#I'm actually very bad at playing farming games but I like playing this one this far

[sayheykid]

i love zegras as much as the next guy but i truly think that mason mctavish is the most interesting young talent on the ducks right now. mark my words, within the next five years we will see him get an A, and he will become captain within his career

[1tarashka1]

Some quick sketches from me playing Snacko

[factual-fantasy]

29 Asks! :DD Thank you! :}}📦

@holly-opal @tallchest13-blog

There was not a single thing I liked about the trailer. Not a single thing.

Not the visuals, not the hinted at Jumanji style story, not the casting, I hated all of it. The thing I hated the most was Jack Black being casted as Steve. 💀

I hated his voice for Bowser, I hate him playing as Steve. Sooooo much hatred and disappointment for this trailer 💀💀💀

AAAAA THANK YOU!! :))))))

I have made my own version of Tarr! :D They are not intended to be cute 💀

Soft? :0

I haven't heard of it <:0 google seems to suggest its a Roblox game..?

@spirited-splashes

AAAA IM GLAD TO HEAR IT!! :DDDD TEAM PLATONIC!!! :))))

@pokefan250

I'm pretty 50/50- I GOT THE 8 WINS IN FALL GUYS JUST HOURS BEFORE THE CHALLANGE ENDED SO THAT MADE ME HAPPYbut then my health came back to bite me and I had a very scary health day :x sooo.....

Other than Barnaby's mom living out on a big farm away from the neighborhood- I don't actually have many ideas! <:D

And I had no plans for the neighbors to have cars.. but now I'm thinking of giving Eddie a cute little mail car :))

Yeah I wouldn't use the word "miss"... miss makes me feel like home cares about Wally in a tender way and wants him to come back because it cares about him.. that's not quite the right vibe..

Home doesn't want Wally to leave, and it wants him to come back when he's gone.. but that's the only way I'd word it. Kind'a cold and with unknown intentions..

Also thank you so much!! :DDD

The timing if this is quite humorous. (I spent the last week making 10+ frog plushies)

@pewpewae

I imagine out of all the neighbors, Poppy and Barnaby would have the most knowledge on basic first aid and home remedies. Considering they both grew up way out in the sticks, you're bound to get hurt or sick and not have anyone nearby to help you. So they learned from their parents how to take care of themselves or others when they're unwell :))

If someone is injured or sick though, I can imagine that it might stress Poppy out to come running to her screaming- so people probably turn to Barnaby for those sorts of things <XD

I thought that Howdy gets up early and comes home late. So out of all the neighbors, Sally gets to spend the most time with him because he's almost always awake and out and about! :)

Howdy is also always on the move- doing things around the shop and working. Usually most neighbors cant follow him around from job to job fast enough- but Sally can! :)) She's been able to get to know him really well and they get along like two peas in a pod!

Howdy is witty and quick with his responses. He rarely stutters, so these two can just chatter away for hours and hours!

When it comes to worrying about him,, it is just the cold thing. But Howdy "not liking the cold" only scratches the surface of it. Howdy practically shuts down in the winter time, ALL the neighbors worry about him..

In the wintertime, Howdy is one lullaby away from collapsing on the floor and falling asleep 💀 the cold completely destroys his energy.. Also he's constantly hungry. He really slows down and starts running into things, forgetting things, sleeping in and being really hard to wake up.. <:/ and he gets sick pretty often in the winter so he's just not having a good time-

Huh, I've never seen anyone take that direction with Ingo! :0

@anewbieartist356

HELOOOO!! :}}}}}}}

AAAA THANK YOU SO MUCH!! :)) IM SO GLAD YOU LIKE HIM! :}}}}}}

And yeah, his hair probably take a few hours to braid and I bet bedhead is his worst yet more common nightmare 💀

(Referencing this post)

WARHHRGG SOBBS LOUDLLYYY!!! 😭😭💞💞THANOYU SO MUCH!!! 🥹🥹🥹💞💞💞💞

@abaroo

I feel like unless Home deliberately interacted with Barnaby and wanted him to know its alive, he would never suspect Home to be a living entity. Barnaby assumes that Wally has bad anxiety and its amplified when he's alone.. thus inviting him over to his house just to get out of his own home for a bit, or spending the night at Wally's house..

Barnaby has stayed over at Wally's house a lot and Home watches him too.. but in the end Barnaby chalks up the weird feelings he gets to just the worry over Wally..

I've never played the game, but I love it :) the fandom can be a real pain sometimes..

Currently I'm only really drawing/thinking of the base Unovan pokédex, not the pokédex from black 2 and white 2. (There are some select exceptions to this)

Mostly because the second dex is HUGE. And because Pokémon white was the game I grew up playing- so that's the one I wanna pull the Pokémon from. Ngl though, I might not be able to resist incorporating Metagross from the second dex.. 👀👀

Also my violet team wont make any canon cameos, but I did draw a doodle of Grim and V as slimes! :}}

@holly-opal

AAAA THANK YOU!! :DDDD

Meow meow! :))

(Thank you! I wish the same for you! :} )

@minnesotamedic186 (Referencing this post)

AAAA THANKYIU!! :))) I have a couple ideas for them but I'm having a hard time writing them out 😔

@msdamneighty

AAA I LUB YOU TOO! :))))))

@neo-metalscottic

Hello! I've unfortunately not been doing well health wise.. this week has been a rough patch.. but I'm hangin in there as best I can! <:) The fam says hi! XDDD

As for your questions, the fam has been blessed with never being too cold or too hot. So they probably like the winter time because that's when I'm at my happiest :)) I've never given them snow- but I'm sure they'd love to play in it! And yes, Gerald absolutely desires to A-pose out on the garden XDDDD

I typically play as Pit or Metakight. As for the others, I wonder..

Maybe Bibi would play as Luigi, Cici as Bowser, Jangles as Peach and Gerald as Wario XD

Also thank you for the ask! :DD I look forward to your next one but no pressure! :)))))

@littlelightfish

Its very rare that anyone from the crew hides their illness.. If someone hid an illness that's a big no no because they can infect other members of the crew. Plus it's really easy to tell if they're sick-

Also thankfully, (aside from Octo that one time-) no one really hides injuries. If the wound is in an embarrassing spot and need help, they'll probably just get the crewmate they are most comfortable with to help them..

I think Tuna only has that gnarly hook hand, he doesn't have anything else to put on in its place 💀

I can imagine when he first got his prosthetic arm he probably hurt himself on it once or twice <:( eventually he got used to it though and didn't hurt himself anymore-

Who made his prosthetic arm.. hmm.. I kind'a imagined he put it together himself.. Hence why it looks impractical and dangerous 💀

I didn't have plans for him to miss anyone... perhaps his mother but she's gone.. at least he doesn't miss anyone from his old crew.

After a battle/conflict on the ship, the very first thing Tuna does is go looking for Ellie..🥺

I imagine rolls are Tunas favorite food because he's kind of a picky eater. So some beautifully made plain bread rolls are hard to beat! :))

I didn't intend for Red to have any siblings,, his family was mostly his rotten mom and dad. :(

I think Coco and Cuttlefish get along better than you might think! :)) They're both rather sassy and have a lot of the same opinions. Other than Tuna, there isn't anyone that Coco butts-heads with :))

Due to the varying body types, the crew typically doesn't steal each others clothes 😅 but I can see Red stealing Coco's coats and boots from time to time 🥺

I haven't thought much about Ellies family.. perhaps she lived with her cruddy uncle before running off with Octo and Seafoam? :0

Thankfully like you said- other than Octo, nobody's gotten hurt so badly they thought they'd lose them. <:)

I'm afraid I don't Understand that question about Red.. D:> But Blue Beauty's favorite food is probably krill! :0

And lastly, WAAHGRGGT THANOUU SO MUCH FOR THE ASKS SND INTEREST IN MY OCSSS!!!😭😭💞💞💞

@loud-kid2

While I have no plans to add E. Gadd to my AU, I have made my own version of King Boo! :))

Aww! I still need to work on Julies sisters, but I can see this being the direction I lean towards! :))

Wally would probably stay home and try to just recover.. but if Home his illness starts making his anxiety/paranoia way worse- I can see Barnaby staying over for a few nights to take care of him. Perhaps even bringing Wally to his house if he thinks it might help- :0

[kleinv01]

Playing games with the LIs:

Klein: Really good at most games- but will beat you in racing games especially. (Playfully) rages or whines when he loses but will always be down to play again. He's never actually annoyed nor frustrated, he really is just doing this to get your attention.

