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totemsp2blog · 2 years ago

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Totem’s 2022 Backlog of shame Awards

Sometimes, I… wanna write about games. So here are some words about some games in an arbitrary fashion whose workings are known only to me.

I also play games, and then I don’t. These are their stories *dun dun*

“I paid my money” Award (also winner of the “Timesink stream jail” award)

Betrayal at Club Low

The Cosmo D experience.

Awarded for being purchased but I made the grave mistake of saving it as a stream game, because it was so much fun playing Tales from Off-Peak City blind, as well as other Cosmo D games on stream. The problem is… my streaming ‘hobby’ is dead in the water at the moment. As I’ve begun to refocus my social efforts away from the broad social internet at large (aka, social media in general), and into friend groups and regular hangout spots, it’s been making less and less sense for me to reach out to the internet void, and hope someone notices, which usually comes up empty. I don’t really have a presence or anything to sell, and honestly I think it’s way better this way. I mean, if you have friends, why wouldn’t you just chat to them instead of making short posts on to pop up on their timeline.

So, this award will be revoked once I reorganize my priorities and decided to just play it on my own or stream it directly to my discord friend group.

Besides, I never promised to stream it… that tweet doesn’t exist anymore never existed.

“I’m ancient now” Award

Cult of the Lamb

The government funded cult sim experience.

A game developed here in Melbourne, noteworthy for being funded by my state government, and thus has the ‘Dan Andrews seal of approval’.

It’s on the list because my taste in gaming has changed where action games don’t interest me as much as they used to. I wasn’t necessarily bad at the game, in fact I took to it quite well. I just stopped after a while because I’d simply had enough.

I even started my game over… for personal reasons… and that also might have something to do with it.

Who knew a certain action would permanently remove a follower from your Cult. I swear I would’ve torn that fucking rat’s heart back out and shoved his decap’d head in the composting box it I could’ve, for I am the god damn word!

*sigh* Did you know I once rolled back 30 minutes of progress in Subnautica because I ran my Seamoth into a Rabbit Ray?

“Master procrastinator” Award

Warframe: The New War (and subsequent updates)

The pre-Hydron experience.

Warframe had the potential of losing this award, but as you’ll soon find out, it was retained because I’m a fool… in fact, I was always a fool.

For the longest time, I thought the prerequisite for The New War quest was… well, how do I explain this to people who don’t play Warframe? It was a certain sword, and an equippable mech suit (no the Warframes don’t count as equippable mech suits… it’s complicated)

Anyway, I thought that for a long time, and even complained about it on the internet, only to get corrected and told “no, you don’t need the Paracesis, you get loaned one in the quest.”

“oh…”

So I didn’t have to do a dumb grind, and only had to do a much less dumb grind. With that in mind, my energy for the game came right back, fully intent on catching up a full year of content that I’d missed out on.

Only… for me to hop back in and start doing the exact same thing I’ve been doing in the game for the past collective year… grinding XP on Hydron… until I burnt out again. (oh, I also did a little resource collection to build a new pet, and then I took that pet to grind XP on Hydron.)

If you don’t know, Hydron is a location in the star chart that appears to be everyone’s favourite area to grind XP, or try out new gear while grinding XP for them. Reliably so, you can easily get a full party of pubs each mission. That’s all what I’ve been doing in Warframe for so long. Just hopping on a defense, testing weapons and frames, clicking on Grineer.

But what I should’ve been doing is tackling the requirements for this quest so I could enjoy new content and all I’ve been doing is playing a mission that has probably been in the game for almost a decade… because it’s a comfy place to meet up with 3 strangers and wreck house while playing with new toys, so that’s why it gets this award/excuse.

Runners up

Halo the Master Chief Collection

Pictured: Not MCC, also the Halo Infinite Beta Forge experience

Reminiscing about the old times. Haven’t finished it due to a bug with the music in The Maw. Very annoying. Would’ve gone on to play the rest of the master chief story afterwards… perhaps stopping at Halo 4.

Metroid Prime Trilogy (primehack mod)

The "Nintendo won't be happy about this" experience.

Speaking of Reminiscing about the old times, A way to play my favourite games of all time, with Keyboard and Mouse? And all the other features Dolphin provides? What am I waiting for? That’s a good question. I’m probably waiting for my current gaming obsessions to run dry before taking it on. It’s a good standby nevertheless!

Void Bastards

The Auspost experience.

This is a good game, featuring The Stanley Parable Narrator, which means I have a source of Kevan Brighting to tide me over while I wait 10 years to be able to play Ultra Deluxe again. This was a runner up for the “old bastard” award, because it deserves a mention, but I’ve put it down for similar reasons, though I haven’t suffered a severe loss to the extent that I did in Cult of the Lamb.

Deep Rock Galactic

The modded DRG experience.

This was a runner up for the “Procrastubator” award (ew). It too is a 4 player coop loota game with missions. But instead of weird space children telekinetically controlling people violently transformed into hunks of weird parasitic metal with the powers of the V O I D, it’s funny space dwarves digging a hole full of bugs. A great game, that’s fun with friends, that I’ve just burnt out on for the time being. I’ll be back for sure.

War for the Overworld

The 2010s unofficial-but-superior Dungeon Keeper experience.

I have but one more mission to beat in this game. Shamefully, this counts for more than one game in my collection, but this get’s a special mention because it’s a great Dungeon Keeper game that we should’ve gotten instead of that mobile shit pile EA put out. Well, now you can get this game and none of that money goes to EA, so it’s a win win!

Backlog of Shame Game of the Year Award

Death Stranding

The 'Bring your daughter to work' experience.

Content Warning: sad

When I finally got to see what the gameplay of this game was, I knew I’d get into it. And I did!

I got up to a point where I was using Excel to do my nerdy (autistic) thing of cost calculation, so I could quickly move the right amount of freight to build all the roads. And I was pretty thorough with areas before moving on. I may have put in roughly 50? or so hours before I moved on from the first area and as of now I have nearly 150 hours and I’ve only reached Heartman. And then I had enough for the time being.

Time passes…

Things change…

And now I have the Directors Cut.

And I want to play it… but I can’t.

It’s because the game makes me sad. Well, Sadder… I mean it was sad before, but now… it makes me really sad.

I should explain that it’s not the game that makes me sad (as much), but the use of licenced music. The tracks by Low Roar are hauntingly beautiful, and I had been enjoying them during my time playing and listening to them on my own… but I had been curious enough to read up on the songs, and the album they're from and find out what it's about. And right now, after things happening in my life, the subject matter is too sensitive for me to listen to them.

Some would say that embracing these feelings and exploring them through artistic mediums can be a good thing, but not when it starts being not so “being a downer”, more so “bad for my mental health” which may be a bit strong to say. I guess what I’m saying is it’s perfectly acceptable to give yourself some time away from subject matter you’re not prepared to deal with, especially when you should be taking extra care of yourself. Not just me, that counts for just about anyone I can think of. If you’re reading this, you count too!

I wanted to finish this game, to find out what in the goddamn is going on and what in the heck it’s all and going and why and… stuff. I was ready to hop back in when the DC dropped, but right now… it’s not the time.

Someday I will play it again, but that day is not in sight, and I don’t know when it’ll be.

Which is annoying since they just announced a sequel. Oh well, hopefully Kojima’s Xbox game isn’t so depressing.

Have a happy holidays, or at the very least, hang in there. It’s not the end.

Oh… and the...

“attention redirection” award

for game most responsible for putting a few games on this list is goes to my current obsession…

Space Engineers

The first space flight experience.

...thanks to the server I play on being back up and running. Plus runner ups for any games I’m playing with Server 9 in the interim.

LATE EDIT...

I have completely forgotten there was a game that absolutely should've made the list, a game so significant, that the endless praise I have heard from everyone in existence that knows of and has played it, was truly palpable. And it's a wonder how I completely forgot about it.

And so, I am giving the...

Backlog of Shame Lifetime achievement award

to...

Outer Wilds

The "Totem not played Outer Wilds because I just... I dunno..." experience.

I have no excuse for this one.

Maybe the explorative adventure game design is not my cup of tea... which doesn't make sense because I love Cosmo D games. But Cosmo D games typically give you a hand because they understand that you're ultimately here to look around. Perhaps I don't comprehend the difficulty of the game yet (not with just 2.9 hours).

Perhaps... I'm...

I'm...

still obsessed with Space Engineers. Hey, it's kinda like that. You take off in your space ship, lose control, and then you crash. I wish Space Engineers has a time rewind function... oh that's called backup saves.

I dunno... It's just not... taking me. It looks and seems really goddamn cool, but I don't know, it's just not drawing me in...

oh it is drawing me in...

oh god it's drawing me in too fast HELP M- ...

Totem’s 2022 Backlog of shame Awards

Sometimes, I… wanna write about games. So here are some words about...

#video games

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bubonickitten · 5 years ago

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TMA fic: Night Terrors

Summary: At first, Jon assumes his nightmares are just that: bad dreams. But it's only a matter of time before he is forced to acknowledge what it means to be the Archivist.

Cross-posted to AO3 here.

[Spoilers up to MAG 132. CW for canon-typical horror, unsettling dream/nightmare imagery (think MAG 120), some passive suicidal ideation, and some spider mentions here and there.]

Jonathan Sims has had the same nightmare since he was eight years old, with only slight variations.

Sometimes he is the fly in children’s overalls being offered up as a meal. He can feel the anxious buzz of the delicate wings on his back, a foreign and sickening vibration humming its way across his exoskeleton. Four feet rub together nervously in front of him in an uncanny, insectoid pantomime of hand-wringing. The looming form of Mr. Spider is made all the more horrifying by his hundredfold vision and his inability to blink.

Sometimes he is the larger fly, offering up a victim as sacrifice. He can feel his face contorting, features molded into the horror-stricken face of Mr. Horse that still haunts him on sleepless nights. He is forced to watch his offering devoured, slow and excruciating. After, the monster turns its eyes on him.

Most often, though, he is the spider. Or, rather, he watches from the spider’s perspective, a prisoner trapped behind the creature’s many hungry, glinting eyes, as helpless as a fly caught in a web. The dream sequence unravels in slow motion and he is forced to witness the weeping faces of his intended prey for what feels like hours. Enormous block letters bear down on him, announcing the spider’s insatiable hunger, its demand for more, more, more.

Finally, blessedly, he is allowed to close his eyes, but the relief is always fleeting, for when he opens them seconds later, he sees the aftermath of a massacre: smears of reddish-brown blood coating the walls, the floor, the wilting flowers in their vase.

Then, he hears a knock on the door. He sees many – too many – hairy black limbs reach out to open it. He catches a glimpse of a terrified, familiar, but still nameless face through the crack. He always awakens just as the victim opens his mouth and begins to scream.

