#I write this the day after making and posting that Avatar gif set

[cidthesquid]

More New Features/Update - Style Savvy : Styling Star #02

[Previous Post]              [First Post]              [Next Post] Aaaand we're back! Last time, All we really got to do was the prologue, restocking and setting up our starting outfit, So let's see what comes next:

So first I ended up using mods to edit my character a bit, Inital Design: | New Design:

The most obvious change is the skin tone, I'm not the biggest fan, of how darker skin tones work in the new art style, I would have preferred something in the middle, Or a slight tweak to the lighting, as the color of both can vary quite a bit in various conditions:

But I still think both look good overall, (emulator could be Affecting) So I haven't decided what I'll stick with long term. (I don't really believe that our avatar's need to look like us IRL, so I encourage everyone to try whatever you want, even other skin tones!) I also adjusted the eyes a bit:

I really like the 'cat eye' design from before, but I did not like that it was 'baked' into the eye shape. This really restricted some designs, and make eyelashes look a little weird imo. The lipstick is new for post 2 as well, and I think it's a nice addition, without being too flashy, but I may change it later. Any ways, even after all these blogs, it's still a little uncomfortable talking about physical appearance, even for my own fictional avatar, So I'll even the design choices at that, let's hop back into the game! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Alright, so another new feature for Styling Star is:

They actually announce when new people show up in town! It's another small change, that really helps add to the feeling of the town growing! If only they made it a little easier to find and talk to people, maybe the social aspect was a little over done in fashion forward, But it's a little weird to have a new entries that shows a bunch of people walkign around, with no option to talk to most of them.

It kinda feels like we've reverted back to the first 3ds game where you only have fixed NPC's in specific locations:

...and they only cycle through a small handful of lines. Maybe this will improve overtime, it's not a huge deal though. I also learned that you can change you can change your phone's wallpaper and background picture, that's pretty fun:

Yup, I'm pretty broke again! Time to go to work! And we just had a customer walk in and ask for a full outfit!

I guess that mean's we're near the end of the tutorial, And the dialogue choices even let us Savvy veterans skip the explanation! Again, they really nailed the prologue in this game! It's really good at giving players freedom in how to approach the start, while still keeping them from getting lost. So now it's time to make our first real outfit of the game:

I think it turned out well given out limitations, but maybe the hat as a bit too much,haha. There's also a neat little option to style from any outfit you've saved in your scrapbook. But for some reason, you can't save the outfit you're currently making So you'll have to design them in your apartment first, then you can suggest your custom design for customers. Any way, they were the only customer today, so on to the next... ----- The new girl from the prior day shows up at our shop:

(I guess they wanted to give us a days advance notice, or it overlapped with an event?) Anyway, she asks for a rock skirt, literarily the one item I did not yet buy in that style! XD So I head to the exhibition hall, buy way more than I need, and head back.

I completely forgot what she was wearing, despite having the other screenshot literary showing on my second monitor. (as I write this while playing) But it all turned out ok, as I picked up a really nice match:

And that was it, she bought the skirt, and left. I was expecting this to be more of an 'event' like explaining, if a customer 'really likes' an item, they can ask for a full outfit, but nope. They did have a cute little epilogue though, after they bought the outfit, her normally Stoic boyfriend complements her look:

A bit of an seemly fluffy ending, but kinda directly tied into a comment I made in my bonus post about not really being comfortable delivering complements, especially in regard to one's appearance, (outfit or otherwise) It may seem like a simple thing for some, and I don't really think it's worth going off-topic enough to explain why it's difficult for me, but it is interesting seeing some version of that shown in-game! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ The rest of the day was also mostly filled with people asking for a single item, so a bit on the slow side, So I decided to work on a few pre-made (scrapbook) outfits to offer to customers, It was a little weird having to build them all on my avatar, as the hair and makeup don't really match the styles I was going for:

And once there were no more customers to help, I changed back into my standard outfit and decided to turn in for the night:

This game must have been a huge 180 for people playing right after fashion forward. No real time clock is a nice change, but with the limited customers and lack of npc's to talk to, (so far) it really feels like the days have a fixed end point. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ New Day, and a new brand unlocked!

Also, I think I forgot to mention the 'daily results' screen, I believe it's a replacement for the 'happiness gauge' From trendsetters, but improved to show a numerical rank rather than just resting with no trackable progression. This is the last day we'll cover in this post, it both seems like a good stopping point, (And I'm kinda hungry, and my ADHD's hyperfocus is forcing me to finish this haha)

I guess this game has achievements, that's pretty nice! So, I wake up and see another "new person has arrived in town" notification. So, I leave my apartment ready to run into them at my shop, and on the way, I literally run into them:

(Oh hey, an actual event!) They fell over, so after making sure they were okay, I'm introduced to Rosie and We're given the chance to name the city:

Oh, gees, I was not prepared for this, and I probably can't change it later, ahhh.