"Argh, I lost! This game is so hard… Hmm… But I'm not giving up! You enjoy seeing this, don't you, darling? Hehehe, just you wait, I'll prove you wrong. Come on, let's play one more game!"

Yael: Bad at it, probably needs some teaching. Laughs it off whenever he fails at something. Your best bet is to play Farming Sims with him (Imagine Stardew Valley) or really just casual, laid-back games. He just enjoys your company more than any games, honestly. And please don't ever make him play horror games. He will cry

"MC, how do I interact with this item?" (Listens to you explain, nodding along) "Oh, so that's how you do it… Okay, the E button…" (goes silent and chuckles after a moment) "I accidentally threw away an item. Is there any way I can restore it?"

Al : Good at games, but fairly picky with what he plays. He likes story-driven RPGs, FPS shooters, and Soulslikes. Almost no reaction, even in the case of Soulslike- when he loses, just mumbles out a very small "oh…" or grunts a little (on a rare case of him getting a bit frustrated) but then still plays again afterwards. LOL

(Trying to beat a boss) "..." (Keyboard and mouse tapping noises, very concentrated) "...!" (Sat up straight, staring at the screen.)

You can't see it due to his bangs, but his eyes must be sparkling a bit out of excitement he just got after defeating said boss in the game.

[nychta-luxury]

A Strange God

Gen Z reader

soft au - reader is an adult -

Warning: Not proofread, dark jokes, mostly comedy rather then serious, swearing.

-------------------------------------------

You were sitting in you're room playing genshin, doing your usual things like commissions, Tea pot, exploration, farming.

Until something strange happened your device wasn't responding. I don't mean the screen froze oh no no. You can still move your mouse however the game itself is moving on its own

"Oh hell naw I didn't sign up for this demonic shit. " You say as you back away from the device. Your main is still moving and the worst part is, its not even part of any idle animation or something you have seen before. You don't care if it's a hacker or some possession shit, EITHER ONE IS BAD

Then it hits you, you starting to get light headed, vision becoming blurry, you start on panicking. What the hell was wrong with your body just when you were about to reach for a phone you black out.

You are now concouice though haven't opened your eyes yet, it feels... Very peaceful your not sure why.. The birds are singing, the smell of flowers in the air, the grass on the ground

"THE GRASS ON THE GROUND?!" You instantly opened your eyes.

"Why is this grass brighter than my future." You say as you look at the neon like grass "Did people kidnap me to touch grass like a normal human being?" Look as much as unbelievable that suggestion was, you have been told to randomly touch grass more than your salary combined.

"You know what fuck it, it's like-" You look at the sky "I'm going to pretend I know what the time is, however I can say it's too early to care." You lay back down, ah how peaceful. Too peaceful, but who cares you can pretend to be in some anime and lay down at the grass.

"AHHH IS THAT A FUCKING BUG" You instantly sat up from the ground, honestly what were you thinking

"GET THE HELL AWAY SATAN SPAWN."

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Okay now that's over with. You look up at the sky "Okay universe we both know you will fuck me over one way or another. I know damn well that the bugs were only the beginning." You sigh, done with your anime protagonist moment and reach out to grab your phone.

"Where's my phone...?"

"NO NO NOO," you say panicking "WHERE IS MY LIFE PURPOSE?!" You scream "I AM STILL WAITING FOR TCF MANHWA TO UPDATE!!"

It's been 30 minutes and you are still upset you don't have your phone. YOU DON'T CARE IF SOMEONE KIDNAPPED YOU AS LONG AS THEY GAVE YOU A PHONE OR BE AN IPAD KID.

"Ugh, what's the purpose of life if it isn't to update that one story you never continued in 2020." You say dramatically, if anyone was watching they would think you just lost a loved one.

you felt a small tickle on your foot, and your -20 IQ brain thought that it might be a spider... but suddenly you had gained 1 IQ and decided to actually look at what it was instead of kicking your feet aimlessly.

Turns out it was was a squirrel, thank goodness you didn't kick it. Let's just say tiktok traumatized you with too much information about animals..

The squirrel was just cuddling up to you, your weren't really sure why. It was then you realize your surroundings. "Why the hell am I in some old ass ruin??" Now your confused, you look around the area to see where you are perhaps you might even recognize it who knows? You can see a huge structure, it kinda looks like a crossbow, your not quite sure how to describe it. It feels very familiar for some reason, you can see carving marks on it, it read "Seed of stories, brought by the wind, and cultivated by time." huh for an ancient structure it sure had modern English. Wait. That's not English. How are you even reading that??? there is only one explanation for this. "I am some fictional work that doesn't even make sense, like 90% of fantasy reincarnation stories even if the protagonist was transmigrated and not reincarnated, but they use it anyway to sound cool." You say with a serious face, "Lmao as if that was true" You feel something on your shoulder, you immediately turn to what it was just to find the same squirrel just climbed up to your shoulder and now just cuddling you. "You are so lucky my reflexes didn't kick in, I almost throw you off my shoulders yk." "Why am I even talking to a squirrel? gonna be Snow White 2.0 ig" suddenly you hear something drop, you turn behind you and see- IS THAT AMBER???? looks like she dropped her bow, why does she look so surprised? Is it your outfit maybe? Maybe even the hair?? Anyways you just walked over and picked up ambers bow for her "Yo, you uh dropped this" "YOUR GRACE, YOU DON'T HAVE TO PICK IT UP FOR ME!!" "Wait tf you mean your grace." ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Welp Gen z reader popped up in my mind so here- I decided not to add to many gen z jokes just yet since it is a little short story, might make a part 2 if this post goes well-

[hawberries]

holy shit, could you share some of your ratios/artis because multiple top percents is nuts and I wanna see the stats

HAHA TY! Unfortunately you've activated my yap card, so I'm really sorry about how the rest of this post is going to go. I do want to admit that it actually isn't that impressive because there's ways to sort of "game" the Akasha leaderboard system, usually by sharing high CV pieces between your characters, overbuilding crit rate and ER or finding specific leaderboards that aren't as competitive, but it still is a fun sort of low-stakes, inconsequential PVP mode that I enjoy! This is my Akasha page. As you can see my Emilie and Kinich are not doing well.

One notable way I've "cheated" is the fact that my Chiori's ranking is on the Jade Cutter leaderboard, but that's not a real place, because my Chiori is on a Wolfs-Fang. I'm thinking of going for her sword next time she reruns, actually, so she may lose her ranking soon. The boards only look at your artifacts and then make their own assumptions, so board ranking is a VERY poor reflection of in-game performance. Another example is for any Childe mains who have him on Nymph's Dream: it's not actually that good of a set for him! The boards overestimate the uptime, but in actual gameplay, especially if you look at International speedruns, the uptime is bad and he often performs better with mixed sets. However, the difference is not likely to be felt in a practical scenario outside of speedruns and high-level play, so it's reasonable to keep him there for the valour, since he's still going to be good enough.

the reason my Mualani is so high even though I am not a Mualani main is because 1) she's so new that everyone is still working on her domain and using placeholder pieces and 2) I hit her with the yassify beam (gave her this absolutely stupid Hydro dmg goblet which is by far the best piece on my entire account). It just gets passed around between all my watery guys depending on whose personal damage I'm depending on the most at the time, but since Mualani is a hypercarry and Ayato and Yelan are more supportive, it makes the most sense to leave it on her. I expect her to drop a lot in the rankings once people have a chance to farm the Codex set more.

