#(not exactly but with similar level of awesomeness)

[batri-jopa]

world_of_engineering_75 on Instagram

[thetwilightroadtonightfall]

I am the happiest person on earth right now because I just went out with a friend to grab a late lunch and it was just supposed to be a quick casual catch up thing that turned into a 4 hour conversation in the car about things that happened to us almost a decade ago 🥲

[vaguely-concerned]

the things it adds to both of the characters involved that lucanis used to have a thing for viago could not have been more tailor made to be for me. literally the ideal thing to come out of this game for me personally and specifically and spiritually. I mean I'm teia x viago trash until the day I die and nothing will ever change this (and with the best will in the world and even the power of lucanis' big beautiful soulful eyes, that would never have worked out even if viago DID somehow understand he was being propositioned. which I'm not convinced he did. the mutual 'so. snakes are pretty cool huh. and. knives. also' awkward energy without someone of teia's charisma and people skills involved to mitigate it... it would have been dire), but on so many levels I find it so incredibly charming for what it says about them both that the (one-sided) attraction was there once.

what's more, it means the man about whom this legendary paragraph was written:

Viago was not a typical Antivan. He liked facts—checklists, numbers, precise measurements. Heart palpitations, clammy hands, tight pants—Viago did not like these things. In fact, he would go so far as to say he hated them. Mild curiosity was his favorite mood.

has got some of the hottest coolest deadliest people in thedas down so catastrophically bad it's got them acting unwise. teia had to wait a UST-drenched decade for him to be ready to take his fucking gloves off for her. and she did!! the tetchiest most neurotic least approachable little vetinari knockoff of a man you ever saw has game for days and days and lives rent free in heads for years. in eight little talons viago consistently feels so inadequate up against dante and it's like. man I'm shaking you by the lapels you have what he'll never have. the ability to bewitch body and soul with your terrible personality and long thin legs. do not waste the gift you've been given go get her she's waiting!!!

(lucanis is really good at reading people, so I wonder if maybe he saw through all of that to some of the steadiness and incredible capacity for warmth and tenderness in specific interpersonal relationships you see viago have with teia when he finally opens up enough, and maybe that was part of it. either way it's so perfect that both he and teia have regarded viago with this affectionate intrigued amusement. lucanis still seems pretty fond of him in a 'viago continues to be exactly himself no matter what else happens or goes wrong. comforting universal constant' sort of way, he brings him up quite a lot in party banter.)

you've seen lucanis' game in this day and age, arguably or at least hopefully older and wiser -- can you imagine how catastrophically bad it must have been back when he presumably handed viago, most paranoid man in thedas all years running, a knife like this expressed everything it needed to. people give him so much shit for the cake moment being his big romantic lock-in, but considering where we started that is GROWTH and I for one am so proud of him fhsdkjaf.

also I wonder at what point vis-a-vis that whole Situation teia and viago met for the first time, leading us to ask... just how much was it a matter of lucanis simply being ignored out of a lack of interest on viago's part (tbf, not entirely unlikely). how much was it lucanis truly not managing to make himself understood. (all but certainly. literally how would one understand that. I think it says some sweet things about rook and lucanis' dynamic that they -- somehow -- DO pick up what he's putting down in a similar scenario presumably b/c they know him pretty well by then haha.) how much was it viago interpreting the romantic move as a death threat from one of the most dangerous people alive and freaking out. (1000% and indubitably.) and how much was it andarateia steal-your-girl cantori turning up and thus setting off whatever spectacular, volatile, awesome-in-the-original-sense chemical reaction between the substances of her and viago's souls that goes on to this day and makes everything else kind of a side note at best. a gentle mix of several of these things, perhaps. ...god I love all these characters so much

[what-even-is-thiss]

An overwhelming theme of Greek mythology seems to be that things used to be better and everything sucks now. Which makes sense when you realize that the Mycenaean Greeks stopped doing big society for whatever reason and their great big palaces were left to crumble and the Greeks of the dark age didn’t know exactly why those were there but they did know that they used to be full of people.

And when they lost their trade routes, they lost their access to tin and couldn’t make bronze anymore and had to use iron instead.

Hesiod coined the term Iron Age. He claimed truly he was living in an age of iron but he meant this as a bad thing. Bronze is prettier than iron. We now know that iron is harder and better in many ways but they didn’t know that. Bronze was just better in their minds.

But by the time the Greeks had started writing down their opinions about all of this, life had started to return to a similar level of impressiveness to the way it used to be. Great big walked city states were created. Culture and trade in the Mediterranean began to be awesome again.

But still in the mythos and the literature was that feeling hanging over everything that the current day and age sucks in comparison to the far past. So when almost every Greek myth ends in tragedy you have to wonder if this was just the natural order of things to them. Things get worse.

In reality things don’t universally get worse, not do they inherently get better with every generation.

And is this an age of iron? And if it is, what does that mean exactly? Are we all doomed by the narrative or not?

[dedalvs]

Top 3 Games That Don't Exist Anymore

LEMMINGS (1991)

Absolutely incredible puzzle game (based on the great lemming myth) where you attempt to guide a horde of lemmings to their home. Obstacles get in their path, so you have to give them jobs (building staicases, bashing through walls, digging, through the floor, stopping other lemmings from moving) to help them get home. It was cute, simple to understand, and INCREDIBLY difficult—especially once you got to the difficulty level "taxing".

WHAT HAPPENED TO IT

Folks just forgot about it and it kind of bounced around, never getting picked up when things like the Wii online store came out. After some remixed variants it never got a proper release.

HOW TO PLAY IT NOW

Aside from emulators, there's a free (with purchases) iOS/Android version of Lemmings now. The functionality is similar, and it's definitely cute, but it's not exactly the same in terms of gameplay, sound (the music!), and the levels are different. I'd love to be able to play the original levels again.