Sorry, I panicked, and just typed stuff unto Google Translate until something with a nice sound came out. XD Sorry to anyone who's french, I just think your words sound nice. google says "nouvelle vie" means "New Life", that sound like a reasonable enough city name. Anyways we learn she's from out in the country, and a little lost, She complements our clothes and mentions only ever seeing fashionable people on tv. She also mentions that she's interested in getting some new clothes, so we invite here to visit our Boutique! And now we've opened a few new events, But I've just been informed that I have already used up my 30 photos for this post, so I guess the rest will have to wait till next time! <Next Post> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Thanks for reading! I had a lot of fun making this, so I hope you had fun reading it as well.

As always, all comments, questions, and suggestions are welcome! (I'm also looking for feedback on this new style, how's the formatting, too many Gifs?)

You literally can't bother me, (unless you go out of your way to be a jerk), so post whatever you need to say!

[moreteethplease]

Devlog: Close The Window, My Love

Close The Window, My Love is a game about nursing things that should no longer remain. It was made for the 73rd bitsy jam, with the theme "close the window" - pretty on the nose, I know lmao. Click here to play it!

C/W for the game: allusions to death and physical illness.

Told myself I'd write devlogs/post-mortems whenever I make something, even if it's a very tiny something, so here goes! This devlog contains spoilers for the game.

Writing

When I started making this game, I didn't really know where it was going. The game jam's theme didn't spark any inspiration, which is ironic because I voted for it. So I just whipped out a word document and started writing, and the first thing I wrote was this: "Close the window, my love," she says, voice softer than a whisper."

But why is this person asking me to close a window?, I asked myself. Maybe they don't really want me to close the window. Maybe they're only doing it because they feel they have to?

I often find that I don't set out to create things that relate to me, but if I let myself write and work, the things I'm processing begin to leap out, begging for a spot in whatever I'm working on. That's what happened here. This is an ode to a past version of me, one so vastly different to who I am now that we have little in common, one I've spent the longest time desperately clawing my way back to, trying to embody them again. I love them very dearly, and I'm sure they love me, but it was time to let them go. I'm never going to be them again, and it's time to accept that and move on, growing into someone new.

It took me a whopping three days to finalize the script. I started out writing prose, but when some lines ended up rhyming, the non-rhyming lines felt out of place. I flip-flopped between intentionally rhyming them and trying to remove all rhymes for two days before committing to writing a rhyming poem. The poem is divided into four "parts" or "portions", each with three verses.

Making The Game

Because I'd spent so long on writing the script and was pretty busy the week of this jam, I didn't have a lot of time to spend on art. I opted for a very simple room - just a little square with slight top-down perspective, bare walls aside from the window, and a bed for The Relic (yes, that's what I call the person in the bed). When that seemed too empty, I added a doormat and a lil bedside table. Don't ask where The Relic uses the bathroom; I don't know either. It's an impractical living space, to say the least.

I made sure to leave plenty of space for four lines of dialog on top of the screen that wouldn't obscure the room. This is important because the window sprite doesn't appear until after the first two verses of each part of the poem, and I wanted players to see the window change colour, indicating it is now interactable.

My favourite portion of this game is the bit where the window slides down over four lines. I really love doing stuff like this in bitsy, where you shift rooms to create an effect akin to very simple animation. I've only used it a couple of times - the last time with It Piles Up - but it's so much fun. I didn't have a sketch for this, I sort of just made it right away at the 128x128 size used in bitsy and tested it, found it satisfactory, and added it to the game. I did this with the "Dot" brush in Ibis Paint, which is how I make most of my bitsy sketches and tests.

I also wanted each part of the poem to have a different mood, despite the fact that the poem itself mostly has the same vibe throughout. To do this, I used a different colour palette and ambient sound for each portion.

Of course, I needed the four parts of the poem to be divided smoothly. Just having the player avatar pop back up in the exact same room would be jarring. So I created a small area where the player avatar walks up to a house, and the environment slowly loses its verdancy with each new part of the poem - until the post-poem portion, where it is green and lively again.

Okay, I don't really know how to write these things. This might have gotten rambly. Please give the game a play if you like! You can play it here:

[dirtyoldmanhole]

so while it is true that you cannot "technically" support gunter in revelation ...

you can, however, wander over thisaway ~

oho, what's this?

:D

anyway, let's talk gunter's C support, shall we ~

(under a cut for length of the post/images. mostly meta!)

fun fact: did you know if you're looking at past support logs in a different route, your avatar name will update to whatever is your current name? (Corrin is so much her own person / personality it didn't make sense to do "krad" there, tbh.)

anyway, in the slowburn fic, this hits right before Fort Jinya.

(it should be said i'm not writing 1:1 supports or scenes, that'd be boring as hell. but sharp eyes are going to grin and know exactly what scenes I'm riffing off of, vibe-wise.)

there's a shippy headcanon for reasons(tm) I have of him avoiding Corrin after they come back from the bottomless canyon the first time. (tl;dr chemistry and denial lul~~~)

but even disregarding that, it's kind of cute that corrin goes to check on him, and evidentially keeps an eye on him. ;_____;

they keep talking about memories; ime it's also really well done/relevant that so many of their scenes are about that reoccuring theme, when you consider what a big deal "memory" is to Corrin, and what she's been robbed of.

Gunter: It's seen better days, but it's still in pretty good condition, don't you think? Corrin: It really is; I'm impressed. I didn't realize that you'd kept it after all this time.

