremely grateful for each step along the way -- from Wyoming to West Virginia to back where I grew up. Read the full article

#Basketball #NBA #SportsIllustrated #UpperOhioValley #wheeling

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jcherrybct · 4 years

Text

3/3/20

In the days since my last post, a few things have happened involving COMP570, CTEC501 & CTEC502!

I have been slowly working my way through the programming worksheet we were given in our last programming session, this has been very helpful in getting to grips with the fundamental knowledge. I do have to admit however there were a few times I felt like punching a hole in my computer screen, before realising the problem was with the person in the screens reflection. Not the screen itself. I am getting more used to minor things such as the dreaded semi colon; which has stopped processing from reading the code I have written, and am sure it will soon become second nature. However, there were other errors that took me far too long to realise, such as using a single quotation mark as opposed to speech marks, which led to processing to let me know repeatedly there was a, ‘badly formed character constant.’ I shouldn’t be making that mistake again in a while! I have also gone through a few, ‘Hello processing!’ lessons in an attempt to both reinforce what we have learnt and keep myself writing the correct code! I am currently really enjoying processing and am looking forward to my next lecture/lesson!

Zoog! - The ‘man’ on the screen followed your mouse around the box.

In regards to Studio, the team and I now believe we have our ‘hacked’ board game ready for the presentation tomorrow. We all came in yesterday and managed (with several trials) to work out how to connect an LED to the Makey Makey and to only light up when a certain key is called upon. This came with help from a member of another team giving me potentially my biggest learn of studio so far. Copper wire has an insulating paint on, and is therefore is not conductive. I had been trialling different ways of connecting the LED to the output section of the Makey Makey using copper wires and discounted that we would be able to do so until finding this piece of information out. As good as self learning is, collaborating sooner would have helped save a lot of ‘wasted’ time. (I do not believe that the time was wasted as it got me thinking about several different solutions which could have been better than the trialed method). This also helped with the grounding pen we had created, I had isolated that the copper wire wasn’t conducting however believed it was due to too much copper tape, and that potentially one side of the copper tape wasn’t conducting through to the copper wire. However after trialing and inspecting the pen it became apparent that attaching the crocodile clip to the copper tape was the obvious solution and then worked perfectly. It later became obvious the copper wire was the problem having been told this. After this Marc showed us the code he had written in processing to bring up the correct functions when buttons are pressed using the Makey Makey. Chris got to drawing up some icons and John to making a platform for the Makey Makey. I started wiring up the makey makey and adding a switch into the ‘click’ function allowing the winning move to light up the LED and show fireworks (with explosion sound effects) come up on the laptop.

Trialing different options for buttons.

Today after our lecture, we aimed to polish up our board game and have it ready to play for tomorrow. This included a lot of wiring, firstly outside the mount to make sure everything would work whilst it was still accessible. Then secondly I had the challenge of wiring everything up again inside the mount. As with everything on the project so far this required a recalculation. This time with the mount being too low. John added a further section for the Makey Makey to sit in on its own so the mount would rest flat. We had quite a few problems with this due to clips being too close to each other and therefore allowing the wrong function to be pressed, the LED not working as the wire to the output was not in tight enough. This was hard to isolate due to all the wiring being correct otherwise. We also added play dough to colour the foil buttons we had created so it is more obvious which button to press depending on what you land on. Once all this was completed, I suggested we have a playthrough as if we hadn’t seen the game. This highlighted several problems. Firstly that we had condensed the categories from 5 to 3, and it wasn’t obvious that if you landed on red or orange you had to press red. I suggested adding a small piece of play dough into the corner of each space on the board with the corresponding colour of the button we should press. We also realised that we will have to include a small rulebook to explain few of the game features (such as multiplay) that are confusing before the game had even been hacked. Finally we also have to add icons to the timer and reset functions. All in all we have made great progress in this project and I feel I have come a long way in wiring circuits and finding solutions for problems. I am happy with the game we have created however we could potentially have aimed a little higher (more LED’s etc.). The only problem there however would’ve been the time constraint. My biggest take away from this project so far I believe is failing is the first step towards a proper understanding and succeeding.

A soft circuit, checking for faults whilst keeping the wiring accessible.

The final board with all the wiring concealed.

Before we continued with the boardgames today, we had our second ‘Introduction to Creative Technologies’ class. We did a recap of last week, including our brainstorming technique, a chat about our Vlog assignment (I am yet to come up with any large ideas. So far I believe I will just be explaining what creative technologies meant to me when I applied & what it means now, having had a brief insight, and also a brief introduction to me ). We also talked over the reading that we did from Rich Golds - “The Plenitude” In which he talks of the ‘four creative hats’ he has worn. Drawing from personal experiences he likens Science, art, design and engineering together whilst saying they are also all massively different from one another. He references how science is actually incredibly creative, pointing towards the machines used in high tech labs. Interestingly my takeaway from this chapter was that despite making several valid points I agree with, Mr. Gold had a bee in his bonnet about art, (fine art in particular) being on a more true and virtuous level than Design. Several of his points about design being controlled and judged by the client rather than peers making it different from art are contradicted by saying that Pop art is encapsulating what the wider audience is feeling and therefore they are actually very similar. I did find this reading very interesting however and it really got me thinking! I do completely agree with the sentiment that, to really harness potential, collaboration across disciplines is crucial.

We then talked about what makes you ‘creative’, using the following:

Firstly Paradox. One of the two internal ways of being creative. I understood this as being completely open to ideas and not ever closing the possibility for change. Even if something seems certain, you have to aim to keep your mind open to the possibilities that there are ways to improve, change or manipulate what is black and white into something different. The other sections of this visual are quite self explanatory and my biggest learn from here is that I should keep open to try and do new things, resist monotonous routine and bring this attitude to life into work. Why take the bus every day just because it worked the first time. By going a different way, who knows what you may stumble across!

Having thought about the phrase Creative Technologists work with:

Their hands,

their heads and

their hearts

to make the world a better place.

I believe this means a few things, and it is better understood when you look at the three parts collectively rather than separately. Creative Technologists have the power to take something they are passionate about, be it making a change or something they rave about (their hearts). Apply their (and their peers) knowledge to it (their heads), and paired with their hands, there is the power to take ideas out of the ideas phase and actually do something with them. The ability to act on a passion like this as well, rather than any random job provides a great drive. The phrase I haven’t mentioned is, ‘to make the world a better place.’ This is because this phrase can mean so many different things. From the obvious of reducing carbon footprint, waste & helping with diseases to bringing joy through games & toys. Wherever the CTs passion falls within this spectrum is the area that they will try to make the world a better place.

We also looked today at a clip today (https://youtu.be/803LU4C_7IY?t=92) showing how many different opinions can be given on different projects. Where some will say, “useless!” whilst taking a step back there is likely a lot of value. Whilst this task may actually by definition have no use whatsoever when it was performed, and therefore useless, the learning and enjoyment brought actually does provide value. This is paired with what we looked at next in that Creative technologists have the ability to actually take an idea from its early stages & grow it into something physical. Even if you don’t know how at the beginning through failing and learning.

I have tried to cut down my entries today to slightly larger learning points, to save on extra long posts! There are many more points to add, and I have lots of work to do, such as trialing a new technique we learnt today (Affinity diagrams), Identifying some myths & barriers & reading the A-Z of CT to name a few bits!

Bring on studio tomorrow!

#CTEC501 #CTEC502 #COMP570

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platinumsupa · 5 years

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Diakko highschool AU maybe?

(but isn’t it already a…?

in any case! Here’s a diakko high school au! Diana may be the popular girl at school, but unfortunately for her, she’s ended up head over heels for a certain someone at the exact opposite end of the bell curve…

1700 words, so it’s a bit long, but that’s because I was having fun with it, sorry~ ^ ^;)

Diana was what people would call the popular girl.

Student Council president, top of the class, head of theDance Squad, and she was perhaps the prettiest in school to boot, or so that’s whatpeople told her. Boys who were unaware of things often tried to ask her out, orat the very least sit with her and hope she looked their way. Every time shewould respectfully decline, which seemed to just add to her reputation as an unattainable beauty.

Akko was a new transfer student here at school. She was continuously almostbeing kicked out of the lacrosse team because she couldn’t keep her grades up,and when she wasn’t getting into very loud, fiery conversations with herteammates, she was usually getting into trouble with teachers. Last week, Diana watched ahalf-asleep Akko walk face first into a doorframe.

And Diana had noidea how to talk to this girl without feeling like a complete moron, because god, she had it bad.

How did she let it get this out of control? She really couldn’t say.

The first time Diana saw Akko, she was walking home with fellowclub members Hannah and Barbara, and they all stopped when they saw a short Asiangirl up in a tree, tangled in tree branches. And they watched, slack jawed, asthe branch broke from under her and she came tumbling down hard to the grass.

In her arms was a small black cat. In a show of gratitude toits rescuer, it clawed at Akko’s hands and took off running back home. Akkotook a moment to suck on her bleeding pinky before she finally noticed the threeof them looking down at her on the ground.

“Hi there!” She said, still on the ground. “I’m Kagari Atsuko, but everyone just callsme Akko. What’s up?”

Hannah and Barbara laughed at her, and Akko grumbled, simplystanding up and rubbing the dirt off her sleeves, watching the cat’s rapidly retreatingtail.

Diana’s heart started pounding, for some reason.

Some time later, Akko had talked back to Finnelan and landedherself an after school detention. Diana had found her alone in the classroom,not cleaning like she was supposed to. She took no notice of Diana there, becauseAkko was too singing along to an anime theme song playing through herheadphones and dancing with her mop like it was a microphone.

Diana spent all night thinking about it.

And then soon after, Diana absently looked over in Mathclass, and spent a good five minutes staring as Akko glued plastic gemstonesto her lacrosse stick in the shape of the Big Dipper. By that point, through nochoice of her own, Diana was definitelyvery interested.

Because Akko had a very cute face, not to mention such a passion in her voice, and a swagger inher step, and one would think a student in the running for some of the most prestigiousscholarships in the country wouldn’t be so stupidly useless, but here Diana was,her standards dropping like an elevator with its cables cut.

She spent a good portion of Mrs. Lukić’s science classtrying to keep her attention on the slides, and not the opposite table whereAkko was doodling in her notebook. To the point where she almost didn’t evenhear Mrs. Lukić’s announcement.

“Why don’t you all get with a partner and work through someof the problems on the board?”

Most students simply immediately went with the same friendsthey always did. Frank looked in Diana’s direction hopefully, as did Hannah andBarbara who sought to make a group of three, but Diana only had eyes for oneperson.

“So.” Diana said, standing over table. “You don’t appear tohave a partner at the moment. Allow me to help you.”

“Partner?” Akko looked up from her notebook and cocked herhead. “Wait, we’re doing group stuff?”

“You should really pay better attention. It would be problematicif you failed, especially in regard to your games, would it not?”

Akko huffed. “I don’t need you to tell me that. I can keepmy grades up just fine on my own!”

“I was not saying you couldn’t. But in any case, the teacherintends for us to work in pairs for this assignment, so…”

Akko shoved her things to the side of the table to give Dianaa place to set her own notebook down, and the blonde gracefully took her seat.She looked calm and serene, which was surprising given the frantic thoughts runningthrough her head.

It didn’t surprise either of them how begrudgingly Akko wentthrough the questions, with Diana mostly just trying to convince her of the valueof hard work as an extant concept. In about five minutes, the most they hadmanaged to accomplish was putting both their names down on top of the paper.

“I just don’t get why teachers like to cram us with allthese little assignments…” Akko said, twirling her pencil around. “I mean, sheprobably won’t even check this at the end, so it’s a little pointless, isn’tit?”

“They’re not pointless.It’s important to have practice with these concepts if you’re going to understandthem for the exams.”

“Yeah, but her instructions make no sense anyway. What even is this stupid equation she wants us todo? Like it’s all these weird G’s and x’s…how do you keep these straight?”

Diana glanced down at Akko’s notebook. Interspersed throughall the cutesy doodles, Akko had made an attemptto copy down the equations Lukić wrote on the board. Though not all of them, andwith one of the most crucial ones, she had simply stopped halfway through.

“Take this one for example, Akko.” She gestured to it. “It’sover r squared, not just over r.”

“What? But she said…”

“Here, if think of it more like this, it should make iteasier to follow.”

What happened next was mostly Diana’s fault. She neverreally did group projects, so shewasn’t even thinking when she started writing in her notebook in front of herwithout moving it. She actually had caught herself and was about to tilt thepage so Akko could actually see what she was doing, but Akko had already leanedover, unintentionally pressing their shoulders together.

(Diana’s heart was pounding again. Mother would be ashamedif she knew how weak her baby girl had become…)

“Oohhh! Is that how you’re supposed to do it?” Akko asked, eithernot noticing or not caring that she was all but leaning atop of the other girl.“That’s not how they taught it at my last school. Weird.”

“It…” Diana nodded. “I suppose I can imagine some of the…erm,letters and such and such might change depending on the…the language. That’s whyit’s important to practice, after all.”

“Yeah, but you did a better job explaining it than Mrs. Lukićdid. I guess I’ll have to remember this way for later then. Thanks.”

Akko took her notebook for a moment so she could copy downthe explanation into her own notes, and she quickly flashed Diana a gratefulsmile as she settled back into her own seat.

(oh god, her hair smelled really nice.)

“Think nothing of it,” is what Diana said at last. “…So.Aside from this, how have you been…adjusting to the new school?”

Akko simply shrugged. “It’s okay, I guess. I miss my oldfriends, but I met a lot of nice people here already, so it’s not so bad. Yourguys’ lacrosse team is a lot better than my old one at least!”

“You enjoy lacrosse then?” And what a shockingly goodquestion to ask her that was, because obviously she carried the stick aroundjust for fun.

But thankfully, Akko leapt at the chance to talk. “It’s the greatestsport there is! We’re totally gonna be going to nationals soon, I’m sure of it!I’m gonna be the best player on the entire team before the end of the year.”

“That’s…a lofty goal. But it’s good to set your sights high.After all, you don’t get the things you dream of, you get the things you workfor.”

Akko gasped excitedly at the lyric. “Oh my gosh, do you listento Chariot’s albums too?!”

“I’ve…overheard a song or two, yes. I just thought it seemedrelevant to the conversation.”

Akko laughed out loud. “You know, you’re a nicer person thanI thought, Diana! We should do more group stuff together some time!”

“Oh, that would be nice. I’d really like to spend more timegetting to know you better.”

“Really…?” Akko looked at her curiously.

Diana clamped her mouth shut. The calm expression she tried to take was betrayed by the visiblyhot blush spreading across her features.

No, she couldn’t lose her calm here. Friends could want toget to know each other better too, after all. Right? And every second she sather staring silently at Akko made her look more guilty. All she needed to dowas calmly explain what she meant in that context.

“I-”

“5 more minutes!” Lukić called out. “I expect you all to haveeverything answered…”

Akko quickly snapped back to her. “Oh shoot, we gotta finishour assignment, right?”

“Right. Right, the assignment.”

Diana picked up her pencil and set to work, and after a moment,Akko tossed Diana’s notebook back with the rest of Diana’s stuff, and set to helpingher finish.

Fortunately, they managed to finish all the questions intime.

After the assignments were collected, everyone returned totheir seats. And as for Diana, she spent much of the remainder of class stewingin her own gay frustration. She must have run through the entire conversationin her head 5 times a minute, picking apart every stupid thing she said. Shewas supposed to be good at speech,how did she do so bad at talking to one person? Akko must think she’s an idiotnow.

Lukić told them to remember to bring their textbooks fornext class, and Diana moved to write it in her notebook. But she paused, lookingat the top margin.

That note written there…that definitely was not her handwriting.She looked at the note more closely. It read;

‘got a game Friday at4pm!! you should come cheer me on! :3

Akko ♪’

Diana could not stop the grin from taking over her face. Hannahand Barbara would never understand the intensity in which she stared at thescribble at the top of the page.