BOOKWORM ADVENTURES (2006)

Utterly incredible spelling game. You play a cute little bookworm who has to travel through time and literature to battle beasties by spelling words. The longer the word you spell (and the more value the letters have as in Scrabble) the more damage you do. It's cute, it's educational, it's fun, it's competitive (there are records for biggest word, most damage, etc. so you can compete with friends); it's a nearly perfect game. And there was a sequel, too!

WHAT HAPPENED TO IT

EA purchased PopCap games and then, one day, for apparently no reason, removed it from their online store. And that's it. It's gone. Forever.

HOW TO PLAY IT NOW

You can pirate it, but otherwise, the closest I've found is a mobile game called Letter Quest: Grimm's Journey by Bacon Bandits. The core functionality is there, but it's not really as clever or as cute or as fun. There's an Easter egg for fans of Bookworm, and bless them for creating a very similar game, but it is just not the same.

UNIRACERS (1994)

Also called Unirally, this was am awesome concept that was perfectly executed. You're unicycles that race really fast and do crazy tricks. All the stunts have names, you get points for them, there's track obstacles. It's simple, pure, unadulterated fun.

WHAT HAPPENED TO IT

This absolutely drives me up a wall. Pixar sued the makers of Uniracers because they said their unicycles looked like the unicycle in their short film Red's Dream from 1987. Like ARE YOU KIDDING ME?! Thematically, the two things aren't similar at all, and, as the creator of the game said, "[t]here's not a lot of ways you can bring life to a unicycle without looking like the one Pixar did". Like...duh. The judge who made this ruling did irreparable damage to video games.

HOW TO PLAY IT NOW

There's no legal way to play this game, and, thanks to Pixar, there likely never will be. I've never encountered anything similar. It was such a unique play experience.

[michajawkan]

This is always my #1 pitch for PF2, because not only are the ancestry options full of great stuff like goblins and skeletons, every single ancestry ALSO gets a heritage on top of that, so not only can you be a goblin you can then also differentiate yourself from other goblins by being a goblin who's resistant to disease or a goblin who's extra-tough or a goblin who's really good at biting or a goblin from the arctic or etc

and then on top of THAT there's also Versatile heritages, which is how the system handles things like Tieflings and Aasimar and Elementals and things like that

and then even deeper, a lot of versatile heritages also have specific feats that grant a certain Lineage, so if you want you can be a Beastbrood Tiefling Goblin, which is a Goblin who is a Tiefling descended specifically from Rakshasa

and speaking of feats, all of these things give you access to specific ancestry feats that run along their own separate track from your class and skill and etc feats, which leads to a ton of potential variety in flavor and mechanics between characters of the same ancestry without even looking at what their classes or backgrounds are, and I adore this so much

I have seen several posts about your dislike for D&D and I wanna know if it's the same for Pathfinder? I love pathfinder but in my eyes it's just a crunchier D&D. (Though admittedly the "canon" worlds for Pathfinder are far more interesting to me)

Obviously that's a very baseline view of the two but I wondered if it's possible to like one and not the other due to their similarities.

P.S. I hope you've had a good week!

Truth be told, I don't dislike D&D! I dislike people treating it as a universal game when it's a very specific type of game! Note: what that specific type of game is also depends heavily on edition! But regardless, D&D will end up sucking big time if you don't play to its strengths!

Now, my opinion on Pathfinder is basically that Pathfinder 1e leaned in on some of the worst designs of D&D 3.5 (a quirky game that still had a lot to love about it): towards the tail end of D&D 3.5 its designers were at the same time getting really nutty with the design and coming up with some really inventive designs (Binders, Tome of Battle, a lot of individual systems in Complete Champion and Complete Scoundrel) but at the same time they were running out of ideas and they came up with the Worst Type of Feats: feats that made a thing that anyone could theoretically do into a thing now gated behind a feat. Player's Handbook 2 for D&D 3.5 had a few of these.

And Pathfinder 1e for some reason decided to really lean in on this type of feat. I will never shut up about the feat that allows gnomes to request their captors to loosen their shackles.

Now Pathfinder 2e is a much better game in my opinion because it seems to have largely rejected that type of design and focused on being a really crunchy D&D clone. It feels like a better successor to D&D 3.5's design ethos instead of Pathfinder 1e, that was ultimately a collection of D&D 3.5 house rules (some of which imo made the game worse than D&D 3.5!) coupled with following some of the worst design trends of D&D 3.5.

Also I refuse to ever shut up about Pathfinder 1e literally having feats that didn't do anything like Monkey Lunge and Prone Shooter. But anyway Pathfinder 2e actually looks like a fun albeit crunchy game instead of just being D&D 3.5 but somehow blander and with worse rules-writing. (now of course D&D 3.5 also kind of sucked in its own ways, but it kind of sucked in a "hey these example characters don't actually qualify for the Prestige Class they're supposed to be representing" type of way instead of a "our FAQ accidentally made it so you could qualify for the Eldritch Knight Prestige Class simply by virtue of being a Tiefling" type of way)

[lemurballing]

This is stupid:

buuuut it still works cause tangle is awesome :] i direct you to issue 37, where tangle does this:

at face value, heck yeah!! using her tail as a pulley system to tie up the boat?? so clever :) (and being able to wrap her tail around all that after the boat starts falling, before it loses much height - that’s very fast, accurate tail extension! what if she’d accidentally bonked her tail into any of those metal beams down there instead of going between them? she wouldn’t have made it in time if she did bonk!)

but you look closer… and it might not be that clever. in fact, it looks like a mistake.

