#:( i just don't have energy to do this rn

[thekittyokat]

you ever just have a lot, a LOT of feelings all at once about a character and not even remotely enough words or brainpower to FORM the words to describe everything you're feeling. so it feels like you may explode. yeah

[laquilasse]

I know you're probably past Ace Attorney now but would you ever consider playing Professor Layton vs Phoenix Wright? It's really good and pretty underrated in the Ace Attorney fandom :3

girl dw I'm shu takumi's bitch for life, I'm just taking a detour in children's card games. I also did play/stream/voice act layton v wright and it was an absolute work of art

[mea-trinitas-profana]

sharts this out

[alongtidesoflight]

so here's my honest thoughts on dragon age: the veilguard, after ~40 hours of playing. i finished the main quest after having finished all companion quests and major faction quests. just to clear up what content i saw, i played as an elven transmasc rook who is a member of the lords of fortune. he romanced lucanis (although after finishing the game i'm now leaning towards taash). i don't know what's happening in playthroughs that have a different race, gender identity, romance or faction going on.

full spoilers ahead, i mean it. don't read further if you want to avoid them. i don't want complaining about it in my asks.

oh and also, if you're worried because of a few negative reviews online i can comfort you by saying don't give a fuck about a certain big name youtuber who is very much tied to bethesda franchises giving this a negative review. i'll explain why.

i'm starting off with the things i liked

the game looks really pretty. i was worried it wouldn't feel like thedas anymore (with them trying to "focus on northern thedas only" i thought they'd make a clear cut in environmental design. they do and they don't. it's complicated. i'll elaborate on it when talking about the negative stuff). anyway it does. minrathous feels like kirkwall. treviso enchanted me like the winter palace did. the hossberg wetlands reminded me of the hinterlands and a couple other inquisition maps. arlathan looked like... arlathan. the crossroads were different, but familiar. overall i like the way it looks and feels. it's thedas, with a twist. it's a good one, and gives everything a solid but unique feel.

combat is top tier. if you're a hardcore dragon age player you WILL miss the tactical aspect of it for a bit, but i promise you, once you're used to the way the combat works, you will be lapping that shit up. and once you get to ability combos you'll mourn the control you used to have over your companions in battle a bit less

the MAIN quest and its story. i expected worse, way worse. and for a while the game even had me tricked (harr harr you'll get it in a second) it is Really That Much Worse. but holy shit was it good. i walked away satisfied ngl.

your choices have SOLID weight. there's consequences, good AND bad. i got minrathous blighted, ruled over by venatori, and the leader of the shadow dragons ultimately died because of my decisions. i made those at the beginning and throughout the game. he died at the end. DAVRIN died because i didn't expect what i was saying to have that much weight. i thought i was in the clear. he had hero status. well turns out, your choices can still get your companions killed even if you do everything right. i fucking love him. he shouldn't have made that sacrifice just because i told him to do everything it takes once.

the inquisitor, morrigan and dorian being there, surprisingly. there's also negatives to this though, see below.

speaking of companions dying and the inquisitor playing a bigger role: the final quest feels like me2's suicide mission. i was blown away by it and the fact that i got to see the results of all my efforts playing out in front of me.

bioware are NOT trying to redeem solas. they love him as a character yes, but i wasn't forced to see any good in him. he betrays you. he fucked my rook over twice. he fucked him over right back, for good this time (the veil wasn't torn down, i anchored it by binding him to it, he's doomed to uphold it). but solas really lives up to his name as the trickster elven god. rip to all the people who grew really attached to him over the years.

varric died. if you like him that's probably as hard reading it as it was watching it. varric died and the game lies about it until the very end. when the realisation hits, it hurts. but in the very best way.

the amount of care they put into gender expression and trans identities this time around. (i'll add onto this with negative points as well too).

rook feels very much ingrained in the world of thedas. he doesn't ask questions that expose the player to lore through dialogue as if he's stepped foot into thedas for the first time. those conversations feel very solid and good. i hope other faction players got as much joy out of this as i did.