I'm very chuffed with my Navia's build because I recently crafted a new feather for her with the artifact transmuter. Feathers are not broadly recommended to craft, but Navia's feather was by far the most obvious weak link on my account – in the sense that not only was it so bad that it would be easy to get an upgrade (it had 4 low rolls of crit damage and NO other useful stats, not even lower-value ones like atk% or ER) but the rest Navia's pieces were good enough that I had no reason to still be actively farming her domain. Anyway, I got quite lucky with the crafted feather, though as you can see it's still easily the weakest of all her pieces. This is enough to tide me over until Nighttime Whispers is in the strongbox :D

I've worked really hard on my Xiao's build – I've strongboxed 364 Vermilion pieces to date – but Xiao, being an older character with dedicated mains, has a very competitive board, so I don't expect to ever get much higher than this. Isn't that feather disgusting, though? I farmed Marechaussee domain a lot but never got a build good enough to replace this one, especially considering I'm on Jade and therefore about to overcap on crit rate just by sneezing. He has 97% crit rate WITH A CDMG HAT, I want to point out! I am considering crafting a circlet for him as his current one is relatively weak, but that's a problem for future Phee to think about, since I'll want to rebalance his build anyway once I get Xianyun – he'll need less ER and less crit rate.

What level of nerd am I about combat stats in the video game Jenshin Intact? I do my own damage calculations to see which pieces are best! That's why Xiao is on an attack goblet instead of an Anemo DMG one 😔

Also… see how my Wanderer is top 2%? I still don't have an EM goblet on the Flower of Paradise Lost set. RNG is really so funny sometimes. Anyway, at the moment I've allotted myself 6 weeks of farming time to try and get Emilie at least a good 2pc 2pc, after which I'll probably go back to making my Kinich not suck!

[jq37]

FH Junior Year Post-Season Thoughts

With another season of Fantasy High in the books and my recaps all finished, I wanted to do an overview of my thoughts on the season as a whole. Even though I feel generally positive about my experience with the season, there are a few things I think maybe could have been done differently narratively or mechanically. This isn't to criticize the way the season went down or to backseat DM/Play. More my combined ten years of college for textual analysis and storytelling bleeding through, haha. 

I first want to start with the things I thought worked really well.

Fantasy High has "High" right in its title but, in past seasons (and especially Sophomore Year), not as much time as you'd think was spent actually at school and even if it was spent at school, there wasn't much time spent in class or engaging with the realities of being a student. This season really dug into the academic consequences of skipping your classes all the time and the realities of needing to do a ton of extra stuff to try for a scholarship and I think that was a refreshing thing to highlight for a change. Being more scared at flunking out than the dragon that's trying to eat you feels very emotionally resonant. Real "High School Is Killing Me" vibes for anyone who's a fan of NPMD. 

Even though Fantasy High is a show that has some deep emotional beats and strong character arcs, it's first and foremost a comedy show. From the jump, everyone was generating bit after bit that had me cracking up as usual. "Little girly dog collar" is one of the funniest combinations of words I can think of. I think it was Siobhan who said that this was the goofy season and, having seen it, I'd have to agree with her. It never failed to make me laugh and it was always a highlight of my week.  The cast just has great table chemistry that I love to watch no matter what they're doing. 

Watching some of these high level combat encounters is as close as I'll get to understanding people watching sports. Even though combat is generally my least fave part of D&D, I think the cast really killed it this season with how cleverly they played and Brennan came up with some really great combat encounters. Special shout outs to Baron's Game and The Last Stand for their unique mechanics.  

This is going to be one that's on the other list as well because my feelings are mixed, but I genuinely do like the downtime mechanic and how it forces hard choices. I think it's an interesting way to connect a mechanic to the story and cultivate stressful atmosphere for the season.

I have problems with the execution but I love the Rat Grinders in concept. I think as early as season 1 I was hoping that we'd meet a party that was like the Bizarro Bad Kids and the idea of a party that's farming XP instead of going on crazy adventures is a strong concept. Likewise, I think a character that's jealous because of your "cool" (read: tragic) backstory is also a fun trait for an unhinged antagonist in this kind of setting.

This is me absolutely showing my bias but I adored the Abernant Sisters content this season. I dunno if Siobhan specifically asked Brennan to not put her on a bus with the other beloved NPCs or what but I'm so glad she stuck around and we got the development we did. It was almost entirely ancillary to the plot but there was this clear pattern of Aelwyn getting softer and sweeter towards Adaine over the course of the season, from the guarded, "Enjoy the nemesis ward," to, full I love you's and, "I'd take them to get you." It was way more focus than I expected considering that Aelwyn completed the bulk of her arc last season and a lot of the time, a redemption arc basically ends after the big gesture (in this case, Aelwyn taking a magic blast for Adaine in Sophomore Year). So the fact that we got to see all of these sweet moments of them reestablishing their relationship outside of do or die moments was such a pleasant surprise. Again, I fully admit I am extremely biased, but this was my top wishlist item and the season overdelivered so there's a baseline happy I'm always gonna be with Junior Year. 

OK, so moving on to things I things I think could have been tweaked.

Even though I liked the downtime system and the pressures it created, it also squeezed out the chance for more casual PC to NPC interactions that would usually be more common because they were semi-locked behind the relationship track and there wasn't an obvious benefit to roll for Relationships (as opposed to something like Academics which was crucial for not flunking out). Making the mechanical benefit more clear would have helped that (even if it meant Brennan didn't get his reveal--which he ended up just telling them anyway so might as well do it early). The other thing is that the consequence of a rage token was so bad that of course they spent all season avoiding getting one. Things might have gone differently if the consequences had been a bit more obscured, like in Neverafter. And it could have been a nice parallel to the Rat Grinders to take this unknown resource that makes things easier for you but is also having this negative effect. Then it could be like dang we did the same thing they did unknowingly. 

I mentioned this in my recap but I'll talk about it again. It is a little confusing to me that we did the Ankarna subplot right after we did the very similar Cassandra subplot. It took up so much time this season which I don't think is an issue in and of itself, it's just that we literally just went through some extremely similar beats last season. Why double up on this same storyline when there's so much new ground to cover? Or if we're going to raise a god, why not make it a different kind of god? One theory I had early on was that the Rat Grinders were trying to raise their own god to one-up the Bad Kids but instead of raising a chill, misunderstood Cass type, they accidentally raised a god who was erased for a good reason and got in over their heads. 

It's fun for there to be connections between seasons but sometimes it's like, OK that's a *lot* of coincidences. Like the god who your rivals is trying to raise *happens* to be the wife of your cleric's god and also *happens* to be the god of the fiend trapped in your friend's mom's chest and that fiend *happens* to be the relative on your bard's dad's side which is *also* the reason she is randomly cursed? That's a LOT of red string connecting plot points. As unhinged as Kipperlilly is about coveting Riz's backstory if I saw that go down I'd be like you have *got* to be kidding me.  

The mystery elements didn't feel like they clicked as well as they did in other seasons. I think that's partially because Porter's plan was so convoluted (seriously, I made another post about how haphazard his plan was) and had all these moving parts and we didn't get clear answers for a lot of mechanical things like how the rage crystals actually work and when they were implanted and stuff. You had stuff like Devil's Honey which I think is super cool as a thing that exists in the world but ended up being an element that just led the players down the wrong path and had a relatively small payoff (that Porter was using it to lie to Ankarna). I think it's plausible that a forgotten god would be willing to listen to anyone saying the right things without introducing this element. (As opposed to, for instance, Ambrosia which has a very clear connection to what's going on and is a solid clue that someone is flirting with aspirations of godhood.) 

The Porter reveal came so late in the season that even though it was a fun/challenging fight, there wasn't a lot of emotional weight behind killing him. It was basically just dunking on a teacher Fig has always hated who was also mean to Gorgug so screw him. Which, valid of course. But the Bad Kids were never going to react as strongly to Porter as they were to the Rat Grinders so putting Porter in the prime villain spot isn't necessarily what I would have done if I wanted the fight to be more than just a brawl--especially since we've done "School admin with student minions" already in S1. I don't mind the full circle callback but it would have been nice to pick something else for the sake of variety. We haven't had a child mastermind yet and I think Kipperlilly could have been a great candidate for that. My friend suggested that it would have been fun if Kipperlilly was trying to become a god instead of just being Porter's underling and I agree. "I'm not anyone's chosen one so I'll choose myself," is still within her established jealousy and Type A tendencies. If we want to keep Porter involved since that was Brennan's gift to Emily, maybe have it be that instead of Kipperlilly working for him, he's working for her. Like Artemis Fowl vibes! And the Rat Grinders can be varying levels of on board--from true believe to redeemable. I don't think Brennan planned for the Bad Kids to ever redeem her so might as well go full megalomaniacal mastermind with her and make her The Villain if she's not gonna be nuanced anyway. If My Little Pony can do it and send a literal child to Tartarus for pony treason (or whatever Cozy Glow did), Fantasy High can too. 

