#I mean it did happen very suddenly

[oldtvandcomics]

I just wish death wasn't such an absolute taboo in our society.

My grandmother died unexpectedly. But, really? Did she really??

Once upon a time, a passer-by helped Death up when he'd fallen down alongside the road. To thank him, Death promised not to come unannounced, but to send a messenger ahead of him. Death sent illness, and fewer, and old age and grey hairs and aching joints. The man didn't recognize any of these as the promised messenger, and was genuinely shocked when Death showed up at his doorstep.

My grandmother died unexpectedly. She was old, and getting noticeably weaker for years now. The last two weeks, she could barely move her arms for pain in her shoulders. Eventually, she had to call a relative for help, who called a doctor, who called an ambulance to take her to the emergency. The next day, she died of heart failure. Unexpectedly.

She was, by a complete coincidence that we definitely won't need to worry about, almost exactly the same age as her father, when he died of sudden heart failure. Funny thing, these coincidences.

My grandfather also died unexpectedly. He had Parkinson's, and wasn't able to move much those last years. Just before his death, my mother took him to the hospital for a check-up, and left him there, then came back here where we live. According to my sister, she cried when she left my grandparents' city. At that time, we visited three times a year, so she knew perfectly well that she would be back in three months' time. Why would she cry? But no, my grandfather died unexpectedly.

The next one to go will be my aunt. It is pretty clear, has been pretty clear since she was diagnosed with cancer last year. We could, theoretically, like, prepare for it. But no, because you can't talk about death, so we can't even mention it unless I'm alone with my father.

"Thank you for helping me," said Death. "As a thanks, I will not come unannounced, but will send a messenger."

"That is a fine thing," said the man. "That way, I won't have to worry about you hiding behind every tree."

And if I say any of this out loud, then I'm an unforgivable asshole.

[puppyeared]

18 and 24 for the ask game :]!!

18: do you believe in ghosts and/or aliens?

24: what's one thing you're proud of yourself for?

[blue-eli]

Realised it’s @khoc-week so even though I don’t have the energy to do it daily have this I did a while ago but never posted.

Arxeht my beloved. They came to me in a dream where I was a replica (of multiple people but looked most like Vidar) made by apprentice Nort/Xemnas, who was the fifteenth member of the organisation and also had my knowledge of hit video games Kingdom Hearts and kept getting randomly thrown through space and time.

[brionysea]

if mike was straight, stranger things would've ended after season 2

[oreegaanoo]

Once again I am fueled by comments from my thesis supervisor and feel like I can actually do this thing hell YEAAAAHHHH

I CAN WRITE THIS THING!!! I CAN DO IT!!!!! AAAAAAAHHHH

[krbkss]

mha 395

has anyone brought this up yet </3

[biblicalhorror]

Thinking about my Rook hours </3

[itwoodbeprefect]

i don't have a point here except ???, but i realized today that starsky & hutch episode the psychic a) was written by micheal mann of (among many other things) classic crime thriller heat fame, and b) contains a baffling amount of (references to) crossdressing. it's one of the two episodes that opens with starsky and hutch chasing a guy in a dress (which gives us the "well i don't know, you('d) look rather nice in basic black and pearls" starsky-to-hutch line), later on they interrupt a robbery being committed by ANOTHER guy in a dress (and grey wig, posing as an old lady - presumably with the intent to disguise his identity rather than express some part of it, but who knows), and THEN they meet a hot lady mechanic who among many fast lines says to starsky "i'm really a basketball player in drag. whatever turns you on, honey" (interestingly timely, considering starsky's earlier comment about hutch). and finally, not entirely related but also not unrelated, there's these people at a laundromat hutch hits up on his mad phone chase at the end of the episode:

so yeah. ???.

[elibean]

I’m on a huge losing streak in spoon 😔 sad….

[butterflieswhisper]

i was genuinely planning to watch more of ratastrophe tonight but i started it, got to "[you whispered to unidingo: please don't die out there yet] I think their hunt is more successful if i'm not there" and my phone case literally fell apart in my hands. so.

[opens-up-4-nobody]

...