Jon may have managed to wrench himself away from Mr. Spider, but the fear and the guilt still cling to him years later, like the wispy strands of a broken web. It’s only right that they follow him into his dreams.

~~~

Jon isn’t sleeping well lately.

Well, that isn’t new. But he’s sleeping even worse than usual.

It shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise, Jon tells himself. The new job is stressful.

The Archive is a monument to entropy. A tornado could have swept through and blown things into a more sensible order than the previous Head Archivist left them. The Archives contain nearly two centuries’ worth of case files, and they're scattered about with no discernible system of organization. Material isn’t sorted by format: cassette tapes are thrown haphazardly into the same boxes as loose leaf paper. It isn’t sorted chronologically: case material from the mid-1800s can be found mixed in with recent statements from the 2000s. As far as Jon can tell, it isn’t even sorted thematically; on a cursory perusal, the statements boxed together seem to vary wildly in content, comprehensiveness, and verifiability.

In fact, the conspiratorial part of Jon’s brain can’t shake the feeling that there’s an eerie sense of curation to the disorganization. The more rational part of him knows that Gertrude Robinson was simply elderly, set in her ways, and secure in a position that she had held for decades. Elias isn’t one for hands-on management in the best of cases; there was little to no risk of him actually making his way into the Institute’s basement to observe the way Gertrude ran her Archives, let alone to actually discipline her for lax work ethic.

Either way, though, the result is the same.

The first thing Jon had noticed when he walked into his new office a week previous was a stack of unmarked boxes against the back wall behind the desk. They were partially covering what at first glance appeared to be fingernail scratches on the floorboards, but he told himself that he didn’t have time to dwell on that and deliberately pushed it to the back of his mind. He could deal with it later – or, with any luck, not at all.

The first box he opened contained a handful of unlabeled cassette tapes, a stack of blank index cards in a plastic sandwich bag, an empty manila folder, a nonfunctioning USB thumb drive, and a mess of loose papers with no coherent theme: some fragments of personal correspondence (unsigned and handwritten on yellowed paper in nearly illegible cursive), the scattered typewritten pages of a statement (pages 2 and 7 of 10 missing, presumed lost), and a hand-drawn map of what looked like a labyrinth. The second and third boxes contained more of the same: scattered documents and a yawning void of context. The fourth box was completely empty. The fifth contained only a single matchbook with a faded spider printed on its surface, rattling around the bottom of an otherwise vacant box.

Unmarked boxes, improperly-preserved documents, no rhyme or reason, a layer of dust, and an ignition source. It wasn’t a good start – and, unfortunately, it seemed representative of what the job was going to look like, at least for the first few months.

But beyond that, Elias had been insistent that Jon begin creating audio recordings of statements as soon as possible. Jon had initially chosen to interpret “as soon as possible” to mean “as soon as everything is organized,” and after seeing how big of a task that was, he was careful not to promise a time frame. After the third email from Elias inquiring about Jon’s progress with digitizing the old statements, though, Jon was honest: every day, he found himself adjusting the project timeline as they found more and more statements misfiled or missing.

“I believe it would be best for you to begin recording the statements as you go along,” Elias said. It was obviously an order, but he masked it as a friendly suggestion. Jon hates when he does that; it feels manipulative and condescending, like a parent (or grandparent, in Jon’s case) presenting the illusion of choice to a child and daring them to call it out for what it is.

Jon never was good at keeping his mouth shut, though.

“My first priority is to ensure that everything is cataloged and stored properly. Digitization will go more smoothly if everything is in order before -”

“You have three perfectly competent assistants,” Elias interrupts. Jon bites his tongue before he can make a snide remark about competence. “I’m certain they can handle a bit of filing without your close supervision.”

“But we -”

“I want you to begin making audio recordings, Jon,” Elias interrupted, finally adopting a tone that brooked no argument. “It all has to be done eventually, and it doesn’t matter what order you go in, so you may as well pick a place and start.”

“Some of the documents are incomplete.” Jon couldn’t quite manage to keep his annoyance out of his tone. “I found pages of the same statement scattered across three different rooms -”

“Start with the statements that seem complete, then. If you find more related case material elsewhere later on, you can simply make supplemental recordings.”

And with that, Elias had walked away before Jon could protest further.

So, yes. He’s stressed. The Archives are an unmitigated disaster, Jon only has three assistants to help him put them back into some semblance of order, and Elias wants him to embark on a massive digitization project when they still haven’t even inventoried the contents of most of the unlabeled boxes piled around the place. It’s like standing in the immediate aftermath of an earthquake and being told to start construction on a new building before the damages are assessed or the rubble is cleared. Oh, and he isn’t given any blueprints for direction.

Sleep troubles are to be expected.

~~~

These nightmares are new.

It isn’t that all of Jon’s nightmares involve spiders. He does occasionally have standalone nightmares that are perfectly spider-free: finding himself back in uni and failing a class he’s never attended and doesn’t remember signing up for; being chased by something sinister and tripping over nothing, only to wake up just as its teeth puncture his throat; waking in an unfamiliar place surrounded by things just to the left of human, hiding behind names he knows well and faces he does not recognize.

But this is the first recurring dream he’s ever had where spiders do not feature prominently.

At first, all he can see is the fog, pressing in on all sides. If the dream lent itself more to cartoon logic, it’s the type of fog that could be molded like putty. He doesn’t make the conscious decision to move; the dream simply puppets him forward and he lets it take him. He doesn’t even notice the open grave until one foot is suspended over it, and when the dream loosens its grip on him, he throws his weight backward, swaying off-kilter and nearly stumbling into another pit that has appeared just behind him.

The fog recedes just enough for him to make out the dozens of empty graves now surrounding him.

Then it starts to move back in, tendrils reaching out to him like the myriad limbs of a living, breathing creature, coating his skin and filling his lungs, and all at once he is pummeled with the overwhelming revelation that he is alone. It’s not just that there isn’t anyone around for miles. It’s not even just that he will never again see another living person. No. It’s that he is, for all intents and purposes, an island. No one knows him. No one ever has, and no one ever will. And he has never known anyone else, either, only carefully constructed personas meant to mask the self – if there even is such a thing as the self.

He will die here, and nothing will remain of him, and no one will notice that he disappeared. And that’s… that’s okay. It’s right. It’s exactly as it should be.

Someone is screaming. Actually, he realizes belatedly, someone has been screaming for a while now, but only now does it manage to reach him through the haze.

Once again, the dream forces him to move. It maneuvers him around the vacant graves, drawing him ever closer to the voice. When he is finally brought to a stop, he is wrenched forward and his gaze is forced downward to behold a shivering figure sprawled six feet beneath him in the earth and mud. She looks familiar, but it takes a few moments before he can place her.

Naomi Herne.

She nearly weeps in relief when she sees him, another living, breathing person after so long lost in the mist. She reaches up to him, begs him to help her, but when he tries to kneel and extend a hand, he finds that he cannot move. He cannot speak. He cannot blink.

He can only watch, and so he does.

The seconds stretch into minutes stretch into hours, and the whole time she pleads with him to say something, to say anything. He watches as her fingers dig deep furrows into the walls of her prison and eventually her pleas dissolve into hopeless whimpers.

He wakes up in a cold sweat, feeling as if he never slept at all.

Untangling himself from the sheets, he stumbles into the bathroom, turns on the faucet, and splashes cold water on his face. As he stands and stares at his reflection in the mirror, he notices how pronounced the dark circles under his eyes have become. Naomi Herne’s statement had been unsettling, certainly, but apparently it’s affected him more deeply than he had initially thought.

It’s not all that surprising, he supposes. There have been a lot of changes in his life recently. The content of the statements he reads is… upsetting. He’s stressed. It would be strange if he didn’t have trouble sleeping.

It’s fine. It’s normal. He’s fine.

~~~

The next night, he dreams of Naomi Herne again.

And the night after that. And the night after that.

Every time, she begs him to say something, to take her hand. She needs to hear another human voice; she needs to feel a human touch; she needs an anchor, anything to chase away the isolation.

At some point, though, she begins to curse him. He is her jailor, her tormenter. She would rather be completely alone, to be left to suffer in dignified privacy, than to have her loneliness amplified by that unwavering stare. Why is he doing this to her? Why won’t he just say something?

As usual, he cannot make a sound, and he cannot look away.

~~~

Jonathan Sims and Melanie King rubbed each other the wrong way from the moment they met eyes, and she is no more pleased to see the Archivist in her dream that night.

They both watch as Sarah Baldwin pleads with an unseen, unforgiving assailant. They look on in revulsion as she staples her skin back together. The scene plays over and over and over again, and eventually Melanie wrenches her gaze away from Sarah and hones in on the Archivist. All of her fear transmutes into anger and she unleashes a torrent of accusations, railing against him for his arrogance, his callousness, his foolish conviction that he knows better than everyone else, that he understands anything at all.

He can’t open his mouth to argue with her, but even if he could, he’s not sure that he could counter her allegations.

Melanie is still shouting at him when he is pulled from the hospital and finds himself in the graveyard again. Naomi Herne is huddled in the corner of her grave tonight, knees hugged tight to her chest. She is utterly silent. He wishes he could look away, but the dream has his head locked in place and his eyes plastered open and he watches her for the rest of the night.

Jon wakes up all too aware of his skin and what lies beneath it.

~~~

The tables in the dissection lab are piled high with pulsating hearts, quivering lungs, and writhing bones.

Hand trembling, scalpel in hand, Dr. Lionel Elliott slices into an apple as if demonstrating how to dissect a human heart. The Archivist catches the glimmer of tooth enamel, the glint of a silver crown on one of the molars, and a shared wave of nausea crashes over both of them. The professor begs the Archivist to take the apple from him, but as always, the Archivist is immobilized. He can feel every ounce of the Elliott’s helpless fear as if it is his own.

The Archivist knows what Elliott is thinking. He wants to run. He wants to curse. He wants to beg. He wants to bury the scalpel in the Archivist’s unblinking eyes. Instead, his blood curdles and his limbs contort and his joints dislocate and he writhes like a live butterfly pinned to a board in front of an uncaring, ceaseless watcher.

The Archivist feels all of it along with him, and neither of them can scream.

It’s only a dream, of course, but Elliott feels so alive that Jon wakes up with a sense of pity all the same.

~~~

The Archivist wants to tell Helen Richardson not to open the door, but his jaw is wired shut with invisible thread.

The Archivist has lost count of how many times he has been forced to watch as the Distortion’s maze devours her, the scene playing recursively in its mirrored hallways.

Of course he dreams of her. She disappeared right in front of him and he could do nothing to stop it. In quiet moments, the scar that the Distortion gave him still twinges, and brings with it the deep ache of guilt. It’s to be expected that it would bleed over into his dreams.

~~~

Letter by letter, Tessa Winters consumes the keyboard. An eerie, cold glow highlights every detail of her pained expression. Although the Archivist’s mouth will not open, he feels one of his molars crack under the crunch of plastic, and as Tessa moves on to the monitor, a shard of glass slices into the roof of his mouth. The blood pools on both of their tongues, trickles down their throats, and they both wish they could gag.

The Archivist's thoughts unravel into acute angles and sharp edges, shredding his consciousness to ribbons. He is a collection of garbled text and rogue characters, of noisy pixels and castoff artifacts, of corrupted extensions and crossed wires.

It’s cold, and it hurts.

IT%’s/ côLd &&;t <<hurts>>.

I̴t̸'̴s̴ ̵c̸o̸l̶d̵, ̵a̵n̶d̴ ̸i̴t̴ ̸h̶u̸r̵t̸s̶.̸

Ï̵̡̻ͅț̴͘'̴̰̙͒̌͠ͅs̶̻̿̎ ̴̞c̵̮̒̾ơ̴̞͕̕͝ļ̴̱̅d̶̥̣͎̈ ̵̨͕̀̿̊a̵̗̪̽̆n̶͕̩̞͆d̵̦̮̳͐̏͗ ̵̢̻̑ȉ̷̪t̸͓̉͒ ̶̮͉̹̇͠h̵̳̻̞͝u̴̢̬̣̒ř̴̠́t̵͍̟͛ṡ̷̨̤͓͒̾.̸̦̭̓

I̶̢͚͓̤̗̹̱̠̱͚̤̾t̶̛̳̏̑͐͗́̍̈̿̄͒͗́̔̈́̈́̈́̚̕͠'̵̡̧̦̖͚͓͙͙͕̜̻̣̙̲͓̑͂͋̾̊̄͌̀̑͒̚ͅͅs̶̀̂͌͌̈̈́̃̽̏��̛̣̻͚͓̫̜̔̌ ̵̗̫̓̊̾̇͆c̷̨̑̀̈́̇̊̇̑͊́̂̊̇͘̚͘̚̚̚͝ǫ̵̈́̎̿͑̔̔̑͛̀͋̉̋̓̾l̷̙̯͙͍͇̟̭̳͉̹̳̖͎͇̲͖̝̖͈̺̍d̴̡̫̼̗̮̹̎̌̽̏̂̐̑̈̏̀̃͆͗͂̓̚͝ ̴̧̛͈̭̼̭̰͔̥͓̟̲́̒̊̍̉̌͆̇̆̑͗̑̿̉̅̑͒̽̈̿a̵̳̰̽̌͆͂̏͒̌̓̔̈͐̆̿̕͝n̸̨̢̧̧̲̺͙̗̪̻͎̥͉̥͔͇̠͙̫͒̌̅̃͒́̌̈́͐̀̈͘̚͘̕͝͝ͅḋ̵̢̡̧̜͇̜̤̠̺̜̦̲̳͓̼̩̣̼̭̱͐̿̿̍̿̀͌͊̃̿͊̕͠ ̶̭̩̥̲͈͚̟͇̱̹̼̩̪̙̱͒́͑̌͒͐̕͜ỉ̸̲͇̬͓̫̪̞̜̱̪̻̲̎̿́̃̽̕͘͠͝ţ̸̗͙͍͍̫̞͚̞͓̙̼̝͚͕̮̋͋̏̌͂͗̈ ̵̨̟̗͉̯̘̙̫̱̹̱̲̘̪͖̤̱̟̦̘̹̟̎̐̌͗̾̋̿̄͜͠h̴̢̡̨̢̛̫͓̠̤͉̠̩̮͙̞̪̏̇͊̈͂̿̅͋͌͘̚͠ư̵̰͙̯͖̈́̄̊͌͐̾͐̃̈̈͒̑͠ͅr̷̨̛̗͈̣̰̘̲̩̦̙̅̃̽͛͒̈͜͠ͅṯ̶̮͕̺͖̹̺̺̦͈̰̮͚͇̳̘̺̤̹̭͐͊̏̓̅̊̏͌́̒́̚̕͘͘͜͝͝͠͝s̶̺̻͔̹̙̟̭̜̏̆͗͂̔̄̔͋́͆̀̋̈́͌͂̚͝.̶̘͚͚͓͕̝͖̪͔̼̙̲̞͎͉̩̳͍̙̩̋̆̅͒̇̅͌̆͗̉̋͊͒͐̔̅̏̕͜͝͝ͅ

~~~

When Jon finally bolts upright into wakefulness, he knows.