Continuing from the above, if we have the Porter fight in place of the Grix fight (a la Daybreak) and don't use Ankarna, that gives way more time for the Bad Kids to investigate the Rat Grinders throughout the season and it would mean that they would have their personalities developed a lot more. With the limited downtime, they Bad Kids didn't have a lot of time to spend on these kids who were just hating on them for no good reason (valid). But if you cleared their plate of the god hunt stuff, they'd have more time for this. And if they weren't all rage zombies to varying degrees, it would be easier to see them as characters. Besides Kipperlilly (and, funnily enough, Mary Ann) we don't really have a good read on what these kids are actually like. The little time we spent with them all season was kind of a wash if them breaking out of rage means their personalities got laundered too. Anyway, regardless of how their loyalties ended up shaking out, it would have been fun for them to be more than the minions that they were in canon. As funny as it is for them to just kinda be XP farming losers, they did have the potential to be more interesting in their own right if they weren't just Porter's minions. And again, we've done adults forcing or coercing children into being minions in Freshman and Sophomore Year already. Lemme see some self-created child maniacs! (Or, peer pressured child maniacs. That's cool too. The Lucy/Kipperlilly dynamic is way more interesting to me if it's like girl, I would take a bullet for you but I CANNOT walk this path with you any further in response to *I* will be a god and you can be *MY* champion.)

Anyway, those are my thoughts! Like I said, I have my points that I think could have been tightened, but overall an enjoyable season and I will be glued to my screen if they decide to close out with Senior Year! 

[forestshadow-wolf]

Because I am equally obsessed with cod and a video games call coral island, I have meshed the two together so often but imagine a very loyal protective guard captain of the menfolk kingdom ghost who distrusts humans and human soap who got out if the military and takes over the family farm as a fresh start and falls in love with ghost. Anyway I hope you have an amazing day!

Aww this is a cute idea :)

---

Soap had always had an affinity for the ocean. A couple kilometers down the road from the farm is a vast expanse of rocky cliff-shores. He used to spend his days as a boy playing, and swimming down at the rock flats with his siblings.

He fell out of touch with that side of himself not too long after joining the military. There is a severe lack of beach days in the army.

So I'm thinking about soap not quite fresh off of honorable discharge due to his demolition days having put a permanent ringing in his right ear, and a bad explosion wrecked his knee bad enough that he's got a permanent limp and sometimes it'll go weak and drop him. He's deep in depression without the direction and rigidity of military life. Sure he's working, his da sets him to work in the fields, but it's all just numb.

One night he finds himself walking out the front door, down a distantly familiar path that leads all the way to the rock flats. He almost doesn't realize until salt water is splashing over his bare toes and soaking into his trousers.

And for once he actually feels something. He feels real. It feels like home. He should have come here sooner. He doesn't know why he hadn't.

Something catches at the corner of his gaze.

There sitting in the edge of the rock is a man. Sitting dangerously close to the water for the time of night it is. The tides get... playful when the moon comes out.

He moves closer to warn the man of the danger, but as he approaches he sees that its not a man. Or- it is (maybe) but he's not a human. He knocks a pebble with his shoe and it skitters across the rock.

The man- the mer, he sees now- whips around, some kind of viscous hooked weapon in hand. The man's large frame coupled with the bleach white skull obscuring it's face, and the wicked sharp teeth it bares at him, the man makes an imposing sight. Soap freezes, holding his hands up in Surrender.

A better look at the man reveals details a quick glance didn't reveal to him before. The three notches in the underside of the dorsal fin, oddly enough it looked red and almost fresh. Fresh scrapes along the length of his scaly tail that soap could see. What looked to be old scars, and fresh cuts on his chest and arms.

---

Another attack on the kingdom from the shadows, had left the kingdom wary, and Ghost on edge. He was working himself too hard, ghost knew, and soon Price was gonna send Gaz after him to settle. But for now he had a job to do. For now he focused on protecting his kingdom. And fight now that meant patrolling the area, making it known that they were as strong as ever, that should the Shadows from the south, or the Kretch from the east decide to attack, they were ready.

The Kretch had been fairly quiet as of recently, but he'd found another scouting group of shadows on his rounds of the land. Taking them out was a workout, they bashed him into the rocks, opening fresh wounds, and scraping up his tail, but nothing he couldn't handle. It was the dog they let loose on him that had been the problem. Bullsharks. Viscous creatures, even in the best of times it was smart to avoid them. But especially so if it was the Shadows' dogs, they keep them starved, makes them angry

He's strong, but he knows his limits. And he'd struggle with one on a good day. Injured and overworked, he has no chance. His saving grace? Bullsharks are fast, but he's always been faster. So he swims.

Away from the kingdom. Away from the people he swore to protect. He swims to land, dreadful, dry land. The only thing besides death that'll deter these beast is land. So up he goes onto the rocks. He'll have to wait it out.

I'll be continuing this later today. Let me know if you want a tag.

[stemmmm]

Stem's Thoughts on Harvest Moon 64

(that other title's too long so i'm cutting it down now)

Harvest Moon 64 opens on a scene of your character walking around the street, speaking to everyone in the village who’s come to the event. You quickly piece together that this event in question is actually your grandfather’s funeral, the same grandfather who’s farm you’re about to take over. This little scene beautifully sets up both the tone of the game, and immediately shows the player that this iteration is far more focused on the story and characters. HM64 tells a story about the lives of many people in a small, dying town. It is a story about life, and it is a story about death.

A short disclaimer before we dig in: I played this game before the idea to write these essays cropped up, and have not replayed it since then, so this will be mostly vibes. I will try to do my research to make sure I’m not straight up lying though. (Also all of the images in this one are from google because I don't have a means of getting images from my N64 other than photographing the tv screen and I'm not doing that.)

What’s new!

HM64, also called Harvest Moon 2 by HMGB2 and nothing else I’ve ever seen, is the direct sequel to HM SNES. It’s not a sequel in the usual way sequels are, where you’re continuing where you left off with the same character, but in that every main character is the descendant of their equivalent in the previous game. It’s not important to the story, in fact if you don’t already know this, you probably wouldn’t notice anything past some similarities. I played this game before I tried out SNES and it still took me a minute, plus having it directly pointed out to me to get it. Maybe I’m oblivious, who knows. 

Gameplay-wise, this iteration is home of a few series firsts: For one, your house can be upgraded to have a kitchen! You can't cook though, only collect recipes. You can also get a greenhouse where you can grow crops year-round. Sheep are introduced as barn animals that produce wool. You receive a fishing rod you can use whenever you want, but as far as I understand, the timing is nigh impossible unless you’re playing on a CRT (I am not, and never managed to catch a single fish). There’s a mine you can access in winter for something to do while you can’t grow crops (there are fall crops, but not winter) where you can find about two key items and garbage otherwise. Tool upgrades are no longer done by magic, but by leveling them up through use! Which I think is very neat and feels very natural, like you’ve just become more proficient with them as a farmer through practice. Characters can now come to visit you on the farm at random times, for either special story events or just to say hi! Your farmer can get sick from working too hard in bad weather, just like your animals, and there’s now medicine for that, just like your animals. And there’s inventory menus that I'll discuss at better length later.

What’s the same is… Most things in a basic sense. You’re on a farm with a dog, planting crops, raising livestock. You can make friends with folks in town by talking to them and giving them gifts. The livestock mechanics, as far as I could see and as far as I’ve been able to understand from online forums, are exactly the same as they were in SNES, the exception being there’s no wild beasts that can kill your animals but they’ll still get sick if they aren’t fenced overnight– and they’re not going to eat any grass unless they’re out overnight anyways.