(at the dark purple question mark, her tail’s path isn’t very clear. i went with ‘repeating the pattern’ around a part of the boat we couldn’t see in blue, which would then wrap around at the angle you see her tail stretch left, out from the question mark.)

it’s wrapped around the whole boat, so where’s the problem…?

the problem is: leverage (or whatever the word is for pulleys & ropes).

in the leftmost diagram, we see the dots - the anchor points of the rope - are at equal height. at a resting point, they will both hold the weight up with their own material integrity; that is, it will stay at the resting height unless the material breaks.

in the middle diagram, the ‘anchor point’ for the right rope has moved lower; the bar it holds the weight up towards is far lower, and the excess is wrapped over to tie to the ground. again, at resting position, it will remain there while the material holds.

in the right diagram, the rope arrangament is the same as the middle one, but now we’re applying pull force to bring the weight upwards. at this level, due to where the right rope is ‘anchored’ on the bar, no matter what force is applied, it cannot raise the weight any higher than that bar - only the rope on the left could pull it higher, or support its weight in a higher position.

applied to this situation:

the blue sections are parts where tangle’s tail can support the boat just by wrapping around and staying in place, pretty much; it’s a net woven around that just needs to not slip. the orange sections are where the only provable anchor point above the boat is tangle herself! (and i will note that the way she’s holding her tail here, her tail is almost certainly not the limb doing most of the pulling - for it to angle so much before and after her grip on it, it can’t be tensed. to better clarify - if you have long hair, and something pulls on your hair, it pulls your scalp. unless you grab your hair with a hand and pull it closer to your scalp, and then all the active tension is redirected through your arms.)

which means that for the boat to stay where it is - above the ‘blue level’ - tangle is actively pulling it higher! pulling the entire weight of the boat up.

so how hard is this - how heavy is the boat? in this panel, it looks like a relatively small boat; maybe a dinghy? dinghies can have those ribbed sides, and are generally round, and it could weigh somewhere between 100-200lbs, and be a little tough to carry…

nope! it is some type of motor boat (perhaps a skiff). you can see a propeller under the ‘cinch’, so it has a motor… and if you look at the rest of the page, it has at least 7 seats (presumably 8), so it has to be large enough to hold at least 7 people!

i’m not acquainted with boats so i had to do some digging - and most of the ones i found at first had consoles/raised walls/less seats than this one, which weren’t exactly a fair weight comparison. i also didn’t want to try to calculate precisely how long this boat is, since the angles are off and hard to calculate from this perspective.

so, instead i looked at a few different types of boat to get rough estimated of weights, and then i’d roughly downsize that based off estimates of how much smaller a boat for ~3ft people needs to be!

i went through a handful of similar motorboats (mostly 1-4 people, but with added physical features to add weight) and found weights between 1,000lb to 2,000lb depending on length (18-22+ feet). a yamaha 195S is 19’5” long, and 2,509lb - but a nitro z18 is 18’8” and 1,700lb. the only good visualizers i found were charts for what motor horsepower to use for what length and weight:

so it was super hard to get a good estimate of the weight here!! like super hard!! so i’m just doing a vague whatever conservative estimate and someone else can do proper math!!!

if you half the length to a presumed 10ft long - which i’m not sure is properly long enough for this boat, i’d guess somewhere between 12-15ft - and then quarter the 20ft weight to try to account for the square-cube law, you get a guesstimate of a boat weighing about 500lb. if you’re conservative with it, maybe 400lb?

which, to keep from tipping out away from the metal cradle, lowering to the level of tangle’s tail wrapped around underneath, & be held upright as tangle is doing, has to be fully supported - and as noted earlier, without real assistance from tangle’s tail’s strength, this is just her arms.

now, you could assume tangle simply wrapped that mystery segment of tail around the cradle bar she’s standing on, and this would allow much more of the boat’s weight to be supported by her tail’s structure… but it’d have to be an awkward angle for her tail to do that and it to not be visible next to her feet or in the empty space to the right, which would also put some more of the strain on her arms/body instead of her tail, so she’d stil be doing a lot!

and especially if you estimate the boat closer to 12-15ft, which is closer to 600-750lb, that gets crazier…

PLUS the fact that she had to hold that weight up for at LEAST as long to ask them to hurry & tie the boat up, AND as long as it took for the others to actually work something up/fix the cradle to hold the boat and relieve tangle of it.

conclusion: this is canon

[desiredcaramellatte]

Do you think you could do some crk self aware au stuff?? The tag is painfully dead.. if not feel free to delete lmfao

That aside, during Cookie Odyssey, I was **convinced** that soulstones we're going to come into play somehow, it was like my major theory during ch.2, and nobody could convince me otherwise but it never happened. Giving the soulstones an in lore explanation would've been fricking awesome imo..

Can we get some HCs of the player (or their in game kingdom) basically having a monopoly on soulstones while the cookies are left scratching their heads as to not only how they work, but also how the reader got what is technically a part of their souls.

Write for anyone really, idm that much. I generally like the Creme Republic though-- whether reader is still behind the screen or knows the cookies are self aware is up to you really.

That would be very cool if they actually had a lore explanation :0 I thought the soul jams were soul stones first time I heard about them tbh, they just linked together in my mind, also reader is so real for trading monies for souls

I have never written self aware before so apologies if it sucks-

Anyways enough of my ranting, hcs yes

Self aware cookies & reader

(Who has a soul stone monopoly)

Gingerbrave & friends

Gingerbrave is one of the least confused cookies regarding this, to be honest. Mainly because he doesn't really care enough/doesn't notice to really question it. You gather these little trinkets that make him stronger! Cudos to you from this boy.

Wizard, on the other hand, is confused as hell of this process. Where do these stones come from? Are they truly linked to the Cookie's souls? Does that mean that they are not fully themself and/or complete until they are fully leveled, even if they only materialize with twenty of them?

Wizard just wants to know. He has asked you multiple times over, getting confused by your answers and delving in deeper whenever he can. Exactly WHERE do they come from? He's obsessed with finding out by this point.

Strawberry really doesn't mind. She's a little confused where they come from, but, like Gingerbrave, she doesn't question it too much. She does like to occasionally made theories, but she doesn't really like to share them.

If you're good friends with her she may share some of her theories with you, but none of the wild ones, and only if you ask.

Clotted Cream

WHOLE ASS ENGROSSED. He wants to know everything about the soulstones. Where do they come from? How would one even 'farm' these and how does farming a soul even work?