[thethingything]

a fun fact about us is that sometimes we will be having a bad time and our brain, in all its wisdom, will go "I know just what you need to help you cope with this: a guy who is having a worse time" and then it'll just make one and we have to figure out how to help the new guy with his wild source trauma which is probably meant to happen instead of dealing with the real life stuff that's going on but instead just kind of piles on top of it

[number-1-crush]

i am so attracted to her it is insane

[eisthenameofme]

The piano. It is approaching.

[jaythelay]

The Life Gems in DS2 are a damning mark against the game that genuinely further exemplifies why people have issues with the entire game.

To start, it's a crutch for game design. DS1 was designed, with levels that had intention behind beating them with 5-20 flasks of varying heal amounts. But because of this, it meant areas were more "chunky" than hallway-like. Segmented into almost mini-games if you will.

If it didn't separate "chunks" with a bonfire, it separated in unlocking a shortcut, elevator or ladder, a key or character. It meant even in death you took something with you. It wouldn't be a waste of time, you made progress of some form outside of just your character or equipment.

Life Gems cost souls, cost time to grind and find. Because of this, using one means Wasting Souls, and time, however it's used to progress forward. Dying...even if you retrieve your souls, means Wasted Time and Souls, which are also, Time. There's seldom few shortcuts due to the "Hallway" design they took for DS2 onwards. Shortcuts are Bonfires far more often than anything unique, and whatever items you find are very likely worthless since the worthwhile stuff is never within reach of general progress, but almost random "exploration".

Yes, the interconnected design of DS1 was a nightmare to create, but it's not like it's impossible to keep in some fashion, that's actually fun, mind you. Having "Chunks" is far superior to these fat hallways they keep making, with ER being the biggest hallway I've yet seen for any openworld. Wouldn't it have been cool to unlock shortcuts back to areas of the openworld? Instead of like, getting a horse and using tornadoes, or fast traveling...

What "Hallway" level design means, is "linear" as in only Point A and Point B with everything inbetween being spaghetti in a circle formed by A/B, pretending to be Point C/D/E, but make no mistake it's just a hallway that has no real exploration, just poor navigation pretending to evoke exploration via removing direction entirely.

Best way to describe it, is imagine A at the top, and B at the bottom, there's 3 paths, 2 of them dead end, and all 3 lines look like spaghetti. There's little design other than making the world look pretty and 'natural' but there's no direction for the player, think "yellow paint" but competent and respectable. So you're stuck aimlessly wandering a swamp that somehow feels like 8 swamps in one hoping desperately trying to find Point B getting stuck in Point J and N.

Because of this, it means you can basically be at any level with any gear, so fuck it, all the enemies have unreadable attack patterns, hop around at mach 50 multiple times, and are spammed every which possible way. The idea being that, you, have to find a way to avoid activating more than you can handle, over, and over, and ov-

Because of this, they rely on the crutch of "infinite heals" because god knows they know they couldn't design around something as simple as "they have either 5 heals or 20." There's no limitation so they don't have to care about level design, who cares! They can spend hours in the wrong area because they don't even need a Point B anymore!

Which again, is another problem, they treat Point B as THE reward, like it's not just a cool thing to find that helps you, it's THE reward, it's your fast travel, it's your means of navigation and direction, getting souls from a boss is frivolous without the bonfire, same with clearing an area, so keep that shit as obscured away from the player as humanly possible, so they're more likely to lose it all, until the end of a boss fight. Blegh, it's just hard for the sake of being hard, the challenge should be the obstacles, not the fact I'll be wasting time if I make one mistake I couldn't possibly have not made without trial and error.

Which there's a balance for everything I've said here to be complete clear, and to me, DS2 heavily lacks balance, because it's not designed around "Here's the challenge and you can do stuff to make it easier" it's almost always "Die to Learn and most times that's not enough so Heal Heal Heal baby good luck making progress!"

So, here's the deal, the simplification, When You are Considering something, your first thought is likely Resources. In the case of DS1, you know you have limited resources, so you Design Around That, there's an intention behind the obstacles that are intended to be overcome with that set amount of resources. Bonfires aren't The Reward, they're a signifier that you Made Progress.