As for your farm, you’re set up with the usual: a small house, a barn, coop, and fodder silo, a wood bin to store debris cleared off your farm, and a big messy field that you have to clean up before you can properly use it. It starts with three new additions though; a doghouse, a bowl that you can feed your dog with by putting edible items in there, and a mailbox that you’ll occasionally receive letters and notices in! They’re small additions, but very, very charming. The one thing that’s been removed is the toolshed, now replaced by a tiny toolbox by your house.

The world outside your farm is like an enhanced version of the SNES map. Imagine the town and forest now have one or two extra sections tacked onto them, one in the town for some extra housing, and a couple in the forest to let you explore the mountain more and get you deeper into the woods. The mountain still has a cave in it (this time with Harvest Sprites, who have been removed from your farm) and a summit you can climb to for certain events, but it has been upgraded with little wild animals that wander around and can be picked up and shown to people for a few friendship points, if they like the animal. (This applies to your dog too, there’s a well known exploit to max out Karen’s friendship in one day by repeatedly showing it to her in the bar where time is stopped.) The crossroads zone is also expanded by having three new areas you can travel to– the ranch that you buy animals at, a vineyard that’s more of a story-area, and a beach that mostly comes into play for a couple of summer festivals! 

On the visual side, this game is the series’ first venture into the new frontier of 3d graphics… kind of. The artstyle is made of isometric 3D models that are rendered into flat sprites and then projected onto the TV as if that’s not what’s happening. The game even lets you turn your farm around in 3D to face different directions, but it’s locked to only let you play in specific angles. Changing the direction made me forget where everything was and get lost on my own tiny farm, so I never touched that mechanic.

Due to the dramatic artstyle shift– not only being in 3D but also presented at a 45 degree angle, the game becomes a fair bit harder to play than either of its 2D predecessors. The controls are just a little clunky, and the bizarre shape of the N64 controller really doesn’t help. This makes the tedium of farming a little irritating to do, since it requires pretty precise inputs done over and over for every extra thing you’re trying to grow. Fortunately, you're not on the hook to ship everything before 5PM comes around like in SNES, so you get to move a little bit slower. The fickle farming experience also gets a little help from the new inventory menu that can be accessed anywhere and any time. It has multiple inventory slots for both tools and items, each type having a dedicated section so there’s no need to prioritize carrying tools versus turnips. Unfortunately, this actually ends up being a little more cumbersome than useful, as the menu takes a little longer than is comfortable to open and is pretty clunky to use. I mostly avoided it unless I was bringing gifts to people. But the addition of an inventory opens up the opportunity for something else which defines this entire game...

Key items– a set of unique, unsellable items –are most frequently found in random, secret places around the farm and town, and they give you a reason to scour every inch of the place. They can also be given to you by NPCs when you gain relationships with them, which is convenient because their entire purpose is to help you get even better relationships with each of them, and maybe even unlock little stories with characters. For example, there’s a music box you can dig up in your field that can be given to any of the girls for a decently sized relationship bump. There’s also an old weathervane in the shape of a chicken that you can find in the little mine. If you give it to Rick, he’ll tell you that it was a precious thing that belonged to his grandmother as a cute scene to deepen the town’s lore and connect it to the first game. Key items quickly become the most important and sought after things in the game because they act as a vessel to deliver that which the game is all about: stories.

Lots of people in a little town

The narrative premise is exceedingly simple: you need to fix up your grandfather’s ruined farm and make a new life for yourself in this town within a certain amount of time, just like its predecessors. Except, this game is a lot bigger than either of them, and it didn’t fill all the extra space with new things to grow on your farm. In my entry on the SNES game, I mentioned that the introspective style of writing turned the repetitive farming gameplay into something more like meditation on things going on in the town. This game takes that idea and runs with it! The town in this game may only be slightly bigger than it was before, but it has a lot more people in it, and every single one of them has a lot more to say, more to do, more festivals to go to, and more story events to take part in. There's even a new photo album that fills in with images for reaching special events or succeeding at certain festivals! Your given goal may be to successfully revitalize your farm, but that rapidly stops being the reason why you want to play. Farming is only a means to further the narrative of the town.

Story events are no longer a reward for reaching the highest heart level with a girl, but instead something that happens naturally in the world as you make better friends with people, or if you just happen to be in the right place at the right time. The world doesn’t only consist of you living it and things happening to you. Instead, you end up being a fly on the wall to other people’s conversations and life events, and you get to see how those events change the people around you. People will begin to say different things, go different places, live different lives without your input at all– often much better lives, as everyone in the town is pretty deeply troubled, whether they seem like it or not.

There’s an added depth, too. While the characters in this series have always been defined by their conflicts (in the first game, every big cutscene with each girl was exclusively about their major life conflicts), this game takes it further in multiple ways. Characters have conflicts with their families: you as the player have a conflict with your parents who can take you home if you fail to farm well, Lillia and Basil have conflict over their marriage and the fact that Basil leaves for half the year, and Karen’s family situation is…. A lot. Then, there are characters at conflict with things much more nebulous, like the Mayor who tells you that the town is going to die out but he can’t find any way to save it, or like the young boy Kent who wants to be a farmer just like you, but through a series of events is forced to learn that life isn’t so simple, people can’t just do whatever they would like, and it takes very hard work to get to do the things you dream of. And then there are conflicts that aren’t even necessarily conflicts unless they run into your long-term plans.

Instead of only having a bunch of girls in town who exist only as your prospective marriage candidates, there are also five boys in the town who will marry those girls instead of you, if given the chance. Like in SNES, there are 5 levels of hearts that the girls can have for you. Unlike SNES, each one of these hearts has a corresponding event you can have with the girl where there’s a chance of her liking you more afterwards, if you say the right things. In addition to that though, there are just as many events coming from the other side of the story, rival events that trigger if you happen to be good friends with the boys.

My favorite story by far is that of Harris the mailman who falls in love with the librarian, Maria, from just seeing her handwriting on the outside of all the letters that she would write. I frequently saw him in the bar at the end of the day and he would tell me the woes of his love, saying that he just needed to work up the courage to finally speak to her. Then one day, I happened to be outside of the library when he and Maria met face to face and she handed over a letter addressed to him. No longer did he sit in the bar forlorn every night, instead all he would do was excitedly tell me about Maria, and then when I visited the library, Maria would tell me about Harris!

While I’m on the subject of these characters, I think it’s worth going in a little more depth on who these people are past the grandchildren of the characters from the last game. See, you may be familiar with names like Karen and Kai and Gray, etc., etc. from a little recently remade game called Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town, which is a modern version of Friends of Mineral Town on the GameBoy Advance, which is a port of Back to Nature on the PlayStation. These are not those characters. At all. While the basic elements of these characters are intact– Popuri is cute and childish, Ann is a workaholic, Maria is shy and a little oblivious –nothing else is the same. They all work different jobs and marry different people than they are paired with in later entries, and in my humble opinion, it all works WAY better in this game, probably because of the fact that these characters were designed for this specific context!

As an example, Popuri’s exasperated mother, Lillia, runs the flower shop and Popuri was named by her father, Basil, who loves plants. She’s childish and sweet and loves flowers, but can also be a complete brat. She eventually marries Gray, Ann’s brother, who lives on the ranch run by his father, Doug, who struggles to understand his children. Gray is an angry young man who seems to have a particular dislike for you, but you don’t learn why until you discover he was a promising young jockey until he got a bad injury and had to give up the sport.

Am I gushing a bit and letting the game design part fall to the wayside? Sure probably, but I can only gush because the game does a brilliant job of making a cast of characters who, while simple on their own, have interconnected lives that come together to give every one of them so much more depth than they would have otherwise. It all builds a narrative, and while narrative design is definitely something different than game design on its own, this game is far more about the narrative so it’s impossible to not focus on.

The problems

The trouble with these events is that I nearly missed the chance to see that letter be exchanged. You have some control over the progression of the events, because you have to be decent friends with the boys in order for them to trigger at all, but unlike the girls who have a handy visual signal of how much they like you, the boys have no such thing, so you can’t really know if a new event is ready to fire off. There’s no way of knowing where or when they’ll happen either unless you look it up, and even then you have to get lucky because sometimes they just don’t trigger when you want them to. I had a lovely moment in my game where I managed to accidentally catch a cold from working too hard in the snow and lost a day to being bedridden, followed by the New Years celebration which takes a day away from you, then followed by Kai and Karen’s wedding– something that I had missed multiple events for and therefore had no idea was coming, which also took a day from me. After that three day chain of no work, I think I was extremely lucky my animals didn’t get sick and die. 