She spent the rest the night trying to lay the perfectoutfit out for Friday.

#fanfic #writing #little witch academia #I know i'm slow at these but i'll definitely finish all of them so no worries #diakko #diana cavendish #akko kagari

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littleawkwardmess · 5 years

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What they don't tell you about adulthood.

6 months into adulthood and it’s already baffled me how ill-prepared I am for this new phase of life. But that is not all…

I was never excited about adulthood. There’s something about that word that triggers nothing but a tinge of fear in me. I guess I’m just too used to the comfort of having things simple and easy. I’m a person of routine and certainty, and adulthood, although is routine, never is certain enough for me. Think of it this way: when you were in school, there’s always a rather clear path– be it finishing a project, or completing an exam, or simply just making it through another lesson. And there’s summer, there are parties and all sort of things that keep your head above the clouds for a while.

But there’s no predetermined path in adulthood. There are so many ways to make it (or not make it) in life that it confuses us. I remember the first time sourcing for houses a few months ago, starting with zero experience. I remember going through houses and houses trying to find the right fit. Some houses were terrible. Some were okay. Some doesn’t even look like how they were on the photos. But no one ever really told us what to look for in a rented house. I guess we were lucky enough to find one that we thought was the ideal house (of course, we didn’t know how to negotiate and check before buying, so we did run into minor issues when we actually live there for a while). After all, we really just did go with our gut feel, and despite minor issues, I guess now we know what to do and what not to do.

Next comes the first few months of work (and the disenchantment of routine). I know I said I’m the person of routine, but ironically, I’m not a fan of repetitive work. I guess when you started your first job; there are tonnes and tonnes of things you don’t know. People tend to underestimate what fresh graduates can do, and because of that, we as fresh graduates sometimes underestimate our own power. We forgot that we’ve spent years in school going through arduous late night projects, pulling all-nighters to get an assignment done or juggling 5-6 projects all the same time. We forgot we are as capable as we believe we can be. And just because the world sometimes treat us as if we were incapable, we should never let that determine our fate. I remember the first month of doing repetitive design work, just because someone above me told me so. I remember saying ‘yes’ to everything because I don’t trust my own guts. I remember struggling to love my job because the things I did were neither what I truly love nor (most of the time) agree with. Only when that ‘supervisor’ was gone and I had to step up and exert my own opinions did I realize they were actually valued. Only at that point in time did I realize I have it in me to make a difference to how I feel about my job every day. I can’t say I’m excited to wake up every day and go to work (because some days are just not my days), but I can safely say there are more days of excitement at work than there are of boredom and disenchantment. But I was lucky. Who knows what had happened if that chance to step up did not just fall from the sky? So if you are a fresh graduate like me who got disenchanted by your job, maybe it’s time you give your self a push and believe that you have it in you.

Now comes routine – the good one that keeps life in order. It takes me at least 2 months to get the right rhythm to my everyday life. Time is always in demand, but the truth is, adulthood makes it so much harder to manage. Every day we spend on average eight to nine hours at work. Some people had it easier (like me), and some people had it worse (shout out to all the all-nighters, the night-shifters, the ones in the ‘wrong’ time zone). Ideally, another seven to eight hours should be for sleep, so we only have eight hours left every day for the rest of our routine. It sounds like a lot, but minus off the commuting time, we are probably left with six hours for eating and resting (some people don’t rest either…). I used to have plans to study language (and many other skills) once I graduated. I used to believe I would have more time once I started working but boy I was so never so wrong. The first 2 months into adulthood, it dawned on me that I truly have very little time every day for anything. I struggled with squeezing in workouts, meal-prepping, meeting up with friends (hardly ever did), and simply getting some downtime to watch my favorite shows. That was when I realize routine is what’s going to make it easier. So I start setting up meal-prepping day, resting day, 1 hour every day after work for working out. It was tough at first, but eventually, once I got the rhythm of it all, things start to fall into place and I find myself more at ease, and even have time to play some board games with friends or binge on my favourite shows. So do establish your own routine. It may sound boring, but it’ll definitely save you time for more exciting stuff.

Lastly, love, friendship and other things in adulthood. The only thing I can say is to treasure people around you. When we were still in school, we didn’t realize how big our social circle actually was. We can have up to 20 friends whom we meet often. We spend the most time in class, at the canteen, and even after class. It was easy to maintain friendship with, let’s say, with at least 10 people then. (Some people have a lot more than that in their social circle but I was very much an introvert so yes I will be humble with the number). But in adulthood, your social circle shrinks and keeping friendship requires effort. Again, I was lucky enough to be staying with some of my friends, so it requires a bit less effort to keep in touch with them. But for the rest of that 10 people I mentioned above, arranging meet-up alone is just a pain. We have our busy schedule, and believe it or not, we all have a ‘going-out’ quota every week too. Some people can afford to go out 6 days a week; some only 2 (I belong to the latter group btw). So it becomes incredibly difficult to keep in touch if we don’t put in the effort ourselves. Same with relationship. Treasure the short moments you have with your loved ones. Treasure those dinners, those weekends lazing around because both of you are too tired to go out (but occasionally please go out, it freshens the relationship). Forgive people if they are late. Forgive people if they complain too much, or if they look gloomy. Chances are they are fighting a battle (at work) you may not know of. Drop them a message randomly if you haven’t heard from them for a while. Be the one to initiate meet-ups even if it sometimes gets nowhere. Truth is, we all just need to know that we are remembered.

There is much more learning to do. I haven’t even touched the area of financial planning (because I’m guilty of delaying it for too long). And then there’s the topic of ‘when will you get married?’, which I also prefer to talk about only when I totally figure it out (I still get a shock whenever I hear someone of my age or slightly older is getting married, so obviously I’m not that used to this topic yet ><).

Adulthood is never easy, but comes with it a lot of space for growing. It’s bizarre to see, but also a wonder to witness how a few months can change you so much. And that did not just happen to me; I saw it in people around me as well. If you are struggling with adulthood, I hope this was helpful, or at least comforting to know there’s a fellow struggler here too. But I do believe we can all make it.

Until then, happy adult-ing!

#thoughts #reflection #adulthood

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jturnerinteractivity · 3 years

Text

Show and Tell, September 18

Getting to see what everyone worked on is valuable. When we are given such creative freedom, you get a sense of what interests everyone. There are those looking to work more with physical objects, those who wish to break boundaries, those who like games, et cetera. Not only does this provide valuable insight into what everyone can do, but can also provide inspiration for my future work and to push myself.

My group, like many others should have been better about documentation. I will definitely take more videos of the process in the other modules. The initial plan was to demonstrate previous sketches with my Arduino, but it was not working. MANY groups seemed to have issues with their Arduino boards. Perhaps we should not trust our school work to such finicky pieces of technology.

We were told early in our education we would not necessarily need to program in our careers. We were told in coaching that we should not think of the project as a programming project. And many groups during the show and tell were told they were too focused on the minutia of programming rather than the feeling of their interactions. However, the realities of our assignments are they are largely focused on programming. It can be hard to change focus and be more experimental when you have no experience in a programming language and you are told not to focus on programming when the whole project revolves around writing code.

Many students seems perplexed about criticism of their work that never showed up during coaching. I personally was surprised at how groups seemed to be coached with opposing guidance in mind. We were told to hone in on creating an interaction that may require some skill or learning to master and incorporate stakes, but many groups presented a light that blinks when someone approaches it. They focused on the emotion and communication using the LED, but I cannot help but wonder why they were not also pushed to create an interaction more complex than just moving towards a sensor.

We managed to break away from the metaphors we used to help us develop our project, however much of the critiques fellow students faced seemed to treat metaphors super literally. The purpose of a metaphor is to not be so literal. The value of working with a metaphor in this project is that we have no experience with C++ and these metaphors helped give us a more concrete action to attempt to program. Without them I feel like everyone would have been stranded in a sea of code stretching in all directions--no lighthouse to guide them towards something achievable (see what a did there?). I agree that it would have been nice for us to be more experimental in our approach, but we simply did not have the knowledge base to do this. An abstract artist typically knows the “rules” before getting more wild and creative. A jazz musician must master the fundamentals before being able to improvise.

I am happy with what we produced. I completely understand that we should have pushed further from something so game-like. We did not experiment enough. We were coached to incorporate elements of skill, put something at stake, and to think about temporality of action (incorporating a user’s past and future actions). We were successful in incorporating those features and while I tried to break away from a game context, it was helpful for guiding us to follow our coaching. With more time, I think it could have been interesting to consider a material approach as other students did. Maybe we could have changed how we view the light or use the analog stick? Perhaps we could have made something portable that combines the stick and the LED? Considering form and materials as other students did could be beneficial for me to expand my skillset and push myself to be more experimental in future modules. We arrived at a point at which we had something functional we can then use to experiment more creatively. I hope to get there faster next time as creating something useless is intriguing to me. I like the creative freedom of experimenting but it does rely on myself and my partner to push ourselves and be more daring.

Our approach with the LED was extremely simple. I was interesting in pushing the LED to communicate several pieces of information and how complex those pieces of information can be but ultimately could not crack it in an effective manner. We found it was more effective to embrace the constraint and keep it simple. Several of our colleagues attempted to work with emotion and personality and while many were successful and forged more creative output than us, I feel like no one really broke the boundaries of what an LED is capable of. I would love to see someone more experienced than us really blow our minds with an LED. I hope I can successfully push myself to be more wild with future modules.

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douchebagbrainwaves · 3 years

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HERE'S WHAT I JUST REALIZED ABOUT A

Good programmers often want to be doctors than who want to meet him. But I think they pay more because the company would go out of business and the people would be dispersed.1 The phrase seemed almost grammatically ill-formed. We started Viaweb with $10,000 in seed money from our friend Julian.2 The surprising thing about throwaway programs is that, like the temporary buildings built at so many American universities during World War II, they often don't get thrown away. That's what makes sex and drugs so dangerous. When you're launching planes they have to be trimmed properly; the engines have to be at full power; the pilot has to be the series A stage. Which means if it becomes the norm for founders to retain board control after a series A is clearly heard-of. The use of credentials was an attempt to axiomatize computation.3 When you're deciding what to do.

This is too big a problem to solve. Hackers share the surgeon's secret pleasure in popping zits.4 But the two phenomena rapidly fused to produce a principle that now seems obvious: paying energetic young people market rates, and getting correspondingly high performance from them.5 I can't draw.6 How would you do it? Why haven't we just been measuring actual performance? In the earliest stage, because that's where the money is. Misleading the child is just a series of web pages. Think about where credentialism first appeared: in selecting candidates for large organizations. And once you apply that kind of thing for fun. Most smart people don't do that very well.

I learned it hadn't been so neat, and the problem now seems to be fixed. It was small and powerful and cheap, as promised. Why haven't we just been measuring actual performance?7 As a lower bound, you have to do the unpleasant jobs. But all it would have taken in the beginning would have been for two Google employees to focus on the wrong things for six months, and the reactions that spread from person to person in an audience are always affected by the reactions of those around them, and the PR campaign surrounding the launch has the side effect of making them celebrities. Others are more candid, and admit their financial models require them to own a certain percentage of each company. One way to describe this situation is to say that you despised your job, but a return. Till now we'd been planning to use If you can read this, I should be working. I've been able to undo a lie I was told, a lot of propaganda gets slipped into the curriculum in the name of simplification.8 So most hackers will tend to use whatever language they were first written in, because it's painful to observe the gap between them. I were a better speaker. After all, pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.

My grandmother told us an edited version of the change I'm seeing.9 When you scale animals you can't just keep everything in proportion. I believe they conceal because of deep taboos. But I don't think the bank manager really did. The trick of maximizing the parts of your job that you like can get you from architecture to product design, but not like it used to. The very idea is foreign to what most of us, it's not that inaccurate to regard VCs as sources of money.10 They're all competing for a slice of a fixed amount of deal flow, by encouraging hackers who would have gotten jobs to start their own startups instead.11

So if you're going to clear these lies out of your head, you're going to be slightly influenced by prestige, so if the two seem equal to you, you probably have more genuine admiration for the less prestigious one.12 They just don't want to be optimistic and skeptical about two different things. Maybe this would have been for two Google employees to focus on first, we try to figure that out.13 For millennia that was the canonical example of a job someone had to do was roll forward along the railroad tracks of destiny.14 Then the important question became not how to make money that you can't do it by accident.15 When we were kids I used to think I wanted to know everything. They want to feel safe, and death is the ultimate threat. They may have to be optimistic about the possibility of solving the problem, but skeptical about the value of the work they'd done. But we all know the amounts being raised in series A rounds creep inexorably downward. I usually write it out beforehand. We compete more with employers than VCs.16

Java. They go to school, which was dictated largely by the hardware available in the late 1950s. That's what board control means in practice. When my father was working at Westinghouse in the 1970s, he had people working for him who made more than he did, because they'd been there longer. I read it, and look bold. To do something well you have to make it something that they themselves use. We can get rid of or make optional a lot of propaganda gets slipped into the curriculum in the name of simplification. Children of kings and great magnates were the first to grow up in. At the moment I'd almost say that a hacker about to write a profiler that would automatically detect inefficient algorithms.

I remember because it was so surprising to hear someone say that in front of a class. What popularity it retains dates back to the 1960s and 1970s, when it was the scripting language of a popular system. The organic growth guys, sitting in their garage, feel poor and unloved. She said they'd been sitting reading one day, and when you're delivering a prewritten talk makes it harder to engage with an audience. We started Viaweb with $10,000 in seed money from our friend Julian. But I am daily waiting for the line to collapse. When a man runs off with his secretary, is it always partly his wife's fault? It's also wise, early on, when they're trying to find the function you need than to write the code yourself.

Notes

Content is information you don't even want to learn to acknowledge it.

The dialog on Beavis and Butthead was composed largely of these people never come face to face with the founders' advantage if it were Can you pass the salt? Actually Emerson never mentioned mousetraps specifically. You have to factor out some knowledge.

If you want to. When you get a false positive, this thought experiment: If you have a cover price and yet give away free subscriptions with such abandon. This is why I haven't released Arc. They also generally say they prefer great markets to great people.

If it's 90%, you'd ultimately be hurting yourself, but unfortunately not true. It shouldn't be too conspicuous. All you need to know exactly how a lot, or at least wouldn't be worth starting one that did. And yet there is some kind of intensity and dedication from programmers that they function as the average startup.

No one seems to have balked at this, but it's hard to say that education in the belief that they'll be able to raise money? The CRM114 Discriminator. 03%. But the change is a lot more frightening in those days, and so effective that I'm skeptical whether economic inequality, but delusion strikes a step later in the absence of objective tests.

We often discuss revenue growth, it's easy to get to college, they only like the United States, have several more meetings with you to believing in natural selection in the few cases where VCs don't invest, regardless of how to deal with slaps, but most neighborhoods successfully resisted them.

For example, the best new startups. Give the founders realized. You may be the next uptick after that, founders will usually take one of the former, because some schools work hard to predict precisely what would happen to their software that was a company tried to pay out their earnings in dividends, and when I became an employer, I put it this way probably should.

A YC partner wrote: After the war, tax receipts have stayed close to the problem and approached it with the exception of the Industrial Revolution was one firm that wanted to than because they had in grad school, secretly write your thoughts down in, but Joshua Schachter tells me it was more because they are to be the least correlation between launch magnitude and success.

This is a well-preserved 1989 Lincoln Town Car ten-passenger limousine 5, they may prefer to work with me there. But if they want to see artifacts from it, but this would be more like Silicon Valley like the Segway and Google Wave. I'm just going to call all our lies lies. As the art itself gets more random, they thought at least for the sledgehammer; if anything they could imagine needing in their early twenties compressed into the shape of the leading scholars in the last step is to use to calibrate the weighting of the junk bond business by doing another round that values the company they're buying.