These are not his nightmares.

They are shared dreamscapes.

No, not shared. Invaded.

Just recently he had noted how long it had been since last he was the spider in his nightmare, but maybe that was premature.

At least the others showed up at the Institute to give their statements on their own. Tessa Winters, though, was his fault. He wrote the forum post that drew her to him. She wouldn’t be in his dreams if he hadn’t cast that net. He spun a web and waited for the prey to wander in, all because he needed to know and was willing to lure someone in under false pretenses just to get the answers he craved. It doesn’t matter that he didn’t intend this – the consequences are the same.

And Tessa Winters knows it. She meets his gaze, equally unblinking, baleful and accusing. He is a thing with too many eyes, gorging himself on her suffering, devoid of empathy or humanity. When she looks into his eyes, she sees a ravenous, pitiless voyeur, and even if the Archivist was allowed to speak, he would not dispute her claim. After all, the Beholding is the feeling that something, somewhere, is letting you suffer, just so it can watch, and the Archivist is its pawn and its representative and its instrument. Tessa's eyes pin him in place just as effectively as the ever-present Eye in the sky.

He is becoming – has become? – that which he fears, and he cannot look away.

It really isn’t all that different from the spider dreams after all, except this time there are witnesses to his sins.

~~~

The words on the paper are blurry and his head feels full of cobwebs. His eyes itch and sting in equal measure, making it ever more difficult to keep his heavy eyelids from drifting shut. He keeps nodding off, leaning forward and jerking upright as soon as the sensation of falling grips him.

“-n? Jon!”

“Wha-” Jon startles as Martin’s voice finally reaches him through the fog. “I – what?”

Martin has a concerned look on his face. That seems to be his default state these days, Jon thinks distantly.

“I kept saying your name but you were just… you weren’t answering.”

“Oh.”

Martin worries his bottom lip between his teeth. Jon can tell that he wants to say something, but he just stands there waffling, and –

“What?” Jon snaps, and then he and Martin wince at the same time. “I’m… I’m sorry, Martin. I – I’m just tired.” He rubs his eyes furiously, trying to chase away the haze. “I’m sorry. Did you need something?”

“I… Jon, when’s the last time you slept?”

Silence.

“Maybe you should have a lie down? I made up the cot in the storage room, and –”

“I’m fine,” Jon replies through gritted teeth.

“You’re falling asleep at your desk. Actually, um,” – a small, cautious grin crosses Martin’s face – “I don’t know what paperwork you used as a pillow, but you have ink on your face.”

Jon groans and scrubs at his face with both hands.

“You really do need to sleep, though,” Martin ventures again, gentle but firm.

“I… I don’t want to,” Jon says stiffly. As soon as the words leave his mouth, he curses himself for the honesty – Martin is going to want to talk about that now, and –

“Why?”

Jon is silent, steadfastly refusing to look Martin in the eye.

“Fine,” Martin sighs, exasperated. “But you can’t go forever without sleep, I don’t care how stubborn you are.”

He’s right, Jon knows.

Jon did manage a full 70 hours awake before he started nodding off in spite of himself. For the past few days, he’s been allowing himself short naps, setting his phone alarm at hour intervals to wake him long before he can enter REM sleep.

It isn’t sustainable, but the alternative is haunting people’s nightmares, looking into their eyes and Beholding what they see when they look at him: Cold, calculating predator. Unblinking voyeur. Too many hungry, prying eyes, feeding on their terror, stripping them of their dignity, soaking in their trauma with cruel fascination –

“Jon.”

“Fine,” Jon grumbles. “Sixty minutes.”

~~~

Whenever he slips into the dreamscape, Daisy promises to hunt him down. Finish what she started. Bury him in a shallow grave and leave him to become yet another mystery.

The Archivist wonders if being killed in the dream would wake him up, spare the other dreamers from his scrutiny for just one night.

He wonders how Daisy would react if he was able to tell her that he resents the absence of her knife at his throat just as much as she does.

~~~

Six months.

For six months, he wanders, an uninvited, hated guest in those familiar dreamscapes.

The Archivist wants nothing more than to throw himself into an empty grave, to turn the damp earth into a prison with six-foot-high walls, to break his legs in the fall so that even when his resolve crumbles and he tries to clamber out of the hole, he will be unable to do so. The other dreamers would be safe from him, then. There would be nothing for him to watch but unyielding soil and the chill, impenetrable fog above.

He Knows that the Eye is still there behind the veil of fog; he can feel its unceasing gaze, but at least in the lonely cemetery, he cannot see it.

There is an open grave in front of him, its waiting maw calling him forward, promising to shackle him, to hobble him with blindness and paralysis. He stands at the edge, knees locked and eyes peeled, staring down into a plot that he desperately wishes belonged to him, and him alone. The dream keeps him there for what seems like hours, taunting him, holding relief just out of reach.

Then, the dream turns him around and pulls him inexorably toward his true objective. Once again he is forced to watch as Naomi’s freezing, bloodied fingers scrabble uselessly on the walls of her prison. Her tears have left trails in the mud on her face, and when she looks up at him, she asks the same question she does every single time: Why are you doing this to me?

Eventually – after far too long standing statue-still, eyes locked on Naomi’s pained, desperate face – the Archivist is yanked onward toward the waiting carnage of the dissection lab, the mournful singing of the coffin, the undulating mass of ants.

When Jane Prentiss shambles toward him, he can feel the worms burrow into his skin all over again. He wants to scream, to scratch, to grab a corkscrew and start digging – Dig, comes the intrusive thought, blinking in his mind like a marquee: Dig. Dig. Dig. – but his mouth and his hands are not his own, and his eyes – so many eyes, so reminiscent of the spider – are fixed on Jane. Her otherworldly screams pierce the night as she burns, and the Archivist desperately wishes he could clamp his hands over his ears to block out her death knell.

Being brought before Georgie Barker is almost worse than confronting Jane Prentiss. If she could still feel fear, the Archivist is certain she would wear the same expression as the others. Instead, there is only a mix of pity and resignation. Over and over again, Jonathan Sims has walked into burning buildings for even the slightest chance of having a question answered. She wishes she was more surprised to see what he has become, but she is so intimately familiar with his pattern of self-destruction and stubborn curiosity, and she has long since recognized it for what it is: a fatal flaw, coaxing him toward tragedy like a moth to the flame.

The exterminator makes no distinction between the Archivist and the Flesh Hive, and Georgie Barker likely wouldn’t, either. As always, the Archivist cannot find it in himself to argue.

When at last he finally awakens, he is not surprised that she leaves with such finality, her parting words condemning him as a lost cause. He pushed on past the point of no return, just like she always feared he would, and she has no desire to watch him burn.

~~~

Jon may not have been allowed to toss himself into a lonely grave, but the coffin welcomes him with an eager appetite, and imprisons him in much the same way. He may be unable to move, but at least his body is his own, unlike in his dreams; he may not be able to escape, but at least he can speak.

“After the mission. I was planning to kill you,” Daisy tells him, matter-of-fact. He knows why the moment she starts talking about her dreams. “Realized you weren’t human. Needed to die, as soon as it was safe. Never mind Elias and his… insurance.”

“And now?”

“Don’t know. I – I miss dreaming. You don’t sleep, down here.”

Jon finds the prospect of eternal wakefulness in this place downright horrifying – the endless boredom alone sounds like torture – but... no sleep means no nightmares.

“Daisy, you should know, I – I’m… if I wasn’t human before, I’m, uh – I’m even less now.”

The distant rumbling of the shifting earth picks up in volume until he can feel it in his teeth.

“Yeah.” Daisy doesn’t sound surprised. “Well, at the moment, I don’t care.”

“And if we get out?”

“But we can’t get out.”

“No.”

The noise grows in volume, drowning out his voice.

I really should have known better, he thinks to himself. Of course his rib wasn’t a strong enough anchor. He’s so alienated from his own body at this point, so far from human that he couldn’t even die properly. How many times has he found himself thinking, What’s another scar? In a way, he feels just as detached from his body when he’s awake as he does in his nightmares. The idea that a part of his body would call to him from outside the coffin… it’s just as ridiculous as his rushed, irresponsible deductions about the NotThem’s table.

“I’m s – I’m sorry,” Daisy stammers, snapping Jon out of his reverie. “I’m sorry, Jon.”

“So am I,” Jon replies. For everything, he does not say.

The rumbling fades, and silence descends on them in a rush.

“You know,” Jon begins after a minute, choosing his words carefully, “I… I didn’t know, at first. That the nightmares were real.”

Daisy says nothing, and Jon interprets it as permission to go on.

“I – I thought that they were just my nightmares. That the first statements I took hit me harder than I’d expected. I was so dismissive to the first few people who came in to give their statements in person, and I assumed that my – my guilt over how I treated them was manifesting as nightmares, since I refused to process it in real life. That I was just…” He lets out a bitter laugh. “That I was just stressed about the new job.”

“When did you figure it out?” Daisy asks levelly.

“I… I think I suspected after a few months? But I just – I told myself that I was being ridiculous. I went through a bit of a – a paranoid phase, and I thought that I was just… overthinking things. I tend to do that, to just – obsess, and let my imagination run wild –”

Daisy snorts. “Yeah, I gathered that.”

“I – I've had a lot of practice with denial, I suppose,” Jon says, sheepish. “Or feigning denial, at least. Playing the skeptic was… safer. Admitting out loud that I believed in – in monsters felt like it would… draw unwanted attention, I suppose. That it would somehow provoke the thing watching me to strike. I convinced myself that pretending to be ignorant would keep the monsters at bay.”

“That’s…”

“Stupid, I know.”

Daisy gives a dry chuckle.

“I had to give up the act after – after Prentiss attacked the Archives,” Jon continues. “Even after that, though, I still wanted to believe that the nightmares weren’t real. But then one day I woke up and – and I just knew –”

The dirt around them begins to press in again, forcing the air from his lungs. Jon feels Daisy’s fingers brush his wrist and he takes her hand. Not alone. Not alone. Not alone.

Then the pressure lets up all at once and they are both left gasping in its wake.

“Keep talking?” Daisy’s voice has that desperate, pleading edge to it again. It’s so at odds with the Hunter that Jon knows, more like prey than predator. “I – I need – I don’t want to be alone.”

“Not alone,” Jon murmurs, as much for himself as for Daisy. “The dream that made me realize – her name was Tessa Winters. I took her statement, and that night she was in my dreams. The way she looked at me, I just… I knew. She was really there. Her eyes were so – so accusing, like she knew that it was my fault that she was there. And – and it was. The other statement givers came to me on their own, but she likely would have never come to the Institute if it wasn’t for me.”

“Oh?”

“I – I posted on a message board, soliciting supernatural experiences related to technology.”

“You can use a computer, then,” Daisy teases, a smirk in her voice.

Jon smiles too, and for the briefest moment he forgets where they are. “I just turned 30 this year, Daisy,” he says, rolling his eyes, and she snorts.

“Still, I can’t picture you making forum posts.”

“I had an ulterior motive,” he admits, his smile fading as the old guilt bubbles up. “I had found Gertrude’s laptop, and I needed help breaking into it, so I – I figured maybe I could lure in someone who knew computers, take their statement, find a way to casually ask them to have a look at the laptop for me. It worked, but then she appeared in my nightmares, and – if I hadn’t drawn her to me, she wouldn’t be there.”

Daisy makes a noncommittal sound. Jon shuts his eyes tight and takes a deep, faltering breath.