Gunter: We played so many games of catch with it. Corrin: It really does stir up all those old memories. Gunter: How does a round of catch sound to you? For old times' sake. Corrin: I'd love to! Gunter: Excellent. I have a few tasks to deal with today, but we'll play sometime soon? Corrin: I look forward to it.

(god, gunter, you are so sentimental and it's feelsy as hell ;___; how the hell did he manage to keep that ball with him all the while falling down the literal bottomless canyon? )

anyway

it wasn't until i started writing Corrin's horrific mind wipe ordeal(s) that i started realizing Gunter was kind of a fucking genius for starting their whole game of catch. I'll go into this more in the B-A support, but in addition to the game being a gentle "carrot" method of getting young!Corrin to cooperate that set him apart from Garon's punshiments (eg, not stepping on her triggers), it's kind of like physical/trauma therapy for a kid that doesn't feel like therapy.

idunno about y'all but i've spent Way Too Much time in a similar situation in a similar time span. it ain't fun! at all! you got these scary adults in a scary new situation and everything hurts from poking and prodding and you just want to go home and they keep wanting you to do weird random shit like walking in loops or parallel bars or other shit.

(obviously in hindsight it makes sense, but you get a scrambled kid in a new scary situation, and they usually end up having meltdowns, for good reason.)

something familiar, that feels concretely like play, and is very clearly a routine for both of them with a set goal/reward, is something almost literally out of a textbook to help her recovery. caretaker daddy here has a galaxy brain considering he hasn't been trained for this shit at all, kudos to him ~

(... of course, a lovely piece of fridge horror is that it gets way sadder when you realize he's probably cobbled together most of this knowledge from raising his own kids. who are. you know. now dead.)

(y e a h)

[snarktheater]

Ready Player Two — Opening Cutscene & Chapter 0

Hello again.

It’s been a while. I haven’t been active on this blog since, fittingly enough, Ready Player One. I was going to do this sooner—even had an alarm set up and everything—but then, it turns out, I’m feeling so much negativity about the world in general that a book just pales in comparison.

Seriously, I had to scrap this post’s entire intro because it’s not even 2020 anymore as I write this. And you know, maybe that’s for the best. I’m not really in the mood for doom and gloom and bitching anymore. I uninstalled Twitter from my phone a while back, I’ve been doing good at my daily writing sprints, my biggest fanfic project concluded on a positive note from people I didn’t even realize had been following it for years.

So I don’t know what this is going to be like. My commentary, I mean; I’ve heard echoes of what the book is like, so I’m not expecting a surprise there.

The book opens right after the end of Ready Player One, in a “Cutscene” where Wade recounts to us what happened after he won Halliday’s contest. It also assumes you remember exactly who the main characters of the book are, which is a bold move for a sequel that came out almost a decade after the original.

Technically, I could just look up the details I’m fuzzy about. But also, I think it’s more authentic if I don’t. I trust my memory enough that if I’m wrong, it’ll be in subtle enough ways that it’ll almost be a private jokes between all of us. An “if you know, you know” sort of error system. And I don’t think there’s anything more true to the spirit of this book than that.

Shoto had flown back home to Japan to take over operations at GSS’s Hokkaido division.

So Wade starts his tenure with nepotism. Wasn’t Shoto really young? Why is he qualified to run anything?

Aech was enjoying an extended vacation in Senegal, a country she’d dreamed of visiting her whole life, because her ancestors had come from there.

You know what, I’m not touching “send the token black character back to Africa.” This isn’t my lane.

And Samantha had flown back to Vancouver to pack up her belongings and say goodbye to her grandmother, Evelyn.

Why is she saying goodbye? Why, she’s moving to Columbus to be with Wade, of course! It’s not like there was anything else in her life. Was there? And why isn’t she referred to as Art3mis? I’m pretty sure Wade found out all of their offline names in the last book, and the inconsistency mildly bothers me.

These three sentences are back to back, by the way. Someone—I forget who—once described Ready Player One as a book that’s fun to write a wiki about, because it’s got fun concepts to summarize about until you realize that all the emotional connective tissue you need to turn a list of things into a story is missing, and that’s roughly how this first page feels.

Hell, the first line of the book is Wade telling us he remained offline for nine whole days after winning the contest, but by the end of the second paragraph we’re already to him logging back into the OASIS to "distract himself from [his and Samantha’s] reunion.

I’ll give Ernest Cline one thing: it feels like he wrote this opening nine days after the first book and did about as much maturing as a teenage boy would do between the two books.

Way more time is spent describing Wade’s OASIS rig, or the in-game planet where the climax of the last book happened, than anything else in this introduction. He is immediately greeted by a crowd of adoring fans who have been waiting over a week for him to come back in the game, because they’re all grateful that our protagonist and his friends restored their avatars after they were annihilated by the Sixers.

You’d think the adoring fans would serve some kind of purpose, or that something would happen, but no. Wade immediately goes “ew, people” and teleports away, since he essentially has ultimate powers within the game. With a caveat: the powers are actually coming from the Robes of Anorak he’s wearing, and I’m mentioning that in the hopes that it will pay off sometime in the book’s future, assuming Cline at least learned to do that. But still, let’s not skip too fast the fact that we introduced that crowd of adoring fans for no other purpose than to tell us they’re out there, because it fits right in with the last book’s attempts at saying as little as humanly possible in as many words as possible.