Whereas there is money. His best bet would probably also encourage companies to acquire you. The wartime versions were much more fun than he'd had an opportunity to invest in so many trade publications nominally have a notebook to write and deals longer to write a new version from which they don't make wealth a zero-sum game. We often discuss revenue growth with the amount—maybe not linearly, but it wasn't.

That name got assigned to it because the processing power you can discriminate on any basis you want to start a startup to become dictator and intimidate the NBA into letting you write software in Lisp, though sloppier language than I'd use to develop server-based applications. I mean type I startups. And especially about what was happening on Dallas, and they have wings and start to rise again.

Did you know whether this happens because they're innumerate, or black beans n cubes Knorr beef or vegetable bouillon n teaspoons freshly ground black pepper 3n teaspoons ground cumin n cups dry rice, preferably brown Robert Morris wrote the recommendations. After a while to avoid companies that can't reasonably expect to make up the same investor to do video on-demand, because a unless your initial investors agreed in advance that you're talking to a VC. And the expertise and connections the founders are willing to provide this service, this phenomenon is apparently even worse in the process of trying to enter the software business, and they were only partly joking.

Bankers continued to live inexpensively as their companies. Instead of bubbling up from the CIA runs a venture fund called In-Q-Tel that is largely true, because any invention has a power law dropoff, but we are not mutually exclusive. Xenophon Mem. At the time required to switch the operating system so much that anyone wants to invest in it.

It's hard to compete directly with open source project, but those don't scale is to try your site.

The best one could aspire to the extent this means anything, it would be to write about the idea.

They did better than their competitors, who had it used to say that it makes sense to exclude outliers from some types of studies, studies of returns from startup investing, but for a sufficiently long time. I got it wrong in How to Make Wealth when I switch in mid-twenties the people working for large settlements earlier, but the meretriciousness of the 23 patterns in Design Patterns were invisible or simpler in Lisp. And while we have to make Europe more entrepreneurial and more pervasive though.

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weeklygamereview · 6 years

Text

Kingdom Hearts Union χ[Cross] and fundamental failure

How do you judge a free-to-play mobile RPG? The kind with stamina timers, premium currency, and a "gashapon" that randomly dispenses characters and weapons? If you expect hours of uninterrupted play requiring dextrous, precise inputs, you're better off with a console game. But not even most portable console games can give you a satisfying play session within a lunch break, and most every mobile game can.

Although they're all intimately tied to a predatory monetization model, there's something special about a perpetual game on your phone. I hold fond memories of when Terra Battle or Tales of the Rays supplemented my life with structured play and planted a hobbyistic fervor in my mind with their clever, streamlined battle systems. There were post-launch story chapters and limited time events to frequently test my mettle, and when I just wanted to unwind, I was able to grind with easy content that didn't require my full attention. Despite some bursts of compulsive play and frustration with unlucky pulls, I felt I had mutualistic relationships with them.

My time spent with Kingdom Hearts Union χ[Cross] on Android, however, was largely parasitic. It neither provides stimulating enough combat to fully engross nor allows for the relaxing, hands-off play of an idle game. So, KHUX fails to provide the base pleasures of free-to-play mobile RPGs.

This game was first known as Kingdom Hearts χ[chi] on browser and originally for mobile as Kingdom Hearts Unchained χ, changing to its current name with a new co-op mode so unremarkable I neglect to mention it elsewhere in this review.

Battles are turn-based, and each of your attacks is derived from a medal (the primary gashapon item) slotted into your keyblade. You can tap on the screen to attack a single target, swipe the screen for a weaker attack that hits all foes, or swipe a medal to activate its special attack (they're officially named special attacks) requiring the use of a resource gauge called... "gauge." These always deal damage and may heal, grant buffs and debuffs, restore gauge, or grant ailments. Whenever you attack, the current medal rotates out to the next one until you've used each once.

Now, streamlining gets a bad rap. It's often associated with dumbing down instead of refinement. But there are so many mobile games that take advantage of their simplicity to make accessible depth. Just look at Puzzle & Dragon, the mobile puzzle RPG that requires thought and skill surpassing many of its pure action puzzler peers. In its case, shrinking the game board and allowing the free movement of pieces makes it easier to read a board WHILE offering superior board manipulation than the average match 3 (meaning more combos that you meant to make and less that come by chance). That's successful streamlining.

The medal system, unfortunately, doesn't use its simplicity for such an end. Each of your 3-7 medals must be activated one after the other in clockwise order starting with the first; your sequence of attacks is predetermined for every fight once you enter a stage. There's no dexterity or timing required for inputs. Ailments (largely useless) and enemy attack patterns are the only sources of randomization within combat, so there is no risk/reward dynamic.... and no choice. You either have enough gauge for a special attack or you don't. You either came with enough damage and healing to last or you didn't.

Though there's something resembling insight in the 1 Turn Triumph mechanic. You normally regain gauge piecemeal from damage dealt, but a 1 Turn Triumphs allow you to gain back multiple counts of gauge as long as you defeat enemies in a single turn. This requires consideration of enemy and medal attributes (red beats green beats blue) and damage distribution (single target or AoE). Clearing all enemies in a single turn is the most common requirement for objectives, optional achievements that grant currencies for character progression and the gashapon. Normally, you regain enough gauge to use special attacks at every opportunity, so you have to get a feel for how much damage you need to take out enemy formations in 1 turn, which will help you grind up enough gauge to defeat the stage boss.

Sometimes, the same objective is repeated... within the same mission. Why?

The battle design is self aware of where mobile RPGs most disappoint; they can't make stages significantly challenging to complete without seeming to have a paywall, but if it's too easy, hardcore players will become disinterested. The game attempts to address this by assigning three objectives to each stage. These might require you to defeat all enemies in 1 turn, defeat bosses in a certain number of turns, or restrict which medals you may use to on attribute. So, allowing bad players to clear stages effortlessly while offering optional objectives accommodates everyone! Hooray! The game is designed, even at high levels, around players arranging their medals in the correct sequence before stages start instead of expecting them to think turn-by-turn. I find this to be a legitimate design decision for mobile (and console RPGs like Final Fantasy XII, for that matter). I hate it, but I respect it; it lets you take a laid-back approach to character management before battle and enjoy the results of your fine-tuned set-up.

Unfortunately, the game doesn't let you play effortlessly thanks to the lack of a true auto-battle. There's an auto setting that uses special abilities for you, of course, but it doesn't move you throughout the stage. You must navigate environments and encounter foes by laboriously sliding your finger across the screen—not with a virtual joystick, but across your entire screen.

There are mobile games that get away without auto-battle. For example, Fate Grand Order doesn't have basic attacks, and its skills are cooldown based or can expend variable amounts of meter for increased damage. A simple auto-battle routine couldn't easily tell whether you want to charge limit breaks, gain critical stars, burst down enemies, or activate unique character skills; the game is too complicated for it. Puzzle & Dragon wouldn't make sense with one in the same way an auto-play option wouldn't make sense for Bejeweled. But these two games are much more demanding, one for optimal order sequencing and the other with its puzzle board. You know, actively, traditionally-for-a-video-game engaging.

There's so little to this game's combat in the first place that I find it excruciating to manually navigate through its environments. They're expertly illustrated. Beautiful, even! But they work against the mindless, chill grind the battle system is meant to facilitate. The novelty of their beauty fades as you're forced to balance your phone in one hand and scrub dramatically across your entire widescreen phone to go from left to right and back again (how I wish it had a virtual joystick so I could play with one hand!). By the way, you have to touch and hold at the far edges of the screen to reach full speed. There’s an option to tap at a location, but the player character will vary its running speed depending on the distance away. It’s always a pain to perform movement, which doesn’t even factor into combat itself and often takes up more time than battle within a stage.

Keep in mind you have to scrub through this entire map dozens of stages in a row to clear the most common objective (defeat all enemies in 1 turn) at this scale:

If you're not used to playing mobile games, this might sound like a ridiculous complaint. But when the core combat is just an excuse to grind and make numbers go up, a shallow vessel to deliver the Good Chemical, it wears you down. Like, imagine if Cookie Clicker lacked store items that automatically produced cookies. KHUX is that kind of contradiction, a game designed to be passive that demands your attention in irritating, frequent pulses, an inconvenient hand cramp of a game.

There are more ways to play, extra mechanics, a baffling pet system... I won't go into everything the game has to offer, but know that they provide no depth to combat or medal management, merely complication. But I want to go over the main means of progression in the game: Guilt.

You level up medals to increase their power. You level up medals by fusing them together, losing all medals used to level the other. Their maximum level increases as their rarity increases. You can increases their rarity rank with materials you can grind for in daily objectives. I'll assume you understand how this kind of system works. Yet the game won't settle for this tried-and-true progression loop. It introduced the Guilt system.

So, every time you fuse identical medals together, the remaining one gets an orb (yes, it's just called an orb). The medals MUST be identical in both name and rarity. If the medal has any orbs, those are transferred to the base medal. If a 6* rarity medal (the rarest and most powerful rarity) gets all its orbs filled plus one, it rolls for a Guilt value. The Guilt value bestows a random percent bonus to damage up to 150%. Guilt value on the rarest of medals can range from 70% to 150%. What happens if you're unlucky and roll a 70%? Well, better go to the gashapon and pray for a copy! Even then, you might get a 71% and wasted a powerful medal. Good job!

The community encourages players to Guilt medals that drop freely through the story. This is the optimal sequencing of medal fusion to Guilt one of these medals:

You need to, at minimum, 39 medals of the same name at different quantities for each rarity, AND all of the medals required to increase their rarity, AND all of the medals to level them up. If you don't do it in this exact sequence, you're wasting dozens of material medals and hours of time. It's absolutely absurd.

The game, of course, severely limits the amount of medals you can carry unless you pay with the premium currency. Even the joy of 10x gashapon rolls were tainted by the hidden tax of inventory expansion. Collecting medals should be fun. Collecting medals is what makes you want to spend money. Collecting and arranging medals is all the game is, really. And it's always accompanied with grueling, tedious inventory management that does nothing but stress me out!

I haven't even gotten to the power balance of medals. In short: it's whackadoodle. After making so much effort to Guilt my common 1* Stitch medals, I got lucky as a F2P player and rolled Illustrated Xion (EX). A single use of the medal buffs your damage with itself and all other medals by over 200% for multiple turns, refills more gauges than it takes to spend, and consequently breaks the majority of content over its knee. I never once, ONCE, in the entirety of the main story, had to manually choose which special abilities to activate to conserve gauge. And I had to manually move my character all the while, find an enemy, wait for the elaborate attack animations to cease, and start again. I stopped caring about clearing objectives; I was powerful enough to clear all of the story's content without bothering.

Other games use cost systems to prevent the abuse of rare medals at early player level, only allowing the use of one or two of the rarest kind of character or weapon. Due to a variety of factors involving the pace of progression, this did not factor in at all. Even without using all of my most powerful medals at once, Illustrated Xion (EX) was enough to utterly break what was meant to be a pacey, early-player experience. I ruined the game by getting a favorable gashapon roll. This is a fundamental failure in the design of randomized collectibles in a game I haven’t seen since the early days of mobile gaming. This has been solved for years.

By the way: I only started playing to see where the story would go. The community has reached a consensus that the plot only begins to develop significantly after stage 350, months and months after release. I would say it actually picks up in the early 300s, but by the time I got to the good parts, I was too bored out of my gourd to continue despite being greatly intrigued.

The game has built its entire postgame around the use of medals like Illustrated Xion (EX) that make all previous game content trivial. Half a year after introducing the first medal of this type, Illustrated Kairi (EX), there is now a permanent budget gashapon that has a paltry chances to drop these buff medals as a way to allow the unluckiest of players access to postgame. But I'll tell you: the postgame isn't worth it. It's a skilless test of how lucky you are or how irresponsibly you spend money. And if you can access it, your medals are too strong to enjoy any other content. There are no objectives asking you to bringing low-rarity medals to otherwise increase challenge. There is a Proud Mode variant for many story stages, but these have such strict restrictions that I could barely clear any of them (the most common of which restricts special attack use to medals that have been Guilted AND have a Guilt value exceeding a certain amount, which isn't nearly as hard as it is expensive). Even verifiable trash like Fire Emblem clone Phantom of the Kill has objectives requiring low-rarity characters to provide some bracing challenges.

In conclusion, Kingdom Hearts Union χ[Cross] fails to provide what I seek from a mobile game on a basic level: relaxation or engagement. It fails to relax me thanks to its hand-cramping map navigation and the oppressive inventory management. It fails to engage with its battle system because it's designed to be largely effortless and relaxing. It is a frustrating waste of time as a time waster.

#khux #kingdom hearts #kingdom hearts union x #kh

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tulpacest · 6 years

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Repost, don’t reblog.

Tagged by: @ahogedetective , thank you so much!

Tagging: @luminaryblood if u haven’t! And if u have... pls link me this is my fav kind of quiz. Otherwise!! Please steal!

Name: K/orekiyo Shing.uuji. (Sorry but,,, I’m going to be talking about some uncomfy stuff and I’d really rather it not go in the tag riuguir).

Nicknames: Sweet/Gentle Korekiyo, Kiyo, Korey (Hagakure why...), Shitguuji, ‘shit eating worm’, ‘slug’, ‘creep show’ (I love you Miu).

Orientation: Pansexual Panromantic (No preference.)

Preferred pet names: I think Korekiyo would find petnames to be interesting. I... actually like that he offers the name ‘Kiyo’ on first meeting, it creates a sense of immediate familiarity between himself and his peers - exactly what he wants as an anthropologist, after all. Additionally, it means ‘Korekiyo’ is a name reserved only for his Sister - which we’ll get into later. Obviously, he doesn’t particularly like being compared to an insect or dung, and would prefer only beautiful things be associated with him.

Relationship status: He’s currently in a fully committed romantic relationship with his own tulpa. He truly believes that his dead Sister’s spirit rests inside of him and they are continuing the loving partnership they had in life - but she does not. This is a coping mechanism born out of impossible grief, and he does have brief moments of self-awareness. In those moments, the world feels sterile and empty. This is his reality.

Favorite canon ship: H E I S T H E C A N O N S H I P. In all seriousness, I do find the relationship he has with the tulpa to be incredibly fascinating, fucked up and inherently unhealthy. The tulpa is simultaneously the only thing keeping him alive, and simultaneously destroying any development he could possibly have. He cannot overcome grief without it, he cannot overcome grief with it. And if he just didn’t ... you know... kill people because of it, I feel that the tulpa perfectly embodies the theme of the game. A lie can sometimes be good, can sometimes even save lives - and that is what his coping mechanism is - simply an incredibly well-fabricated lie. He’s such a fascinating and... oddly tragic character because of it.

Favorite non-canon ships: I really like Korekiyo/Rantaro! Their interactions in the board game were incredibly sweet... Korekiyo is actually concerned with his health! He asks after him! They visit each other inbetween trips! K O R E K I Y O H A S A F R I E N D ??? And I know you could read that he’s just getting close to him in order to kill his sisters... but? He was doing all of those things before he even knew Amami had sisters!

I really... really feel like Amami is one of the very few people who would have the patience and the kindness to help Korekiyo work through the whole tulpacest situation. I... Idk, I just have this really profound image of Kiyo finally asking Rantaro if he wants to meet his Sister, and Amami is hesitant at first - like, he knows by now that... something weird is going on, but it’s okay, he trusts his friend enough to see where this is going... And then Kiyo takes the mask down, and Amami’s heart just. Breaks as Sister says ‘hello’ to him, her lip trembling - and he finally clicks it all together and he understands. And then he rushes forwards and just wraps her in the tightest embrace, and her eyes immediately turn to glass and she just sobs because this is the first time he’s been hugged properly in years, and suddenly all that time spent hugging himself is... not enough. Bluuhhh and that’s my sickly-sweet power fantasy, eventually Amami helps Korekiyo get over the tulpa and accept death (or he supports his friend’s coping mechanism and they enter into a more complicated relationship) - either way, GOD. That’s the healthiest Kiyo ship I can think of and I Am Here For It.