and the things i didn't like and boy there's a lot unfortunately

the music. let's just get that out of the way holy shit. it doesn't feel like it belongs in this universe. it gets so incredibly sci-fi-y at times you'd think it's taken straight from mass effect andromeda. there's not a single song unique to veilguard that i really enjoyed. it broke my immersion, real bad. hearing a busker play the tavern songs from inquisition on a lute right after i killed some venatori with wobbly bass songs playing in the background is just odd. weird tonal shift. don't like it. it's made for people who like flashy light-weight cinema.

tevinter nights is required reading. the podcasts are required listening exercises. the game is so fast paced, especially at the start, that there's no time to introduce you to characters and how much weight their names carry in-game. i would not have known who half these people are if i hadn't skimmed over tevinter nights. i'd care even less about them than i already did. there is no time to get properly attached to them. people will act as if you're talking to a legend personified and you'll be thinking man goddamn which chapter of tevinter night were they in again and what did they do???

there's a weird mismatch with the animations. you'll have beautifully fluid ones, like emmrich casting spells. and then you'll have rook's face animating in the most unnatural manner that's sorta reminiscent of mass effect andromeda's "my face is tired" addison, when their emotions SHOULD be landing with the player rn instead.

i'm not vibing with the art style. sometimes it works. most of the time it doesn't. at points i felt like i was watching tangled.

that also brings me to some of the dialogue. same issue. i am watching frozen. i am watching tangled. someone on the writer's team really likes the adorkable trope. bellara is its victim.

for all the talk about identity, bioware sure doesn't like theirs. the grey warden armor got a redesign again and it just makes them look like a generic army. i hate it lol

in general, i don't like the armor design. the wardrobe/appearances system is fine, but it's just not helping if all the armors are just... kinda bland or downight bad looking? and don't get me started on the lords of fortune armor. that is orientalism personified.

the world states should have been carried over, full stop. i know they said they didn't because they want to separate what happens in the north from what happens in the south, which... i could have lived with that. but the inquisitor sends you letters that keep you up to date on... the south of thedas. you learn that there's a blight again, that people are standing strong but it's difficult, denerim's fallen, the rulers are taking care of it, orlais is fighting and they're successful for a while, etc etc. what's good bioware. i thought we don't care about the south this time around. why are you feeding me so much boring generic information. if you're not gonna show any of it and just write letters, then carrying the world state over should not have been an issue. i have a game dev background. those few lines of code would not have broken your budget or pushed your engine's limits. fuck right off.

this gripe of mine carries over to all the cameos. as a lord of fortune you have to deal with isabela a lot. it's fun. i missed her. you get to go drinking with her and taash and bellara! also my hawke romanced her. she's not mentioned once. they had the opportunity to put a sentence or two about her in there with not a lot of effort, trust me.

when varric dies, all she has is a single line about it. for gold, for fortune, for varric. she only says it if you interact with her on your way to the final push. that's not mandatory.

morrigan is there. kieran isn't. the old god soul that mythal and then solas absorbed? who cares at this point, the gods are dead now and solas is locked away for eternity. i suppose? why is morrigan there. she feels unneeded. i wish they'd just left her down south, at least that way i wouldn't have had to witness her god awful redesign.

dorian at least feels as if he belongs in this story. the shadow dragons are a crucial part to protecting minrathous. he's also weirdly underutilised. isabela and morrigan had more lines than him in my playthrough.

on the topic of romance: bro that was underwhelming. no, genuinely. you know when romance picked up a bit? after the point of no return. i heard maybe two lines of companion banter about it before that. maybe i missed something which i honestly doubt, but romance did not play much of a role in lucanis's storyline. i saved his grandmother as he wished me to (and if you read tevinter nights you know she was rather abusive and their relationship not the healthiest) and told him to focus on his family. a reunified family my rook wasn't even introduced to as a partner at the end of all that.