Anyway, Wade went back into Anorak’s study, where he arbitrarily checks out the Easter Egg he got at the end of the last book, and finds an inscription on it. I was dreading another riddle, but no, it’s just straight-up instructions to a vault in the GSS archives, so Wade logs off and goes to check it out.

Of course Halliday had put [the archives] [on the 13th floor]. In one of his favorite TV shows, Max Headroom, Network 23’s hidden research-and-development lab was located on the thirteenth floor. And The Thirteenth Floor was also the title of an old sci-fi film about virtual reality, released in 1999, right on the heels of both The Matrix and eXistenZ.

I’m equally shocked that it took two whole pages (on my ereader) to get to the first slew of references, and that one of these references is from 1999. I didn’t know we were allowed to think of anything that isn’t the 80s. Speaking of which, I’ll spare you the whole paragraph, but the book does feel the need to explain why it’s vault 42.

Inside the vault, there’s another egg containing a super-fancy and advanced OASIS headset. The egg also has a video monitor that plays a video message from James Halliday shortly before his death.

But despite his condition, he hadn’t used his OASIS avatar to record this message like he had with Anorak’s Invitation. For some reason, he’d chosen to appear in the flesh this time, under the brutal, unforgiving light of reality.

That oh-so-important message? An infodump about the headset’s working. He called it an OASIS Neural Interface, ONI for short. It basically lets you experience the OASIS through all your senses with sensory input just like the real thing, you know, that thing Wade had to get a fancy suit and massive rig to do in the first book. And yes, Wade does spend a paragraph or two comparing it to other works of science fiction. Of course he does.

More importantly, it also records all the sensory input into a separate file, which can then be replayed over to re-experience said sensations, or live someone else’s experiences. Halliday tries to frame it as a tool to generate communication and empathy, seemingly all without acknowledging the potential creepiness of that. But hey. Who knows. Maybe that’s because this is the setup stage, and it’ll pay off eventually.

I also wondered about the name Halliday had chosen for his invention. I’d seen enough anime to know that oni was also a Japanese word for a giant horned demon from the pits of hell.

Add “reducing Japan to anime” to the list of things the book has failed to improve upon. By the way, the narration insisted on spelling out ONI letter by letter earlier, so it’s weird to make that link now. It’s also just kind of inelegant to just tell us “this is the symbolism behind the name”, but that’s just the sort of thing I’ve come to expect from this book.

Anyway, the reason Halliday kept this for his successor to find is he wants Wade to test out the technology and decide if humanity is ready for it. Why Halliday thinks the most glorified pop culture trivia / video game competition qualifies you for such a decision should be a problem, but sadly, a lot of billionaires have said and done a lot of dumb and eerily similar things in the past few years since I read Ready Player One, so actually, I can’t fault the book for that one. Tragically, our fates really are in the hands of people who should rightfully be cartoon villains.

To his credit, Wade does question Halliday’s motives in keeping this under wraps at all rather than releasing it himself. So hey, maybe it really is setting something up.

Wade goes back to his office with the ONI, and we’re treated with this lovely piece of narration:

I was grateful that Samantha wasn’t there. I didn’t want to give her the opportunity to talk me out of testing the ONI. Because I was worried she might try to, and if she did, she would’ve succeeded. (I’d recently discovered that when you’re madly in love with someone they can persuade you to do pretty much anything.)

There’s a lot to unpack about the implications this has for their relationship, but it’s way too early in the book for me to editorialize when one character hasn’t even been on the page yet. So I’ll just leave it here for the record. Hopefully you see the problem without me needing to point it out anyway. If not, feel free to hit my inbox.

So Wade, confident in the fact that Halliday would have warned him if there were any risks to using the ONI, decides to try it out. Even though he immediately follows up that statement with this:

According to the ONI documentation, forcibly removing the headset while it was in operation could severely damage the wearer’s brain and/or leave them in a permanent coma. So the titanium-reinforced safety bands made certain this couldn’t happen. I found this little detail comforting instead of unsettling. Riding in an automobile was risky, too, if you didn’t wear your seatbelt…

Wade. My dude. What the fuck is this simile. And why don’t you see that maybe a machine where you’re forcibly trapping yourself inside a virtual reality might be dangerous? Hell, when I said this was setting something up, I was expecting something vaguely interesting about the potential breach of privacy, or how you don’t need to literally walk in someone’s shoes to feel empathy for them, or anything substantial, but now I’m worried it’ll just end up as “man, sometimes science fiction machines will scramble your brain, isn’t that weird”?

Like, I don’t know, to me “it will put you in a coma” sounds like a good reason for Halliday not to release the ONI. Maybe we can still make it into a commentary on how corporations will sell stuff they know is directly harmful if it can make them a profit. Who knows.

The book waffles on about more risks, and the mechanics of how the ONI activates, and the warning disclaimer when it does turn on. Specifically, there’s a time limit of twelve consecutive hours, after which you’ll be automatically logged out, because yes, using the thing for too long can also cause brain damage.