“And then – after the Unknowing, I – I should have died. I was dead, technically. My brain was still firing – dreaming,” he says with distaste, “but I had no pulse, no respiration, no… no other signs of life.” He feels the pressure of tears in his eyes and he fights to keep his voice steady. “You should have seen the way the doctors and nurses looked at me as they were explaining it. A – a medical mystery – a marvel, really – the sort of thing that most professionals would kill for a chance to study – but they couldn’t wait to get away from me, to hurry me out the door.” He pauses to take a deep breath, but between the crushing earth and his own grief, he can’t fill his lungs. His exhale comes out shallow and shaky. “And – and Georgie, and Basira, and Melanie, and –”

Daisy tightens her grip on his hand. It’s so surreal that Jon almost laughs. This is Daisy. Daisy, who seized him by the throat, who tried to kill him, who enjoyed seeing him terrified and begging for his life, who took such pride in the scar she left him with – and now she’s comforting him. He isn’t sure how to process that turnaround, so instead gives her hand a squeeze in return, clears his throat, and continues.

“So – so for six months, I was in a coma. If you can call it that. But the whole time, I was dreaming. For six months, I walked through the same nightmares, over and over and over again. There was no waking up to escape it, and – and it meant that the other dreamers couldn’t escape me, either. Up until then, if I was awake while they were asleep, they could get away from me, but – but I was in the dream every hour of every day, so I was there every night they slept. And the way they look at me – like I’m a monster – it just… they’re not wrong, but I just wish – I wish I could tell them that I’m sorry, that I don’t want this either, that I don’t want to watch. The Eye doesn’t let me speak, though – or move, or – or blink. I am an observer, and an observer does not interfere.” He laughs then, a little hysterically. “It – honestly, it felt like longer than six months. I lived through the same scenes so many times that I started to feel so numb to it all.”

“What about my part of the dream?” Daisy asks quietly.

“I – ever since the Unknowing, whenever I get to your segment, there's nothing but the coffin. I always enter it, but it never brings me to you. Until now, I suppose,” he says with a humorless chuckle. “Oddly enough, though, I always found myself wishing you were there.”

“Really.”

“Yes, I – it’s hard to explain.” He hesitates for a moment before settling on honesty. “You always looked at me like I was prey, instead of predator. Or – or maybe like I was a predator, but a – a weaker predator, something that could be killed. A monster that could be vanquished. I… I wanted you to catch me. I suppose I thought that maybe – maybe if I died in the dream, it would end the cycle, and release the other dreamers from the Eye.”

“Might have killed you in real life, though,” Daisy points out. “If the dreaming was the only part of you that was alive.”

“It may have,” Jon agrees.

Daisy lets that linger for a minute, heavy and revealing.

“I… I don’t think I want to die,” Jon eventually continues, “but I can't stop thinking that maybe it would be… better, if I did? All that would happen is that the world would lose another monster, and – and that would be fine. It would be right. But I still…” He chokes on his words, something between a laugh and a sob. “God, when did not wanting to die start to feel selfish of me?”

The dirt around them shifts, sibilant and imposing. They hold their breath, as if speaking might provoke it. Daisy waits for the rustling to settle again before she speaks.

“Why did you come here, Jon?”

“To – to find you, to get you out –”

“Yeah, but why? I nearly killed you. Would have tried again. Would have liked it.” She huffs. “I know you didn’t come here out of any loyalty to me. So, why?”

“I…”

“To get yourself killed?”

“No, I – I really did want to get you out of here.”

“Why did you come for me, then? Out of guilt? To justify not dying?”

“I…” Jon sighs heavily. “Yes, I – I suppose. And - and Tim was dead. Sasha is dead, and Martin is... gone, and when we found out you were still alive, I just - I didn't want to lose anyone else. I couldn't just leave you here, not if there was a chance I could bring you back.”

Daisy is silent. Jon knows that she wants him to say more, and he takes a deep breath.

“The others don’t trust me – not that I blame them, I don’t trust me, either. Martin is… he has his own plans. Georgie wants nothing to do with me. Melanie hates me for not having the decency to die, blames me for everything that’s happened. Doesn’t even think I’m me anymore, just – just some monster wearing a familiar skin, and – well,” he laughs uncomfortably, “I have a hard time arguing with her assessment.” He takes a deep breath. “And – and Basira, she… she doesn’t put much stock in my humanity, either. Sometimes she sees me as an asset to be used, but…”

He trails off, feeling faintly guilty for his mixed feelings on Basira. She encourages him to use his powers when it will help further their goals. She doesn’t go so far as to claim that the ends justify the means, but she does frequently remind him that they need to be pragmatic, like Gertrude. The rest of the time, though… she looks at Jon like he’s a dangerous animal, unpredictable and poised to strike. He knows that she’s fully prepared to put him down if it starts looking like he’s too dangerous to be allowed to live, and although that hurts, he’s also glad that there’s someone who he can trust to put an end to him if he loses himself.

Nonetheless, it’s frustrating to be hated and feared for what he can do – to hate and fear himself so thoroughly – while still being expected to embrace those powers whenever it’s deemed useful. He’s more of an instrument than a person now, a tool to be used and then locked safely away once he’s fulfilled his purpose. At the same time, though, it at least offers him some semblance of control. He may be a vehicle for the Eye’s machinations, but perhaps he can balance it by giving their side an advantage in whatever way he can, principles be damned.

And he did give Basira explicit permission to use him.

Sometimes he wishes he had Gertrude’s certainty, or Basira’s resolve, or any sort of confidence in his own convictions. Most of the time, though, he fears what he could become if he was more decisive. He doesn’t trust himself to live without doubt.

He doesn’t know how to explain all of that to Daisy, though.

“I don’t – I don’t expect them to trust me,” he says instead. “Or like me. It seems dangerous to be near me at all, and I’m not exactly” – he huffs out a short, bitter laugh – “I’m not good enough company to risk it. It hurts, and it’s lonely, but I – I do understand. But I can at least make myself useful –”

Without warning, the Buried constricts itself around them in a rush, strangling his words and stealing the air from his lungs. This time, it feels like hours pass before it finally relaxes its chokehold. The only conversation that passes between them for a long time is synchronized, frenzied gasping for what little chill, stagnant air the Buried deigns to permit them.

“We’re the same, you know,” Daisy says eventually, forcing the words out even as she struggles to catch her breath. “I'm afraid of what I am, or - or was, or could be again. I needed the Hunt. Liked it, even – I enjoyed the thrill of the chase, the kill. But now I – I look back and I’m disgusted. I hurt people who didn’t deserve it. Even the actual monsters were… I wasn’t killing them because I cared about justice, or protecting others, not really. I was feeding on the fear of the prey. It made me feel alive –”

An abrupt coughing fit interrupts her then, and several minutes pass before she’s able to continue speaking through the grit coating her tongue.

“All I’ve felt since I came down here is fear and pain and guilt. I accept that – I should feel guilty, and I – I probably deserve more punishment than this. But still, I… I want to see the sun again, to breathe fresh air, to –” Her breath hitches. “I – I want to see Basira again.”

Jon can just barely hear her sniffling, but knows better than to draw attention to it.

“But – but if I leave here, I – I know I’ll hear the blood again. I don’t know who I am without the Hunt, but I – I still don’t want to go back to it. I deserve to be here – but I also want to leave – and that feels selfish. But I suppose it really doesn’t matter, does it?” When she laughs, it almost sounds like a bark, hollow and brittle. “There’s no way out.”

“No way out,” Jon repeats. “But maybe… maybe the world is safer without me in it – without… without either of us, I suppose.”

“Yeah,” Daisy chokes out, her voice hovering between a laugh and a sob. “That’s – that’s pretty messed up, isn’t it?”

Jon lets out his own tearful chuckle. “Yeah. Yeah, it is.” He pauses. “You said that – that you don’t sleep down here, that you don’t dream?”

“Yeah.”

“That's probably for the best,” he sighs. “At least this way, the Eye can’t reach the dreamers anymore.”

“And at least we’re – we’re not alone?”

“No. Not alone.”

“I’m glad that you’re here, Jon,” Daisy blurts out in a rush. “I know that’s horrible of me, but – but it’s the truth.” She takes a shaky breath. “I don’t want to be alone. I’m… I’m glad I’m not alone.”

“I’m… I think I’m glad, too,” Jon admits.

He wasted so much time pushing people away, refusing to trust, rebuffing any offer of help. Georgie told him that he needed human connection to help him stay human, and she was right, but when he finally admitted that – by the time he finally resolved to trust the others, regardless of his doubts – it was too late. When he woke up in the hospital, there was no one left to offer their hand when he reached out for help. Even worse, he can’t exactly deny that it’s his own fault.

But now, trapped here in the cold and the damp and the cramped, suffocating dark, Daisy holds his hand. The firm pressure of her grip is comforting, despite the clamminess of their skin. He can’t remember the last time he was touched with anything less than malice.

“I’ve been alone since I woke up,” he continues, “and – and afraid of what I’m becoming. It’s nice to have someone who – who understands what it’s like. I think this is the most companionship I’ve had in… in a long while. It’s nice to be the one seen for once – by something other than a monster.”

Daisy tightens her grip further, and Jon marvels at how such a simple gesture is so much louder than words.

A silence falls on them then – a bizarrely companionable one, so incongruous with their current predicament. They clutch each other in the dark, focusing on one another’s breathing to coax them through the irregular ebb and flow of the earth pressing down on them, peppering the gloom with quiet conversation whenever the Buried gives them an inch to breathe.

Daisy talks about her childhood dog, and The Archers, and how people are always surprised to learn that she has a sweet tooth. She tells Jon about the first time she and Basira went camping: They had stretched out beneath the night sky and Basira taught Daisy the constellations, the origins of their names and the legends they represented. Affection welled up in her as she listened to Basira muse about how even though the constellations vary across time and culture, humans have always shared this collective impulse to look up at the sky and make meaning out of randomness.

For the first time in a long time, Daisy had been truly present in the moment; for once, she wasn’t gnashing her teeth, impatiently anticipating the next hunt. Basira’s voice anchored her in the present, and the call of the blood was drowned out by a flood of warmth and devotion.

Jon talks about the Admiral, and his brief foray into AmDram at uni, and how he's always hated poetry, but then he read some of Martin's, and, well... some of them were quite good, actually. Jon confesses that he too has an unexpected sweet tooth. Martin somehow guessed; whenever Jon was having a particularly rough day, Martin would make his tea sweeter than usual. Martin never drew attention to it, and Jon never commented on it, but it was... touching, if he's honest with himself. He wishes that he had told Martin then that he noticed, that he appreciated the gesture - that it made him feel seen in a good way for once.

Jon misses Martin desperately, worries for him fiercely. Worse, he knows with a certainty that Martin will never know just how much he is missed. He spent far too long underestimating Martin, taking him for granted. Sure, Martin had stumbled a lot in the early days, but when Jon learned that Martin had lied on his CV, he was actually impressed. It's remarkable how competent Martin managed to be with no prior experience or qualifications to speak of. Daisy listens as Jon rambles on about how Martin is so much braver and cleverer than Jon or anyone else ever gave him credit for, and how much he wishes he could tell him that now.

They go back and forth like that, confiding in each other about their regrets, and the apologies they will never get to make, and all the things they miss. They talk about fears, and monsters, and what it means to be human. They talk about choices.

Jon does not dream. Daisy does not hear the blood. Together, they listen to the quiet.

#the magnus archives #tma #tma fic #jonathan sims #daisy tonner #just gonna tag those two since they're the main ones i focused on #anyway i didn't mean for this to get so long but i have a lot of feelings about jon and daisy's friendship sooooo #have 3400+ words of them comforting each other in the buried i GUESS #tma spoilers #up to MAG 132

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wildlyminiaturesandwich · 5 years ago

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The Sims 4 Realm of Magic - Early Access CAS Review

Huge thank you to the EA Game Changer Program for providing me with the opportunity to play the Realm of Magic Game Pack early!

I have been quietly hoping for a long time that we would get some kind of Makin’ Magic style pack, so needless to say I was VERY happy when Realm of Magic was announced. I was even happier when the Gurus started “leaking” gameplay images, and completely ecstatic when the trailer came out! So you can imagine how psyched I was when we were given our early access codes and I could finally get in and look everything!

You all know by now how this works, right? If I like something, I generally can’t think of much else to say besides screaming at the top of my lungs “OMG I LOVE IT!”, and if I don’t like something I will straight up tell you guys and explain why... Yeh I’m looking at you Moschino reviews. So with this pack, there are a couple things I had issues with (not as many as Moschino lol) so if you don’t want to hear my nitpicky opinions about those things you can just skip straight to the "The Verdict” section at the bottom of each review.

