#It looks like i pressed every button on the editing program lmao

[maukiki1-but-cringefail]

ok so i know i JUST posted about a yuriy amv i made but i made another one (wanted to make use of the clips i already had for the last one) and kind of did a remake (?) of this like 17 yr old promises amv and i spent like 4 times more time on it than a normal amv 🙏🙏🙏this ones 10 times better than the last one TRUST🤞 if ur not convinced heres a clip🐺 😢😢😢😢😢😢😢💔

n heres the full vid

[kafus]

could you tell us the story of your shiny competitive latias in gen 3? im so curious

oh yeah so the reason i didn't go in depth about that in the post is it's actually quite a lot of obscure game mechanic talk and i didn't wanna divert from the heartwarming story to break people's brains potentially lol but yeah sure! i'll put the whole explanation below a cut because it's pretty long. warning that i'm going deep on the nerd shit sorry in advance LMAO

essentially the latias i use in gen 4 was obtained in pokemon emerald and then transferred through the pal park, i obtained it by combining ACE (arbitrary code execution) and RNG manipulation. neither of these things are hacking or require any sort of tampering with the game and can be done on original hardware (i did all this on my original emerald cart in an actual GBA SP) but it is an unintended way of playing the game, just to be upfront, not that i mind because i'm doing singleplayer stuff for fun.

so, RNG manipulation is the process of perfectly timing your button inputs and actions to get the game to spit out the "random" result that you want. because computers struggle to do true randomness (especially something as old as generation 3 pokemon games) usually "randomness" is actually based on elaborate algorithms/equations. in emerald, the game is supposed to choose a "seed" to generate random pokemon spawns etc with (think minecraft world seeds and how those generate a world, but with wild pokemon and stuff instead if you've ever played minecraft!) based on the RTC (real time clock) of the cartridge, but due to a programming error, emerald actually never seeds properly, causing it to always be stuck at a seed of 0. there have been a couple methods discovered to force the game to seed but that's irrelevant here. since the seed is always 0, every time you play emerald, all of the possible spawns are actually the same each time. to a casual player they will never notice such a thing but to an rng manipulator this becomes very, very useful.

when you get into a wild encounter (or obtain a gift pokemon, encounter a legendary, etc) the game checks what frame you're on since you booted the game, tosses that frame into its random number generating algorithm against the seed, and then every aspect of that pokemon is determined by the result, like IVs and nature and etc. so, if you were to backwards engineer this algorithm and then figure out a way to perfectly time your A press to hit the exact frame you want, you'd be able to get any IV spread etc you want... and you'd also be able to predict and time your inputs to get shinies assuming that you know your SID (secret ID, a hidden value paired with your trainer ID on your trainer card) which can be figured out through a variety of methods that i won't get into here.

as it turns out, the pokemon community is nuts and the whole backwards engineering process was already done by people way smarter than me, and software has been developed to be able to sift through all possible pokemon encounters in pokemon games, including emerald. i use PokeFinder which is by far the best program out for this right now that is getting consistently updated. software has also been developed to time your A presses, the main one i use is EonTimer which lets me pop in what frame i want to hit and it calculates the amount of time i have to wait and then beeps to tell me when to hit A. i feel the need to repeat again this software does not require you to tamper with your games in any way - i honestly highly recommend trying it sometime even if just for the novelty of getting a shiny to appear on command, it's really fun and there's tutorials on youtube by "i'm a blisy" dsfjfdskd

edit: here's a screencap of what eontimer looks like btw! not the same target frame i used back when i got this latias but yeah. it's neat

with all of that out of the way, it sounds like it should be as simple as saving in front of the latias and then looking up the spread i want, popping it into the timer, and then resetting my game, waiting for the beep, hitting A and rinse and repeat until i get it. there's a few holes in this plan though:

the spread i want (timid 31/31/31/31/31/31 AKA perfect IVs) would require me to leave my game on for literal weeks on end per attempt, which is entirely unrealistic and unfeasible. i'm doing this on actual hardware, no speedup!