Gregarious Simulation Systems will not be held responsible for any injuries caused by improper use of the OASIS Neural Interface.

See, now there’s the sort of thing that could be a source for commentary, but no, instead it’s thrown in there like it’s nothing and Wade glosses over the entire warning, and instead keep wondering why Halliday didn’t just release the ONI if even the safety disclaimers were in place.

By the way: this whole system has apparently gone through several independent human trials already, so I’m finding it hard to imagine that it’s actually a secret Halliday took to the grave as Wade says. Unless he also had everyone involved in those trials killed afterwards. Or maybe they all ended up with brain damage which rendered them incapable of talking about it.

And before you think I’m being unfair and maybe we’re supposed to understand that ourselves even if the protagonist doesn’t, I’ll remind you that the book didn’t trust its reader to know what the number 42 is a reference to, or what an oni is, even though I don’t think anyone in the target audience wouldn’t know about these two things.

There’s also the fact that, since this book came out, a video game did release with a scene intentionally designed to cause seizures, and it had countless fans flocking to defend it over that fact. So you’ll have to excuse me if I’m not assuming this book’s stance on whether your video game console causes brain damage and possibly coma is actually a bad thing, or just an acceptable risk.

Wade certainly seems to think so, since he agrees to the terms of service.

As the timestamp faded away, it was replaced by a short message, just three words long—the last thing I would see before I left the real world and entered the virtual one. But they weren’t the three words I was used to seeing. I—like every other ONI user to come—was greeted by a new message Halliday had created, to welcome those visitors who had adopted his new technology: READY PLAYER TWO

Well now that’s just silly.

And that’s our opening cutscene. And while this post is already long enough, I feel like I have to go on to chapter 0, because it feels like barely anything has happened so far. We didn’t even introduce any new character motivation or conflict, or a mystery to set the plot into motion, unless I’m supposed to think “why didn’t Halliday release this?” counts.

So Wade is back into the OASIS, and tells us about how much more real it all feels thanks to the ONI. I especially have to question how he can smell or taste anything—both of which he tells us he can. Like, who coded that? Did Halliday implement every single smell and taste himself, without anyone noticing? I hope you don’t need me to tell you that’s not typically how features are added to a large-scale video game.

If it feels like I’m nitpicking at the logic of the book, even though I always say I’m not very interested in that and would rather talk themes, it’s because I am, because there isn’t much else to discuss so far. Wade is happy about tasting virtual fruit. That’s the scene.

He tests out if he can feel pain, but no, the ONI reduces pain (a gunshot is translated as “a hard pinch”). On one hand, good, it would be a nightmare otherwise. On the other hand, I sort of hope there’s a setting for that in there, because otherwise, you just lost an entire clientele of kinksters.

This was it—the final, inevitable step in the evolution of videogames and virtual reality. The simulation had now become indistinguishable from real life.

Ah, now we have some juicy themes. Because if you think this is the inevitable final step in the evolution of video games, I invite you to look at literally any other art form, and what happened to them once hyperrealism became easy. Hint: they didn’t stop evolving, because it turns out realism isn’t the only goal one can achieve with art.

The realism discussion is not a new one in video games, mind you. In case you’re out of the loop: most of the big-budget blockbuster games (“AAA” as they’re known) are aiming for hyperrealism nowadays, and it results in development teams being forced to work in horrible conditions (known with the equally horrible euphemism of “crunch”). And, because it turns out that 1) humans working themselves to the bones isn’t healthy and 2) racing for realism with little to no vision besides it makes for poor creativity, a lot of these games come out as disappointments. Oh, there are hordes of Gamers™ who will defend them to the bitter end, but inevitably, in the months following release, the defense cools off while the criticism keeps on going, because the defense was a knee-jerk reaction born of a mix of people hyping themselves up for a game they hadn’t seen that much of yet, then attaching a part of their identity to liking that thing.

Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that this throwaway line feels like it comes from someone who is so out of touch as to accidentally support a world view that has in fact resulted in the biggest part of the industry stagnating artistically while growing more toxic for the people working in it. All the while, more and more independent games come out every year, proving that that realism is nowhere near the most important thing to making a game good, and that you can achieve much better results with a small team.

What I’m trying to say is: watch Jim Sterling’s channel, they’ve been bleeding out subscribers since they came out as nonbinary and make much better commentary on this topic than I could, and play Hades.

Back to the book, which sadly hasn’t become any more interesting since I decided to go on a tangent. Wade tests the ONI functions some more, all the while musing on how he knows Samantha would disapprove but that he doesn’t care, because what loving relationship doesn’t consist of that?

Among the functions, he tries the ONI files, the aforementioned recordings of someone else’s experiences. Specifically, a woman, which Wade tells us by telling us he suddenly has breasts, I suppose because Ernest Cline saw that subreddit about men writing women and went “I want a piece of that”. Oh, and also, those sample files were recorded from real people, in the real world. And yes, this goes exactly where you think it does.

SEX-M-F.oni, SEX-F-F.oni, and SEX-Nonbinary.oni

Look, I actually started writing a complaint about the boobs thing, and I deleted it, but now Cline is doing it on purpose. So, here goes: I saw a quote from this book on Twitter that looked like Cline attempting to make up for Wade’s casual transphobia in the first book. It wasn’t good, but it at least sounded like he was trying. So to immediately get this is…a lot? Let’s go for a lot.