As per usual, I’ll be posting both CAS and Build/Buy reviews, but instead of a gameplay review (because let’s face it, I never seem to be able to get around to that damn thing lol) this time around I’m going to be posting a short gameplay “story” instead, and will be voicing my opinions about certain things on the posts as it goes along. The gameplay won’t be all posted before the pack releases though, so...

Anon will be back on for the next few days so if you have any questions about Realm of Magic, feel free to send me an ask! ✨

See a preview of all the new CAS items here

I’m still a little uncertain how I feel about CAS as a whole. It has a lot of great stuff and it’s definitely worth having in my game, but it also has quite a few things I don’t like, things that (in my opinion) should have been included that weren’t, and the usual issues with some of the meshes/textures that continue to happen with every new pack.

✨The Hair

For some reason I was expecting more than five hairs? I don’t know why, but based on the trailers this pack seemed like it was going to have a lot more content than any other Game Pack, and it does to a certain degree... just not hairs; there are only five of them. Because let’s be honest, there might be six hairs in the catalogue, but they’re are only five new hairs... and one identical hair with coloured streaks.

Probably a completely unpopular opinion but I’m not a fan of this new trend of getting extra hairs with ombre and streaked textures, I’d rather leave that up to CC makers and have the Sims team work on more new meshes.

Which brings me to the only real issue I have with the hairs in this pack. The streaked version of the long braided hair is really weirdly textured in my opinion. The streaks start right at the hairline and haven’t been feathered/blended out into the rest of the hair very well so it kind of looks like when I accidentally add one of my accessory overlays to a hair it doesn’t belong on LOL

✨The Clothing

The clothing in this pack falls into two categories; Netflix Sabrina and Hand-me-down Winter Harry Potter. Normally that wouldn’t bother me, and in this case the clothing is really well made and looks great, but I do find myself a little disappointed by the lack of what I call “Comfy Casual” clothing.

This could be entirely just a me thing but much like me in real life, my sims rarely leave their homes, and I dunno how you live your life but I don’t walk around my home in fancy button-down shirts and dress pants and shoes. I wear leggings, a hoodie and slippers; and that’s provided I even bother to get out of my PJs that morning! I keep waiting for more comfy casual clothing to be added so my sims don’t have to get all dressed up just to sit around and play video games or finish off that novel they were writing.

But with the exception of a few things in this pack, everything is either ripped, leather, mesh, buckles, collars, or corsets. Which works really well with the whole magical theme of the pack, but spellcasters deserve to be comfy too! That’s not to say the clothes we got aren’t amazing though, they definitely are and I will definitely get a lot of use out of them!

But we all know I mostly talk about the issues I have in these reviews so let’s move on to them properly shall we?

Let’s go from left to right, starting with the drop-crotch pants. This one is quick and simple: can we all just agree that this is not a good look and move on please? It was bad enough in the 90s, we don’t need to be over here in 2019 looking like we’re wearing diapers, thanks.

Oh, key necklace... I was really looking forward to using you. Sadly, unless my sims have literally the smallest possible breasts hanging all the way down to their knees, you look like someone threw you in a fireplace to melt a while 😭

The yellow dress is another classic example of “Instagram vs Reality” meme that tends to happen with every pack. The dress looked really good in the trailers and promo images, but sadly looks butt in game.

The leather bodysuit is cool, huh? Yep, it’s definitely cool. The mesh looks good, the texture is really well done... oh what’s that? You want to wear leggings under it? Well you can’t, sorry. No leggings at all can be used with this bodysuit.

Up next we have the... ahem, Slave Bracelet. I promise you I tried to find a better name but this is the name it usually goes by and the only other one I could find, Harem Bracelet, wasn’t much better 😬 Not the point though! This bracelet/wrist cuff has some weird things happen when you pair it with an outfit that shouldn’t technically allow the bracelet to show up underneath it. As you can see in the example on the far left, with some long tees it doesn’t show the bracelet but still shows the specular for it, and in the image on the far right, with other long tops it kind of merges with mesh and flattens itself on top of them.

Next is one of my pet peeves with quite a few of the clothes in this pack; the addition of gloves, scarfs and other accessories to the outfit/top that should have either been made into their own separate meshes, or left out completely. That top in the image would have been really nice to wear during all seasons, but because of the gloves, it now only makes sense in the colder months.

Then we have the new makeup options, which I know isn’t clothing but shhh lol. It’s EA makeup... do I really need to say more? It probably wouldn’t look as bad if it weren’t so pixelated but whoever is in charge of creating makeup looks for this game needs to get in touch with @crypticsim ASAP ‘cause OOF!

And the last of the pics is something that has constantly bugged me about a lot of meshes in this game, all the way back to base game; why do they change the shape of my sims like that!? Like look at this comparison of my model sim with and without the outfit... WHY!? HOW!? WHY!?

Lastly... This is probably the biggest disappointment with this pack for me and I just don’t even know how to begin to describe how annoyed I am that ONCE AGAIN there is nothing for kids and toddlers. Zero. Zip. Nada. Not a damn thing. That’s two packs in a row with no new content for any sims under teen age and I just don’t get it. Moschino actually make kids and baby clothing! And with this pack, Gurus specifically mentioned that there was a special trait for sims who were born into spellcaster families...

SO WHY NO KIDS/TODDLER STUFF!? 😡

✨The Verdict

I know this all probably came off as sounding really negative, but as I said at the start, when I don’t like something I have a lot to say about it. But I do genuinely love the clothing, it fits the theme of the pack really well and most of it looks great. I just wish a little bit more attention had been paid to certain things, that there was more comfy casual stuff, and that kids and toddlers weren’t once again neglected.

All thoughts and opinions expressed in this review are my own. I am not paid by EA to “hype” their games; I am given the opportunity to review their games early in exchange for an honest review.

Click here for my Build/Buy Review

#The Sims 4 #Sims 4 #TS4 #EAGameChangers #TS4RealmOfMagic

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missghouls · 5 years ago

Note

Why does most of your models use so many polygons? Mizuno always kept models simple so it looks like it belongs in minecraft but I'm still not over the teapot

I apologize on the wall of text you’re about to be bombarded with; but since i get this message quite often (usually off anonymous so i can answer privately) i’m posting it here. ((This is not meant as an attack on anon at all, i’m not upset or angry or anything, i promise!

The first thing i want to mention, is that I’ve cut down on a lot of the poly’s in my models, actually! I agree that a slightly simpler look, just looks better -- but i still like the angles. Just not so many @.@ I’ve been sticking to only using simple angles in newer models where they make sense instead of rounding everything off like i used to (unless it’s a very specific patreon item where they want it to look as close to their reference picture as possible) -- but at this point, the soft-cornered look it is the style that i like to use. You have to realize, that this pack is less than a year old. I learned how to model and make CIT, texture, and do everything else during the time i’ve been updating it (and i’m still learning! :D).

Just like any artist, i experiment with my style, and it’s taken me a while to find it. (look at the people who do the 5-year/10-year comparisons with their digital work! It’s amazing!! and their style changes SO MUCH :O I’m trying to fit all of that into love to go back an simplify some of the models (that aren’t patreon ones!) to better match the newer stuff, but 1) it takes a LOT of time that i don’t have at the moment, and 2) some people are very attached to the way something looks, so my option is either to change it and tell them to suck it up, or to add an alternate model and make the pack even BIGGER (which is my 1st highest complaint, so i’d rather not do that, lol)

I get questioned a lot about how & why i do things the way i do. Minty’s CIT does things incredibly simply (usually under 20 blocks) AND she textures things herself -- so why don’t I texture everything myself like she does? Why do i use Mizuno’s textures instead of making my own for every item? Why don’t i animate things like this other person instead of the way i’m doing it? Why do i use blockbench and not CubikStudio? Why didn’t i just make this a mod? Lots and lots of questions! I do my best to answer them all in the kindest and most patient way possible, but to put it simply: Because I’m doing it my way

Now, I am self-taught -- and while i appreciate pointers, tips, and help on making things better/easier on everyone (including myself!), I've come a long way on my own and it’s far too late to turn back now and suddenly change 2000+ items to match Mizuno’s cute chunky style.

An example i like to use is this: When people play Sims games and decide to download custom content: Not everything matches. Some people like super photo-realistic high-poly stuff. Others like Maxis-Match. Neither is wrong. Neither should be looked down on or argued about. It is a game that anyone can enjoy any way they like it -- and the same principal stands here. It may not “match” the same way, but it doesn’t mean people don’t enjoy it the same you happy, and if you find something missing, find an artist that can make it for you, or learn to make it yourself :D

People are welcome not to use Ghoulcraft -- i won’t be hurt i promise, lol -- and i highly encourage them to use whatever pack(s) makes them happy. I love pimping out other people’s packs (like Aria’s coffee shop/Adventure Kit, Dreamlandcraft, Minty’s Little Things, Mizuno’s, Itembound, Transmobifier, etc!). Do they all fit together and play nicely? Hell nah. We all use different textures, different models, different styles -- but that’s what makes it fun. It’s NOT the same thing, and you can see someone’s personality through what they made.

There are resource packs and modpacks that i absolutely cannot stand or that irk me -- but i would never message the artist to nitpick, complain, or put down their work just because i don’t like it -- i just don’t use it. ((Not saying this anon is doing so, but i have had messages previously, downright shitting on my pack and how much they hate it/how popular CIT is/etc. I don’t respond/publish it because i don’t feed negativity here. Minecraft is about building up -- not tearing down. So keep in mind when you message somebody, that what you’re saying is to a real person, and that tearing them down/insulting them/picking apart something they put a lot of time into, isn’t constructive or helpful at all -- to you, or to the person you’re messaging. Keep it constructive and helpful, or at least kind & polite. I know y’all know how to do that

Lastly -- As for the utah teapot -- it’s an easter egg in many video games. To pull straight from the wiki:

The Utah teapot, or the Newell teapot, is a 3D test model that has become a standard reference object and an in-joke[1] within the computer graphics community. It is a mathematical model of an ordinary teapot that appears solid, cylindrical, and partially convex. A teapot primitive is considered the equivalent of a "Hello, World" program, as a way to create an easy 3D scene with a somewhat complex model acting as a basic geometry reference for scene and light setup.

In short, it’s meant to be complex and realistic. If it were a regular square tetapot, it wouldn’t make as much sense, it would just be a normal teapot, lol. It was also a patreon-reward item from someone who wanted to see it in-game, and therefore will not be changed, sorry! Plus, Mizuno has already done 3 incredibly cute teapots/kettles, so i didn’t feel as though i needed to make one (unless maybe like, a recolor -- but i always feel weird recoloring their things).

Again, none of this was written in malice or anger, so i really really hope it doesn’t come across as such

#asks #faq #minecraft #ghoulcraft #personal #important #this isn'tt discourse i promise #i'm not angry or upset #i just ramble a lot!#Anonymous

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simranger · 6 years ago

Text

a somewhat comprehensive performance guide for the sims 3

what it says on the tin. i’m sticking everything under the cut to avoid clogging everyone’s dash because, hoo boy, this is a looong post

welcome to my kitchen, and hopefully i can help you get your game to run a bit better!

first, if you haven’t already, make sure to launch your game (i recommend just bg so it loads quickly) and check if you need to change your graphics settings. if you’re on windows and would like to play your game in windowed fullscreen:

download and install this program (it’s safe, i promise)

open the program and you should get a notification that it’s running in your tray

with ts3 open (in it’s windowed mode), click on your tray and right click on the program’s icon, then select Add window

go back to ts3′s window and press F3 on your keyboard. you should get a notification that ts3 has been added to the program’s list, and you’re done!

you’ll also need an fps limiter to prevent the game from frying your video card. i use this one, set at 60fps. alternatively, you can download MATY’s fps limiter and place it in your game’s bin. (The Sims 3/Game/Bin)

is your game crashing on startup? check your DEP settings or try using 3booter.

some tips to help your game run better

have as few programs as possible running while ts3 is open.

run a 4gb patch on your game. download this, run the .exe, select the game’s executable (The Sims 3/Game/Bin/TS3W.exe for patch 1.69 or TS3.exe for patch 1.67), and click open. you’ll get a pop up saying it’s patched. please note that your computer needs to have over 2gb of RAM for this! (most do, but do check how much RAM you have!)

if you’d rather increase how much RAM the game uses yourself, follow this tutorial.

download razer game booster. this frees up some memory on your computer to increase performance.

check how much virtual memory your pc is using. follow this tutorial.

delete cache files. the game will generate new ones every time you open the game, so make sure to delete the following files before running the game: CASPartCache, compositorCache, scriptCache, simCompositorCache, socialCache. these files are found in Documents/Electronic Arts/The Sims 3.

if you’re on pc, delete your WoldCaches folder. not everyone will have this folder, and the game may also regenerate the folder. (mine didn’t regenerate the folder, but it’s happened to others) DO NOT do this if you’re on mac!!!!

disable your FeaturedItems folder. this prevents the game from generating a fuckton of store thumbnails you’ll never look at. follow this tutorial or just set the folder to be read only.

turn off the following in your game settings: shop mode, interactive loading screens, and online features. i also recommend turning off story progression and memories and using mods to handle these instead.

edit your GraphicsRules.sgr. this will help your game load textures faster. (it also helps how fast your sims change their clothes!) do it yourself by following these tutorials ( 1 + 2 ) or download avian’s graphics fix (v1.69) (v1.67). i recommend doing the latter more than doing it yourself!

modding your game: a quick crash course

yeah, i know most people know how to download and install custom content + mods, but this is still good to give a read for managing your sims 3 cc!

first, you’ll need a mods folder because ts3 won’t generate one by itself. i recommend you download this framework and follow MTS’ guide to setting it up. it comes with a nifty little no intro video mod!

use the compressorizer redux. you can extract it wherever you’d like, just make sure to keep all its files in the same folder. this program is pretty self-explanatory, it compresses .package and .sims3pack files. to use it, click Add Files to List, select the folder with your files (you can do this multiple times), and click GO! now, just let it do its thing! it may take a while to process everything if you have big files, but you��ll get a pop up saying how many MBs you saved when it’s done. you can also use decrapify mode on .sims3packs (useful for store content!)

i recommend downloading Delphy’s Sims3Pack Extractor. i avoid using the game launcher to manage my cc at all costs, and this tool is useful for extracting .package files from .sims3pack files. follow this tutorial to use it!