the spread in question also isn't shiny with my current SID. i don't need the latias to be shiny or anything, i just want it to be for fun

i am using my emerald save file that already has the roamer Latios generated, so i no longer have the option of rng manipulating that one. this means i need to get to Southern Island and RNG the latias there... which is a mystery gift. i do not own the e-reader nor do i own an extremely expensive eon ticket to get that event in my game

and this is where ACE comes in! ACE is... complicated. if you've ever seen people pull off some excessively wild and glitchy stuff in gen 1 by swapping items around in their inventory, you were probably watching a form of ACE in action. it's the process of glitching the game into a state where you can get it to take some form of input from the player as code and then run that code, hence "arbitrary code execution". honestly ACE is not something i have studied in depth, especially with gen 3, and i mostly just followed tutorials on getting what i wanted. i can summarize this process down into a few steps:

getting the NPC trade pokemon DOTS the seedot and EV training it to a very specific spread

performing glitzer popping (wild name, i know) to corrupt DOTS the seedot into a very specific glitchy egg

changing the name of my PC boxes to what is essentially GBA assembly instructions

cloning the aforementioned glitch egg using the emerald battle tower cloning glitch a bunch of times so i can use them whenever and then hatching them, which due to the EV spread i gave DOTS, will execute the code i changed my PC box names to!

i used ACE to solve all of the aforementioned problems with this rng manipulation.

i used ACE to make my game jump thousands upon thousands of frames forward, just a little bit before the competitive spread i wanted, and then went to the battle frontier to save a battle video at the battle factory by going in and instantly losing... this is because every time a battle video is loaded, it doesn't actually save every random result that happens in the battle (like missing and damage rolls) and instead just remembers the state of the RNG before the battle started and player choices and re-calculates the same exact random chances. therefore, if i watch this battle video from the trainer card upon every reset, i will jump back to that place thousands of frames forward, right before the latias spread i want

i used ACE to change my SID to a value that would make the spread i want shiny in combination with my TID because why not

i used ACE to spawn latias on southern island and to give myself the eon ticket to get there, no real life eon ticket/e-reader required (there are ways to inject this event that don't require ACE/the real life event items but i wanted to do all this without tampering!)

as a side tangent, i should mention that i had a very obscure problem with running the ACE to get to southern island that i had to contact some gen 3 ACE experts for help on... too complicated to explain here in any sort of legible way i think, but basically the problem was every time i hatched the glitch egg, the game just froze despite my code being typed in properly in my PC boxes with no typos. the audio kept playing but it would hang on the hatching screen, resulting in this extremely cursed footage of me hatching a void egg that looked like nothing and caused my game to crash:

i just think that's neat LMAO. anyways yeah after getting all that complicated ACE shit out of the way that took me 123989123 years to set up, it was just a matter of standing in front of the rock on southern island, saving my game, getting my timer ready, soft resetting my game, watching my battle video and starting my timer, and then waiting a handful of seconds and trying to press A with the exact 1/60th of a second timing to get the latias to appear. (emerald runs on 60 fps, this always takes a few tries)

(i can't put 2 videos in a tumblr post but if you want to see the encounter happen, i took a video here, it's a direct discord file link lol)

after that i simply transferred latibreak through HGSS pal park and trained her up and started using her in the battle tower :) technically a player could randomly stumble on this latias if they left their game open long enough and had the right TID/SID, it is a completely valid encounter that can move through pokemon bank and pokemon home! i just used a variety of game knowledge and glitches to get it to appear for me without having to wait for luck. i hope any of this made sense and sorry for all the jargon!! i wasn't sure how else to tell this story tbh. if any of this sounds interesting to you i highly recommend trying out at least rng manipulation sometime! you can do a lot of cool stuff with it even without ACE being involved, i just really needed ACE for this specific pokemon i wanted SDFJFDS

[dvp95]

quiet on widow’s peak (3)

pairing: dan howell/phil lester, pj liguori/sophie newton/chris kendall rating: teen & up tags: paranormal investigator, youtuber phil lester, dan howell is not a youtuber, online friendship, slow burn, strangers to lovers, nonbinary character, trans character, background poly, phil does some buzzfeed unsolved shit and dan is a fan word count: 3.1k (this chapter), 9.5k (total) summary: Phil’s got a list of paranormal experiences a mile long that he likes to share with the world. Abandoned buildings, cemeteries, and ghost stories have always called his name, and a particular fan of his has a really, really good ghost story.

read this chapter on ao3 or here!