I can almost excuse the use of “M” and “F”. You gotta name your files and you could excuse a non-exhaustive list. But…nonbinary? On one hand, I want to know what Cline means. On the other hand, I don’t think he can come up with an answer I’ll find satisfactory.

We are thankfully spared from finding out because Wade has just lost his virginity to Samantha a few days ago and he’s 1) not ready for this and 2) pretty sure this counts as cheating. You could make a case that this is more like porn, but I can see that this is more of a personal distinction anyway, and I can respect that one. Plus, you know. I don’t want to find out.

Wade logs off, and he can’t tell the difference between the OASIS with the ONI, and decides this will change the world. And then it’s back to the “how did he do it and keep it a secret”, even though Wade now finds out in the documentation that this had been in development for twenty-five years, basically since the OASIS launched. So it’s not really that it’s a secret, so much as there are a lot of people under very strict NDAs out there. Or, again, they’re all dead and/or otherwise incapacitated.

The ONI is the product of the Accessibility Research Lab, and Wade tells us about other stuff that the lab has produced using similar technology, mostly for medical purposes.

GSS patented each of the Accessibility Research Lab’s inventions, but Halliday never made any effort to profit from them. Instead, he set up a program to give these neuroprosthetic implants away, to any OASIS users who could benefit from them. GSS even subsidized the cost of their implant surgery.

Look, it’s nice that you want Halliday to be the good guy through and through, but it’s kind of hard to take any social commentary seriously when you think this is how a billionaire is made. Hell, even when he shut down the lab and fired its entire staff, he gave them a big enough severance package to set them for life. You know. Capitalism!

Hey, remember when Samantha said she was going to end world hunger if she won the contest, a thing billionaires right now could be doing, but aren’t, and she is now the co-owner of GSS? Yeah, I kind of hope the book remembers that too.

Speaking of the co-owners, the book just completely skips over the debate that our four main characters have over whether or not to release the ONI to the world. All we know is that they voted, and the vote goes in favor of releasing it. I mean, why have characters who could have opinions and feelings that could create a discussion? That might make us care about them! And who wants to care about characters in a story?

We put them on sale at the lowest possible price, to make sure as many people as possible could experience the OASIS Neural Interface for themselves.

What exactly is “the lowest possible price” here? Your company literally owns money. Like, OASIS money is real money. There is literally nothing stopping you from giving them away, especially because what you’re giving away is access to the platform you’re already running for a profit.

It’s almost like, even trying to make “good billionaires” out of its protagonists, the book can’t stop and actually make them significantly good.

Oh, I should mention. If you thought my Ready Player One review was angry at capitalism, wait until you see what the past couple years have done to me.

Anyway, once they his 7,777,777 simultaneous ONI users, a new riddle shows up on Halliday’s website. Because yep: our plot is apparently not about the implications of releasing the ONI, or any of the potential ideological discussions associated with that, it’s another riddle. Oh boy, do I wish I’d known that.

Seek the Seven Shards of the Siren’s Soul On the seven worlds where the Siren once played a role For each fragment my heir must pay a toll To once again make the Siren whole

I cannot wait to have the book give me just not enough information to solve the riddle until it’s solved by the book itself. That was so much fun the other…what was it, five times? Six times? Something like that. Wade already tells us the Siren might be Kira Morrow, because her alias was named after one of the sirens of Greek myth, so I can’t wait for that plot point to stick around. It was so fun to hear all about this man pining for another man’s wife the first time!

So this is the “Shard Riddle”. People are apparently convinced it was made by Wade and his crew as a publicity stunt, but of course, they know that that isn’t the case, and they also don’t know what that riddle is supposed to lead to. So, that’s great. We have a puzzle, and we also don’t know what the stakes are. All we know is that Wade wants to solve the puzzle essentially because it’s a challenge.

We skip over a year, and Wade tells us about how IOI collapses and gets absorbed by GSS because of the ONI’s launch. Remember IOI? They were the bad guys, so I guess we have to cheer?

GSS absorbed IOI and all of its assets, transforming us into an unstoppable megacorporation with a global monopoly on the world’s most popular entertainment, education, and communications platform.To celebrate, we released all of IOI’s indentured servants and forgave their outstanding debts.

On one hand: good for the slave. On the other hand: not gonna cheer for a monopoly, you guys.

Another year’s skip, and now 99% of the OASIS users are using the ONI, and yes, that includes trading their experiences with one another too. And I guess we’re still hand-waving any possible problems associated with that technology, because the technology is made so that all recordings must be shared and played through the OASIS.

This allowed us to weed out unsavory or illegal recordings before they could be shared with other users.

How? Do you know any of the problems associated with content moderations on the current platforms? I don’t know if I want to point to Youtube’s extremely faulty algorithm, Twitter’s complete apathy towards its Nazis, or Facebook doing moderation by making underpaid staff watch all potentially problematic content, which resulted in serious psychological damage to said staff.