Delphy’s Dashboard Tool is also useful for finding any broken, duplicate, or conflicting cc. i don’t recommend using the fix all problems option, do it yourself instead to make sure you don’t delete anything you want to keep.

renaming cc files can also help with lag. follow this tutorial!

you can also merge your package files to help with lag and load times using this tutorial. i don’t do this personally, but my mods folder is pretty small too.

note: the game launcher can only load 500 .sims3pack files at a time. only use the launcher to install absolutely necessary items!

to help reduce lag and load times, you can delete everything in your DCBackup folder (Documents/Electronic Arts/The Sims 3/DCBackup) EXCEPT for ccmerged.package. DO NOT delete ccmerged, it has all the cc installed through the launcher. (ps. you can safely use the compressorizer to compress your ccmerged file!)

final tip: try to control the amount of cc you have installed. i’ve noticed that the game takes a lot longer to load when my mods folder starts to reach a Gb. my mods folder is currently 368Mb, and it takes around 5 minutes to load any saves.

helpful mods for your game

the ETERNAL must have: nraas’ mastercontroller. you’ll need this to run all nraas mods! also be sure to grab overwatch and errortrap while you’re at it! these catch and clean any errors that happen in your game. i also recommend register and traffic.

no (or fewer) auto memories is SUPER useful for controlling memories in the game and helps with game performance. it’s super customizable!

ellacharmed’s world fixes. not really a traditional mod, but this helps with routing and camera control! note: don’t use these on preexisting saves! some lots have been moved and there will be little gaps in the world with preexisting saves.

routing fixes for schools + other lots. be sure to use nraas to reset your school lot after installing!

interaction on sloped terrain. this is mostly just a sanity saver, but very useful!

finally, i recommend grabbing awesome mod. it has a bunch of fixes and is very customizable!

reducing save game bloat

a.k.a. the steps i go through to make sure that my game loads relatively fast and runs with minimal lag.

if i’ve taken any screenshots the last time i played the game, i move those out of ts3′s screenshots folder and into a separate folder.

i delete all generated cache files. see the tips section above for more info

i run kuree’s save cleaner on the save i’m planning on playing. if the latest version (2.1) doesn’t open/work, try using v1.1 instead. you can also do this manually, though i don’t recommend it for the sake of your sanity.

every couple of in-game weeks in a save i run a total reset on the world i’m playing in. this is done through nraas mastercontroller. click on your city hall from map view>nraas>mastercontroller>total reset

tip: to help prevent your saves from corrupting, use save as and keep multiple versions of your save. for example, i have 3 versions of my lepacy save. this way, if a save does corrupt, you have a backup!

misc. ways to reduce lag

don’t run the game with all packs enabled. it’s going to murder your game. only run with packs you know you’ll use. you can also refer to this masterpost for bgc items if you only want certain items from a pack.

don’t keep tons of stuff in your sim’s inventory. use the fridge to keep fish and harvestables instead.

if your sim has the collection helper LTR in their inventory, make sure you have it set to none when you’re not using it.

i recommend downloading simborg’s CAS hiders, ILTS’ CAS Rehaul, and/or sweetdevil-sims’ CAS hiders to reduce CAS load times.

change CAS’ catalogs to show in compact form using nraas mastercontroller. select a sim>nraas>mastercontroller>settings>CAS and look for show in compact form options and set each to true

nona’s no limos mod can help nraas overwatch’s nightly clean up

make sure to turn off any build/buy cheats you activated when you go back into live mode. (even if it’s just to save)

if you’re using CAS a lot in a play session, it’s a good idea to quit to desktop and reload the game every once in a while

try to avoid saving presets and CASt swatches

disconnect from the internet. i don’t do this often because i usually have spotify or carl’s sims 3 guide open alongside ts3.

good resources to refer to

the sims wiki’s game guide to improving performace

nraas’ tips for better game performance

this thread @ MTS

optimization guide @ games4theworld

this post by darkfridaysims

that’s all folks!

if you’d like to know what cc and mods i’m using, here’s my resources page. thanks for reading all this, and if you need any clarification or have anything to add onto this, definitely hmu!

edits

*ps that i won’t be tagging people i credit so i don’t risk clogging their activity, i’ll still include a link to their blog!

the fps and 4Gb patch aren’t needed, it was fixed in a patch! (thank you, create-a-sim!)

#ofc feel free to rb this!#i took me 6 hrs to get this all together so i'd really appreciate it!#sdjkadh how do i tag this #the sims 3 #sims 3 #ts3 #tutorial #tips #reference #sr

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amillionsmiles · 7 years ago

Text

your hair was long when we first met (Pidge/Lance)

Summary: Pidge’s hair grows with the seasons. So do Lance’s feelings. A/N: feelings are hard, kids. written while listening to “No Promises” on repeat so that kind of explains the last scene, I guess. Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4

[Read and review over on Ao3] or continue under the cut.

FALL

Lance takes a sip of his coffee and immediately regrets it, the liquid scalding his tongue. His fault—his mug is programmed to alert him of the temperature of its contents, but sometimes he gets too lazy to look at the status bar and decides to risk it the good old fashioned way instead.

The door of the break room opens and Amara enters, blouse perfectly pressed as always.

“Hey,” she greets.

“Hi, Amara.” Lance lifts his mug in acknowledgement.

Amara moves toward the coffee machine, starting it up with a steady whir. Over the noise, she congratulates: “Good job on bringing in the top numbers again this month.”

Lance smiles, one shoulder pulling higher than the other as he shrugs. “What can I say? I’m competitive.” He remembers the Garrison, waiting for sim score postings with bated breath. The very first time he and Keith raced in their Lions, neck and neck.

“You’re going out with us tonight, right? We’re having a mixer with the tech team.”

“Wouldn’t miss it.” Lance winks, and it feels good, to be on top of his game again, to receive Amara’s answering smile and see her tuck a strand of hair behind her ear.

Somebody else enters the break room.

“Oh, good, Lance, you’re here.”

Pidge.

He stands a little straighter. Over Pidge’s shoulder, Amara wiggles her fingers in goodbye, slipping out through the door.

“What’s up?”

Pidge walks toward him, a data pad clutched in her hands. “I need a second opinion. We just had one of our technical writers redo the user manual, but I still want to make sure that it’s not too, you know, science jargon-y. And you’ve always been good at picking out that stuff…” She sets the tablet on the counter, swiping to bring up the file; Lance twists to his side, leaning over her shoulder to get a look. It’s muscle memory, this position—they might as well be poring over battle plans or a holographic projection of a planet.

His eyes swim at some of the paragraphs. Oh, god, what am I getting myself into— “I could take a look at it over the weekend,” he offers.

Pidge blinks up at him. “You’re sure?”

“Yeah, no big deal. Just send me a copy.”

“Already done.” Pidge brightens, typing in his work email, the data transmitted with a satisfying swish, and it’s comfortable, like this. Friends who trust each other’s opinions, coworkers who pick each other’s brains. Teammates.

Lance glances down at the lid of his mug, tries for nonchalant. “Hey, are you going to the mixer thingy tonight?”

“At Jolie’s?” Jolie’s, the bar just a few blocks away from their work, with the atmospheric blue glass lights and the karaoke stage for when you’re too many drinks in and feel like serenading the whole world with your feelings. Sales team already has bets going on who will be the first to drunkenly volunteer; currently, the majority favors Jeremy.

“Yeah.”

Pidge considers. “Probably. Are you?”

“You know me. Like I could turn down a party,” says Lance, nudging her.

She cracks a smile. “I’ll see you tonight, then. And thanks for looking over the manual, seriously. I owe you.”

“I’ll keep that in mind next time I need somebody’s account hacked.”

“I don’t do that anymore, Lance!” Pidge protests, punching his arm. Before he can react, she’s by the exit. He has half a mind to feign injury, if only to prolong their interaction for a few more seconds.

Instead, Lance raises his mug to his lips, taking a long sip.

His arm throbs. The coffee slides down his throat: still warm.

“Lance! You’re late!”

“Fashionably, I hope,” says Lance, shrugging out of his jacket as he follows Amara toward the bar. The lights cast everyone in a dark red glow, and for a second he’s back in Red’s cockpit, weaving through space. His coworkers spin toward him and away like dizzy stars.

Amara leaves his side, drawn by the noise coming from the pool table in the back corner. Lance orders a glass of scotch, then looks down the bar to see Pidge perched on a stool, dragging her index finger absentmindedly around the sugar-encrusted rim of her drink. Lemon Drop. Sweet with a dose of sour—classic Pidge.

“So, you come here often?”

She looks up, features relaxing when she recognizes him. “I was starting to wonder if you were ever going to show.”

“That boring without me, huh.”

“Actually, no, it’s been pretty entertaining. You missed Eric getting frisky on the dance floor.”

“Aw, man, seriously?” Lance mourns. “Please tell me you got a recording.”

“Obviously.” Pidge shoots him one of her secretive little smirks. “I can’t pass up prime blackmail material.”

“So you haven’t left behind your old ways after all.”

“I like having a lot of information at my fingertips,” Pidge justifies, and Lance thinks of the files she’d kept on their team, categorizing strengths and weaknesses. When he’d first found out, he’d felt a little betrayed; it hurt to think that someone close to him could pick him apart like that, lay him bare on a page. But he’d come to learn that it was Pidge’s way of caring: a constellation of data points that she drew close to herself, as comfort. They existed in the flesh, but also as facts and figures—indisputable, something nobody could take away.

Over on the karaoke stage, Jeremy has finally taken the microphone, launching into some ballad from ages ago: I’m all out of love, I’m so lost without you—

Lance bumps Pidge’s shoulder. “I challenge you to a duet.”

She scoffs. “Please, I’m way too sober.”

“We can fix that.”

Pidge finishes her drink, turning toward him. When she meets his gaze, her eyes are bright with challenge, and Lance lets himself tip a little closer to her gravity. The pieces will fall where they may.

Three hours later finds him standing on the curb, waving his goodbyes. A warm pleasantness sits in his chest, muscles relaxed.

“I had fun today.”

Lance turns, startled to find Pidge taller than usual. A glance downwards reveals that she’s wearing a pair of black pumps; it’s the first time he’s noticed them this whole night, and the thought does something funny to his stomach.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” Pidge shifts from foot to foot. Lance resists the urge to smile, already anticipating the next nervous stream of words: “I mean, I like everyone, obviously, I wouldn’t be here otherwise, but you know me, it takes a lot of time for me to really get comfortable and open up and… it was just easier, with you around.”

Don’t read into it, Lance.

“How’d you get here?” he deflects.

“Took the rail link.”