really, do not buy this game if you're only in it for the romances. others might be better, lucanis's basically gave me nothing. except for an outing (the second coffee date i had with him, it was getting repetitive) all of it played out once i committed to the final quest. the sex scene was a fade to black. annoyingly right after davrin died. if you're looking for well paced and good spice, pick up something else. the sweet talk and the final goodbye were nice though.

for all the good the ever-presence of gender identity does, it is brought up in such a disruptive manner too. it doesn't even play out naturally if you CHOOSE the lines that are meant to be said. hearing the words trans and non-binary in this setting doesn't feel right, and i'm saying this as a trans guy. i think it could have been handled more gracefully. the amount of times my rook went "i'm a MAN" as if he's about to start drumming on his chest and roaring any second now got super nerve-grating. "i'm so glad you're into me... the me who is trans. remember?" just. tell me one trans person who'd talk like that to a person they've grown close with and are trying to romance. this game doesn't handle sexuality well, so all this hey my body might not look like the way you're expecting it to look talk amounts to nothing anyway. i feel about this the way i feel about krem: this is partial exposition to trans experiences... packaged up for cis consumption. the ONLY exception to that is interacting with taash. holy shit was all of that heartwarming and bro did it feel good and natural to talk to them about theirs and rook's gender.

rivain and nevarra are new locations added by veilguard. they're also incredibly underwhelming, small and constricted maps. rivain is a coastline with a few ruins. the hall of valor is a partial ruin nestled into a cave on a beach, with a fighting pit. isabela is there in her skimpy outfit commentating your pit fights. that's it. i'm sorry if you were looking for a bustling pirate cove or whatever. you're not gonna get it. the nevarran crypts btw are a long ass dungeon crawl. that's it.

speaking of maps. i thought people were being dramatic when they said you're gonna be fighting the same enemies on them again and again. i thought they were figure of speeching it. they're not. you WILL fight the same amount of enemies. in the same spot. every time you reload the map. best to stay on a map and clear out the enemies and do as much questing on that map as you can before leaving, because you WILL have to do it all over again once you return.

the three choices i made for my inquisitor didn't matter lol she didn't have to face solas and therefore couldn't stop him at any cost as she had sworn (maybe because my rook tricked solas into binding himself to the veil, there was also an option to fight him. would she have stepped in? who knows). blackwall wasn't mentioned. and either her using a small amount of her forces in the final fight was the reason the civilians of minrathous fared so well..... or it just didn't matter. ultimately i think she had very little impact on anything

[lucienne-thee-librarian]

Just to minimize my chances of being genuinely misunderstood OR deliberately misinterpreted, and crucified for something I don't think, How Dare You Say We Piss on the Poor website etc...I'm gonna say this right up top. I absolutely understand why people don't like Thessaly as a character, if anyone does completely unironically stan her as some kind of feminist hero who Did Nothing Wrong uwu, I personally see it as a bit of a red flag. I don't like terfs real or fictional. In a vacuum, I could even completely sympathize and agree with the people who want her cut.

HOWEVER.

It's really something to me to see people clamoring for her to be cut, because she carries and expressed an ugly indefensible prejudice (transphobia) in words towards (1) person. Meanwhile Hob fucking Gadling enacted one of the most violent forms of antiblack racism I can even think of against thousands no, millions of people, the ripple effects of which still affect billions more today. Just a little light idk, profiting off the fucking slave trade and had to be told by someone else that it was bad...and he's a fan favorite.

People are saying Thessally being Dream's love interest reflects badly on him or is somehow endorsement by the narrative (?!?!?!?!?!? Didn't she (SPOILER ALERT AS IF IT MATTERS BY NOW) help participate in his extended assisted suicide? She's not painted as a great person to me just another character what are y'all SMOKING whatever fine. It's fine this is fine.) But shipping Dream with Mr. Former Slaver is not only not verboten or frowned on widely in the fandom but its THEE most popular pairing by far. So...why the difference?