More specifically, he is trying to find a connection between soulstones and souljam. They do almost the same thing and have very similar names- they're both linked to the soul, and make cookies stronger.

He has spent many restless nights awake thinking about this.

Much like Wizard in that he's harassing you for answers, but he does asks questions more subtly.

Clotted Cream has flipped a few tables (with occasional assistance from Financier) before, mainly when he gets annoyed enough at not having a verifiable answer to this.

Financier

It is what it is. She accepts this. She's got dragged into the theorizing by Clotted Cream.

Chilling, mainly. She doesn't really mind not care. Likely to thank you for doing your best to collect them and to make everyone, including her, stronger.

Black Raisin

Intrigued by the sparkliness of most of these soulstones. Much like a crow, she is attracted to shiny objects. Her crow friends are too.

Black Raisin has a small hoard of soulstones that she's occasionally found, of all different sorts of cookies. The sparkler the soulstone, the likelier she and/or her crows are to snatch and hoard. If the soulstone is just a pretty rock then she'll also hoard those too.

If you really need a soulstone she will likely give one to you. How often and/or how many depends on her connection to you.

She's farming them with you by this point.

Oyster

Yoinks you.

She wants to have conversations about this. She wants to know what they are and where they come from. She will offer you tea and scones while the two of you converse.

When she first found out that her stones are Super Epic, she was very proud of herself.

Probably sends you back with some every time you come visit her.

Captain Caviar

Doesn't believe they exist. They're just rocks. Nothing more.

He will stand by his claim to the death. This WILL be the hill he died on. Captain Caviar does not believe soulstones exist.

Probably has made some propaganda about soulstones being fake. Socks, hats, jackets, you name it, he's likely made it with the words "Soulstones do not exist, numbskull" in big letter on it. Except shirts.

Pure Vanilla

Very much like Oyster. Will likely join in on your conversation time and/or will invite the two of you over for his homemade tea and treats!

Most likely to understand how Soulstones work due to him wielding Souljam, which is the most similar thing to them. Also the fact he has lived for a long time and has gathered many knowledge on the subject.

Probably has a book on the subject somewhere.

He likes to sit and watch the Ferris Wheel Landmark rotate. He likes the motion.

[hxneyfarm]

It’s not that Robin is bitter. She’s not. Really. Bitterness implies anger. She’s not angry. Not at all. She’s… okay, she’s jealous. Just a little bit. And that’s fine. That’s… well, it’s not expected, exactly, because nothing about this situation could have been predicted in the first place so there’s been nothing to expect. It’s not expected, but it makes sense. Who wouldn’t be jealous?

And, like, there’s something else, too. Something a little darker simmering just beneath the surface of her jealousy that Robin’s been having a hard time putting a name to. Not bitterness, though.

Maybe it's because Steve is hers. Yeah, platonic with a capital P, all of that, but he is hers. Back before Vecna, when he was trying to date every pretty girl who walked into the video store, that was different. Not a single one of those girls was a threat to what Robin and Steve have because that's on a different level.

This, though? Maybe Robin feels a little threatened.

Steve's beside her at the counter, his elbows on the glass surface of it as he leans forward to see his own reflection in the tiny compact he'd pulled from Robin's bag. He's clumsily dabbing her concealer on his neck to cover the red and purple marks that make him look more like the victim of a vampire than the love-drunk dweeb he actually is.

So, yeah. Robin's definitely a little bit jealous because where the hell is her great gay love affair, huh? How the hell did her dingus get his first gay kiss before she did? And how has he been able to seamlessly, unconditionally accept this part of himself when it had taken her years to come to terms with who she is?

And yes, she absolutely feels threatened by this burgeoning thing between Steve and Eddie, of all people. Becuase the way Steve and Eddie get along, the way they're so in tune with each other, it's kind of similar to the way Robin and Steve get along. It makes Robin feel prickly, because those silent conversations those two have started having? Those belong to Robin.

What if she loses him to Eddie?

It's irrational, because Steve and Robin were separated at birth or something, and he would never, ever, ever abandon her and she knows it. Knowing doesn't silence her fears, though.

And that sucks, because Robin should be the most supportive cheerleader of a best friend, and she is happy for them, honestly.

But damn. Eddie's almost always around now, and that's fine, it's great, really. Because she likes Eddie, thinks he's great, thinks he's an awesome match for Steve. It's nice to have someone else like her around, someone who can commiserate with her anxiety about being queer in a little place like Hawkins.

Or, it would be nice, if Eddie and Steve could stop sucking face for, like, a minute and a half when it's just the three of them hanging out.

Robin has never third wheeled this hard in her life.

its just a little thing, but hi i'm going to start publishing stuff now i think

[damned-punk]

Kid and Killer are both awesome and they share such a deep bond ❤️. Might not have one without the other. I keep thinking about what it would be like to have a love triangle with Kid and Killer. What would that look like and who would play which role in the relationship?👀🔥🔥🔥😋

☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★

I agree, I definitely don’t think you could have one without the other. They are two sides of the same coin, the same soul split in two. That dynamic is what makes the idea of a love triangle so interesting with them because it’d be a constant push and pull, both of them so stubborn and unrelenting so that the other could have their chance with you.

As far as instigating the whole thing, it could result from either of them at any given time though I don’t see them being the type to actively seek out a relationship. It’s far more likely that a mutual attraction spontaneously occurs similar to what happened with Victoria and when it does inevitably happen, Kidd and Killer are locked in before they even fully realize its going on.

Perhaps it starts with some increasingly intimate interactions in the common areas of the ship, maybe some out of place compliments given by a red-faced Kidd or an unusually talkative Killer. If you happened to be a non-member of the crew, prepare to be asked to join and don’t even attempt to decline as they’ve already sunk their teeth deep into you when it comes to that point. They wouldn’t force you to be with them romantically, but they’re very protective of those they care about and would want to ensure your safety from the haven of the ship.