A quick note on shipping: Korekiyo is really... really difficult to ship. He firmly believes his one true love is inside of him, and he has sacrificed everything to fulfil that delusion. Unpicking it would be a long and hard process, and cheating on her is not going to be an option unless it’s like. a very very very clear one-time affair. Even then, he’s... unlikely to get completely physical with you - and falling in love is simply not an option........ at least, not right away. Any shipping I did with Kiyo would have to be delicately paced and involve a lot of plotting/threading.

Opinion on true love: He firmly believes in it, and it is one of the only matters (asides from death) where he will suddenly start acting illogical. Anything concerning love makes him highly emotional, but he would also expose that ‘real’ love is not a physical connection, it is something that is worked on and reshaped and kneaded over time. He is extremely romantic, to say the least, and believes that you should do anything for the one you love.

Opinion on love at first sight: Although this is something ever present in folklore, fiction and fantasy - he believes that love takes more than a mere moment. It’s something that requires tending to - even if it begins like a hot-flash in the pan.

How ‘romantic’ are they: Very.... Korekiyo’s appearance may imply anything but, but he is a highly romantic person. He enjoys affection, soft touches, hugs, being squeezed, giving gifts, huge gestures, romcoms, holding hands, dates... I could go on. He adores the saccharine and can be incredibly gentle when it comes to matters of love.

Ideal physical traits: Korekiyo would struggle with this question - after all, his pet theory is that all humanity is beautiful. Beauty is alluring, and beauty is born from the soul - less so the body. However... He has an aesthetic appreciation for features similar to his own - archaic beauty, ink-brush strokes for hair, well-kept and slender. But! Tbh, radiant love overcomes any physical imperfections, his tastes bent to his heart’s desires.

Ideal personality traits: He is particularly drawn to bright, effervescent people. Those who possess a deep, unending curiosity - who possess wit and good humour, intelligence and grace. There are many traits that he admires - just as there are many roles in this great kabuki play of life. However, above all else... A thirst for life. If your character displays a drive to survive against all odds, a ‘fuck you’ attitude to death - then his heart sings. Bravery in the face of impossible odds, an unwavering heart, hope blossoming amongst the tangled thorns of despair... cliche, yes, but traits he finds incredibly attractive. Additionally, he really enjoys being approached by someone else. His love hotel scene begins with Saihara taking an interest in him, after all.

Unattractive physical traits: Hmm, again... there really aren’t many.

Unattractive personality traits: He is not fond of people who are loud-mouthed and quick to interrupt him. He really dislikes those who shut down intelligent conversation, or think of him as boring, or refuse to pay attention. He hates promises being broken, and he will blame himself for being a poor teacher if someone shows even the slightest disinterest in what he has to say. He also dislikes those he cannot pin down easily. If he cannot assign you a role and you baffle him with layers of inconsistencies/lies, he’s... going to lose interest, fast. If, however, he can pick up some threads of your puzzle - he’ll have... so much fun deciphering you that he’ll get lose in it. Overall, it can be difficult to predict what traits Korekiyo is going to find unattractive since he is forever fishing for your beauty...

Ideal date: Travelling, discussing anthropology, consuming media and analysing it afterwards... but more romantic moments are appreciated, too. If it’s an activity that allows him to revel in your beauty... he’s down, lmao.

Do they have a type? Immensely passionate, confident & bright people!

Average relationship length: Forever...

Preferred nonsexual intimacy: Being held/holding. I mean. The boy literally hugs himself bc no one else will... he’s honestly so desperate for this kind of physical affection that it breaks my heart on some level. Please.. someone... anyone.... hug him,,,, Outside of this, while sexual intimacy can be incredibly loving and important in a relationship, I think he values nonsexual intimacy more. I know! This sounds! Really weird! Coming from! The self-declared rope man! But! He constantly reiterates that love does not have to be ‘a physical connection’. So... honestly - beyond cuddling, his favourite thing to do to express intimacy is probably just to talk. Talk and talk and talk. Enjoy doing things together, be in one another’s company, revel in the beautiful connection between you both - the real meat of a relationship, you know?

Commitment level: He’ll literally destroy himself and give up his flesh in order to let you inhabit his body if u go and die on him. And although he indulges his curiosity in the love hotel scene... we have to remember that that is his fantasy. In the dating sim mode, he repeatedly shies away from sexual topics/intimacy (though he expresses they are normal human behaviours and he respects/is intrigued by Saihara because of them), because it would be ‘cheating’. Then again, he does claim that he tied up a whole village of women, so....

The thing is, Korekiyo’s. Well. What counts as ‘cheating’ might be a little fluid - can he indulge in Kinbaku because he’s doing it for ‘anthropological’ reasons? How far does that card stretch? He seemed to be aware that he actions with Saihara were dodgy given how much he emphasised it was a one-time affair... so, idk. GENERALLY THO I’d argue he is more committed than most, lmao.

Opinion of public affection: He wants it, but it makes him incredibly uncomfortable. Like. Ideally he could be physical with his partner near constantly - but he’s learned that matters of love are best kept private, and with good reason.

Past relationships: My personal headcanon is that his Sister is around a year & a half older than him, and they have been engaging in taboo acts since he was around 13. It’s... highly uncomfortable to think about, but. Yeah, so. Considering he still thinks he is in this relationship, they’ve been ‘together’ for 4-5 years.

#[ ☯ | moral relativity ]#[boy has that tag ever been more relevant... ]#incest //

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dwollsadventures · 4 years

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TDG Prologue 3 - Devil

After a century of imprisonment, one prisoner is finally being released. The prison guard assigned to walk him out is troubled by a single fact gnawing at his heart: Seth Farofeil Locke is the devil himself. -- AH It's finally done. The revision of the final prologue!!

If you've ever wondered who the fellow with the rainbow glasses you've seen in my galleries is, this is him. And the primary antagonist of the gang, even if he doesn't show up right away.

My original plan was to finish writing and publish it on October 30th, but I got influenza and panicked that it was actually the plague. Turns out, it wasn't! Still pretty dangerous and I've been feeling like shit, but still a big weight off my shoulders. Halloween is as good a day as any to publish it though. It is sort of scary in some parts.

Warning though, there is some verbal violence and mentioning of some violence (towards people and animals), and strong language as well. On par for demonic stuff, but he doesn't actually do any of it.

The next updates, writing-wise, include some cover art for this story and the actual first part of the TDG Acronym Pending.

Enjoy whenever you want, regardless of how thin the veil between the dead and the living is, and have a happy Halloween!

On this day, October 30th, 1961, a man was released from prison and nobody was happy about it. Except the man in question of course.

Under the fluorescent lights of the block, there was no noise except for the footsteps of the guard, miserably marching towards his cell. The absence of noise let the footsteps and their echoes bounce around, until they became so distorted it sounded as if a giant were walking through the halls. Walsh normally liked the silence of the prison. Now it was more awful than anything he could imagine.

Despite the early glow of morning light betraying the fact it was nearly six am, every inmate in the block was awake. Staring at Walsh. He wanted nothing more than to shout at them, to tell them to mind their own damn business and keep their faces away from the bars. Under normal circumstances he would have, too. Now he didn’t trust his own voice not to crack.

The pressure of all that attention hammered away at the officer’s mind. It was as if he were an inmate being wheeled away by a couple of officers for the electric chair, an act Walsh had participated in a few times, but never on this end. His fingers itched for weapons he wasn’t allowed to bring with him.

In the darkness every haggard face looked at him anxiously. They all knew where he was going. The younger inmates may have noticed the similarity to a cartoon, where an unfortunate soul looks at the trail of gunpowder light as they sit on a box of dynamite. No such connection happened. Firstly, because there were very few young prisoners in the high security Galgenvogel. Secondly, the only person in the prison who might have laughed about the situation was Locke himself.

He was the reason they were all awake. Some of them hadn’t even been able to sleep the night before, others made each other promises to wake them up before it happened. They weren’t sure what was going to happen. Most of them had never thought Seth Farofeil Locke was capable of being released from prison. Even those not skilled in algebra knew Locke equaled prison. It was like watching a fundamental piece of the universe disintegrating in front of their eyes. But if anything was going to happen they wanted good seats.

The guard continued his resolute march with his attention on the path in front of him. The scuffed steel walkway seemed so solid compared to the rows of strained faces. That comfort was short-lived. Even the honest steel in front of him seemed to melt before his eyes, twisting the floor into the red-hot road leading to Hell. Walsh’s prison was melting before his very eyes.

Galgenvogel Penitentiary was known for two things: being the oldest operating prison in Illinois, and being a huge, dull block of brutalist efficiency. Its walls were blank concrete and metal, so thick a tank would need a week to bust in and so sleek even spiders had trouble scaling them. The inside of the prison was the same; metal had only been integrated decades ago and the dark iron railing stood plainly against the dreary grey of the stone walls. Though it was primarily a medium-security prison the stark dress did nothing to correct many people’s assumption that the single maximum-security unit was its sole purpose.

Even the uniforms worn by the inmates were devoid of color: white for general circulation, black for high-security, and grey for those on watch in circulation.

Walsh, the senior-most guard, had always expressed his opinion that a good monochrome always made them feel like they were in prison. He'd go on to say that all this orange and blue and green was part of what was wrong these days, with the recidivism rates as high as they are; gang-bangers jumping in and out all the time, swapping one color for another, it made him sick.

If there were a better representative of Galgenvogel than Walsh, he'd probably shouted at them. Walsh was, in his army days, lauded by his superior officers for being "big". It had gotten him high praise and higher wages back then. Now, with nearly forty years working under his belt, he was merely big. He was as grey as the building, though usually pink in the sunlight, with a topping of black hair and a big black moustache which his wife said made him look distinguished. Galgenvogel didn't hire guards for their kindness, nor their smarts, nor their sense of justice (although Walsh did consider himself a rather judicially minded man), especially in the Twenties. All the other prison guards looked up to him. A man of his seniority and experience was highly valued in a prison like Galgenvogel. There wasn’t a nook or cranny left that he hadn’t personally reported on.

Everyone at the prison, barring the inmates, whose opinion didn’t count, knew that Walsh was a good man. Raised Christian right around Chicago with a big family and a modest one of his own. If he could name a stain upon his soul, one singular sin that made even him question his own placement in the divine firmament, it was this belief: that Seth Farofeil Locke was the devil himself.

This wasn’t some crazy delusion, he assured himself. It had taken him nearly a decade of knowing Locke to fully accept it. He had all the evidence he needed as well.

It was a secret he was loath to share with anyone. His fellow guards, the wardens, even his own wife. In his day Walsh had dealt with gangsters and dragged murderers and lunatics to the electric chair. He placed himself as a stalwart wall against the criminal darkness to protect the innocent. The fact this one, singular man posed the greatest challenge he had ever known drove Walsh up the wall.

To Walsh’s knowledge Locke was as clean as a whistle. He had never thrown a punch, participated in a riot, or said anything to incite violence in others. Which wasn’t to say every word out of his mouth was clean and shiny. No, Locke had a special way with words. His tongue could infuriate the most stoic and subdue the most homicidal. Never once had he gotten a job or joined in on any of the other inmate’s games or activities. He’d checked out two books from the prison library during his entire stay at Galgenvogel and had never bought anything from the commissary.

Locke was perfectly fine to eat whatever the prison gave him, sleep whenever the guards told him to, do anything to waste away the days until he got released. Even if it meant staring at a wall for hours on end, looking at the strange shapes the bars were morphed into by the dying sunlight.

Once Walsh had gotten permission to throw Locke into solitary for three days after he was late for a count. For three days he heard nothing and saw nothing. On the last night of the third day Walsh escorted Locke back. He had asked him about his stay in the hole. Locke shrugged noncommittally and simply replied, “been in worse holes”. And that was that.

Walsh hated him. None of the other inmates made him feel as old and slow as Locke did. The guard was a big man, even in a profession where that wasn’t much to distinguish him. Galgenvogel let him carry big weapons, weapons they got from the army when they didn’t need them anymore. There hadn’t been a man Walsh had met that couldn’t be beat down given enough time. Except Locke. Everything passed over him like a gust of wind. Physical force, verbal haranguing, harsh punishment, it was all the same to him. He was the only prisoner Walsh had ever needed to use his brain to combat.

For as long as he’d been at Galgenvogel the two had been caught in a fiendish game of cat and mouse. Just when Walsh thought he had him, Locke slipped between his fingers once more and the game continued. All those chases over all those years for it to end like this.

In front of his cell, waiting for the watchtower to unlock it, he was face to face with the present. Without the lights on it was as dark as the mouth to a dragon’s cave.

Walsh could feel the inmates’ stares burn into his back like lashes as the cell door clicked open.

Locke was waiting for him. He sat on the edge of his bed in civilian clothes given to him by the prison. No one else was inside. For some reason or another, Locke was always alone.

In his hands were probably the only personal possessions Locke had ever had, two red dominoes. At least, Walsh thought they were dominoes. They looked like dominoes at least, the color of redwood and smoothed by years of being passed from hand to hand, slipped between his fingers like a magic trick.

Once Walsh had gotten them from him during an inspection. Despite his probing they weren’t laced with drugs. The symbols on them looked like pieces from a mahjong board, and despite his insistence none of them were gang signs. During the week they were gone, Locke stuck to his cell and shambled around like a ghost. Afterwards the correctional officers classified them as “depression-alleviating equipment” and that they were not to be taken from him anymore.

Regardless, the prison guards tried their best to sneak them away from him, often failing. To their knowledge none of the other prisoners had ever laid hands on them.

One night, one of the junior guards thought he saw them sitting on Locke’s eyes while he slept, like coins for the dead. Walsh was the only guard at the prison who made the effort to keep an eye on Locke. Amongst the staff Locke was a taboo subject.

Now the dominoes were simply jingling in his pockets. Locke stood up and nodded to Walsh. He wanted to get it all over with as soon as possible. He did not look back at his cell as he left.

With little pomp and circumstance, he led Locke out and towards freedom.

As Locke made his way across the block, the other inmates stared. On their faces was a mixture of confusion, contempt, pity, and relief. No one wished Locke goodbye and good wishes. No one shook his hand. No one said anything. They just kept staring at him.

The penitent theater gazed upon the two actors on the steel stage, breaths held in anticipation. Would he burst into flames as soon as he crossed the threshold? Or would snakes shoot out of his orifices? Would he make a mad dash for the warden and slice up anyone he met on the way? They didn’t know. They just kept waiting.

Walsh was by no means a shy man. He was a regular at the baseball stadium and his boisterous cheering could carry over the roar of a Cub's game straight out to the parking lot. Now, with hundreds of faces staring at Locke, he felt like an extra in a movie, the ones all dressed in black so they could move props without getting in the way of the actors.

By the time they’d crossed the barrier out of the block Walsh’s throat felt like it was tied in knots. He picked up his equipment, including his gun which he felt immeasurably safer carrying, and wiped off his brow.

If the walk affected Locke at all he was doing an amazing job at hiding it. He just kept staring ahead, twiddling the dominoes in his hand.

To break the silence Walsh cleared his throat and asked, “No one to say goodbye to back there?” Partly to ease the tension, partly to get a name to interrogate later.

Locke shrugged.

The continued walking out of the depths of the prison. Windows now let the early morning light in, basking the two in pink light which made Locke’s hair look like wildfire.

No friends, not a single one. During his initial investigation Walsh had spoken to some of the correctional officers, to see if Locke had gang affiliations or something of the sort. Perhaps a past inclination to associate with fellows of a darker nature. Anything that would seem more likely than him being a… demon. Walsh felt too embarrassed to even think the word now.