Like where are the same fans who are saying Thessaly shouldn't just be more clearly shown to be wrong, she shouldn't even be in the show at all when it comes to Hobert's crimes??? Yes, transphobia is indefensible. Isn't racism?

And I hear the cries of "it's fiction!!!" Already rallying (if anyone who needs to hear this even sees it lol) to which I say:

HORSESHIT. I KNOW you don't, deep down, really agree because if you did, why get upset about Thessaly being included??? Why does what she said to one person matter if it's Just Fiction You Guyze. Fictional characters are allowed to do bad things and fiction isn't reality sweaty....except when you only apply that standard to fictional racists you like and simp for, but fictional transphobes you don't are SO HARMFUL they shouldn't even be portrayed in fiction.

Like. Give me a big fat BREAK. This looks like bullshit, no? I'm sorry, but I'd love for someone to try and give any other explanation besides one personally offended you or hit home for you, and the other doesn't.

And if that bothers you or you feel like it says something negative about you...idk what you want me to say??? You can't control how other people perceive you and that's how people outside this majority-of-the-fandom bubble see it. You don't need to respond, I just wish and genuinely hope this gives you a moment to think about why fans who ARE bothered by both (and not just paying lip service to being bothered by the one but railing against the other) are so frustrated with people saying everyone is welcome but in practice only bending over backwards for the comfort and emotions of themselves, and people they can easily relate to.

You don't have to like Thessaly (I don't. I find her an interesting antagonist, I don't stan her. And frankly imo likability is not. the point of her character) but you'll pardon me for feeling more than a bit cynical and side eying people's motivations for what seems a...pretty obvious double standard, on what fictional crimes related to real world issues matter to y'all, and which clearly don't. Either actually bring the same energy to the table for fictional people who committed atrocities, even if against a group you're not part of and thus don't feel the need to empathize with, or just carry on, but accept that you don't have the SLIGHTEST room to talk about cutting characters who do immoral things. And you also need to accept that you look like a hypocrite when you do.

[cerealforkart]

Sparrow Alone

Individual panels

[wildflowercryptid]

i'll probably add on more details to these edits later, but here's how mjverse florian ( florian russel cavallari ) & juliana ( juliana sigal cavallari ) would look at the start of their journey!

— free to use & edit w/ credit!

[rapidhighway]

today is a day you just gotta sleep through... Ughhhhh

[aro-culture-is]

hey all. it's been a while. life has been not... bad per se, but I certainly haven't had the energy to keep up with this blog in quite some time. I'm closing submissions for now, and gonna try to queue up the whole of what has previously been submitted.

i'll let you know at the end of all that if i'm gonna continue at all. if I decide to abandon this blog, I do intend to keep it up as a resource and will not delete it.

thank you all for a great time

--- mods, kee system

[barghest-land]

today i wish my government a very pleasant disappearance from the face of the earth

[simstoyourdismay]

HELLO IT IS MY DAUGHTER’S CANON BIRTHDAY TODAY!!1!!!1!

[dawnthefluffyduck]

Not May, but the semester is finally over (not officially, but with my finals schedule, I've practically got nothing left)

I'm back :D I feel god-damn awful though, so for the next few days I'll be sharing the handful of sketches and scribbles I made over the last month or so. It's not a lot, but hopefully I'll be on my feet when they're all posted and able to work on my own art again. Thank you guys for your patience and support while I was gone, it meant the world to me as I was trudging through the rest of the semester <3

[thyfleshc0nsumed]

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAa

[givemewallywestorgivemedeath]

Hi, im researching for a fic im writing, and i want to ask if you know whats up with Jai's messed up connection to the speedforce? and also how the fuck do they use the speedforce to get super strength? how does going fast translate into being strong? Do you know what issues to read to learn more about this? like why do Jai (& Jesse?) have super strength, how did they do this? Why did they do this?

So Jesse's strength is a very quick and easy answer so I'll address that first before jumping into Jai's whole thing.