Interviews used to be Phil's least favourite part of this job. The research was always captivating, the filming was always fun, the editing was always challenging, but talking? To people? About things? Absolutely not.

He still doesn't love doing it, but he's long past the point of begging Martyn or Ian to pretend to be him on the phone.

The curtains in Phil's room are open for once, letting natural light in so he doesn't look as dark on the Skype screen. His eyes keep drifting to himself, distracting him as he tries to fix his hair or laments not getting out of his pyjamas. This is his fourth interview of the day, and he's starting to hate the process with a renewed fervour.

"Okay, thank you," he says, clicking out of the screen record window. "Can I message you here if I have any further questions, or would you prefer this to be your final statement?"

"Oh, um," the girl says, her eyes round with some kind of emotion that Phil can't be bothered to parse. "No, no, that's... that's all I saw. I don't have anything else. But you can still... message me, if you like."

Ah. Phil makes a face that he hopes reads as apologetic and not panicked. "No, I - sorry. Gay. Just interested in your ghost."

"Oh!" she says again, looking more puzzled than Phil thinks she has any right to after a forty minute conversation where he mostly just asked her clarifying questions that she kept dodging. She tucks some of her long hair behind her ear and shakes her head. "Sorry, that's just - you haven't said that online."

Phil isn't very good at knowing when people are lying to him, but now he's definitely suspicious of the half-assed testimony he'd gotten from this girl. He sighs. "Okay, you know who I am, then?"

"I mean, I looked you up when you messaged me about a video and all," she says. "Wanted to know if you were a creep or, like, legit."

Okay, that's fair enough. Phil supposes that if he were a girl in uni and a stranger asked to video chat, he'd also do a little digging first. He still doesn't quite believe her story, though - most of it matches what she'd written on Facebook, word for word, and she didn't go into detail on anything she claimed happened.

"Right, of course," says Phil, feeling awkward and exposed.

Her eyes are wide and blue and she can see into his room, into his life, and she's giving him this look like she thinks she knows something about him. He hates this feeling.

"That a secret, then?" she asks.

"No," Phil says. "It's just not relevant to my job. I don't have a lot of ghouls asking me out."

She doesn't laugh. Phil is getting more and more uncomfortable by the second, and he's wondering if it's worth it to hang up on a potential lead - no matter how dubious her claims - when she says, "Well, alright. I won't tell anyone anyway."

"Thanks," Phil says automatically. He doesn't particularly care if she does or not, but he does want this call to end as soon as possible. "And thanks for your time. Message me if you think of anything else you forgot to mention about the Wilkins place or if you know of someone who's seen something."

Before she can even respond, Phil hits end on the call and groans, resting his forehead on his thumbs for a moment.

Unsurprisingly, this is giving him a migraine. It doesn't take much to make the twinge of a headache turn to insistent throbbing, because Phil's body hates him and overreacts to everything.

Phil takes a couple of deep breaths before he comes out of hiding. He attaches the final screen recording to the email he's already got open and ready to send to Martyn. After a moment's thought, he CCs PJ and Sophie in and adds, Nobody sounds credible except the second person to me, so... it's not looking good lol, before hitting send.

He takes off his glasses and rubs at his eyes for a moment. Interviews are still draining for him, especially when they don't go as planned, and Phil's starting to get the impression that there's nothing to even find at the Wilkins place.

But. Phil pauses, considers his options. He hasn't interviewed everyone, has he.

Before he can talk himself out of it, Phil shoves his glasses unceremoniously back onto his face and opens Tumblr. Winnie hasn't said anything to him so far today, so Phil feels only a little like he's bothering them when he shoots off a quick, Hey! I just finished interviewing the sources you gave me and most of them aren't very promising. Would you consider letting me ask you some questions to round out the video?

me?????, Winnie replies almost immediately. i didnt even see anything?? like im happy to answer questions but idk how much use ill b in an INTERVIEW

I know! And you don't have to lmao so don't feel pressured or anything but you know so much more about the place than they do. Everyone claimed that they didn't know other people were having paranormal experiences.

oh bullshit, Winnie says. Phil is surprised into a huff of laughter.

There's a part of Phil, fuelled by anxiety and uncertainty, that worries Winnie is just pulling an elaborate joke on him. That part of him feels a little more at ease every time he actually talks to Winnie. They just seem... genuine. And maybe Martyn would disagree, would blame Phil's desperation to see the best in people, but there's a reason Phil doesn't tell Martyn everything.