DS2 doesn't consider that at all. It considers the Fight, or the Gank, and again, over and over, it's just about avoiding a gank, sure DS1 has this but it's like, harder to set up accidentally, for sure there's moments, but DS2 is nothing BUT that. Because of this, it doesn't feel like you're fighting, but playing a poor Dynasty Warriors. Since they basically can only design around Infinite Healing they have to make it so you never have time to heal, not because the AI is smart, but because the AI is bountiful and surrounding. You can't design around 6 enemies all clustering around the player and swinging in a Souls-Like that's Absurd, it's poor for that reason and constantly trying to avoid it is simply put, not fun, it's a one trick pony they rely on constantly. Bonfires are The Reward, they enable your means to fast travel Past the obstacles you just struggled horrifically through, it's a pat on the back after almost dying in a car crash. This means you're never rewarded until you No Longer have the chance to Waste Your Time in the exact same area, but a new area with the exact same problems.

To be clear I fuckin' love the artistry of DS2 and the lore, the characters, the theories, fan-art, but DS2's failures come in with Level Design more than anything else, and that Level Design is what lead to Life Gems. Your average player is not going to be able to Flask Only DS2, but you can in DS1, that's nothing to say, other than DS1 has far more intention behind it's entire design than DS2 does.

If DS2 had better level design I straight up think it would've been better than DS1 in far more areas but because of it's dreadful pacing and Hallway design, it's sheer obscurity of complex mechanics that in no way translated from DS1 nor transitioned into DS3, it remains as a unique experience that's incredibly difficult to enjoy. I really think it's like Chulip, it's not a game people recommend playing, but do recommend watching.

[sweetteaanddragons]

I have been thinking lately about a universe where Bruce Wayne killed the Joker.

I want to be clear here, since there are so many longstanding debates on this topic: I do not think Bruce Wayne should kill the Joker. I have just been wondering what would happen if the circumstances aligned in such a way that he did.

And to be clear on a related, yet slightly different topic: when I say I have been wondering about what if Bruce Wayne killed the Joker, I do not mean as the Batman. I mean Bruce "Brucie" Wayne.

Maybe it's kind of an accident? Like, he definitely did intend to hit the Joker, but he's Brucie right now, so he's trying not to look like he knows what he's doing while still doing enough damage to keep the Joker from killing someone, and meanwhile the Joker makes just the wrong move and -

And here we are. Brucie just killed the Joker.

Bruce's reaction here is one thing; he has his one rule for a reason, he's just broken it, he's determined to turn himself in -

His family's reaction is a whole different story. How does Cass feel about this?

How does Jason? Bruce has killed the Joker, just like he wanted, but it wasn't for him, not really, and -

And meanwhile, this happens in front of, say, a gala full of people, so now all of Gotham gets to react to it too.

Average Gothamite, seeing the words BRUCE WAYNE, JOKER, and KILLED in the same headline: OH, NO.

Average Gothamite, once they've processed the order those words are actually in: . . . I did not have that on this year's bingo card.

The city's most famous mass murderer has just been publicly killed by the city's biggest employer/philanthropist/source of tabloid harmless nonsense! Three days before Brucie was making tabloid headlines by tripping into a fountain and somehow losing his shirt in the process! Two weeks before, the newspaper was running a retrospective on the Wayne murders and what donation Brucie was making to help the families of victims this year! The article mentioned how one of his adopted sons had also tragically become a murder victim!

Now this has happened, and Bruce is having a breakdown over breaking his one rule, and the rest of Gotham just assumes that this is because poor Brucie thinks this somehow makes him like the man who killed his parents. They send a huge outpouring of support his way. This in no way helps Bruce's actual breakdown.

Ninety percent of Gotham is sure Brucie didn't actually mean to kill the Joker, and pretty much a hundred percent of them support him whether he meant to do it or not. No one wants to have anything to do with prosecuting this mess. Bruce is trying to make it as clear as possible that he will fully cooperate with the justice system and meanwhile an entire gala full of people is suddenly acting like they could in no way have possibly witnessed events that took place ten feet in front of their faces. Did Bruce kill the Joker? Is the officer sure? That doesn't seem like him. Maybe the Joker just tripped on his own. Marble floors, you know. Very slippery.