Luck did not favor Walsh. Everyone in the prison knew Locke, he was tied to the building, like an incarcerated genie. The C.O.s had noticed other men tended to seek out Locke for little things; favors or information. And he never ate alone. There was always one group that could manage to find space for him on the bench. A young Walsh found that every man who Locke hung around with expressed dislike, even hatred for him. Locke didn’t keep his mouth shut. Jokes leapt off his tongue as easily as flies, often spiraling into venomous spiels. Personal ones, too. He had a knack for figuring out secrets and what made people tick, and how to tic them off. Yet regardless of their opinion, they always kept coming back to him. Just like he did.

Walsh was the senior-most prison guard. The rest of his sign-on buddies had left, one by one, due to injury or stress (being sissies about it, he reflected) or plain old retiring. Not Walsh. When he first came aboard it was in the twenties. After his service in the Great War, back when it was called the Great War, he'd gotten a job at his home-town's police station but got an even better deal at Galgenvogel from his old sergeant. There he avoided all of the nonsense that the market-crash brought with it and rode a secure wave all the way to the prison equivalent of tenure.

Back then he had a lot more friends, people who he could reasonably confide in. Never in a million years did he share his secret suspicion, but there were at least other people willing to acknowledge that something about Locke didn’t seem right. His old friends helped him even though they didn’t know what he was actually looking for.

The older prison guards never helped him. All he got from them were shifty eyes and downcast gazes. He’d never liked the spineless old men. He’d vowed never to give the new recruits the same treatment. Some of them wished he would, always prying into their lives, lecturing them like a father.

Locke’s official paperwork didn’t offer much enlightening evidence. The three sheets of paper that constituted his record were from decades ago and tended to get details wrong. Eye color and hair color shifted twice and all three listed his age as 33 even with multi-year gaps between the writing.

One record noted a visitation in 1914 with two of his brothers. Frustratingly the names were not listed, and no other report mentions any kind of family. Walsh reasoned they were probably former accomplices of whatever put him in jail. Even a few years into the job he’d grown suspicious of visitors into his prison. Half of them were probably making sure the inmates didn’t squeal on those outside.

Within time both the paper trail and his patience puttered out. Walsh was not a book-learned man and he had no aspirations of following the paper trail.

He had all but given up his notion when one day a key landed itself in his pocket. To this day Walsh could still not recall how it got there. In the back of his mind theories crawled like spiders, but he tried to ignore them.

The key was for a lockbox in the archives. A separate building from the blocks and main center which went underground. In the cramped, dark underground room he found his key’s home. Prison records of Galgenvogel from the years 1860-1870.

Walsh knew the prison was old. Just knowing didn’t prepare him for what he found. Reports of arrests and prisoners, hand-written in curly font that made his eyebrow twitch. Though he assured himself he didn’t have to deal with any of this pencil-pushing crap, he kept reading. And reading. And reading.

Until one report for September 31st, 1861. A prisoner report appended with an arrest report and various court documents. They read that, on the night of September 13th a man claiming to be Seth Farofeil Locke was discovered in the garden of a wealthy family from the Gold Coast of Chicago. Alongside him was the family’s sole daughter, Lily Lyehope, hung from a noose. Mr. Locke was arrested, pled guilty, and sentenced to life in prison at the newly opened Galgenvogel where the judge ruled that he, “shall be confined there for the rest of a man’s natural life.”

Walsh didn't know what to think. Obviously, there must've been some kind of mix up. Locke was probably this guy's son, or grandson. When he got back to the guard tower, the key had disappeared from his pocket.

One week later, there was a fire in the archives. The newer records were kept intact, but everything from sixty years or so ago had been tragically destroyed. This was when Walsh’s suspicions were confirmed true.

No matter what he tried to do to forget, it never left his mind. Even on the days when he didn't think about it, the memory sat in the back of his thoughts waiting for the moment to pounce on his uneasy mind. He'd come to the prison a young man and became an old one through his years of service. Walsh gained weight, lost hair, got wrinkles, grew stiff in the joints, learned to cope with his inevitable death, and even lost a finger to a man on death row. When he joined, all those years ago, he thought Locke was a young man. Time passed, and he figured he was just young-looking for his age.

As Walsh walked Locke through door after door of prison security, watching him sign legal papers, he realized Locke was the exact same man as he’d met forty years ago. The only thing that was different was the uniform.

Walsh was possibly the only man alive who knew the truth.

Around this time the façade began to crumble. He couldn’t help it. All the inmates knew Locke as the guy who was in before them, who knew the prison and everyone in it. Even the ones given life sentences, who’d been in the prison longer than Walsh had. One night, after several before devoid of sleep and full of phantom Lockes watching him from the darkness, he’s snapped and beaten a man giving him trouble well beyond the point of reason.

The warden gave him a few nights off for paid vacation, ‘to rest your mind’. It was the worst vacation of his life. At home he wrestled with the thoughts until he got an ulcer. At first, he thought he needed to hightail it out of there, get his family away from the demonic threat in the prison. Walsh did not decide to do that.

Why did he join as a prison guard in the first place? Why did he go to Europe as a young man? Because he wanted to protect people. He wanted to be a warrior, a defender of the innocent. So, he marched back to the prison reassured of his new position as the last defense against the fiends of Hell.

When he got back, he never asked about the beaten prisoner.

His mission had started ever since then. Walsh was a man who operated best when he was following orders, and as far as he could concern these orders were heaven-sent.

Not being able to tell his wife and kids was the most aggravating part. If they knew the kind of danger he was putting himself in front of every day, they would show him more respect.

It had been long and hard. These forty years took a toll on Walsh, harder than even the trenches. Keeping track of him wasn’t that hard. He never left the prison and only ever switched between general circulation and high security once. And, compared to his other duties as a prison guard Locke wasn’t dangerous. The only damage he’d ever inflicted on anyone in prison had been rhetorical, his tongue could be razor sharp when it needed to be. In truth, after his vacation Walsh had never needed mental help dealing with his feelings, like some of the other pansies he worked with. But it was still hard. If not literal hardship, then poetic hardship.

Excluding his many hardships and daunting heavenly mission, Walsh reflected that his career had been successful. Whenever he didn’t have to deal with Locke the job was steady, and he could probably sink into a comfortable life after retirement. It looked like it was all smooth sailing for Walsh.

“And what do you plan to do after re-entering society? Do you have any careers in mind?”

“Yes sir, one of my buddies hooked me up with a gig. Sweet by the looks of it. Everything I’ve ever wanted to do and more, just need to take the bus to Toledo.”

Seeing him sign his name in the warden’s office and talk with him about his plans for after he got out, it didn’t seem real. None of it did. Locke was leaving. Ever since the retrial last week, life seemed like a dream.

Walsh was called in for an inmate’s trial. Nothing new, he’d done it before, usually to provide first-hand evidence of their behavior and infractions. Informing a court with a rapt audience of some ne’er-do-well’s bad conduct was one of the little joys of the job.

When he heard the judge proclaim Locke’s name, and saw him walk in through the courtroom doors, his heart had sunk. Lights flashed before his eyes. Something was wrong. How could he have missed the name?

It was an especially hot day. A stroke of misfortune on the weather’s part brought an October heat wave. No one questioned Walsh’s perspired brow, his dry throat.

His eyes were glued on Locke the entire trial. All he did was sit there, looking thoroughly disinterested with the theatre of law and order. If the men next to him were suspicious of Walsh’s rapt gaze, they didn’t say anything. Or Walsh didn’t hear them. They didn’t matter anyway. How was Locke going to squeeze his way out of this one?

Finally, he was called for a statement.

From his spot, he could see the jury, the few seated, the lawyer, and Locke. Everyone except Locke and his lawyer was anxious and fidgeting in their seats. Even the judge had to clear his throat after a failed start-up.

“Now, Mr. Walsh, are you able to corroborate Mr. Locke’s… age?”

The pause caught him off guard.

“Age, your honor?”

The judge’s eyes swiveled around, as if he were scared the defense was listening to him.

“Yes, Mr. Locke’s age. Sir Nemo, his lawyer, has claimed Locke to be 132 years old. And thus, he has more than served his life sentence. Is there anything that you can do to confirm or deny this?”

Walsh realized it now. In any other circumstance the whole court would have been called out. But this was Locke they were talking about. His freedom hinged entirely upon Walsh’s testimony.

He wanted to lie. If it meant foiling his plans Walsh would have told the court Locke was born this morning. Something stirred within Walsh, in this moment. He had placed his hand on the Bible. He had put his faith in it entirely. Now, in his heart, he knew if he did the right thing and told the truth, Locke would be forced to give up and maybe even burst into ashes.

Walsh spoke. He told the court nothing but the truth. About the report he’d found, about how Locke didn’t age, about how he seemed to exist separate from the stream of time. He poured every inch of honesty into his speech. Pure, unadulterated faith exuded from Walsh’s pores.

It was the first time the Good Book had failed him.

His lawyer successfully managed to convince the court that the language, “rest of a man’s natural life,” technically did not qualify as an actual life sentence. Furthermore, by any medical assessment, Locke had fulfilled his time and more. No one argued. No one wanted to be in that sweltering courtroom anymore. Even releasing a murderer seemed like a small price to pay for their peace and comfort.

The gavel struck Walsh in the head and the judge’s words poured out of his ears. Seth Farofeil Locke has served his life sentence and was free to go.

Days afterward Walsh moved through the world like a ghost. His eyes were blank, and he responded to others in mere mumbles. It was as if the life had drained out of him. He didn’t tail Locke. He didn’t listen in on the inmate’s gossip. He didn’t believe it.

Locke, meanwhile, was more alive than he had been in the last century. He was getting around and talking to people. Not trading information either, he was really talking to them: sitting with them at lunch to discuss life outside, learning how to play poker (which he developed quite a knack for), even spending evenings at the library. The color had returned to Locke’s grey life.

At one point he had even gotten Tony Larone, Tony Larone the biggest meanest brick wall ever given sentience, Tony Larone the man who during Prohibition killed his two buddies after they ratted him out, Tony Larone who hadn’t smiled since Hoover was in office, to laugh. By Galgenvogel’s standards, it was a miracle.

The closer his release date came, the more Locke flourished and Walsh wilted. For the briefest moment he had considered calling in sick. Only for a moment though. He needed to see this to the end. It was what he was owed, for all those years that had been stole from him. It was hard though. Walsh’s lucidity was slipping. He kept seeing things; fire in the skies and snakes biting their own tails populated his waking and sleeping hours.

Two nights before release Locke was making more phone calls than any other inmate. He could be seen writing in a pad all across the prison and said he was working on his “escape plans”.

During a routine check in the library, before closing, Walsh found that pad. Open to the most recent page, written in cursive so ornate it looked like calligraphy:

Events of Importance: Civil War Abolition of slavery Forty-five hundred dead Indians 2 World Wars “Adam?” bombs

IMPORTANT! Remember to use “burn” cars, so mortals can’t track

Contacts (revised): Go to Toledo, by Walbridge Park. Meet Amon. Best bet to get into Hell. Make sure to bring necessary ingredients for Hellmouth

He walked to Locke’s cell and handed it to him.

None of it phased Walsh, who was so convinced the last week had been a dream that such blatant evidence which confirmed his decades-long conspiracy was clearly lazy effort on his subconscious’s part.

That was how Walsh was treating most of his day-to-day life, actually.

It wasn’t until he saw Locke finish writing the last curly “e” on his signature that reality came to drag Walsh into the terrible present. That was it. The last bit of paperwork, the last performative bureaucracy needed to prove to the world that Locke was no longer an inmate. All he needed to do was wait for the bus.

For no real reason, except perhaps shock, Walsh sat across from him in the waiting room. Soon, when the officer at the front desk left (“it’s seven am, not like anything’s going to happen in here”) they were alone, together.

Locke, in denim from toe to tip two sizes bigger than his body, looked out the window at the rising sun and the gathering storm clouds. Red dominoes slipped between his fingers faster than the eyes could see.

Walsh simply looked at the floor.

Why am I so beat up about this? He couldn’t find an answer. Locke was the devil. He should be glad to see him leave and slam the door on the way out.

But… did he ever do anything particularly devilish? Not that Walsh could recall. There was the arrest record and the archives being burned. And the writing pad with his plans to go to Hell. Aside from that though, Locke never gave Walsh any problems. Locke even spared Walsh the verbal lacerations he so readily gave out to others.

They weren’t friends. No, Locke was his nemesis. His villain. Walsh watched over him for years, decades even. He’d known Locke for too long. Longer than anyone, really. Longer than his work buddies. Longer than his neighbors. Longer than his wife.

They couldn’t be friends. Just because they’d known each other for so long didn’t mean they were friends. Walsh wasn’t friends with his kids. The brats hated him! A friend was someone you knew. Someone you set boundaries with and met with every day. Which. Walsh did do. There was probably no one alive that knew Locke as well as he did.

Friends enjoyed each other’s company though. Did Walsh enjoy Locke’s company? It was so rare that they weren’t surrounded by thugs and criminals that he didn’t really know. Perhaps, compared to the rest of the trash at Galgenvogel, Walsh did remember Locke with something akin to fondness. Maybe Locke would too.

Galgenvogel. Locke and Galgenvogel, the two were intertwined in Walsh’s head. And Walsh liked his job at the prison. Even with the bruises and scrapes he wouldn’t give up a minute of it. Now that he thought about it, Locke was an integral part of that. He was challenging. No other person had ever put Walsh through such a rigamarole as Locke did. Walsh liked that challenge.

Were they friends?

Something clicked in his head. He was sad to see Locke go. A part of Walsh was leaving through that door with him.

Maybe when Locke got his feet on the ground they could meet up, outside of the prison. That would be nice, he reflected. Walsh had never mentioned his work to his family, but that was a good thing. He didn’t want to introduce them all to Locke the Jail Devil, he wanted them to meet Locke the friend.

Wind and the smell of rain tore into the waiting room as the door opened. The bus driver stumbled through, chilled to the bone. Every evidence of that morning’s sun was gone, replaced with rain so cold it nearly froze on contact. The bus was in dire need of fuel so the inmates, or inmate as it were, could wait inside for a little bit longer.

Locke asked if he could wait on the bus.

“’S cold as dick, but if you wanna freeze I won’t stop you.”

The bus driver headed out into the cold once more as Locke stood up, slinging his bag over his shoulder.

Spurred on by emotions unfamiliar to him, Walsh cried out “Wait!”

Locke didn’t bother to look back, but he did stop moving.

Gathering up every atom of emotional intelligence within him (which wasn’t very much) he tried to come up with a speech on the spot.

Then, Walsh said, “Before you go, I, uh, wanted to tell you something. I know you’re the devil. Or, a devil, I’m not really sure how all that works. Maybe should have paid more attention during church. But I also know you’re not as bad as all that. Throughout all the years I’ve known you, you’ve been nothing but a stand-up gentleman. And I’ve known you for quite a few years! More than half of my life to be honest. In that time, I think I’ve really gotten to know you. Really know you. So, all I’m saying is, if you ever stop by Chicago, you’d be welcome at my home. I don’t care if it’s a sin because your friendship has been worth it.”

Sweat poured off Walsh’s brow. That took more effort than he thought, he wasn’t sure how the actors did it.

Locke stood stock-still. Walsh’s perspiration began to feel like ice-cold water.

Silence stole the sound from the room. Even the clock’s tick was hushed. The only sound at all was the hazy ghost of Walsh’s speech.

Locke broke the silence, “You think we’re friends?”

If the flow of the universe were a song, his voice sounded like a discordant string killing the rhythm..

“You really think that?”

Now he had turned around. Walsh’s stomach turned sour.

“I knew you were stupid Walsh, but really? Has dementia climbed into your hollow skull already? I’m not joking is there genuinely something wrong with you?”

Though Locke spoke no quieter than a whisper in his calm, mocking tone, every word rang in Walsh's ears louder than a church-bell.