Kidd might notice that Killer has gotten comfortable around you rather quickly, especially if he’s talking more or allowing you to occupy the kitchen while he cooks, but Killer certainly knows that Kidd is smitten way before Kidd is ready to acknowledge those feelings himself. Kidd’s demeanor is far too open and boisterous which makes his ‘subtle’ changes in behavior that much more obvious, especially since he and Killer know every little thing about one another.

If you maintained a level interest in them both, there would be some inner dialog that makes them question whether you’re being friendly or if you’re actually flirting with them as it seems. This is where the mutual pining would come into play (more on that here) as they may grow a bit distant to see if you’ll seek them out on your own. If they didn’t know about each other’s feelings before, it becomes glaringly obvious when they notice that the other is intentionally avoiding you.

They’d slip away to Kidd’s workshop or their cabin to talk about what exactly is going on, from there it all gets laid out on the table. The major issue that you’d face is that they both value the other’s happiness so much that they’d willingly let you go for the sake of the other. Killer is specifically affected by this sentiment as he has such heavy self image issues and wouldn’t be confident that you’d want to be with someone like him in the first place.

When you can’t ignore their sudden polarization anymore, you seek council from some of your closest crewmates who have sat back and watched the whole thing unfold at a painfully slow pace. Any doubts or insecurities you have would be quickly diminished as they’d reassure you that both Kidd and Killer are interested, they’re just silly little guys who don’t know how to properly communicate their feelings. This could be where the option of a polycule is presented. They’re both wonderful men and realistically, who could choose between them?

They would be open and accepting of the idea, but I don’t see their dynamic changing much at all. They’d still be partners in that platonic soul-mate way and you’d be their new little partner, the platonic aspect of their relationship being completely lost when it comes to you.

★☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★☆

[somegirlontheinternet135]

OH WE ARE SO BACK!!🗣️🔥🔥🔥

Second video here

Whelp, it's happening! Burning Spice is coming to the game & boy we weren't given a chance to breathe!🔥

Like with the previous update my expectations are quite high. ESPECIALLY with Burning Spice Cookie's introduction! His personality so far, his design, his voice!?

All Amazing!! 💕🔥

Also Smoked Cheese reappearance made me SO HAPPY! I was so upset that he didn't come out in, so it was AWESOME TO HAVE HIM COME BACK!!

Safe to say, I'm pretty hyped for this upcoming update & excited to know what round two of Gold Cheese trauma will look like🧀!!

But enough rambling, onto the predictions! Cause I have a few!

(Spoilers Ahead!)

Y'know how I've theorized the connection between Capsaicin and Burning Spice Cookie? Well this update further proves this theory hands down! From what we know from the triple cone cup, Capsaicin is a sweet & friendly guy who tries his best not to hurt around despite the levels of power he has, and who was previously imprisoned for being a possible threat! Who imprisoned him is still a mystery but one thing's for sure; the two definitely contrast one & other despite their similarities. And call me crazy, I think this connection of theirs may be implied further in the story

Now this just be me overanalyzing here but I think the drawings we see in the beginning of the second trailer will play a big role in this update as a means "show don't tell" storytelling. Likely, Golden Cheese will find these drawings in various locations on her journey. Also in a strange way, further feeds in my connection theory(let me explain-)

When first looking at these drawings, I quickly noticed how messy they looked; and sure this could be from a cookie who's never picked up a pencil in those but the drawings themselves don't exactly portray that. They show Burning Spice Cookie in a more negative light, which is weird considering all the cookies we see in trailers so far worship. What only makes the most sense at the moment if they were done by a kid, a kid with knowledge on Burning Spice's true nature

(This is the last one for now) As it's made likely, most the creatures apart of Burning Spice's army are only fighting Golden Cheese to survive; presumably from Burning Spice's wrath. Because of this, there is a chance they'll all turn against him at some point; probably by Golden Cheese and Smoked Cheese's hands

That's All Folks✨^^~

[foodfightnovelization]

Foodfight! The (OFFICIAL) Video Game

Yes, you read the title right! No it's not the fangame I made a couple months ago, this is the real deal, the whole enchilada, the ACTUAL Foodfight! tie-in game! Shortly after ROTTEN: Behind The Foodfight was released, its creator Ziggy, myself, and everyone else in the Foodfight! community thought we'd found everything there was left to find. After all, we'd uncovered the workprint, the novelization, almost all the original footage, Ziggy had interviewed countless people who worked on the movie, some character models had even been found...so that was it, right? But as I hinted at in my last few posts, the Foodfight! story wasn't quite over yet.

Reese, a friend of Ziggy's, had reached out to one of the developers involved in the Foodfight! tie-in game that was set to be released alongside the movie, and shortly after ROTTEN came out, Ziggy also managed to get in touch with them. One thing led to another and we were sent a HUGE 10GB folder of art, documents, models, and footage related to the game. What you see above is a concept submission trailer created to show off the game and what it'd look like, similar to the pitch reel created for the movie itself. Needless to say, this blew our minds! If you've read my previous post on the subject, you'll know that up until now the only thing anyone had EVER seen of this game was a few seconds of grainy footage from E3 2006. To go from that to a whole stockpile of material from its development was INCREDIBLE! To learn more about how this found its way into our hands, I'll direct you to a blog post from Ziggy himself, explaining a little more about the game's developers (and relaying a truly hilarious story about Larry Kasanoff)

However, I want to talk more about the INCREDIBLE plethora of material included in the folder that was shared with us. Ziggy uploaded everything he was sent to archive.org, so I'll link it below if you'd like to peruse the files yourself, but keep reading if you want to know more about what's included!