“Yeah, you should probably call a ride to get back instead.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know,” Pidge grumbles, reaching for the clasp of her purse, and Lance remembers the first time they got drunk together. It’d been after a diplomatic banquet on some planet with two moons. Gathered in the Castle’s lounge, passing around a bottle that was leagues better than nunvill, Hunk had teased Pidge about being the only one of them that had yet to reach drinking age, which set off another argument about laws in space until Pidge said, “Who’s gonna arrest me, the space police?” and grabbed the flask from Lance’s hand. Which was how Lance learned that, while he and Shiro got affectionate and Keith got contemplative (Hunk, too, but in a more incessantly questioning kind of way), drunk Pidge became grumpy and then sleepy.

The car pulls up. Lance opens the door for Pidge, watching her slide into the backseat. “Text me when you’re home safe, I’ll see you on Monday—”

“Lance.” Pidge’s voice is quiet, the barest trace of vulnerability underneath; and that’s bad, because the last time Pidge was vulnerable around him, Lance fucked everything up. “I want… I want you to see my place.”

He shouldn’t. Bad idea. But Lance has another weakness to add to Pidge’s ongoing list, after all these years: pent-up regret and zero resistance to a certain pair of beseeching brown eyes.

“Okay,” he says, and gets in the car.

Pidge is half-asleep when they finally arrive at her apartment building. Lance leaves the car door open behind him for her to squeeze out of, turning his attention toward trying to guess which of the windows above them is hers.

“Fuck.”

He whirls around. “Pi—Katie,” he catches himself at the last second, “are you okay?”

Pidge balances on her left foot, heels clutched in one hand, the other one rubbing her right ankle. “I’m fine, I just—what are you doing?”

“Come on, I’ll carry you the rest of the way.”

“Lance, the door isn’t that far, and there’s an elevator once we get inside—”

“Are you really going to turn down a free piggyback ride?”

“All right, fine,” Pidge sighs, sliding her arms around his neck. Lance hooks his arms under her legs, rising slowly to adjust to the weight. Nobody bats an eye at them when they enter the lobby. In the elevator, Pidge reaches over his shoulder to press the button for her floor, and her hair brushes against the side of his face, giving him a whiff of her shampoo. Coconut.

Several minutes later, he stands in the middle of her living room. Pidge is dozing off again, breath puffing warmly against his neck, and Lance keeps the moment to himself, soaking in his surroundings. Half-assembled 3D puzzle on the coffee table, a fuzzy blanket thrown over the arm of the couch. Over in the kitchenette, magnets from the local planetarium adorn the fridge.

Gingerly, Lance navigates through the darkness. With his foot, he nudges the bedroom door open, the mattress squeaking gently when he sits down on its edge. He deposits Pidge as slowly as he can, careful not to crush her when he leans back—she makes a soft noise as she untangles from him, stretching out on the bed. And it’s like one of those tragic Greek myths; he’s Orpheus, unable to stop himself from looking over his shoulder.

Pidge is curled away from him, toward the wall. Her hair has grown well past her shoulders, now; Lance wonders if she plans on letting it reach mid-back.

His job is done here. He’s seen whatever it is Pidge wanted him to see. Turning around, Lance starts to leave.

A tug on the back of his shirt stops him.

“Wait.”

Pidge might as well have turned an ice cannon on him, for what it does to his body. Lance swallows. “I have to go.”

“I know,” Pidge says, and he can hear her body dragging across the sheets, curving toward him. “Thanks for bringing me home,” she mumbles, words laced with sleep. “I had fun today.”

“You said that earlier already.”

“That’s not… I meant…” She makes an impatient noise, expelling air through her nose. Lance can’t help snorting in return; even when drunk, Pidge’s mind moves too fast to pin down.

“I was nervous about tonight,” Pidge finally confesses. “I was worried things might be weird.”

“Oh.”

“But hanging out with you was… normal. So I guess that means I must be over it.”

“Over it,” Lance echoes.

“Yeah.” She sounds relaxed. Happy, even—like a weight has been lifted.

Lance should be happy, too.

“Whatever it was between us, I don’t care anymore, I just—I just want us to be friends.”

There’s a spot of chipped paint on the wall across from them, right below the light switch. Indistinguishable to most other people, especially with the room as dark as it is right now, but Lance has always had a marksman’s eye. He should have seen this coming, probably. And he can do this: bite the bullet, keep the truth lodged in his chest, no exit wound.

“Yeah,” he says softly, proud of the steadiness of his voice. “Me, too.”

“Oh, hey, Allura—ha!” In the split second that Lance spared to glance over his shoulder, Pidge swept his legs out from under him, knocking him flat on his rear.

“Hey!” Lance protested. “Misdirection! Dirty move!”

“Oldest trick in the book,” said Pidge, beaming smugly. She pointed her staff at his chest. “You lose.”

“All right, fine.” Lance dropped his own staff in a gesture of surrender, showing his palms. He held a hand out. “Help me up?”

She rolled her eyes but reached down to wrap her fingers around his, grip firm.

Too easy.

Lance tugged.

Down went Pidge, a crash of limbs. Her elbow caught his side and Lance cursed, wheezing: “Ow, fuck, my ribs—”

“Language,” mocked Pidge.

“Who are you to talk about language, you’ve got the dirtiest mouth out of all of us—” But that thought cut short, because said mouth was now hovering only a few inches away from his.

In hindsight, perhaps this hadn’t been the greatest idea.

“Lance?” Some of Pidge’s hair had come free of her ponytail, curling in wispy clouds around her face. She’d decided not to cut it and it hung midway down her back, now. Lance was prone to tugging it on occasion, just to bother her. (“Why don’t you ever do that to Allura?” “Because Allura would kill me.” “What, and you think I wouldn’t?” “‘Course not, you’d miss me too much.”)

He swallowed. What were those lines from Legally Blonde? “Exercise gives you endorphins. Endorphins make you happy.” That was what this was, probably. Despite his better judgment, he reached up, tucking one of the loose strands behind Pidge’s ear. Something had been knocked out of him, in his fall—he took a breath but it didn’t quite fill his lungs.

“Right here.”

Here, in the slowly shrinking space between them—and then their mouths were touching, Pidge’s lips soft and slightly chapped against his, and this wasn’t a moment he’d dreamt of but his hands moved of their own accord, found the tie in her hair and pulled it free, gently, tresses spilling through the gaps between his fingers, Pidge pushing down on him until it felt like he’d sink straight through the floor—

Oh, god. They were on the floor. Of the training room. Where anyone could walk in—

“Pidge, wait.” Lance broke away, even more winded than before. “What are we doing?”

She blinked at him. Color was rising to her cheeks, but her voice remained remarkably level as she said: “I thought it was pretty obvious.”

“No, I meant,” he propped himself up on an elbow, gesturing between them with a finger, “this.”

Pidge sat back on her heels. Wary. “I like you, Lance.”

It should have been a no-brainer, after what had just occurred between them, but Lance still felt as if he’d been clobbered over the head. It must have seeped into his expression, because Pidge scowled.

“You don’t have to look so surprised. Objectively, you’re not… you’re not bad-looking, and you get me differently from the others, and you make me laugh, so really, out of everyone on the ship—”

And there were the words he’d been dreading.

“Don’t say that.”

“Say what?” Pidge frowned.

“You said: ‘Out of everyone on the ship.’ That’s settling. That’s talking like we’re never going to get back to Earth.”

Pidge’s eyes widened. “Lance, that’s not what I mean.”

“Think about it. We’ve been up here for what, four years? Spending time with the same company day in and day out, it might just be—” He made a halfhearted motion with his hand. “Cabin pressure? Stir craziness? Things get a little weird but that doesn’t—that doesn’t make me the one.”

“What makes you so sure you aren’t?” Pidge’s voice had gone dangerously quiet.

“I just—” He didn’t know why he was sabotaging himself like this. He’d been chasing a relationship for so long, it felt, and now here it was, literally in his lap. But the words came anyway: “What about all the places you haven’t been yet, and all the people you haven’t met? I don’t want that to get forfeited for… me.”

“Lance.” Pidge’s fingers dug into the cloth of his shirt, just above his heart. “It doesn’t have to be this whole future planned out. What about right now?” Her eyes bore into his. “Right here?”

It wasn’t that he didn’t believe people could have more than one love, over a lifetime. If anything, Lance believed in an abundance of affection. But something had shifted, and he didn’t know how to tell Pidge that he couldn’t talk about a here and now without wanting the promise of a future, and the yearning split him in two, because if— when —they got back to Earth, they’d probably be going after different things. A sadness overtook him, for something he hadn’t even lost yet.

Pidge mistook his silence for disagreement.

“You could just tell me, you know,” she said lowly. “If you don’t feel the same.”

And with that, she stood up. Her weight lifted from his chest.

He didn’t breathe any easier.

Long-range fighting had always been Lance’s strength, and he understood it better, now. It messed you up so much more when you could see the hurt you inflicted up close. He could fix this—a few words and they’d be back on track, the misunderstanding smoothed over—but maybe it was for the best, to quit while they were ahead. To manage the hurt while they were still Lance and Pidge and not Lance-and-Pidge. They were going to get back to Earth, eventually, and she would go to her mom and he would find his way back to Varadero so didn’t it make sense, to not make any promises?

He didn’t want to be responsible for holding anyone back.

The training room doors slid shut.

#pidge #lance #plance #pidgance #flirtyrobot #voltron #my writing #otp: teenage dream meme team #ff: voltron

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morgibritt-blog · 8 years ago

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I’m a terrible shit person who’s terrible at doing replies during the week. So here’s a build-up from the past couple days. I promise I read everyone’s comments! And I really appreciate them! <3

cute!!

I’m glad that you like!

iliketodissectsims replied to your photo “Prickly Patterns: A set of 19 Cactus themed, fully recolorable...”

:O i am OBSESSED with cacti *___*

Ohhh yay! These will be right up your alley then!

justanothersimsblog replied to your photoset “Glitz’s traveling opportunity involves collecting jade or some gem...”

Im guessing its the blue one since its Egypt...but yes, pretty sky more important.

Yeah that sounds right! I just can’t remember what they’re called. Maybe sapphires.. but idk But yes! It’s a lovely sky! :)

oasisdesiresimmer replied to your photoset “Glitz’s traveling opportunity involves collecting jade or some gem...”

What lighting mod did you use? It looks awesome.

I use the brntwaffles’ Frozen lighting mod :)

smillingsection replied to your photoset

this is the cutest thing!

Awww thanks! :)

ieneile44 replied to your photoset

Awe, sooo perfect! ��

;_____; Thanks!

plumbmeow replied to your post “I'm just genuinely curious, if anyone can share their insight”

I do clean up my following count sometimes, but I usually only unfollow if the person has been inactive for a year at least, and even with that, it depends on the person and their content.

That makes perfect sense!

oasisdesiresimmer replied to your post “I'm just genuinely curious, if anyone can share their insight”

True ^ But if they come back and do the exact same thing why unfollow them? I don't get it. I know I would never do that to anyone especially since I just started being more active on tumblr.

Yeah unfollowing is sort of a tricky business I suppose. I unfollow people a fair amount, but just not usually for inactivity.

romeo-and-simulet replied to your post “I'm just genuinely curious, if anyone can share their insight”

and I have to admit sometimes people come back and do completely different things and we don't talk any more so I decide to unfollow

romeo-and-simulet replied to your post “I'm just genuinely curious, if anyone can share their insight”

tbh I don't think follower counts have anything to do with hiatuses at all, sometimes you don't post anything and then come back to ten new ones and sometimes you post your usual stuff and lose tons...it IS sad following people who haven't posted for a year I'll say that...so I'd understand if ppl would unfollow there

Yeah maybe it’s not really related. Who knows really. It does sometimes make me sad when someone comes back and it just feels like someone different. But even when they are inactive for a while, I like to stay following them so that it’s a nice surprise when they do come back *cough* @rosessupposesmanythings *cough*

melien replied to your post “I'm just genuinely curious, if anyone can share their insight”

I agree with you and everyone above, I wouldn't unfollow someone whose blog I have always enjoyed but they've got some reasons for not posting. We're all human. Tbh I have this fear myself if I ever go on hiatus, but I've seen people being away for two years or so, and they still have loyal followers, which makes me more optimistic :D

Yeah I wouldn’t worry about it too much! You’ll definitely have loyal follows and those are the one’s that really count. I mean personally, if someone unfollows me just because real-life is getting in the way of me posting on some website... well.. fine than. No sleep lost for me. You know?

pxelface replied to your post “I'm just genuinely curious, if anyone can share their insight”

I've always wondered that too? Like, wouldn't you want to keep following them so you know when they come back? Its not like there's a limit to how many people you can follow, so why unfollow people who aren't posting? It doesn't affect anything

Yes it’s such a lovely and nice feeling when you see that they come back!

justanothersimsblog replied to your post “I'm just genuinely curious, if anyone can share their insight”

I know that every so often I clean up followers by using an extension that finds inactives. They need to not have posted at all for a month (or more) though. I'll unfollow if I can't really remember anything from what they posted or we never had any contact. I figure if they do come back I'll find them again ��

That makes sense! I didn’t even know there was an extension that does that XD

inquisitive-simmer replied to your post “I'm just genuinely curious, if anyone can share their insight”

i agree with you, it also doesn't make sense in my head

It was helpful to read some other’s thoughts. So if you’re curious, they’re replies are above :)

threadsoftheeasternseas replied to your photoset “One last photo of the whole family <3”

THE TODDLERS ;-; so cute!