Jesse's mom is Liberty Belle, a hero with super strength. Jesse inherited her father's speed and her mother's super strength. She's just... I don't want to say that she's better at being a speedster but high key she is. Jesse only figured out her super strength recently and it's still pretty touch and go. She used to only have the speed and then that fizzled out and she only had the strength for a bit and then it switched back to just speed again. She seems to have both powers now though and she seems to know how to use them both so fingers crossed 🤞

Jai is a whole different ballgame.

So Irey and Jai were born as fraternal twins. There were two things wrong when they were born.

A) Only Irey was born with a speedforce connection. Jai technically wasn't born with powers at all. Irey had wrapped her speedforce connection around Jai to share her powers but it was significantly damaging to both of them.

and

B) Their shared speedforce connection was tainted with Black Flash energy. (Negative Speedforce)

So let's talk about the Negative Speedforce energy. This is the stuff that turns speedsters into Black Flashes. This is what permanently killed Johnny Quick. One touch of this stuff will obliterate a speedster entirely. It's one of the only ways to permanently kill a speedster because it corrupts their speedforce energy in a way that cannot be undone. So there isn't anything left to bring back.

And this stuff was creeping through the twin's shared connection like a virus. That's what caused their fatal aging disease. Their speedforce connection was so out of wack and their bodies didn't know how to fight off this energy and their metabolisms went into overdrive. Aged them both to 100 within six months. Thankfully Wally figured it out and was able to absorb the Negative Speedforce energy. This cured the twins and deaging them down to five ish (but caused some serious problems for Wally).

Okay so back to point A. Their shared speedforce connection. Irey was sharing her powers with Jai subconsciously and that's why she couldn't run. She didn't have enough energy to. She could only vibrate through stuff. Jai also didn't have enough energy to run but he had other serious issues because he wasn't a speedster like Irey. His body wasn't built to handle that much energy.

As a result Jai had some weird stuff going on. Jai's main power was to hyper accelerate the growth of his muscles. This would give him temporary super strength. I say 'super strength' but realistically Jai on par with extreme weight lifters. He wasn't Superman levels of strong. But, again, Jai's body couldn't handle this so everytime he used his power he had about five minutes until he passed out. Then someone would have to feed him or he'd go into shock.

He also had some other strange things. Like his DNA mutating and devolving when he got stressed. Basically his DNA went 'back in time' and Jai shape shifted a bit. This wasn't something he could control and it was very very very bad.

Irey eventually took her half of the speedforce connection back, which cemented her connection and stopped them both from having seizures. Jai was not happy about no longer having powers. Even less happy about Irey being a child prodigy speedster. Although Irey shared her powers with Jai in emergencies (which gave them both superspeed because Irey had a stronger connection and more skill as she grew older), they couldn't do this without Jai being in extreme pain. Also his seizures coming back.

Now we need to talk about the speedforce surge. The speedforce surge is this insane amount of wild speedforce energy that has to go somewhere or it'll explode the world. It's an overload of energy. To explain the scale of this thing, it caused the mass extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs.

Wally tracked this dangerous surge down before it destroyed reality and he absorbed it until he could figure out what to do with it.

And...

Well he gave it to Jai.

Jai's speedforce connection is the surge. Jai operates on this untamable wild speedforce energy. So Jai now has A LOT of energy to work with but it doesn't really work the same way typical speedforce energy does. That's why he can't run. (yet at least. can't run yet)

Instead, the surge energy ramps up Jai's friction barrier, healing factor and his metabolism. That doesn't sound like much but hoLY FUCK it's op.

Every speedster has a friction barrier that they generate when they run. It stops their skin from melting off when they reach top speeds, the wind from tearing their bodies apart, bugs from hitting them with the force of bullets, their bones from shattering every time they take a step, ect, ect. Their friction barriers can only do so much (they act as a cushion, they don't make them invulnerable. They won't stop a bullet for example) and they only really work when the speedster is actively running.