“There has to be. Why else would you think that any sane person would ever consider you a friend?”

Walsh had sat back down, trying to stammer out an apology. His voice was too quiet though, everything he said was drowned out by Locke.

“I’ve got it. You don’t know how abhorrent of a person you are. Well, allow me to add a disregard for reality to your list of mental deficiencies. Fortunately, unlike all of your other personal failings, this one I can fix.”

From where Walsh was, Locke seemed to loom over him. Shadows from outside crept through the windows and flanked him, making him seem all the taller.

“Of all the human beings I have encountered here, you are the worst. The thinnest, lowest scrapings at the bottom of the barrel of humanity, and that’s saying a lot. For a century I have been sitting in this stone midden surrounded by all sorts of gnats. I was told this place was a cage for the worst they had to offer. And yet? Most of them are shmucks, no worse than every other asshole out there, just the ones unlucky enough to get caught.”

Locke’s head scraped the ceiling, and his feet cracked the tiles of the floor.

“Even when I was in the very blackest of pits with actual monsters did I ever encounter one as repugnant as you. You willingly came here, not to preach justice and peace and kissing your grandma on the cheek, but to fight and strike and kill other men. The fact you’re in a prison is only an excuse to get away with it.”

Walsh tried to shrink back, dive into the crease between the chair's back and seat, but Locke grabbed him and held him in his hand. Everything was dark, but Locke stood blazing bright commanding Walsh's attention. All he could do was faintly whisper “No…”

“No? I’ve seen you Walsh. I’ve seen the shine in your eyes as you beat men to an early grave. You don’t care what they did. You willingly sign up to drag them off to the electric chair. You’re an old man and you still come here every night salivating for the chance to show how big and tough you are to some scared sap who stepped out of line. To remind them of how stronger you are than them. I bet you’ve jerked yourself off thinking of that feeling.”

He felt an irritation in his pants, like a hand made of brambles had grabbed his unmentionables. Walsh tried, unsuccessfully, to blink the tears out of his eyes.

“I was planning on leaving this place to go to Hell Walsh. Hell. But as I am standing here looking at your flaccid, dickless form, a thought has crossed my mind. You’re going to end up there. If I go to Hell, I will probably see you there. And now, I’m having second thoughts. Is it worth it, to continue this plan I’ve been working on for the last century, if I have to suffer the misery of being in your presence again?”

Locke was a giant now. His hair stood up and twisted like plumes of flame, his hands twisted into eagle’s claws. Between wolf-like teeth venom dribbled from his mouth.

“You are lucky I don’t have a choice. If I could, I would dive into the grave and burn every forest and scorch every sea so that I wouldn’t have to see you.”

Acting on impulse, with his last bit of strength, Walsh rose up and struck Locke. He faltered, for a moment. Then, Walsh looked down at his hand and saw how feeble of a gesture it was. Walsh hadn’t even reached half-way.

“You're as strong as an ant and as loud as a spider Walsh. I could kill you with my thumb, but you're so disgusting it wouldn't make a difference. Nobody would even notice you were gone."

A third voice came from the door. "Uh... bus is ready."

The bus-driver had walked in, wondering what was taking them so long. He found the inmate, excuse me, former inmate, talking to the guard, who looked terrified out of his mind. Weirded him out something fierce.

Shadows retreated behind their master like faithful dogs and the room returned to its previous state. No sign of the insidiousness from before could be seen.

Locke grabbed his things and left without saying another word.

Walsh only noticed he was gone when he heard the firing up of the engine and saw the bus leave Galgenvogel's gates for the last time.

As the bus left, the front-desk guard came back. No one was in the waiting room. Which was weird, since Walsh should have passed him on his way back. The chair he sat in was empty, save for a small wet patch on the seat. Later, he would call for the janitor to clean it. Later still, he would have thought it worrying that Walsh wasn’t anywhere to be found, except he was a little preoccupied with the world ending.

On the long stretch of highway between Chicago and Toledo, there's nothing to see. There isn't even a "whole lot of nothing", that would be much too imaginative and witty to describe the eye-watering boringness of the road.

Standing out like oases in the Sahara are the few towns you get the pleasure of driving through on your way there. Compared to the start of the drive and the destination they're nothing to sneeze at, but after a couple of hours behind the steering wheel they seem like tiny spots of Heaven.

In one such town, no more than a clump of streets shooting off from the stem of the highway, Ma and Pa's corner-store makes a modest living. Most of their customers are travelers desperate for a reason to stop driving or locals ready to spend an hour chatting with the owners, the eponymous Ma and Pa, while picking up a little grocery.

Because they were on the road they got a lot of people. Truckers, business trips, family-outings, reunions, the local sheriff, census workers, teenagers, and even the odd honeymooners.

They'd never seen one like this before.

Ma had been at the front for a few hours catching up on her stories when she'd heard the tinkly bell of the doors. As soon as she finished customarily thanking him for coming in, she was tearing across the pages of the Yellow-Book looking for the number of the nearest sheriff's department. Something set her nerves off.

It wasn’t the way he was dressed (which made him look like he’d escaped from prison). It wasn’t the way he talked (like a heathen). Nor was it his attitude (which put Ma in mind of those no-good greasers she saw on the telly). She couldn’t put her finger on it, but it just felt like, when he walked into the store, she felt the inexplicable urge to punch him.

The wind outside wasn’t helping her nerves either. As soon as he’d come in it had picked up, and now it was rattling the door. Bird feeders and wind chimes tried to use metal wings to fly away.

Before skulking off he drawled out, "You got candles and salt? Last dump pointed in this direction for 'em."

Ma, barely fending off the beginning of a heart-attack, pointed towards aisles three and five.

He grabbed one of the shopping baskets, knocking six of them over in the process, and walked off.

A cluck made her eye twitch. As if that hadn't been enough, for God knows what reason he'd walked in with a chicken tucked beneath his right arm. This was probably the detail that made her ignore all the warning flags and sent her into a murderous rampage. The mere thought of having to clean up chicken mess from the floor made her fingers itch towards the club under the register.

She'd expected to smell alcohol on him, but the smell filling her nostrils was more like burnt pitch, or a campfire.

Ma was having trouble deciding whether or not he was breaking out of prison to rob them or coming back from some hippy commune to sneakily pilfer something but figured the sheriff could handle either option.

In the backroom Pa sat in his chair watching the chattering television, completely unaware. The way he was looking at it made her blood boil even more. Shame on him for watching that damned thing more closely than the services at church, oblivious to the fact that we are in the midst of being robbed!

She moves to wave at him, hoping he'll notice her, but stops once the stranger walks towards the counter with his purchases.

Regaining her composure, she says on instinct, "Will this be everything?"

He mutters "sure" without looking her in the eyes, instead gazing at the swirling clouds outside. Only the last vestiges of human decency keep her from tearing his limbs off.

Ma would never consider herself a criminal, but she possessed a long and extensive knowledge of heists, robberies, and murders after reading several hundred crime novels throughout the latter half of her life. Even she was stumped as to what crime he could commit with five novelty Christmas candles, a bag of salt, and a chicken.

While ringing up his purchases, she tries to look at his coat to see if there were any bulges that hadn't been there before. But it appeared he had stolen nothing. Nothing that she could see at least.

She does notice that, in his free hands were a small rucksack with nothing but spare change, a slip of paper with a phone number on it, and a pair of dominoes with red markings on them. And his wallet, from which he fished out a five-dollar bill.

"Two twenty-five is your total, would you like a bag to put this in, sir?" He didn't deserve a dear now, much less a dearie.

"Yes, if you'd so please."

She put the strange things in his bag and tried to swipe the peanut bowl away from the chicken, who was pecking at it to get closer. This and the rough, automated noise of the receipt printing only served to worsen her temper.

Just standing next to him made her stomach turn. Which was odd, because, when she got a better look at him, he was quite good looking. If he shaved the curtains over his eyes, he actually reminded Ma of one of her old flings. Back before she was Ma, before she met Pa, when she hung around the wrong crowd.

Together they’d been the talk of the town. Her own mother hated him, which just made him all the more attractive. No boy she’d ever met before had his own car. He’d even let her drive it all the way out to Chicago.

Which made it all the more heartbreaking when he drove up to prom with her sister. Ma stood in front of them in disbelief, and they walked past her without even a ‘how do you do’. It made her so mad.

When she got home, she tore her sister’s room apart. Broke all of her nails clawing the wallpaper and ripping the pillows to shreds. Throwing paint into her wardrobe. Flooding her restroom. Putting a bit of rat poison into the cat’s dinner bowl…

A knock against the window made her look up. There was a crack in the glass.

She looked around, but the wind outside was so violent that it must have carried whatever broke the glass just as fast as it brought it. Ma shivered. She had the willies, the creeps, and the heebie-jeebies all at once.

The receipt was cold, the ink dried. Ma looked over, but the man was gone. She was alone. Just like the night of prom.

Next to her, the sunglass rack spun and nearly gave her a start. Her stranger was standing next to it, with a look of such genuine mystification that you’d think he had never seen a pair before.

In fact, Locke had never seen a pair of sunglasses before. Certain fashion trends had eluded him while imprisoned. The officers weren't allowed to wear them while working, and the inmates only got them if they were working outside.

Spectacles he'd seen before, but the tinted glass framed by wired metal seemed so astoundingly simple he wondered why no one had done it earlier. He wondered why he didn't do it earlier.

Something that obscures your face without hiding it, were the first thoughts on his mind. The second, third, and fourth whizzed by so fast that they could not be recorded in print.

He spun the rack around, marveling at the different types, until he found one that spoke to him.

A pair tinted so brilliantly rainbow that you could see nothing through them. Locke slipped one of the domino-like objects from his left hand and placed them beneath the glasses. Looking down, through his right eye, he couldn't even see their silhouette.

Ma, in the process of extending her neck vertebrae so she could see what the stranger was doing, nearly cried out when a shriek so loud it rung her ears pierced the air. The shocked woman rubbed her ears, not sure if that was the lightning outside or some sort of shrill laughter.

He turned around, glasses set firmly on his face and asked, "How much for these?" His teeth were as bright and sharp as a fork of lightning.

She responded weakly, clutching her chest, "A dollar."

Looking at the change in her hand, "Well then, I reckon you can keep the rest of that!"

With a spring in his step, he grabbed all of his things and left the store. The swing of the door once again knocked over the shopping baskets, excluding the one he walked out with.

Ma did a few things when he left as soon as she was sure she couldn't hear his footsteps in the distance.

First, she screamed at the top of her lungs.

Second, she put the rest of the change in the cashier.

Third, she scoured the path he walked, looking desperately for a speck, an atom of that chicken or its droppings.

Once she was content that her store was clean, she, Fourth, went to go holler at Pa.

During this entire exchange, Pa, the doting husband of Ma for fifty years, was only visible as the back of a head outlined by the white glow of the television he was watching. Normally the two ran the shop together, but during their long periods of down time he liked to watch the TV while his wife read her stories. They kept the TV in the backroom, so he wouldn't be tempted to watch it on the job.

In any other circumstance he would get up and go to the front counter with his wife when he heard the little bell of the door. When Ma opened the backroom's door fully, he was still glued to the TV's screen.

She grabs him by his shoulders, dragging him towards the phone at the counter.

"Henry, I don't know why you didn't come in, but there was a hippy in our store, and he robbed us! I want you to get on that telephone and call the sheriff right now-"

"Judith-"

"He just left, but mark my words I bet he's heading to Chicago-"

"Judith-"

"Oh, I was this close, this close to getting the broom out and walloping him-"

"Judith there's something on the tele-"

"Yes Henry? Yes, I bet you know all about it. Honestly, the way you were looking at it, you'd think it married you instead-"

"You need to see this honey-"

"Oh, and he's got some damned chicken from the Hicken's farm, I don't know what he's planning on doing with it, but mark my words it's nothing good-"

"JUDITH."

Pa shouts, making the entire store seem so much more silent. Ma makes to get at him but stops when she notices the shell-shocked expression on his face. He looked more scared than he'd ever been in his life. Taking his wife by the arm, he shows her to the backroom, to the tiny black and white screen.

Images and videos flash across it, every channel dominated by the same headlines. 'MONSTERS SEEN ACROSS AMERICA', 'SEA-LINER TORN APART', 'WEIRD SYMBOLS SEEN IN SKY', 'GIANT FIGURES STAND OVER LONDON' and countless more. On their own local station, the reporter acts on instinct, relaying all the news in a stammering panic. Monstrous beings and supernatural entities are being spotted all over the world, with disasters playing out in real-time. Volcanoes, earthquakes, tidal waves, storms, it's as if the very earth were waking up and releasing beasts from beneath the surface. Tears dot the reporter's eyes as news of carnage slowly devolves into unintelligible sobbing at the last headline, 'THE END OF THE WORLD'.

This all goes unheard. Soon the reporter falls onto the ground like the couple in their store. A sound tears across the sky, louder than anything in the world. Ma and Pa clutch their ears as they feel their own skeletons vibrate in tune with the sky's scream. All they can do is watch deafened from the floor at the other's expressions of pain, holding each other close.

Outside on the highway, cars have stopped, many crashing into each other. Drivers and passengers alike release horrified screams as they begin to feel the universe's dying moans drill into their skulls. Hundreds of thoughts swirl together, thoughts of the terrible, imminent end to life as they knew it, all suddenly realizing that they were unprepared for it. In their car-seats children wail with their parents, unable to come to understand the finality of life, but still just as scared. Of all the people in the road, only one can hear it all.

Locke walks down towards the city in the distance, ignoring the screams. All the panic choking the hearts of the mortals on the highway is, to him, one more straw on the proverbial camel's back. It'd take more than that to break his camel. He hadn't spent a literal century sitting on his ass to run around screaming like a baby after the first sign of the end of the world. Besides, the world wasn’t ending. He would know if it were ending. It was simply getting more interesting.

The hen can't hear it either. To her, humans were doing weird, distressing human things. Rainwater plasters her feathers down, making her a sodden heap unable to escape the creature’s grasp.

Locke tests out his reflection in the shiny black window of a truck lying upended in a ditch. To the best of his ability he can't see his own eyes past the rainbow reflection.

The man who was driving the truck begins trying to crawl through the window, cutting himself on the broken glass. Locke does not try to help him.

"These things are a damn life-saver."

He once again models them for himself, but the glasses fall off the bridge of his nose to the grass. Locke gets on his knees and gropes around for them.

Once he stands up, he finds the dominoes still in their place.

"Gonna have to do something about that."

Locke walks past the people, recovering from their twenty seconds of utter hell. They take no notice of him and he does likewise. Blood fills the nostrils of the hen, who begins wiggling in his grasp. The grip on her tightens, doing nothing to calm her down but making her move around less.

With a knife, which he did indeed steal from Ma and Pa, Locke carves a few tiny symbols into the thick temples of the glasses without looking at them.

After they're drawn, he takes the hen's neck and makes a slight incision on her forehead. Blood pools fast as he wets his finger in the red liquid. The minuscule symbols are coated in a small layer of blood, activating, so to speak.

Locke bends down ninety degrees, yet the glasses stay on. He shoots back up, throwing his head from side to side, and they stay glued to his face.

"Perfect."

Today would have been perfect too, were it not for Walsh. He’d had the entire day planned and all it took was his dumb ass to sour it all for Locke.

Light shone through the clouds.

By coincidence, rainbow-shaded lenses looked up and met their match. Further along the road, the clouds were clearing from Toledo and the rain met with the sun, forming a real rainbow. From where he stood it looked like the bridge to a new era.

Locke smiled. Oh well. It wouldn’t do to let one little mortal ruin his big day. Now that his punishment was over, it was time to show all those assholes what a real bad guy looked like. First though, he had to go take his purchases and make a few calls down-under.

And Locke didn't know any Australians.