This chain of events led directly to me never speaking to Gray again, even though he was the boy I was most interested in, because I wanted to marry Popuri and there was too much risk of him getting to her before I could. The reason why I didn’t go into more detail about the relationship between those two when I was talking about them earlier is because I straight up don’t know it, I couldn’t risk giving them a chance to get together.

The thing is, even if I hadn’t forced Gray and Popuri’s cutscenes to stop, I still wouldn’t actually know what their relationship is like, because I have not beaten this game. I know what the ending entails and I can reasonably expect I probably would not have gotten an excellent one, but I’m sure it still would have been fine. I stopped playing the game entirely before I even managed to get married. Why? Because I couldn’t get any of Popuri’s heart events to trigger. I had her hearts maxed out and had a blue feather ready to go in my pocket, so I could turn on the game and marry her right away anytime I wanted to. But I wanted to trigger the little events, even if they’re just a couple seconds of some pixels talking to me on a screen. They’re cute. And it made me sad that I couldn’t see them for some imperceptible reason. So I stopped playing and didn’t pick the game back up.

I don’t remember how close I was to the end of the game, I know I was at least in year 2, but I don’t even remember how much longer the game is after that. Probably a good amount. I had definitely gotten most of the events you could get at this point, since multiple other characters had gotten married, and the farming wasn’t something I really enjoyed so I can’t say I wasn’t at least a little bored by this point, but I wasn’t frustrated with the general mechanics of the game. The days were long enough, but not too long, that I had just enough time to go anywhere I wanted and do what I needed before night came. I could still talk to characters and go to festivals and play minigames. But I didn’t want to, because the game wasn’t doing what it seemed like it was supposed to for some arbitrary reason and that frustrated me enough to make me stop. When the fun of a game is found more in experiencing special events rather than anything else, the player feels cheated out of their good time when those events are too hard to find or can be missed outright, and that’s exactly what I experienced.

Parting Thoughts

The ending, according to what I've read, is very similar to the SNES endings, in that you’ll get different results based on all of the different things you’ve done. Whether you’re married, how many crops you shipped, how many animals you have, how well liked you are by the town… I imagine it’s not quite the victory lap that SNES’s ending was with its little cutscenes, since apparently all you get are comments on how well you performed by various people in the town, but it still seems nice and rewarding! At least like more of a reward than whatever the hell GB1 was trying to do. It seems like a perfectly good ending that it would be nice to see myself someday.

Despite all my troubles with this game, I believe HM64 is still the best one out there– at least that I’ve played yet. The events are plentiful and the content is meaty. The repetitive day to day dialogue still has the simple breath of life that SNES did, that manages to make the most out of a small amount. Don’t get me wrong, this game came out in 1999, I’m giving it a lot of praise but the characters still repeat the same line to you every day, and they still freeze in place until you leave the room. It’s revolutionary, but this is comparing it to a game on the literal Super Nintendo. Absolutely pick up this game to try it out, but keep those expectations tempered. That said, I never picked up this game nor knew a thing about it until I was well into my 20’s, but the moment I started playing, it hit me with a wave of nostalgia as if I’d known this game my whole life. At least to me, the look and feel of the game were like coming home to a childhood I never had.

 Will I pick up this game again with the intent to beat it? Maybe! Hard to say for sure when I’m trying to play decades worth of games and write about them at a comprehensive level. What I do know is that this is exactly what I want more farming games to be. It’s a game that has thoughts about life, and about death, both good and bad. And I think this is the perfect context to share those thoughts.

[chaifootsteps]

...nevermind! I have another thing to say and ask.

I just literally searched your username in Tumblr and I got to see a lot of posts accusing you of a variety of things, things like:

being a lolicon / shotacon (steming from you pointing out in a post that fictional children shouldn't be reported and the accuser said that's part of the problem and you're encouraging pedophilia)

being a zoopedo (because of the toothless and hiccup pairing, of course, also managing to see that they've defended and remarked that the "SoftFurArchive" / Norry / idk was trying to warn all of that)

being an armchair psychologist and ableist (because you and an Anon diagnosed Viv with narcissism in a ask)

being a proshipper (an amalgamation of posts, but most focused on the fact of the Toothless x Hiccup ship)

being a KiwiFarms apologist (because of posts about you talking about KiwiFarms and sometimes praising some of the users' comments there)

being a gatekeeper over what's trans (from you saying what a trans should or should not be in a post)

Please, Chai, ease my mind by clarifying if any of this is true or false, or it's just a byproduct of gullible people falling over supposed evidence, or just proshipper puritans attacking you because they don't like you.

— Instagram!Stolas Anon, concerned.

Let's break this down point by point

No, I don't like loli or shota, but I've got a couple of ships that are weird and personal and require convoluted explanations, so I try to extend the same benefit of the doubt to other people.

No, I'm not a pedophile. I'm a CSA survivor, which is why I'm incredibly concerned about things like alarm fatigue. I think certain terms need to be limited to things involving real children and then we can argue about Naruto ships all day.

No, I'm not a zoophile, I like monsters and dragons and generic furry stuff. The term for the former is teratophila. I've been accused of murdering my pets and sent links to actual animal abuse over this.

I don't call myself a proshipper anymore because I'm not playing the "Ah-ha, I think it means X and you said you're that, so you believe what I think you believe" game. I judge people as they come and whether you call yourself proshipper or anti, you're welcome here as long as you can behave.

I've said before that I shouldn't have indulged that ask, but I didn't say that Viv definitely has NPD, I said that if you dangled me over a shark tank and forced me to throw out an armchair diagnosis, it's one I've wondered about. I hope she doesn't, because it's a misunderstood disorder and an extremely sad one. To quote someone who's got it, Nothing's ever OK. You're either too high on yourself for outperforming everyone else, or too harsh on yourself for not being good enough for your own standards.

I'm fascinated by old internet forums and Kiwi Farms is a place that interests me more than any other. It's swaddled in a mixture of misinformation and being exactly as bad as everyone says, but in an increasingly corporate owned, regulated, KOSA-just-passed-the-Senate internet, there are days I'm profoundly grateful that Null's as stubborn as he is.

I'm trans. I genuinely have no idea where this "gatekeeping" thing is coming from.

Let me be very clear. The FBI and NCMEC have literally begged people to stop reporting fictional characters, because fighting pedophiles is like fighting a million headed Hydra. So it burns me when people say things like this.

If you think it's acceptable to do something child protection agencies have again, begged people to stop doing because it gives you a good feeling to do it and you think that trumps the well-being of real missing and exploited children, you are dangerously detached from reality and not welcome on my blog.

TL;DR: All false.

[txttletale]

I don't think the Minecraft critique you posited is really material: every instance of automation in Minecraft is an emergent mechanic. No Mojang developer* sat down and said "let's program in automatic farms". An obvious example is the flying machine, which is so obviously not an intentional mechanic but solely emergent. All of these mechanics are also Optional. It's just as possible to play like an environmentalist, sustainably farming and making limited use of non renewable resources.

It's like saying that Mario 64 supports the murder of baby animals.

Also, even in a game where you are indisputably doing Colonialism, both intentional and required (say Sid Meier's Civilization). What are you... harming? By simulating colonialism on pixelated land? Even if that's not your claim, why phrase this as a flaw with a totally fictional world? "You can do things in this video game that, were they real, would be Very Bad" is applicable to like... every video game?