Before Phil can agree with Winnie's colourful derision, his laptop beeps again. i look like an ogre rn but i can voice chat if you rly think itll help

It would!!, Phil assures them. The tender spot behind his eyes twinges again, serving as a reminder. Can I call in like an hour? I've got a headache from the screen lol

sure i really have nothing else going on today

--

So it's later in the day, late afternoon light still streaking through Phil's window, when Phil sits back down at his computer and adds the Skype username Winnie gave him. His head still hurts a bit, but it isn't all-consuming now that he's had another coffee and some painkillers. The padded headphones feel good to put over his ears, blocking out most of the typical noises from such a full house and a busy street, and Phil just sits in the blissful quiet for a moment before he sends a voice call request.

It gets picked up almost immediately, and Phil presses a smile into his palm before he says, "Hi! Can you hear me alright?"

There's a beat. Phil waits, in case Skype is lagging as usual, but he's opening his mouth to repeat himself by the time he gets a response.

"Yeah," says Winnie. "I can hear you."

Phil isn't really proud of himself for being surprised by Winnie's voice. It's just. He knows his viewer demographics, okay, and he has a rough grasp on Tumblr demographics, and the name - alright. It isn't his proudest moment, is his point, because he's expecting a much higher pitch for absolutely no good reason.

In addition to that, his brain automatically tries to classify Winnie's voice as very obviously masculine, and Phil has to push back against that.

"I can hear you, too," Phil says cheerfully, not allowing his anxieties to spill over into the conversation.

"That's good, probably," Winnie says. There's another beat of silence, and then a huff that might be laughter or a sigh comes through Phil's headphones. "Sorry, I - I'm not trying to be fucking weird, this is just surreal."

"Is it?" Phil hums. "But I haven't even asked you about ghosts yet."

A snort - definitely laughter, this time - follows, and Phil is so glad that he's able to put Winnie at ease even if his brain is betraying him. "That's true. I guess it's gotta get weirder from here."

"That's kind of, like, the subtitle of my whole channel," says Phil. After a moment, he frowns. "Subtitle? No. What's the thing, on the poster -"

"Tagline," says Winnie. They sound so amused and warm and, okay, they've got a nice voice. That's not gendered. Phil can think that. "You're thinking of a tagline, you buffoon."

"Tagline," Phil echoes gratefully.

"Don't you," Winnie starts, then stops abruptly. They don't finish the sentence, but Phil can kind of guess what they were going to say. There's the sound of some rustling, like Winnie is getting comfortable, before they change tacks. "Again, I didn't see any of this alleged ghostly activity with my own eyes, but I know the hot goss."

Phil opens the recording program out of habit, nodding even though Winnie can't see him. "That's still really useful at this point," he says encouragingly. He clicks a couple of buttons. "And, yes, I do have an English degree. Thank you for not asking."

Winnie laughs, the sound of it filling Phil's headphones and making it feel like they're in the room with him. It's warm, like everything else about their voice, and absolutely contagious.

"I didn't want you to think I was, like, a big stalker," Winnie says, and Phil can hear the grin in their voice.

"Eh, I know you watch my videos," says Phil. "So I figure you know some stuff about me. You probably know that I'm going to ask this, too, but - is it okay if I record our conversation? I don't need to include it in the video if you don't want me to, but it's still useful for me if I don't so I can, like, actually remember the things you told me."

"Yeah, sure," Winnie agrees easily. They hesitate, for a moment, and Phil waits for whatever the caveat will be. "Uh, can I still swear?"

The question surprises Phil into laughing. "Yeah, you're fine. I can bleep them out."

"Then I am all for it. Ask me the ghost questions, ghost man."

Phil presses record and glances down at his notebook, where he's scrawled some disjointed questions alongside his usual doodling. "Uh, okay. Yes. I am totally a professional."

"If you say so, mate," says Winnie.

"Hush. Okay." Phil finally gets his brain back on track and taps his pen against a question near the end of his list. "So, Winnie, you did all this research into the Wilkins place on your own downtime, but you mentioned that you've been hearing murmurs about it for a while, right?"