#short story #literature #prologue #tdg #locke #devil #demon #satan #apocalypse #armageddon #halloween #acronym pending #now with cover art

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whovian223 · 4 years

Text

It’s week 3 of our weekly look through the Boardgame Geek Top 100 to see what games I’ve played and which ones I may be interested in playing.

Last week I got educated about Dominion, maybe even enough to try it again some day.

What will this week bring?

Maybe a treatise on train games?

You got that in you, Dave? (let’s see if he reads this…)

I picture Dave like this.

Let’s see if he even sees this…if so, I’m sorry.

Anyway, this week there are a lot more that I’ve played, and some good stuff in here.

And some…well, not so good stuff. At least for me.

So let’s get started!

#80 – Roll for the Galaxy (Rio Grande Games) – 2014

Designers: Wei-Hwa Huang, Thomas Lehmann

Artists: Martin Hoffmann, Claus Stephan, Mirko Suzuki

Roll for the Galaxy is the dice version of Lehmann’s Roll for the Galaxy, but it is so much more than that.

No screenshots of the app yet, so have to make do with boring pictures of the tabletop game

Each player will get a set number and type of dice depending on their starting world development that they choose at the beginning of the game. These dice will then be rolled and secretly used to activate actions.

You get points based on the points on the tiles that you build, whether they are developments or worlds that you colonize (just like the card game) but you have to assign dice to these tiles on your player sheet. Each tile takes the number of dice equal to the point value to put them into your tableau. If you don’t build it in one shot, those dice are trapped until you do.

When you assign your dice, you have to choose one action to activate (Explore, Develop, Settle, Produce and Ship). You can use any die to activate an action, but all subsequent dice assigned to that action have to actually have that action’s symbol (there are ways around that, of course).

If somebody else chose an action that you have dice for, you get to use those dice as well, but if nobody did, they go back into your cup.

I really like this game a lot, and it’s a shame that I haven’t played it since 2017. It just hasn’t come out to the table since then and the one guy who owns it hasn’t been to our game day in quite a while.

I have played some games on Boardgame Arena, though, which is nice.

Here’s hoping I do get it to the table again soon!

#79 – Russian Railroads (Z-Man Games) – 2013

Designers: Helmut Ohley, Leonhard “Lonny” Orgler

Artists: Martin Hoffmann, Claus Stephan

Two entries in a row with Hoffmann & Stephan art!

Russian Railroads is a game that breaks my brain, though part of that is because I tried to figure it out on Boardgame Arena a few times.

It never really made that much sense to me, but I think I have an inkling of what’s going on in the game.

I’m just terrible at optimizing actions.

Needless to say, I’ve never played it on the table, though it has shown up at a couple of game days in the last year or so.

There’s just been something else I wanted to play instead.

Essentially you’re trying to build the best railway network in Russia (I assume, based on the name).

From BGG:

“The development of simple tracks will quickly bring the players to important places, while the modernization of their railway network will improve the efficiency of their machinery. Newer locomotives cover greater distances and factories churn out improved technology. Engineers, when used effectively, can be the extra boost that an empire needs to race past the competition.”

There are three tracks that you’re trying to extend, but you’re also trying to make them good tracks, as well as doing other things. There are multiple paths to victory (so they say) and like most games where that’s the case, I always found myself doing a little of everything and thus falling way behind.

I wouldn’t mind trying this once just to see if I can wrap my head around it when I can physically manipulate the pieces.

However, it’s not that urgent.

If I never get the chance to play it, I won’t be that heart-broken.

Fans of the game, tell me why I should play this as soon as possible.

And then maybe I’ll do it.

#78 – Codenames (Czech Games Edition) – 2015

Designer: Vlaada Chvátil

Artists: Stéphane Gantiez, Tomáš Kučerovský, Filip Murmak

I’m not big into party games for some reason. Maybe I’m just an anti-fun guy, I don’t know.

Codenames is a party game in that there are two teams of multiple players and they’re both trying to make contact with their agents by using the clues that the clue-giver on the team says to try and identify the words on the table that match their agents.

A number of cards with words are laid out in a 5×5 grid. The clue-givers on each team have a layout of which cards are their agents and which ones aren’t. They give one-word clues and say how many of the cards they are referencing with that clue.

The other players have to then try to guess, but if they choose one of the opposing team’s agents, they their turn ends and that helps the other team because they have fewer agents to identify. If they choose an innocent bystander, their turn just ends.

If they choose their own, then they can keep guessing. If either team accidentally chooses the assassin, they lose.

The starting team has 9 agents to identify while the other team has 8.

Whoever identifies all of their agents first wins!

Codenames is a fun little game but it’s not something that really grabbed me that hard. I’m not that great at deduction games and I am a terrible clue-giver in this one. I haven’t played it since 2016 (back when I was less diligent taking pictures, as I couldn’t find one!) and I have no aching desire to do so either.

Of course, it’s moved on now with multiple variations of the same thing (Marvel, Disney, etc), including a 2-player cooperative game!

So many��Codenames, so little time.

#77 – Architects of the West Kingdom (Renegade Games Studios/Garphill Games) – 2018

Designers: Shem Phillips, S J Macdonald

Artist: Mihajlo Dimitrievski

On the other hand, how about one of my Top 10 games played of all time?

Yeah, that would be Architects of the West Kingdom, a game that I’ve reviewed here (and people really seem to gravitate towards it as it now has my second-highest view count on this blog)

Blue didn’t build much, I see…

Go check out the review if you want to know how to play, but why do I like it so much?

I love the “place workers to get resources and the more workers you have there, the more you get but somebody might come and capture all of them to weaken you again” mechanic (say that 3 times fast!). I love the apprentices and how they work to make your actions even better, or at least help you build more buildings.

I love the Black Market and how Virtue can get you points but also can affect whether you can either build in the Church or visit the Black Market (though come on, in reality if you are too virtuous to visit the Black Market you would find a way to get somebody to go for you).

Everything just goes together so well and it’s a blast to play. And it doesn’t even take that long either.

The University adornment gets you a new building card and 2 more points! The Smithy adornment gets you three stone immediately and also 2 more points.

I only have one play of the game with the Age of the Artisans expansion, but I think it will make this game go up even higher in my esteem (if that’s possible).

After you’re done reading this review, go try a game of this however you can. See if you think I’m right.

Because I am.

#76 –Marvel Champions: the Card Game (Fantasy Flight Games) – 2019

Designers: Michael Boggs, Nate French, Caleb Grace

Artists: N/A

I first (and only) played this game at OrcaCon in January and while it ain’t no Marvel Legendary it is kind of fun in its own right.

It’s a totally cooperative game where you all play a Marvel hero (I believe there are 4 in the basic box?) that will be teaming up with other heroes to defeat the nasty villains and their schemes.

The base box comes with Captain Marvel, Black Panther, Spider-Man, and Iron Man but you can buy multiple expansion packs with new cards, new heroes, new villains, and stuff like that.

It was a fun game and I liked how it scales based on the number of players (basically each player draws a card from the villain deck at the end of their turn and has to face what happens, so fewer players means that fewer cards come out.

I just have a thing about Living Card Games (LCGs). I don’t want to be constantly buying new stuff, even though I do like that you know what the new stuff will be rather than buying random Magic: the Gathering packs.

The Marvel Champions packs seem to just add new scenarios and heroes and stuff. I don’t think they add cards for the original heroes (though maybe they do? Somebody please tell me).

The other LCGs that I took a look at, namely Arkham Horror: the Card Game, while you can play with the suggested decks it also has deck customization options as well. I don’t want to construct a deck before each scenario/story and that along with having to buy more and more stuff to get the varied content has just turned me off to the whole concept.

However, as a standalone experience, Marvel Champions was a fun game to play and I wouldn’t turn down the opportunity to play it again.

LCGs just don’t really appeal to me in general as far as playing multiple times.

Somebody tell me what I’m missing.

#75 – Aeon’s End (Indie Boards & Cards) – 2016

Designer: Kevin Riley

Artists: Gong Studios, Stephanie Gustafsson, Scott Hartman, Daniel Solis

Aeon’s End is a cooperative card game where you are trying to defend a town from ancient evil (or maybe just evil in general).

You will choose a Nemesis which will come with its own card deck and then up to 4 players.

There are a couple of interesting-sounding twists to this.

First, there is no shuffling. When you discard your hand, you choose the order it goes in. When you are out of cards, you just flip your discard pile over and start playing again. So you know exactly what cards are coming and when.

Secondly, who acts first, second, etc, is completely randomized. The bad guys could go twice in a row, or maybe it will end up being in order.

Who knows?

From the app, since I haven’t played this before

I have only played the Steam version of Aeon’s End and I know I’m having a devil of a time trying to figure out how to play this and win. I know the basic rules (or can pick them up again, as I haven’t played in a while), but I get my ass kicked every time I play.

It’s starting to hurt.

I wouldn’t mind trying this on the table once, especially with somebody who’s played it before and can coach me.

Because otherwise, there’s no way to win.

When a village sees me coming to protect it, they start setting up their wills and everything because they know they’re going to die.

#74 – Patchwork (Lookout Games) – 2014

Designer: Uwe Rosenberg

Artist: Klemens Franz

Patchwork is a 2-player tile-laying game where you are trying to fill a grid (quilt) with a bunch of different misshapen pieces of cardboard (fabric). You are collecting buttons that will then enable you to take one of up to three pieces that are available to you (depending on how many buttons they cost).

At the end of the game, your points will be the number of buttons you have minus points for any missing squares on your grid.

I have to say that tile-laying “Tetris-shaped pieces” games don’t really do a lot for me.

When I first (and only time) played it on the table back in March 2016, I didn’t really care for it that much.

I don’t like spatial puzzles and this was the ultimate in spatial puzzles.

Then I played the app.

Wow, man, I fell in love with it.

Sure, I still suck at it and probably will never win a game.

But I decided that it didn’t matter. I really really like it.

So much so that I have finally bought a copy (when 401 Games is able to get it to me).

I’ll be able to let you know more a little later whether the game on the table holds up or not.

I’m really looking forward to it, actually.

#73 – Agricola – Revised Edition (Lookout Games) – 2016

Designer: Uwe Rosenberg

Artist: Klemens Franz

It’s a Lookout Games/Uwe Rosenberg/Klemens Franz twofer!!!!!

Yes, we have another Uwe game with Klemens art but they couldn’t be any more different.

Agricola is the first of Uwe’s many “place workers (family members) somewhere to get something, and then don’t forget to feed them at the end or bad things will happen” games (For some reason I have trouble shortening these descriptions).

In it, you’re running a family farm, trying to build up your farmhouse, raise many sorts of animals and plant your crops.

Each round an additional space opens up for you to place your worker, where you can get resources, food, animals or crops to then sow in your plowed fields.

At the end of a certain number of rounds, you have to have enough food to feed all of your family members.

Don’t worry, nobody dies. You just have to beg for food (and lose points).

Might be more fun if somebody did die.

It would be an Ameritrash game then!

I have never played this game on the table, but I have played the app of the original version (this revised edition came out in 2016).

I’m honestly not really sure what the Revised Edition does.

I really don’t enjoy this game that much. The idea of feeding your family is ok (and has been done in many games since) but it’s a very punishing game.

I have never been able to figure this one out. I have played its sister game, Caverna, and it’s much more pleasurable to me (though I still haven’t played it in a long time). Caverna isn’t quite as punishing with the feeding mechanism and that makes me feel less trapped.

I’ve played this on the app recently and unfortunately it still doesn’t agree with me.

Sorry to you fans.

#72 – Troyes (Pearl Games) – 2010

Designer: Sébastien Dujardin, Xavier Georges, Alain Orban

Artists: Sébastien Dujardin, Xavier Georges, Alain Orban, Alexandre Roche

I played this game once on the table but have played many games on Boardgame Arena since then.

This is a dice rolling and drafting (kind of) game where you are managing your own section of the population of this famous city (pronounced “Twah” for those uninitiated). This population is in the form of dice depending on what regions you have your people stationed: Religious, Civil or Military.

You roll your dice and then the first thing everybody has to do is beat off invasions using some of their dice.

Remaining dice are then used to do various actions around the city (or out in the countryside where you may use them to cancel bad stuff that’s sitting out there). You can even buy your opponents’ dice because you need more and you don’t want them to have them.

That can be a mean thing.

It’s a game I enjoy but don’t love, and I haven’t had much of an urge to get it to the table again (not that I could without buying it, as I don’t think anybody I know has it anymore).

It’s fun enough, though, and I’m always willing to play an asynchronous game on BGA, but it’s not something I’m burning to play again any time soon.

I do like the dice drafting mechanics and how you can place your workers in a bunch of different areas to make actions more efficient (as well as possibly get points for them at the end of the game).

I really like how you can buy other players’ dice too.

Overall, I think it’s worthy of its spot in the Top 100 even if it wouldn’t be in mine (well, maybe it would since I’ve only played something like 350 games, but you know what I mean).

#71 – Battlestar Galactica: the Board Game (Fantasy Flight Games) – 2008

Designer: Corey Konieczka

Artists: Kevin Childress, Andrew Navaro, Brian Schomburg, WiL Springer

And now we come to almost the ultimate hidden traitor game, a game that sounds so cool that I really want to play it.

Sadly, I never have.

And it’s not for lack of opportunity, because I have seen it being set up at conventions and stuff.

It just intimidates the crap out of me, partially because of the deduction aspect and partially because it can take 2-3 hours to play. Every time I’ve had the opportunity, something has just told me “no, you need to leave yourself open to other stuff” and I back away slowly.

Maybe I’m a Cylon in disguise and I just don’t know it?

It’s a semi-cooperative game because you are trying to get the Humans to safety, but some of you (at least one, I think, and perhaps more than one?) are Cylons hidden for years without even knowing about it, programmed to doom humanity.

Do you hide the fact that you’re a Cylon or do you just go balls to the wall and try to kill everybody?

Those sound like exciting decisions.

If I ever get back to a con and I see this being set up (or if it’s a scheduled game), I need to sit down and play it.

Scratch that itch, fulfill that dream, kill that human get the humans to Earth.

Crap, that was supposed to be a “delete,” not “strikethrough”

I have revealed myself.

Run for your lives!!!!

So we’ve reached the end of another week. I’ve played 6 this week with one on Boardgame Arena and one on Steam (also an iOS app if you don’t count the Revised Edition). Not too bad.

That makes 13 that I’ve played “officially” (on the table) out of the bottom 30. Almost 50%

Will that go up or down next week?

I guess you’ll have to tune in and find out.

What do you think of these games? Love them? Hate them? Good enough for Cylons but not you?

Is there something I really need to play in there?

Let me know in the comments.

Posts in this Series:

#100-91 #90-81 #80-71

Boardgame Geek Top 100 - Played or Play? 80-71 #boardgames @riograndegames @Zmangames_ @FFGames @czechgames @PlayRenegade @garphillgames @IBCGames It's week 3 of our weekly look through the Boardgame Geek Top 100 to see what games I've played and which ones I may be interested in playing.

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mattmatros · 4 years

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Bill vs. Phil, Revisited

Trapped in our homes, with online poker still not available in much of the country, many of us have become more poker fan than poker player this spring. But luckily we fans are about to receive a much-needed gift straight from the Ghost of Poker Past.

In the summer of 2010, Dr. Bill Chen—math PhD, personal friend, and all-around genius (although he seems to lose his cash or his phone roughly every other day)—faced the great Phil Ivey heads-up for a bracelet in the $3k HORSE event at the World Series of Poker. Late in the match, the following hand came up during the Limit Hold ’Em round.

Bill raised from the small blind button and Phil called from the big blind. Phil led with a bet on the flop of As Th 2h and Bill called. Phil continued with a bet on the 9c turn, and then Bill raised. Phil called and checked the 7h river. Bill bet, Phil check-raised, and Bill folded. Action-packed hand, no? Don’t you wish you knew what they both had?