Jai put all of his goddamn energy into his friction barrier. The child is literally invulnerable. I'm not even joking. And it's constant too, it doesn't switch off.

Jai's metabolism and his healing factor are why he has super strength. Simply put, Jai has a lot of energy. A LOT. And what doesn't go to his friction barrier, goes to his cells. His healing factor is also amped up and would take care of any muscle tears, fatigue, lactic acid build up, dead cells, ect almost instantaneously. What I'm saying here is that Jai's body is in perfect condition always and he has an unlimited amount of energy for his muscles to use.

Jai has super strength because he doesn't have limits. Jai turned Minecraft from Survival Mode to Creative Mode. He can extend any amount of force without any negative consequences on his body. He uses his strength to do his Thunder clap move which is canonically, at 8 years old, stronger than a Kryptonian's Thunder clap. It's confirmed that Jai is still figuring out how to channel the surge energy correctly, so he's not there yet, but one day he will be stronger than the Kryptonians.

Which is insane.

Honestly Wally is the embodiment of 'I will do anything for my children' because Jai was sad about not having powers so Wally gave him a dangerously unstable energy source (that's killed millions of people) that has the equivalent energy of two stars colliding. AT EIGHT. Wally gave a CHILD this unlimited unchecked power!!

Anyway, father of the goddamn year. I love that man. He would truly do anything for his children and now I'm pretty sure his son can't die so 10/10 decision.

[metaforth]

Fuck Linux.

Everytime I complain about a minor issue with Windows I get like 6000 tech bros falling over themselves to screech "JUST USE LINUX" at me. No. I won't use Linux. I have a full time job, medical issues I'm dealing with, friends I wanna hang out with, a game I'm starting work on slowly but surely, and hobbies that have nothing to do with software, and responsibilities as an adult who lives with other people on top of all of those things. And when you consider that combination of obligations and things I enjoy doing and want to do there's not much time for me spending 8 hours fighting with an operating system to make it run the EXEs for the emulators I like.

I don't have the time, will, nor desire to spend days upon days or possibly even weeks struggling through IT bullshit to make my computer do all the things I want to do. The windows computer I already have already works with at least 85% of those things right out of the box.

Sure, fuck Microsoft (though Valve is an awful company to buy LinuxBros get mad when you acknowledge that), and Windows has tons of issues of its own not including the outdated ones MACbros like Dankpods who's barely touched the operating system since Windows 7 think are still relevant (Yes I said something negative about Australian retro funnyman, cry about it.)

I am perfectly happy dealing with the annoying administrative permission issues, inexplicable performance drops doing something it handled perfectly fine yesterday, or apps not closing sometimes even when I go through task manager. Those and many other issues are all annoying but I'm accustomed to them.

My only direct experience with Linux in the last few years has been on my steam deck, and every problem I've had with the steam deck has come entirely from trying to download things through Desktop mode and having to deal with Linux. If there isn't a native Linux version of the program I want to run I have to jump through hoops after hoops doing research for hours as I try multiple methods, most of which fail and the rest seem promising then just won't successfully install for some inexplicable reason. Eventually like the 58th thing I try finally works and then I try and get something else working and that somehow BREAKS THE PREVIOUS THING!

All of which is compounded by this software having no native support for any of this so there's no official Linux support line I can reach out to for further assistance. I have to look up guides or forum posts and pray to the god I don't believe in that they're up to date which 9/10 times they aren't.

I'm glad you techbros enjoy spending 40 hours a week getting Linux to work for you, but I don't want every little thing I do on my computer to be a full time job. I have a lot of other shit going on in my life, including things I actually enjoy doing, and I don't have time. I'll stick with the operating system that works out the box.

[gummy-worms-in-my-brain]

hi. i will draw any character of any fandom(regardless if i'm in the fandom or not) or oc(provided there's a reference) or anything really, might not do every single one but it would be nice if anyone's interested