Just to start off with, the footage from the above concept trailer and the assorted screenshots- doesn't it just look awesome? It's way more visually appealing than the finished movie ended up looking, for one thing, and it's seemingly inspired more by the early pre-motion capture footage than anything that came later on. It's also just mindblowing to finally see all this, to suddenly go from knowing basically nothing about the game to knowing so much about it! And best of all...doesn't this just look EXACTLY like a movie tie-in game from the mid 2000s? I mean, that shouldn't be too surprising, that's exactly what it is, but tie-in games of that era had a very specific look and feel and this just takes me right back to that. Remember the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory game where you're racing around on a trashcan lid, the Spider-Man game where you're running around Oscorp avoiding security robots, or the Incredibles game where you're rushing through a burning building fighting guys with flamethrowers? Doesn't this just look EXACTLY like one of those?

And you might be thinking "it's too bad we only have a few minutes of footage and some screenshots, I wish we could know even more about what the game would've been like". Well, your wish just came true! Buried deep in the files is a copy of the game's design documents, telling us EXACTLY how each level would've played out! (If you're struggling to find it, it's in AUDIO> Final Drop> FF> Docs) So not only do we get to see a ton of what the game would've looked like, we also get to see how the whole thing would've come together, with 26 action-packed levels consisting of a variety of different gameplay types. Looking at several other files, it seems like the number of levels may have been cut down to 15 later in development, but hey, it's fairly common for design docs to be more complex than the finished game. Regardless, reading about everything they had planned...this really is the ultimate stereotypical tie-in game. I mean, just look at some of these level descriptions! Isn't this every movie-based game you've ever played, all rolled into one? You can bet your boxtop if it had made it all the way through development, it'd easily have the honor of being one of the few tie-in games BETTER than the movie it was based off, although considering how the finished film turned out maybe that's not saying much.

Based on what the developers said in the article linked above, it's unclear exactly how much of the game was finished before it was cancelled, and unfortunately it's incredibly unlikely they'll ever be able to compile a build together to send our way. However, there's just SO much included in this folder it's hard to complain. Not only do we get basically a complete picture of how the game would've come together from all the documents, screenshots, audio, cutscenes and footage included, there are all kinds of additional files that are both interesting and incredibly useful.

Not only are there models and environments from the game itself (unfortunately the only character model included seems to be Dex), there are also models of the ENTIRE CAST taken directly from the earlier version of the movie! Every main character is here, from Dex to Sunshine to Mr Leonard, as well as a bunch of other models such as Dan's plane and cockpit. This is HUGE, and I can't wait to see what talented artists will do with all these resources. At the time I'm writing this, someone already ported several of the models into SFM (Source Filmmaker) and another made several animations in Blender!

I'm sure even more will happen soon, but right now this is pretty incredible. Who thought this would EVER happen? That one day we'd have models of every main character, a complete workprint of the movie from 2005, a tie-in novelization, footage of the long-sought after videogame, and so, so much more. In the span of less than a year, Foodfight! went from some of the most obscure lost media of all time to some of the most well-documented lost media of all time. We have so much there's no way I'd ever even be able to discuss it all, that's how far we've come in the past few months.

Seriously, I've barely even scratched the surface of what's in this folder. There are 3D cutscenes from the game, 2D cutscenes, concept art for the planned toy line, footage of prototypes of those toys in action, MORE gameplay footage, previously unseen storyboards not included in the workprint, raw audio of Charlie Sheen's voice sessions from the movie, tons of songs from the game, the entire score from the movie, and that's STILL not everything! I mean, holy chips! I STRONGLY encourage you to download the folder for yourself and take a look...maybe you'll even find something I haven't yet?

I really think that with this folder now out in the public, this is as much closure on Foodfight! as we'll ever get. I know I always say that and then there's some amazing discovery a few months later, but this is just such a huge smorgasbord of material that I don't even think we can count Foodfight! as lost media anymore...okay, we haven't found absolutely everything so it's partially found media at best, but could you really ask for more than all this? We have countless models from the movie, design docs and footage from the planned tie-in game, early drafts of the script, we know EXACTLY what the movie and game were going to be like before everything collapsed... now, if you're so inclined you can take all that and make something out of all of it, but me? I'm pretty satisfied just having the knowledge. Knowing what could've been before it all fell apart, getting to see so much I never thought I'd get a chance to see... right now, I'd say my Foodfight! cravings have been satiated. Unless another monumental discovery is unearthed anytime soon (at this point I wouldn't be surprised), I think there's really not much more to say. If nothing comes up in a month or two, I'll make a post showing off my personal collection of Foodfight! merchandise, an epilogue to the past year I've spent obsessing over this movie. In the meantime, I hope you all enjoy the absolute treasure trove of Foodfight! material that's been discovered! Dig through it all! Make something out of it! There's so much in these files, you could create your OWN Foodfight!, with blackjack and hookers!

[thecynicalcinephile]

So, About Deadpool and Wolverine,

Whereas this film is definitely hilarious, action-packed, and had my whole theater cheering in places, it is still never the less a modern Marvel movie.

The film opens rather strongly, with one of the most awesome and hilarious setpieces I've seen in a while. Honestly it's worth seeing it in theaters just for that opening sequence. And for a while, through the first two acts, the film is able to maintain a similar level of energy. The second act in particular was absolutely incredible, but I can't say more without leaning into spoiler territory.

I will say, however, once we get into the third act the quality of the writing drops drastically. It's like they knew exactly what they wanted for the beginning and middle but had no idea how to stick the landing. Additionally, for one of the villains in here, something happens at the end of Act 2 that really felt like it was a fitting place to leave them and focus on another villain, but instead about 5 minutes later there's a random change of heart where this interesting character begins leaning into clichéd villainy just for the hell of it. Because of this sudden change, the third act really just feels rushed and unplanned with very little build-up or tension. It would have been much better if they'd taken a different direction.

To put it bluntly, the first two acts are about everything you've come to expect from the first two Deadpool movies, but the third act is everything you've come to expect from the worst of Marvel's modern offerings. I'd recommend seeing it in theaters just for the atmosphere, but keep your final expectations low.

[falciesystemessays]

Into the Breach is important.