Aren’t they presh?!

amixofpixels replied to your photoset

HOW?!?!?

amixofpixels replied to your photoset

MORGAN?!?!?

Magic. Pure magic ;)

inquisitive-simmer replied to your photoset

omg beautiful

Thanks!!

ticklemerainbows replied to your photoset

Look at the baaabieeees

They are precious little pixel babies for sure <3

amixofpixels replied to your photoset

I'm coming to live in your game. Can it handle a slim 5'10 person?

Oh definitely. You’re welcome any time!

romeo-and-simulet replied to your photoset

SDHSMVFJHASMBFJHASD

amixofpixels replied to your post “I’m working on a bit of a sim dump”

GIVE ME ALL THE SIMS! or at least the ones, I'm allowed. XD

You’ve got it! ;)

amixofpixels replied to your photo “Gillyflower Blush for phyrcracker93You requested a light pink berry...”

This has sooo few notes, it must be from back in the day.

Yes I made her quite a while ago. She was probably in one of my first batches of sim requests.

#replies #amixofpixels #romeo-and-simulet #ticklemerainbows #inquisitive-simmer #threadsoftheeasternseas #justanothersimsblog #pxelface #melien #plumbmeow #oasisdesiresimmer #simlovinggirl #iliketodissectsims

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nofomoartworld · 7 years ago

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Embracing plastic and the apocalypse: An interview with Morehshin Allahyari and Daniel Rourke

Quick post to say that:

1. If you’re in London this coming weekend, don’t miss the Digital Design Weekend 2017. It’s the 7th edition and this year’s a particularly good one with plenty of critical, intelligent and edgy works and ideas. Think Garnet Hertz‘s Disobedient Electronics: Protest, Tactical Tech, Nina Sellars, etc.

2. Artist Morehshin Allahyari and writer/artistDaniel Rourke are also part of the programme with The 3D Additivist Manifesto and The 3D Additivist Cookbook. And i’ve been asked by the lovely and sharp Irini Papadimitriou to interview them for the catalogue of the Digital Design Weekend. What they’ve done for the reflection around 3D fabrication, speculative design, and more generally digital culture is invaluable. The texts of the catalogue are online but i’m copy/pasting my intro (i’m always surprised at how flowery my prose gets when i’m asked to write ‘outside’ of my blog) and our interview below because it has images and you know i love images:

#Additivism: An interview with Morehshin Allahyari and Daniel Rourke

For its evangelists, 3D printing is going to breezily save the world one 3D printed kidney, wind turbine, honeycomb or insect snack at a time. The costs of domestic 3D printers are dwindling, the products custom-manufactured to meet our precise needs and the technology has been hailed as the most liberating and revolutionary since the steam engine.

Like with many innovations, this cheerful outlook has soon been met with warnings of copyright hurdles, high energy uses, harmful air emissions, and the realisation that the technology relies on the toxic extraction and processing of minerals and crude oil.

#additivism is the bastard of these two visions. It conjures nightmares of toxic machines churning out guns, drugs, counterfeit cash and meaningless trash ad libitum. It also take its cue from additive manufacturing technology itself and suggests that small scale, cumulative actions have the potential to bring about bigger, more complex realities.

In 2015, Morehshin Allahyari and Daniel Rourke released The 3D Additivist Manifesto and called for objects and strategies that would push the physical and conceptual boundaries of 3D printing to its most radical, dystopian and disobedient limits. Artists, designers, activists and thinkers responded with speculative or practical projects, each of them a kind of recipe for transgression and critical meditation on 3D printing and the emancipatory promises of technology. They are presented in The 3D Additivist Cookbook. Made available in 3DPDF format, it is free to download, share, remix and subvert (at additivism.org).

With it, 3D printing finally gets the counterculture movement it deserved.

Laura Devendorf, Anatomy of a Cyborg 3D Printer. A #figure from The 3D Additivist Cookbook

Anna Greenspan & Suzanne Livingston, The Electric Deep: Dream Visions of the Additive Machine. A #method from The 3D Additivist Cookbook

Régine Debatty: Hi Morehshin and Daniel! I like that you chose to follow the idea of ‘staying with the trouble’ and that we probably need to accept that the world is already beyond fixing. This is quite at odds with the tendency of design to imagine nicely-packaged solutions to all sorts of small and vast problems. Have you found that the idea of embracing the horror is still as radical as it was when you embarked on the project?

Morehshin Allahyari and Daniel Rourke: This notion of ‘solving’ a problem, especially in a world that feels increasingly non-fixable, is something that we have discussed and taught in many of our talks and workshops. In the world of #Additivism and our own practices as individuals, we’ve been big advocates of micro actions as ways to make something with wider reach and more critical potential. To build platforms and communities and frameworks for educating through rethinking and refiguring. And in contradiction to many of the principles of design, we are not interested or obsessed with answers and solutions. We want to expose things. Make invisible things visible. Mess things up, or at least offer mess and humour and darkness and speculation as ways to reconsider the complicated status of topics like equality, global ecology, or reproductive rights that need to be constantly re-assessed.

#Additivism is about poking at things with weird sticks and asking ever difficult, and often unpalatable questions. To take the very powers that oppress you and using their strategies and languages and aesthetics against them. Embrace the apocalypse but use its darkness to create light. That’s how we’ve been staying with the trouble.

A solution is always a solution ‘for’ some particular, universalised group. And so ‘radicality’ is a constantly shifting notion, dependent on the struggles and conflicts that impact the lives of unheard and unrecognised subjects. Over the life of our project the rise of negative political campaigns, such as Brexit and Donald Trump, signal how appeals to universals are still a powerful force. We oppose the grand narrative, and rather hope for an explosion of counter and micro narratives, for a recognition of singularities – plural – a project that by necessity must go on and on endlessly.

Antonio Esparza, The TurtleBag. A #fabulation from The 3D Additivist Cookbook

Golan Levin and Shawn Sims, The Free Universal Construction Kit. A #toolkit from The 3D Additivist Cookbook

R: Judging from the content of The 3D Additivist Cookbook, it seems that #Additivism has found echoes beyond plastic and 3D printing. Could you tell us how the dystopian and utopian dimensions of 3D printing can be applied to other disciplines, media, practices and technologies?

M&D: For us the 3D printer has always been a metaphor and point of departure to delve into and overlap others disciplines and worlds. The more we developed the project, and especially when it was the time to make selections for the Cookbook, we used #Additivism as a network of forces. Economic, social, political, material, infrastructural. The 3D printer is a machine that offers the promise of being able – one day – to make copies of itself. A radical metaphor for the capacity of life breathed into the world of inert matter. In an era of increasing interest in robots, AI, and other non human technological agents, the 3D printer is still a vibrant metaphor for the capacity of our technologies to inhabit and parasitise new spaces and realities. Who the particular subjects are who seek out and inhabit these new spaces is our concern, and this is another point at which the 3D printer becomes more than a neutral technology. #Additivism sought to wrestle control of 3D printer narratives away from the white tech males who dominate the field. So we still believe that #Additivism is a call for those on the ‘outside’ to seize control and multiply the possible spaces and worlds they inhabit from fablabs, maker-spaces, bedrooms, and laptop screens.

An Additivist is someone who is interested in the potential of technology to leverage small, incremental actions to potentially planetary significance. No 3D printer is required.

For a large central section of The 3D Additivist Cookbook we commissioned two artist groups – A Parede and Browntourage – to curate a series of ‘Additivist’ works. The works from artists of Middle Eastern, South American and other non-western heritages spiral around queer, feminist and decolonialist narratives. We are really proud of that section of The Cookbook in particular, because it often calls our entire project into question. Challenging dominant narratives is crucial to maintaining plurality. The 3D Additivist Manifesto asked to be contradicted and re-envisioned. Every work in the resulting Cookbook is therefore a seed for generating worlds and actions that even – and perhaps especially – its original designers did not envisage.

Jasper Meiners and Isabel Paehr, The Webcamera Obscura. A #toolkit from The 3D Additivist Cookbook

R: Few things make me happier than seeing provocative design or art ideas spread outside of the usual creative circles of galleries and festivals. How can someone who’s neither an artist nor a designer engage with the #Additivist ideas and introduce small, concrete forms of radicality into their life?

M &D: That’s awesome to hear! We share that happiness with you. So much of what we wanted to build was accessibility, education and activation (daily small actions). We urge people to do the same, and hope #Additivism inspires them. How can your particular skill or knowledge be translated into frameworks for educating and including others? What story or counter narrative do you have to bring to the world? The Cookbook’s most radical feature – we hope – is its accessibility and openness (download it for free now and see). But we are far more excited about the projects that are not contained in it, that still have to be imagined. That’s a daily radical proposition. What worlds have yet to be envisioned? We can only answer that together. Jump in.

A lot of action-based projects in the Cookbook can be realised by anyone with any kind of background, as long as they can download the objects from our website and take it to a fablab for a cheap 3D print. For example, a project by Isabel Paehr and Jasper Meiners called ‘Webcam Obscura’ which is a simple playful anti-surveillance tool for laptops. In addition, a good portion of the Cookbook includes essays, interviews, and stories (mostly science fiction) brought together to encourage Additivist way of thinking. Out of the many many workshops we have delivered we’ve only ever used a 3D printer once. Many projects in the Cookbook do their critical work without ever needing to be 3D printed. Kyle McDonald’s Liberator Variations, for instance, questions the status of the now infamous 3D printable ‘Liberator’ gun, but is also a playful tutorial and poetic homage to 3D rendering software. Many of the most ‘radical’ Additivist Cookbook projects are also the simplest. We hope the Cookbook encourages people to play, experiment and not be afraid to make mistakes. That’s the best way to learn, and it’s fundamental to the practices of art and design. We all start as amateurs. Some of us try really hard to stay that way.

R: Because the place of women in the tech world is still one we have to fight for, do you think that there is a place for feminism in #Additivism?

M&D: Yes of course or we wouldn’t do it at all. It’s actually quite interesting to walk into Fablabs anywhere in the world and see so many women standing next to machines 3D printing or laser cutting objects. It’s something we’ve been counting and paying attention to. But in addition to quantity and numbers, so much of #Additivism is about ‘the female future’ we want to participate in building. The feminism we are interested in is a philosophy of more than women, it is a philosophy of non male, non cis, non white. All those people who have at one stage or another been considered less than human by the social systems that oppress them.

Zach Rispoli, Snowden Crown Jewels. A #device from The 3D Additivist Cookbook

R: #Additivism brings to light an apocalyptic vision of the world. Yet, there is a fair amount of irony and humour in The 3D Additivist Cookbook. How do you reconcile horror with humour?

M&D: Between the two of us we have often talked about (jokingly and for real) being Positive Nihilists. So much of that is about our personalities and how we also perhaps handle the dark world we live in…lol. Do we really have to reconcile humour? If humour is a radical act in itself then it need not be considered as somehow the opposite of dystopia/darkness/apocalyptic visions.

Laughter is a shared bodily sound that carries across a group to show that the threat has passed. One human thinks they see a snake in the grass and call out an alarm, but then they quickly realise it is just a stick, and begin to laugh, and their companions laugh at their mistake. Humour today might play a similar role in light of the global problems we face. #Additivism is full of distractions and counter propositions, pointing to a perceived threat, but showing that the real concern lies elsewhere, at a different scale. Humour is significant in that act. Shared mind shifting. Reflective counter-actions and realities. Embracing the horror together.

Debbie Ding, How to Mine for Space Geodes. A #recipe from The 3D Additivist Cookbook

Belén Zahera, Surface Breeding. A #method from The 3D Additivist Cookbook

The Digital Design Weekend is taking place at the V&A in London on Saturday 23 & Sunday 24 September, 10:30-17:00. It coincides with the London Design Festival at the V&A. All events are free.

Previously: The 3D Additivist Manifesto + Cookbook.

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