* If you happen to bring up the shitheel Notch, it's worth noting was responsible for maybe 7% of the current game.

i am aware it is emergent! that's part of what my post was about:

and sure, it is possible to play minecraft in any way you like, but the systems you are given to work with (you can destroy and replace blocks--you are given ways to cut down trees and cultivate new ones, but no way to interact with existing ones, for example) and the progression structures built on these systems (you--obviously--need to accumulate resources to craft, all the things you can craft other than the purely aesthetic ones exist to help you accumulate more resources) assume that you will be extracting resources. in much the same way that it's facile to argue that call of duty isn't about killing people because you can run around the first level of the campaign not shooting anybody for ten hours, saying that minecraft isn't about resource extraction just because (like almost any game) it contains space for oppositional reception and counter-intended play isn't a very good analysis.

anyway, i obviously don't think that you're harming anybody by playing minecraft! i agree with you that sid meier's civilization is an incredibly colonialist and reactionary game with a pretty abhorrent ideology and my playtime in it looks like this:

this is a strange phenomenon i keep encountering, where people will see me critique the ideological implications of or assumptions inbuilt into a media property and assume that as a result i think it is somehow unethical or morally harmful to engage with it. that's a bridge you're making by yourself!

when i talk about the ideology of a game i am not laying that ideology at the feet of the game--rather, i'm using it as a platform to investigate the normative assumptions that are going into that game. minecraft is not the reason that colonialism exists--but its existence is a reflection of how colonialism has shaped the material and cultural situation in which it was produced.

and this last point is why i do think it is pointless to say 'it is a fictional world'--there's no such thing as a totally fictional world. because it's fictional innit. it has no autonomous existence--a 'fictional world' only 'exists' inasmuch as it is created by somebody living in the real world and it can be interfaced with by other people living in that world. it only 'exists' in the context of such interaction, and as such it can't be neatly removed from reality for analysis--at least not for meaningful and productive analysis!

tldr, i am not saying and have never said: when you play minecraft, you are doing actual real-life harm because the creators sat down and decided they love colonialism. i am saying that the systems and affordances of minecraft have resulted in the creation of extractionist systems of automated slaughter as an optimal strategy and that's important to keep in mind when talking about, say, 'what minecraft is about'

[beckinferno]

My SP hyperfix is back so here's a masterpost for my general headcanons!

I'm sure you can guess which characters are my fav based on how some of them are very detailed. Sorry about any typos or unclear sentences LMAO

Kenny

Has a 5+ year old phone with a cracked screen which barely works. He only uses it to call or text people. At times playing games on it too

He loves chicken nuggets and fries but most of the time can't afford it

He never shows his face and hates it when people tell him to take off his hood

Butters, Stan, Kyle and Cartman are the only people who has seen him without the hood on. Idc about canon, let me have this

He drinks alcohol and smokes cigarettes from but hides it from other people

He loves hugs and cuddles, maybe because he never gets that affection very often from his family

He has a bad immune system

His favorite sodas are Pepsi and Sprite because I say so

He often skips classes or sleeps through them

Fingerless gloves.

He's actually a VERY good drummer and is self taught. He also lowkey enjoys sketching

He hates talking about personal things and will often brush them off as nothing

Stan

Biromantic and on the asexual spectrum

Plays the electric guitar and likes to doodle in his notebook more than doing actual school/home work

He likes ramen noodles

He dislikes weed because of Randy's farm, but he does smoke normal cigarettes and uses other drugs sometimes (as a teen)

Big soccer and baseball enjoyer

Listens to music too much and too often. He likes MCR because I do too

Loves holding hands, hugging, etc (any kind of physical affection) unless he's in a bad mood

He's very messy and rarely cleans his room. He is in no way organized about anything.

Hoodies. He wears many hoodies and sweaters. He loves comfy clothing and has come to dislike wearing suits and fancy clothes

Cartman

Very very very closeted bisexual. No, I won't elaborate.

Owns and knows how to play the electric guitar and is actually kind of good at it

Everyone knows he loves food, but less people know he actually really likes cooking. (He has a secret Pinterest account with only recipes)

He has heterochromia; one blue eye and one brown

He speaks a lot of different languages besides from English. Like German, Vietnamese and some Spanish

Loves Lady Gaga and Britney Spears

Cartman has been arrested a lot of times, and does have quite the collection of mugshots

Even when being a teenager, he has a love for his stuffed animals and always enjoys looking at toys while at the store

Secretly a history/war nerd

He's the type of guy to send random and unrelated memes in groupchats and text conversations

Anger issues about most stuff. Especially when losing in any kind of video game

Likes photography a lot

Ike

Autistic because I am autistic and I say so

Tells people he loves Minecraft and Roblox but actually enjoys violent games the most

Comfort food is pizza and his favorite drink is chocolate milk or coca cola. He also loves any type of cookies/chocolate

Loves his weighted blanket and one of comfort items is a stuffed dinosaur

Stuffed animals, drawing and music helps him calm down after nightmares/memories of Miss Stevenson

Only accepts physical affection from Kyle and their parents. His experience with Miss Stevenson changed his reaction to touch

Plays ice hockey and baseball

Hates being kicked/teased. But loves teasing Kyle back and wearing his hat

Big Pewdiepie, Jacksepticeye and DanTDM enjoyer

Loves cartoons, especially Scooby Doo and Chinpokomon (Pokémon)

Swears a lot despite certain adults not liking that he does it

Very protective and caring for Kyle and even if he's younger, he tries to show it the way he can

He hates being sick and despises taking any kind of medicine. He can be very stubborn about this sometimes

[canonkiller]

Loving your D&D stuff.

thank you! however you are going to get a long answer because you have opened an opportunity for me to list things, which is my favorite

very few of the campaigns I'm in / have latched on to that my friends play are actually in D&D any more, for various reasons (primarily 1. WOTC sucks, 2. the system is not really designed for the kind of thing we like the most, which is "impactful character choices," and 3. "why play skyrim as a farming sim"). The games I've been a full player in are, aside from 5e:

Eberron / An Airship Is A Horse That Loves You is in Pathfinder 2e! We started in D&D 5e, which is why there are some semi-homebrewed imports, but it's a very similar system to 5e in gameplay PLUS Pathbuilder is a desktop and app program that will automatically put together character sheets for you, which is arguably the worst part of 5e. It's great, and I highly recommend considering it as an alternative to 5e if you're wanting something that still has the combat rolls and everything but also has more innate design for doing shit as a character. ALSO also there's a ton of included assistive devices, which range from normal stuff like wheelchairs and hearing aids to specifically magical stuff like my favorite: a wheelchair that has legs and can kill. Derien is my PC in this one, fresh out of the oven.

The only other actually active PC status I have had in this group was in an Eyes On The Prize oneshot! EOTP is a fake-marriage game (made by @iraprince !) with flexible setting / character guidelines that's played with a deck of cards, and I highly recommend it for shenanigans. My character was Moonlight Saidluck, a bug centaur fae who accidentally let a human into the fairy world and was pretending this newcomer was their partner and definitely not a human who had accidentally entered the fairy world. I played the one shot with two other couples, which did make it run overtime, but it was a delight. We also had very little trouble playing remotely, with one person in charge of cards and points tracking on an online draw-party style page.

The other games I'm more a spectator in, and then occasionally contribute ideas like fucked up boats or extended debates about magical darkness and the water cycle. That big list of alternative systems is ~

Persona: The Tabletop RPG (PersonaBS)

Quest (Luxknights)

Kids on Bikes (Streams of Consciousness)

Lancer

Beam Saber (AFI, but we haven't been calling it that)

Girl by Moonlight (MMM / Magical Girls)

Cyberpunk TTRPG

Numenera

Monster of the Week

aaand probably more that I'm forgetting because we're. Quite prolific about our play pretend time (and I've got a few concepts brewing that I still really want to nail down - Tanglethorn, the unnamed one about the sinkhole and Bad Hand may grace this list someday if I really buckle down to iron out the wrinkles)

I'm glad you're enjoying my little guys though! I just love a chance to get people into other TTRPG systems, especially when most of them are easier to learn and play than D&D and there's such a wide range of options.

Here's a little Moonlight png, as a reward for reading

[mister-julius]

I got to thinking (dangerous, I know)...

I remember back when there were more "placeholder" bosses in Warframe like The Sergeant. I remember there was constant discussion, of varying intensity, about the concept of "difficulty". How to increase it, how to avoid making enemies into "bullet sponges", the glorious rage brought about by the rise of nullifiers...

these talks lead to some great boss reworks, leading to 'phases' and a greater focus on 'mechanics', which then turned discussion towards the natural frustrations that came from the then-unlabeled invulnerability phases, and similar stuff that had us feeling like we had to wait for the game's permission to continue to play.