If you somehow have not heard of it, Into the Breach is a microtactics roguelite about giant mechs fighting giant monsters by the developers of FTL. It is superficially similar to games like Fire Emblem and Final Fantasy Tactics, but it turns so many genre conventions on their head. There is basically no output randomness. No misses, no criticals, and the enemies telegraph exactly what they're going to do next turn. Each turn becomes its own self-contained puzzle about pushing and manipulating enemies to prevent damage to the buildings and yourselves. It shows so beautifully that the best part of a tactics game isn't having the highest damage numbers, but manipulating the battlefield.

If you care about tactics games At All, Into the Breach is a must-play, even just to see how you feel about it. As a game designer, there is so much to learn from this game, whether it's about randomness, UI clarity, or just general tactics/roguelike design. I'd also recommend this GDC talk by one of its designers about the process of designing the game. It is very insightful, especially as a companion piece to the game itself.

Okay, with that out of the way, let's talk about the Advanced Edition update.

This took me by surprise. They just kind of shadowdropped a free expansion four years later. Now, I suspected this might happen, they did an advanced edition for FTL too. But I didn't expect it to be so... interesting.

I say "interesting" as both a positive and a negative. Many of its additions are, to put it in scientific terms, fucking awesome. But not all of its choices are ones I agree with. It's especially interesting as many of the design choices are ones that Subset avoided when developing the base game. For better and worse, ITB Advanced Edition is fascinating trying to understand. I've had this essay on my mind for two years, and now that I have this blog, I feel like I have space to make it. So, let's get into it.

Probably the most immediately compelling part of this update is the addition of five new squads, many of which have become some of my favorites to play. They have easily the most creative and unique powers in the game, and many of them revolve around controlling the battlefield, with effects like fire, smoke, and even breaking cracked tiles to create abyss. To be perfectly TBH, my favorite part of a tactics game is getting to play with a new toy, and Advanced Edition has new toys in spades!

This brings us to the new weapons, though, which is a different matter. I like a lot of the weapons that are attached to the new squads, but there are plenty more that you can get randomly from shops and the like that I am much more negative on. Many of them are weirdly situational, like one that depends on the level you're playing on having water. And many are incredibly unwieldy and difficult to understand, like The Big One, which pushes you back but sends a projectile forward which deals damage in a cone shape but decreases in damage as the cone expands. It's difficult to understand, and more to the point, difficult to explain. That's probably why it was scrapped from the original game. But Advanced Edition puts it back in, betraying the game's value of clarity. It's a strange decision, and one I still bristle at.

And on the topic of scrapped things that were brought back in Advanced Edition, Unfair Mode is a thing! I feel like I should give some context for this. So, in that GDC talk I linked, Matthew Davis talks about all the concessions Subset had to make to get the game feeling good. Like, they betrayed their game's determinism by adding Grid Defense, a random small chance for a building to survive impact. They hated doing this, but it was necessary to make sure players saw the game through to the end. Well, Unfair Mode removes Grid Defense, or at least starts it out at 0. Similarly, they had to curtail spawn rates for enemies, because if a turn was even just a bit too difficult, the game stopped being hard and became unsolvable. Into the Breach is a kind of puzzle game, and a puzzle you can't solve isn't exactly a fun time for most of us. Well, Unfair Mode raises the spawn rate, but compensates by letting you recover from building damage faster. The enemies spawn in so fast that they actually hit the limit for enemy count fairly often. This comes with a very funny consequence that once they hit that limit, the game won't spawn in any more next turn, so if you can kill a bunch of them this turn the next turn becomes super easy. It's a very fun back-and-forth. Unfair Mode, I feel, captures the essence of Advanced Edition pretty well. "We tried to avoid doing this before, but we're giving you the option to do it now."

The game isn't just theirs anymore. It's ours.

There's plenty more I could talk about. I mean, I love the new pilots and skills, I'm mixed on the new missions, and I'm trying to like the new enemies. But they all amount to the same thing really. The game is weirder now, for better and worse. As someone who really appreciated the completeness of Into the Breach at launch, it can feel very strange thinking about what the game is now. Because the game can be whatever you want it to be. You can turn off advanced enemies, missions, weapons, individually. You don't have to play on Unfair, or use any of the new squads. This is unlike even FTL's advanced edition, where the choice is mostly just advanced or not.

It feels like Advanced Edition comes from the designers of Into the Breach letting go of their vision, deciding they've already made the game they want to make, and letting the player decide what the game becomes instead. As a designer, I don't know whether to admire or admonish this. But I do know that I still love Into the Breach. It's clear that this game is going to be on game developers' minds for years to come, and plenty of devs are taking direct inspiration from it. Like the upcoming deckbuilder ARC SEED, or Mobile Suit Baba, which is exactly what you think it is. I myself hold ITB as a major inspiration for my own tactics work, (and incidentally if you want to see my work then you can check it out here) but while the base game gets me thinking about the nuts and bolts of design, AE has me thinking more philosophically about the role of the game designer. Is there more value in the finished work, or the open work? Is it more important to stick to your vision, or to give players the tools to make their own vision? It's the kind of question that only games have to ask, and I think that's beautiful. As I spend another eon thinking about it, I'm gonna play some more Into the Breach.

[empressofthewind]

Hi! I've been rereading some of your meta posts and I really enjoy hearing your opinions. I don't know if you've talked about this before, but why do you think Near said "If you can't win the game, if you can't solve the puzzle, you are just a loser"? Does he really think L is a loser? (I don't remember if that line is in the manga, but it's in the anime). And thanks again for your awesome posts :)

Hi Ray!!! Thank you so much, I'm really glad you enjoy them 🥰💕 this line IS also in the manga, and I don't think I've talked about it before but it's definitely something I've thought about! If you take Volume 13 as canon, then there is technically an answer to this, which you can see on the top line here (I've also typed it out in the image description if the text is too small/grainy to read):

This WOULD imply that Near actually thinks L is a loser, so take that as you will lmao. Personally I'm inclined to disagree with this, for two reasons. Firstly, he doesn't seem to extend this way of thinking to Mello when he dies for the same case (or anyone else, for that matter). If he thought dying at Kira's hands made L a loser, then he should theoretically apply that same principle to everyone who died for the case. Secondly, he does seem to have some level of respect for L, although I waver on exactly how much that is - but if he really thought L was just a loser, I don't think he'd wear a mask of his face, keep L's puppet on his finger during his final speech and rule out a potential plan on the basis that "it would be an insult to L".