You can’t just say that as if it solved everything. The chapter later says this is handled by an AI called “CenSoft”, and as an AI engineer myself, let me tell you: this is not going to work. Again: Youtube is the way it is for a reason.

It also let us maintain our monopoly on what was rapidly becoming the most popular form of entertainment in the history of the world.

And again, monopolies are totally a good thing as long as it’s in the right hands!

When I’m implying that the book does not care for any of these potential problems, I mean it. These enormous ethical issues are sidestepped in cold narratin, and we just keep going on introducing new slang that I hate, but have to quote so help you keep up.

“Sims” were recordings made inside the OASIS, and “Recs” were ONI recordings made in reality. Except that most kids no longer referred to it as “reality.” They called it “the Earl.” (A term derived from the initialism IRL.) And “Ito” was slang for “in the OASIS.” So Recs were recorded in the Earl, and Sims were created Ito.

There. You have been infodumped.

In the midst of all this (still extremely dry) exposition about how this changed media, we also get this tidbit:

You could take any drug, eat any kind of food, and have any kind of sex, without worrying about addiction, calories, or consequences.

Now, I was going to rant about this, but then, a page later, this happens and spares me the trouble:

I’d struggled with OASIS addiction before the ONI was released. Now logging on to the simulation was like mainlining some sort of chemically engineered superheroin.

So, you are aware that addiction isn’t just possible, but extremely facilitated by this. But sure, no worries! It’s perfectly safe! Because our protagonists are good.

Also, remember how the last book ended on a weak attempt at having a moral that maybe the real world is good, actually? Yeah, Wade tells us the ONI helps poor people live enjoyable lives in the OASIS. So. Fuck that message, I guess. It only applies if you’re the literal wealthiest man on Earth.

And me? All my dreams had come true. I’d gotten stupidly rich and absurdly famous. I’d fallen in love with my dream girl and she had fallen in love with me. Surely I was happy, right? Not so much, as this account will show.

Aside from the aforementioned returning OASIS affiction, there’s the Shard riddle that Wade is now obsessed with, to the point of offering a billion-dollar reward to anyone with information about the riddle’s answer.

I announced this reward with a stylized short film that I modeled after Anorak’s Invitation. I hoped it would seem like a lighthearted play on Halliday’s contest instead of a desperate cry for help. It seemed to work.

On one hand: good, Wade finally has a character flaw that the book actually acknowledges as a character flaw. I can work with that. On the other hand: this is all told to me in such a dispassionate that I am dreading how the book will handle this character flaw. Which is to say, I’m not expecting it to be very good.

(For a brief time, some of the younger, more idealistic shard hunters referred to themselves as “shunters” to differentiate themselves from their elder counterparts. But when everyone began to call them “sharters” instead, they changed their minds and started to call themselves gunters too. The moniker still fit. The Seven Shards were Easter eggs hidden by Halliday, and we were all hunting for them.)

Especially when this is something the narration feels is more important to tell me about.

Anyway, skip another year, and a gunter finally leads Wade to the First Shard. Solved that riddle, I guess. And wait, wasn’t part of why IOI was ~evil~ in the first book that they were paying people to find the Easter Egg for them? How is this any different, Wade?

And when I picked it up, I set in motion a series of events that would drastically alter the fate of the human race. As one of the only eyewitnesses to these historic events, I feel obligated to give my own written account of what occurred. So that future generations—if there are any—will have all the facts at their disposal when they decide how to judge my actions.

And that is the end of our chapter 0. And can I just say: what a mess already. I don’t think my snark can properly convey how utterly devoid of emotion this book’s writing is, and that alone is honestly more of a turn-off than anything else in the book so far. Even, knowing that I railed about it in the first book, I still feel newly unprepared for it. And it’s not like this double-prologue is making me hopeful that the book will show an ounce more critical thinking—or decent fucking humanity towards marginalized groups—as its predecessor.

So, that’s a lot to look forward to! For the sake of my sanity and schedule, don’t expect me to do such big posts every time. I’ll probably do one chapter a week from now on, if that. We’re in for a long ride, but I hope it’s worth it, at least.

[not-krys]

2am Ramblings

Or more specifically, a place I can put some ramblings about writings I’ll probably never do but just wanted a place to put them outside of my head.

Most have nothing to do with the WIP Wednesdays that are still posting, these are just bare threads of thoughts that may or may not turn into something later. Who knows. 

Some might have to do with specific fandoms, some might have to do with OCs, some might just be silly rambles. Whatever they are, I just wanted to put them out into the world.

Under a cut because, yes, it’s gonna get rambly. 

See you guys down below~

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IkeVamp: The Van Gogh Brothers Find Each Other Again Based mostly on Vincent’s ending (which I’m still bitter about, as I’m sure a few others are), but Vincent and MC make it a goal to try and find the others again, specifically Theo, in the future.

Or Theo tries to find them on his own, maybe not interacting directly with them, but watches over them to make sure they’re okay in the modern life. Since canon doesn’t specify how long lesser vampires can live to, watching over Vincent and MC as they grow old together (since I think one ending specificies Vincent turning human again once he passes through the door. Because what is lore consistency), seeing his brother happy with MC makes him happy and he passes on with them, because gotta love that sweet, sweet angst.