With Steel Path and now "damage attenuation" being a part of the game, memories of those earlier days of discussion come flooding back.

See if the game has no power creep, at some point every weapon becomes a choice of aesthetic. We saw this for a time when Dual Swords were the "meta". I remember talk of Dual Kamas Prime being more or less "Yawn yet another dual swords who cares farm it if you want the fashion skip the Prime Access hope the next Prime launch is interesting". Needless to say, this isn't great from a financial perspective, but then there's Mastery...

One of the games many number-go-up mechanics lies in leveling gear to increase a "Mastery Rank". While this might not be important for most, I think it may be most important when it comes to content creators. After all, how much do they actually know about the game if their profile shows that they've only used enough gear to reach MR15 instead of MR30 or the following Legendary ranks?

It seems like a barely-related tangent, but you have to understand that Warframe is very reliant on content creators helping to onboard new players. Going in blind and alone, the game very easily overwhelms most with a sheer barrage of information that's hard to process in one sitting, even if you try sifting through every in-game tutorial.

If every new weapon is released is a matter of taste and not raw stats or unique gimmicks, how long before the people who have levelled everything else start getting so utterly bored that no amount of number-go-up neuron activation can keep them around? However, if every new weapon is better than the last, then what is the point in grinding/paying for it when something better is just around the corner?

If you make it to where every damage source takes more-or-less the same time to chew through a boss, or if every weapon instantly brings a boss to its next brief moment of invulnerability, we wind up asking the same question.

If we take the financial side out of this, as I really shouldn't care since I'm just some random player, be it phases or sponge, the problem Warframe is always trying to get ahead of is players lacking meaningful reason to interact with the many underlying systems that power their loadouts.

That's bad enough of a problem from a sheer game design perspective, but when you add in the financial need to keep releasing new things for people to potentially buy to afford the increasingly-expensive servers that the game's core functions were made to run on

from all I'm able to understand, which isn't much in the grand scheme of things, it seems all you can do is let the pendulum swing between extremes while praying that whatever players are knocked off by each are replaced by new recruits

I wonder how stressful it is to be in a leadership position at Digital Extremes...

[glitch-karma]

hello! can i request the headcanons of bsd boys (ADA, port mafia, guild, DOA, and hunting dogs) playing genshin impact? i wanna know what is their fav characters/elemental/region hehehe~ thanks in advance!

I LOVED writing this one

Dazai

I can see him liking Pryo characters the most

Someone who plays for fighting and building, not for lore and quests

HIS TEAM IS SO CRACKED LIKE BRO GO OUTSIDE???

I can see him maining Klee/Diluc

Definitely, the type to brag all the time

Joins people's worlds to steal stuff then leave like an asshole

I can see his main team being Diluc, Xiao, Ganyu and Xingqiu

When playing with ANYONE he'll pull out Klee and burn the grass to annoy tf out of them

Kunikida

No.

Played it maybe once cause Dazai forced him

Did not understand the point in it

Ended up uninstalling it literally an hour later

Ranpo

Has been playing it even before Dazai

Has almost every character (and ALL of them are built)

Mains Heizou for Obvious reasons

Likes swirling electro the most

Likes to humble brag but in a mean way

"Yeah I mean, I only play it on occasion I guess I'm just good!"

He's lying

In reality, he spends way too much of his and Fukuzawas money

Definitely still not so patiently waiting for Dansleif to be playable

Atsushi

Dazai got him into the game

He plays it mostly for the story quests so his characters aren't very built

LOVES Anemo and Dendro

He was so excited when Baizhu was announced

He cried really hard when he did the Chasam quest

Mains Kazuha

He LOVES Collei so much

When he first started the game he was confused why Barbra wasn't doing any damage

Cyno reminds him of Akutagawa

Yosano

Got into it from random ads

Mains Beidou and Yelan

Has been pulling for Shenhe for so long but still doesn't have her

LOVES Inazuma

Fav vision is definitely Electro

She has played through all of Shonens quests

Poe

Ranpo forced him to play and he likes it

Ranpo helps him with domains and farming

Enjoys the lore and how it's written, specifically Khaenri'ah lore

Is also waiting for Dansleif to be playable

He's an Albedo main

Relates a lil too hard to Sucrose and Xingqiu

Chuuya

Played to try to surpass Dazai

He wants to out-damage Dazai so bad but..

Poor baby doesn't know how to build correctly.

like he gave a physical build to Yanfei

Chuuya LOVES Cryo

He definitely at one point was a Kaeya main

He freaked out the first time he did 2k damage

Joins Dazai's world and says "You suck" Then leaves

Akutagawa

Only plays it because Dazai plays it

Has tried to get good characters to earn Dazai's approval but he ALWAYS loses his 50/50's

Gets on calls with Dazai to try to show how good he is

"...Why did you put blizzard strayer on Diluc." "..."

Trys to get every character Dazai has

Honestly, he doesn't know what he's doing

Fyodor

Bought an acc from someone with insane stats

Bullys kids on the internet with it

Nikolai

He plays unironically (Unlike Fyodor)

Definitely does that ritual of throwing characters off cliffs before wishing

DEF a Hutao main

Has Fydor to actually play but always fails

That trend where you change the models of your characters? He's ALL about that

Changed Klee into a cursed model of a duck

Sigma

Mains Layla because he loves her

It's his comfort game after a long day at the casino

He plays for the lore and character design

Ango

He doesn't really have time for games

Jouno

Genshin, unfortunately, doesn't have accessible playing for him

I don't think he'd play either way but oh well

Tetchō

He saw a picture of Itto and Immediately installed it

Doesn't understand the cooking function

Is also confused about the look of the food

After meeting the Adepti he actually tried eating flowers

Jouno stopped him

Likes Xiao cause of the sticker of him eating snow

Tachihara

Thinks it's a stupid anime game

[astaroth1357]

My (Painstakingly Plot-Spoiler Free) Thoughts on Nightbringer So Far:

Hello. I have played up through Lesson 7 out of 10. Here are my thoughts:

1. The rhythm game is difficult at first if you don't play the genre all the time, but even someone with a disability like myself can pick them up with some trial and error. Admittedly, I have found that knowing the songs inside and out really helps in that regard. Otherwise I flounder. All OM tracks (without dance beat) are on Spotify.

2. The game is like.... fun. Actually, legitimately fun. It probably helps that electronic j-pop is my jam, but I often find that even if my cards are strong enough to skip a stage, depending on the song, I really don't want to. The rhythm sections feel satisfying. Sometimes challenging, but not cheap (when it doesn't bug out). Which reminds me...

3. JANK. Oh good lord so much jank! The faces on 3d models are the stuff of nightmares. I honestly can't bring myself to look at them. Even if it's the only thing on screen, I glue my eyes to the text. Some things are a little buggy still, hits on the rhythm sectiond don't always register and I think the intimacy system is broke on mine. Mammon has had intimacy 5 then 6 then 5 then 6 then..... You get the idea. It resolves itself overtime, but it's ridiculous. Fix it.

4. Some small quality of life improvements all around. You no longer have to look at each new card individually to get stupid notification to go away, the phone is all one bundle now so you can check for calls and texts in the same place, you can actually SEE your own damn inventory through the gear menu button (finally), that kind of thing.

5. There's both good stuff and bad stuff on the grind front... I think the biggest double edge sword will be the new Skill Up cards. In theory, good! Because if a card goes out of availability you can still level up its skill with the right resources. Bad, in that it adds yet another currency item you need to farm and now, get this, parts of the Devil Tree are locked behind a certain skill level requirement. It... kinda bites pretty hard.

6. Without getting into spoiler territory, I love the story so far. It feels like a good balance between character drama and a decent amount of mystery in-between. Not to any payoffs yet, but very happy so far. I squint if the devs really believe that a newcomer is going to be able to follow along without any confusion, but I digress.

I will give a deeper breakdown of my impression of story and new! (old) characters in another post which will be spoiler marked to high heaven. Right now, I'm just playing as far as I can before I really gotta start grinding up levels and cards (read as: hit a brick wall). But look y'all!

She learns!!! 🥲🥲 (And I know My Chance like the back of my hand so duh it's this song)