Well, now we will. Reliable sources tell me all hole cards will be revealed during Bill’s appearance on Jennifer Shahade’s The GRID podcast. We’re about to get a glimpse into the ten-year-old strategies of two of the top Limit Hold ‘Em players at the time, and rumor has it the results are more than a little surprising!

In advance of the podcast, I thought I’d do an analysis the usual way—without knowing the hands. While Limit Hold ’Em is my best game, I don’t have a ton of experience with heads-up play, so cut me some slack if I miss a trick!

Preflop, Bill will be raising his button with around 90 percent of hands, and Phil will be defending his big blind with at least that many. About all we can say so far is that Bill cannot have the very worst starting hands (72o, 93o, etc.), and that Phil is unlikely to hold a premium hand like a big pair or a big ace. Three-betting from the big blind is much more common heads-up than in a ring game, and Phil would want to build the pot with his best holdings, but we can’t completely rule out the possibility that he is slowplaying for deception.

Phil’s lead on the As Th 2h gives a hint of just how ahead of his time Mr. Ivey was. Limit players in 2010 (and indeed, most players in the $40-$80 games I play in today) were extremely reluctant to lead out from the big blind into a raiser, especially on an ace-high board. We now know from seeing solver solutions that this play should be a fairly normal part of the arsenal, but in 2010 this was the bet of a confident, world-class player bucking “standard” lines. That said, it’s hard to narrow Phil’s range very much based on this bet. He’s probably weighted toward weak aces, flush draws, and other one-pair hands, but he could have just about anything with at least some frequency. There are a relatively large number of hands in Bill’s button range that he simply has to fold to a bet on this flop (undercards to the ten, random queen-highs, suited jacks without the backdoor draw, etc.), so Phil potentially has good bluffing value with any two cards getting 4-1 on his money.

Bill’s call tells us nothing except that he doesn’t have one of the folding hands I mentioned above. Bill would likely slowplay his monsters here, as I know he subscribes to the (very solid) idea that it’s good to disguise information in the first two betting rounds before the bets double in a Limit game. Bill could have anything from queen-high to a set, and he could have any backdoor flush draw or gutshot straight draw or better draw.

The turn is where it gets interesting, and where we can finally start to narrow the ranges. Phil continues with another bet when the 9c falls, which means we can now pretty much rule out his total bluffs. But he can probably still have any gutshot, open-ender, flush draw, or any of the made hands he led the flop with.

When Bill raises, suddenly his range goes from very wide to quite narrow. His minimum value hand is probably a strong ace—say AQ—or better. With any worse one pair hands or hands with showdown value like king-high, Bill probably just calls. Any open-ender or flush draw could potentially be in his semibluff range (note that Js8s, a hand with which Bill would’ve peeled the flop, is now an open-ender, as is QJ). If he raises with all those possible bluffs he would be raising too many hands and Phil would likely show a profit calling down with anything. So Bill has to keep his frequencies in mind when picking his semibluffs. Whether he will assign those frequencies based on some predetermined, game theoretically sound method like looking at his watch, or whether he will decide based on game flow or opponent tendencies, or whether he will pick only certain hands to bluff with is something only Bill knows for sure. If Bill took the last approach, then he could, for example, choose not to semibluff QJ, and give himself a balanced-looking raising range of Js8s, flush draws with no showdown value, and his strong hands.

Phil calls the raise, which probably means we can rule out the very strongest hands from his range, as top two pair or better would like to three-bet for value on this draw-heavy board. How stubborn will Phil get with his calling range? He is probably hanging on to almost any pair getting 6-1 on his money, but he can safely fold his weakest draws like the 54 or 43 gutshots. If he did bet the turn with any low pocket pairs, he can probably fold those as well, since they often have only two outs.

The 7h on the river completes the flush draw, and also completes two straight draws—86 (which is an unlikely holding for either player) and J8, which either player can plausibly have. After Phil checks, Bill will likely show down with his one pair hands, and maybe even with his weakest two pair hands on such a scary river. With a good two pair or better, though, he’ll be compelled to bet for value. And since all his flush draws have now converted to value bets, he can probably go ahead and bluff with any busted straight draws in his range. But if he doesn’t raise the turn with QJ, he really doesn’t have any bluffs here! This is an example of why it’s usually better to tweak frequencies than to pick and choose specific hands to bluff with. As long as Bill threatens to have QJ, then he has a few bluffs to go with all his value on his river. Bill did say on Twitter recently (with no memory of what he had, by the way!—we’re relying on his friend Matt Hawrilenko to remember Bill’s cards for us), that “with QJ I may not bluff vs Ivey, just show down. That’s why it’s a little inconsistent.”

Indeed, if Bill would show down QJ here, then it’s even harder to find his bluffs, which means that when Ivey check-raises the river and Bill folds, Bill would’ve had to have a value hand! It’s rare in Limit Hold ’Em that you bet for value and then fold to a raise, but it is definitely correct to have this plan occasionally. Did Bill really make a thin value bet with something like AQ, only to fold it to Ivey’s raise? It seems hard to believe, knowing how much Bill hates folding.

Phil has some obvious value hands in his raising range (namely flushes and straights), which means he can and should have some bluffs to go with them. Like Bill, Phil’s most likely bluffing hand is QJ, but it’s at least possible to imagine him also holding Q8 with some small frequency.

Knowing that the results are going to be “fun”, as the insiders seem to be saying, I’ll risk looking very silly and make a guess as to what they both had. Bill: QJ, Phil: Q8.

Looking forward to listening to the big reveal on The GRID!

Matt Matros is a three-time World Series of Poker bracelet winner, poker instructor, and the author of the strategy/memoir The Making of a Poker Player. His new book, The Game Plan, is available now from Amazon. Want to see how the Game Plan would apply to a hand you’ve played? Write Matt at [email protected].

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junker-town · 5 years

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Nick Bosa hasn’t even scratched the surface of the player he can be. Yikes!

Photo by Ric Tapia/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images

Retired NFL defensive end Stephen White finally has enough film to break down Bosa’s game — and there’s a lot to like about it.

As you probably know, I have been writing pre-draft breakdowns on some of the top NFL prospects for the last few years. During that time, I have been able to give my thoughts on a lot of good college players who went on to be selected in the first or second round. Because I was usually dealing with the cream of that year’s crop, it was important to me to be fair to all the draft prospects. While I strived to make each profile unique, there were rules I came up with to make sure that there were some common standards.

One of the rules I decided on was that I would only use tape from a player’s final season in college. The simple reasoning was that I had seen enough prospects look good one year and fall off the next, never to regain their mojo ever again. I only trust the impressions I can get from a player’s most recent action.

I also decided that I had to have access to at least three of their games, but ideally four or more. I just felt like any less than that and I wouldn’t have possibly been able to give a fair evaluation.

Following those rules over the years has meant I’ve missed out on doing breakdowns on several players, either because I couldn’t track down enough tape on them (seriously, if anybody has the plug to a college version of GamePass or something similar, holla atcha boy!) or because they got hurt during their last season of college football.

Such was the case with Nick Bosa this past spring. He only played in three games his last season at Ohio State because he had core surgery. For whatever reason, I could never track down the third game, which made it frustrating when he was projected as the top overall pick at one point. After flubbing his brother Joey’s pre-draft breakdown, I really wanted a second shot with Nick’s.

Nick Bosa didn’t end up going No 1; he “only” went a spot later to the San Francisco 49ers. Although he was hindered by an ankle injury for much of the preseason, it hasn’t taken Bosa long to bounce back and show everyone exactly why the 49ers picked him so high. After his breakout game in Week 5 against the Browns, it actually hit me that I now had plenty enough film to do a proper post-draft breakdown on him. It doesn’t make up for not being able to do the a draft profile of him, but at least I would be able to check out his game and explain to you noobs just how he is performing so far.

As you might imagine, there is a lot to like about his game.

What has impressed me the most is Bosa’s outsized power

The guy is 6’4 and almost 270 pounds, so he isn’t some runt to begin with, but when he comes off the ball he just looks like a man among boys. I am particularly impressed with his ability to use that power so effectively and efficiently early in his career. That helps him to maximize his production on the field.

As a run defender, I saw Bosa kicking tight ends’ asses whenever he lined up six-technique head up on them. I don’t think there are many, if any, tight ends currently in the NFL who can single-block him on a running play well. That’s just how strong he is.

Hell, most NFL offensive tackles would not only have a helluva time trying to move Bosa on a base block, a lot of them would end up smushed back in the hole and getting in the way of the runner. I’ve seen Bosa rag doll offensive tackles in every game he has played in so far as a pro.

Oh, and Bosa probably uses his power even more effectively as a pass rusher. He routinely starts off the game dump-trucking offensive tackles back into their quarterback. I am sure you probably saw that clip of him running right over Rams left tackle Andrew Whitworth early on in the game.

Well, you can turn on the film of the other four games and see Donovan Smith, John Jerry, Alejandro Villanueva, and Greg Robinson catch that wreck just like that, too. And Donald Penn, you on deck!

I swear, it seems like Bosa uses his bullrush early in the games to intimidate the offensive tackle for the rest of the day. After he gives them a few sips from a Tall Boy Can Of Whoop Ass, you could almost see offensive linemen start flinching once he starts to come toward them again. That’s usually when Bosa would start faking a power rush initially to set up his finesse moves. It is a very effective pass-rush plan because nobody wants to keep getting run slap over on national TV.

Those guys have families, after all!

Mind you, I’ve seen enough of Bosa on film now to know that if he wanted to, he could just as easily run around a lot of those blocks. That goes for when he is playing the run or rushing the passer. And he would still be able to make a lot of the same plays. However, while he could do it, Bosa seems more than happy to just keep physically dominating the guy across from him almost all game.

It makes perfect sense because the quickest way to the guy with the ball, whether it be a running back or the quarterback, is a straight line. And the truth is I have yet to see him not be able to crush any blocker that he wanted to.

Bosa has the look of a veteran pass rusher — sometimes better

Just like his brother, Joey, Nick came into the league already possessing outstanding technique. I don’t know if I have ever seen a rookie with any better, or more consistent, hand placement than Nick has shown in these first five games of his career — and that includes his older brother. That matters a lot because regardless of how strong you are, if your hands are all over the place, you generally won’t be able to use that power in any meaningful way against quality NFL offensive linemen.

That great hand placement goes a long way in allowing Bosa to stand his ground against the blocker, control them, then shed that block when it’s time to go make a play.

Bosa’s footwork has also been top notch, not just “for a rookie,” but period. When his assignment is to line up and play ball, he’s always taking a good, quick first step straight upfield before he reacts to what he sees. That means he isn’t guessing pre-snap, and he trusts his ability to read his keys and adjust accordingly.

When he’s running a line stunt, I see Bosa consistently gaining ground with his lateral step, then exploding upfield just like you draw it up on a white board or exactly like you would see on a training tape. That may not sound significant to you, but it’s little technique stuff like those examples that help Bosa put himself in a better position to make plays than a guy who isn’t as precise and intentional with their movements.

I have also been really impressed with the way Bosa runs pass-rush games with his linemates. He looks better running them than some of the veteran defensive linemen I watch every week.

Bosa appears to understand clearly that the better he sets the table for the penetrator, the more likely it is that they will both have an opportunity to get to the quarterback on that play. He even knows how to use his hands to flash at the offensive linemen to really force them to keep their focus on him, when all the while Bosa’s teammate is coming to earhole them. There are plenty of veteran pass rushers who haven’t shown themselves to have the kind of feel for rushing the passer that Bosa has already shown as a rookie.

As for his position flexibility, Bosa definitely looks most comfortable lining up on the right edge than anywhere else. However, the 49ers have moved him around a bit at times, and he’s more than held his own from wherever he has lined up.

In the first game of the year against the Buccaneers, the 49ers rotated him as the left edge rusher quite a bit, but that was probably just because he was a backup at that time. He hasn’t been over on the left side nearly as much in the games since, and normally Bosa only lines up there in passing situations.

Don’t get it twisted, though: he looked good over there, too.

He has also lined up as an interior pass rusher on few occasions in the first five games. For the moment, however, the 49ers are pretty stacked up and down their defensive line, and don’t really need him to pass rush from there all that much just yet. Especially when he is doing so well and being so disruptive pass rushing from the edges.

Don’t judge Bosa by his numbers

Some of you may not have seen him play yet and are wondering what the big fuss is over a guy who “only” has three sacks so far. Others might even assume he has gotten off to a “slow” start because his stats don’t necessarily jump off the screen. That’s why you have to see this guy to understand the effect he has on a game.

Bosa’s sacks numbers by themselves don’t come close to giving a full picture of his impact. It’s not even a good reflection of him as a pass rusher, to be honest.

For example, in addition to those three sacks, Bosa has an impressive 11 pressures. There have also been five other plays where Bosa beat his guy and forced the quarterback to scramble out of the pocket. And just fyi, there is definitely value in forcing most quarterbacks not named Russell Wilson to scramble against their will.

Bosa also had five other missed sack opportunities in the first five games of this season. These were plays where Bosa came free by either beating a blocker or perfectly executing a pass-rush game. He ended up missing the quarterback on all five of those occasions, but that doesn’t change the fact that he got to them in the first place.

Of those five missed sack opportunities, only once did the quarterback go on to complete a pass for a first down. One time he forced the quarterback into a sack by his teammate, another time he forced the quarterback to try (and fail) to run for the first down, a third time the quarterback threw an incomplete pass, and on the fourth occasion Bosa got back in the hunt and got one of those 11 pressures of his.

I will note that the overwhelming majority of those missed sacks came in the first three games, while Bosa was likely still trying to get his feet under him after missing so much time in the preseason. As the season has progressed, I’ve noticed him playing more under control, especially when a quarterback is in the vicinity. That should lead to more actual sacks in the near future.

There are still things for Bosa to work on, however

Having pointed out all of the great things about Bosa’s game, I do want to mention one area where I think he can still improve. He sometimes, but not often, has what I would refer to as a “lazy arm.”

When a guy is rushing the passer and he is trying to escape off the block to get a sack, one thing that will always help is finishing the move with whichever arm is closest to the blocker. I generally prefer pass rushers finish with a rip because I think it is the most effective escape move there is, but taller guys like Bosa can use arm overs to great effect at times, too.

Regardless of which move guys choose, they need to do something with that inside arm to finish. Otherwise, they risk giving the blocker the opportunity to recover and grab them by that same arm and hinder their progress to the quarterback.

When a guy doesn’t finish his rush with his inside arm, that’s what I mean by having a “lazy” arm. It hasn’t happened a ton, but I’ve seen Bosa not finish his rush with his inside arm enough times that I do think it could at least mildly affect his production. So instead of Bosa being completely free to chase the quarterback, he ended up several times on film having to try to reach out and grab the quarterback with his outside hand as he came around the edge, and that usually didn’t end with a pressure or a sack.

I suspect part of that is just rust from not being able to practice his craft in the preseason. For a guy whose technique was so good otherwise, I have to believe he will fix that real soon.

On the positive side, once he does get to where he is always finishing his finesse moves, I’m not exactly sure how any offensive tackle in the league will be able to handle Bosa by himself for more than maybe a handful of plays during the game. When you are facing a dude who can run over you whenever he wants, and who can also run around you with ease, there ain’t much else you can do as an offensive lineman other than pray at that point.

It’s true that he has already been nicked up over the course of the last year or so, but if Nick Bosa is able to stay relatively healthy the rest of his career, there is no telling just how much of a monster this kid will develop into.

He has gotten off to a helluva start already — and he didn’t even start the season at 100 percent! I don’t think he’s scratched the surface of what he could be yet. If he continues to improve from week to week, and converts more of those missed sacks into actual sacks, I wouldn’t be surprised at all if he makes a late push to get in the Pro Bowl at the end of this season.

I fully expect him to be joining his brother as an All-Pro player by the end of his third season, if not sooner. But again, that’s if he can stay healthy and not lose any of his progress to injuries.

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