However, I've included this entire excerpt from his profile because I think there are some other lines here that actually give a few extra clues about what's going on with this line. It's notable to me that three of the four quotes on there have very similar phrasing; "you're nothing but a loser", "you just have to say sorry", "you are just a murderer". He has this way of talking about things that reads as almost a bit dismissive? I don't get the impression that he is actually as impassive as he comes across, especially because the way he talks about Mello is always SO passionate and emotive, but rather I think this is just his way of rationalising things. He breaks them up into smaller parts or metaphors in his head, which makes it easier for him to think about them logically. He weighs up the risks and benefits of everything he does, he's very particular about deciding whether something or someone is worth his time, and I get the impression that he has a fairly symbolic way of thinking which helps him work through real-world dilemmas and keeps him from becoming overwhelmed.

So with that in mind, my interpretation of this line is that he compares the Kira case to a game or a puzzle, and thus instead of having to grapple with L's death, he thinks of it like losing a game. It's similar to him making puppets to represent people in his real life, knocking over his dice tower while most of the SPK members are collapsing around him and tipping out his puzzle while he delivers the line in question. This is also reflected throughout the rest of the series in the way he talks about the Kira case. He very consistently refers to the investigation as a game and thinks of it in terms of winning or losing, which I think makes it easier for him to reconcile with the consequences. The moment he learns about L's death, he knows there's an incredibly high chance that he will have to take over the case himself, and at this point, he's 13 with presumably zero real-world detective experience; only whatever training Wammy's House put them through. So if the world's best detective - who's been in that line of work for 15 years and has solved every case he's ever taken on - just died trying to solve this one, it has very scary implications for Near and Mello. Thus, while I honestly don't think he was as cut up about L's death as Mello and Roger were, it certainly wasn't good news, and thinking of it this way makes it easier for him to process.

I hope this makes sense!! Thanks again for the compliments, these are always my favourite posts to make :-)

[pistatsia]

I believe that for Kaiser, Ness (along with his proficiency as a midfielder) is also an unconscious response from his bad coping mechanisms. 

He's a manifestation of his problems and most of all - of his insecurities.

Okay, I've said (wrote) it.

Like, we all agree that he has some... issues, and most of them come from the insecurity. Narcissists (though I don't believe Kaiser fully is a one) often have a really fragile, insignificant, small 'me'. And the worst part? They may not realize it, but they can feel it. What do you have to do to not feel it, to try to remove your non-ideality? Put up a fake, but awesome, ideal-like personality. And constantly, constantly prove that that's who you are by any means necessary - or even better, directly show that you're not just good, but better than someone.

Sound similar? To create a 'new me', to destroy others and feel happy, to come to the other side of the world to crush your opponent, proving that you are stronger before the World Championship, where all eyes will be on you?

Except that just having a new, perfect identity and winning 'for yourself' is not enough. How do you know you're perfect if you're building that ideal for others in the first place? Kaiser's false identity needs to be seen; he needs to be bathed in love, to feel other people's obsession and delight, anything to assure himself that he is indeed perfect. How do you do that?

The reasonable answer? Find someone to do it, preferably someone with low self-esteem and/or insecurity, make them believe you are 'perfect' and then drink all the admiration, love and awesomeness out of them until you are saturated. Only the 'saturation' never comes.

That's the kind of person Ness is to him.

And in the end he gets Ness - moreover, I'm sure he's been shaping him gradually, molding him, making him react exactly the way he needs him to - and until Blue Lock, as is obvious from Ness's reactions, this fragile system worked smoothly. He could show him love, he could give him care, he could surround him in every possible way, binding him to himself more - and "how dare Kaiser look at anyone but me" and Ness's shocked reactions to insults seem to indicate that there was also a "honeymoon" period, the main purpose of which was to bind Ness to himself. Ness is something conventionally stable but mid-level for Kaiser, something he can definitely possess and who will never walk away from him. Someone who admires him (even though deep down Kaiser may know that he doesn't, because his real self is not at all what he shows on the outside), who sort of shows him that yes, you are perfect! I admire you! You're everything to me! I would die without you! You're everything! And what does that mean? That Kaiser is supposedly as perfect as he wants to be.

Ness is the evidence base for his exceptionalism.

Well, somewhere Ness is not enough, somewhere he's restricting, and what? At least (so far) there's no emotional upheaval, such a perverse safety-trap. Kaiser has him under control, and consciously or unconsciously, but easily knows how to manipulate him to get the reaction he wants.

And I'm sure that even if he did feel some surrogacy of such a relationship, even if he wanted someone else for a long, permanent period of time, he wouldn't change a thing. He may not be comfortable with Ness, he may want something more, someone else, but Ness is his safe base. He's not willing to risk rejection from someone bright like Isagi/Sae. Because deep down he knows he won't be able to keep a stronger/better partner. Oh, and neither can a midfielder (imagine the same Sae). He's not enough. People who are successful usually have their own boundaries that they keep - they are independent, they will always have something else, someone else to admire and talk about, they won't be consumed by him the way Kaiser needs it, won't depend on him completely and play by his rules, and it will kill him - Kaiser, for whom admiration and adoration of whom is the main fuel. Food and a way to survive.

What would it say about him if someone would leave him? Someone strong, successful, handsome?

That he's not perfect. 

And that's the realization that Kaiser runs from the most.

Which is why, as long as Ness fuels all of his worst traits, they're stuck with each other.