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Custom MC: Amelia/Amelie/Name Subject to Change

Basically trying to create a soft girl artist MC, based on my current game avatar.

Though most of my game avatars have some variety of dark hair, that blonde bob I’ve had since Vincent route has sort inspired me to make another ikevamp oc outside of Thea. Don’t know much about her yet outside of being soft artist girl.  First thought would be putting her with Vincent because uwu soft artists, but I’ve also had thoughts of her with Isaac and her with Jean as well. She might not understand their passions very well (complicated math goes over her head most days, sorry Isaac) but she likes hearing people being passionate about what they love and she hopes their confidence in their passions can inspire her to be passionate as well.

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Corset Tying Headcanons

Basically a list of the IkeVamp boys helping MC into her corset, based on a gif set I saw a while back of a guy helping a lady into her corset and dress for the day. Wrote a little bit of it but it started getting repetitive, plus some I couldn’t make hard and fast decisions on how they would tie off the corset laces with a bow or a knot and now it’s just sitting in my notes. Was gonna do the same for IkeRev, but again, got repetitive and some characters I just don’t have a good grasp on yet, so it’s also on the backburner until something comes along to spark interest in it again.

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Thea and Her Husbands

I’ve written Thea with Theo before, but I haven’t written her with Arthur yet, and I haven’t written them in a threesome, even though I’ve thought about it for a while, especially after events that feature Arthur and Theo together where Arthur and MC help Theo set up a gallery (one when Arthur’s route came out and I think he hurt his wrist in that one trying to protect MC from a falling painting, and the other when Theo’s route came out and he and Arthur were in a spat but forgive each other in the end). Just gotta figure out how this triangle comes together.

And, though I promised myself (multiple times) I wasn’t gonna make Thea have kids, I still have some thoughts about her having twins someday, from both Theo and Arthur. And, I know, different fathered twins is not common like at all (it’s still possible but extremely rare, as far as I know), but a fanfic from my teen years introduced the idea of different fathered twins and the idea hasn’t left since. So, boy and girl twins, with the boy named Vincent, because of course he is. Girl twin I’m not so sure on, but Arthur gets dibs on naming her since he didn’t get to name his son, lol.

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IkeRev Custom MC: Madeline/Name Subject to Change

Another OC/Custom MC based on my avatar, but it’s IkeRev flavored now, lol.

I’ll just be honest and say that some of the... creative choices from Harr’s route weren’t my cup of tea, but I still love Magic Man, so when I received his Normal Avatar hair, I started seeing my IkeRev avatar as her own character, solidified further by one scene in his route that just made me laugh.

It was the three way square off scene between Harr, Lance, and Sirius in Harr’s route. Mainly the part where everyone is staring tensely at each other, daring to the other to make a move when the baking timer goes off, making Alice meekly reply ‘T-the cake is done!’ and they all have a tea party despite the high tensions. That was when my Alice was born, Madeline.

I put her closer to Harr’s, Sirius’s, and Lance’s age group (closer to Harr as he’s the youngest of the three), little timid and shy but isn’t afraid to stand up for what’s right. Loki jokingly switches between calling her his big sister and his mom because of her relationship to Harr, the both of them scolding him because they’re not married (yet) and they’re not your parents.

On a purely aesthetic level, I also ship her sometimes with Lancelot as he’s the strongest card I have currently, so I often see the two together in Love Battles and it makes me giggle. Maddie might be too soft for Lance if I was to put her in his route, but they could be friends once they stopped being enemies. Black Army is always friendly towards Alice no matter where she ends up, so of course she’s friends with Sirius, if nothing more than to gossip about his past with Lance and Harr, much to Harr’s dismay.

Misc Thoughts: Midnight Cinderella

I have no idea why Alyn’s Sugar Ending sticks out so much for me. I wasn’t the biggest fan of his route (mostly due to the MC herself, Alyn was reasonably okay for an s/o), and yet... that ending has stuck with me more than any of the other ends I’ve done thus far.

Like... I still can’t believe MC would fake her own death to get out of a political marriage with Byron.

Like, Princess, very bold of you. Incredibly selfish to your people and you scared the living daylights out of Alyn when he found out the news of your (fake) death, but still... I was modestly impressed.

Guess I just wanna do a rewrite of that scene, of Alyn finding Princess again after her ‘death’ and the two being together again because she’s not the princess anymore and they can live happily ever now or whatever.

I just like the emotions of that idea, okay?

There was also a thought of rewriting parts of Giles’s route to add in a thriller/psychological terror element about becoming Wysteria’s princess, stemming from my feels from Giles’s first few chapters. I only choose not to write this because I’m a big baby when it comes to scary stuff, so I tend to stay away from it. Not always, mind you, but I tend to prefer nice fluff over the scary stuff.

Or really just a plain old rewrite of Giles’s route because no one likes assault, okay? Like, make it more of a teacher/student kind of relationship that grows into something more later on. We can keep the forbidden lovers element because he’s the royal tutor and was the one to pick her to be the princess so her choosing him looks self-serving but it’s really not. There’s some bits to Giles I like, but it’s surrounded by a lot of not good things, so I just wanna do a rewrite to have more believable character growth both from him and from Princess (and less assault, less assault is always good).

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