"Not that long, actually, I've only been hearing about it since term started," Winnie says, and Phil is struck by how comfortable they suddenly are now that there's a guideline. Or, maybe, now that there's a non-Phil audience. "Which I thought was pretty weird, since I'd been there a couple times since I moved here, and it's a spooky fucking place but nothing to write home about."

That's more or less exactly how Phil feels about the situation, except that he doesn't remember the Wilkins place to be scary at all. Maybe it's gotten worse in the years since, or maybe he's just got a higher threshold for empty, decrepit homes than Winnie does. Either way, he's not sure if he should be relieved or suspicious that their thoughts on it mirror his own so well. He starts a spiral in the corner of his page as he considers the answer.

"So, you never got the impression that it was haunted before?"

"I - can I be perfectly honest?" Winnie asks, and then doesn't wait for a response. "I don't get the impression that it's haunted now. I dunno if people are just making shit up or if they're doing too many drugs, but we all know that ghosts don't actually exist."

Phil snorts. He does have a fairly large number of skeptics who watch his videos to argue in the comments about logical explanations for his findings or to just enjoy watching him fail so much, but he hadn't really expected that from someone who sent him a sourced essay on the topic of ghosts.

He's recording right now, so he's not about to give away the fact that, yeah, he kind of does agree with Winnie on this one. Instead, he keeps his tone neutral and says, "You don't believe in ghosts."

"I don't believe in most things that can't be explained by science," Winnie says, so matter-of-fact that Phil has to smile.

"I don't really believe in science," Phil says, mild.

A beat. "Excuse me?"

"I said I don't believe in science," Phil repeats, doubling down on the joke so he can hear that incredulous pitch of Winnie's nice voice again. "I mean, isn't it all just as made-up as anything else? People just tell us stuff exists and we have to believe them?"

"We believe them," Winnie says slowly, "because it's a fact."

"How do I know that?" Phil asks. He knows how off track he's already gotten, and he decides to cut this part out before he sends the file to Martyn or his friends.

"Because you can. See it. With your eyes." The genuine bewilderment in Winnie's voice is very funny. "Like. What the fuck, Phil. If someone drops an apple and it hits the ground and they're like, 'oh that's gravity', how are you supposed to say, 'uh, no it ain't'?"

Phil leans back in his chair a bit, his spiral turning into an apple. "Because, what if that's just what the apple wanted to do? It's not like we know any of this for sure, Winnie."

"You're fucking with me," Winnie says, but they don't sound very certain.

"I am," Phil admits happily. "Do you remember the first incident that kicked off the Wilkins place rumours?"

"You," Winnie says, and then cackles. They lean away from their mic as they do, but the sound of it still makes Phil feel some secondhand giddiness. He wonders if their laugh has a volume limit, or if it's just going to keep getting louder the funnier Phil is. He is so tempted to put that to the test. "Fuck. You little fucker."

Phil hides his own giggle in the palm of his hand and clears his throat, trying to get back into the professional mindset he'd forced himself to be in for the four earlier interviews.

"Do you need me to repeat the question?" Phil asks. He can't resist teasing, just a bit.

"No, fuck off," Winnie chuckles. They take a deep breath and let it out on a hum, low and thoughtful. "So, there was this shindig during fresher's, which I obviously didn't go to because I'm not a fresher and I'm too old to go to shindigs, but people were talking about how the house was making weird noises. A girl I know - I linked you to her Reddit post - said she saw someone just standing outside the window watching them, but, like, is that really a supernatural occurrence in Rusholme?"

"It's not. And she hit on me as well, so I'm not sure her judgement is trustworthy."

"Sounds like her. Sorry. Anyway, nobody really thought 'ghosts' as much as they thought 'rats in the walls and a pervert on the street', but then - this one didn't get spoken about online. I don't even know how valid it is."

"Word of mouth is how most ghost stories get passed," says Phil. "I'm not going to hold you to citations on rumours."

Winnie huffs a laugh. It's soft, quiet, and Phil almost wishes he could say something ridiculous to make them cackle again. Unfortunately, he has a job to do.

"Fair enough. Well, some idiots spent the night there to see if anything weird would happen," Winnie says, and Phil feels a bit attacked, "and three separate dudes had sleep paralysis."

Phil hums and jots some messy notes down. "In the same night?"

"At the same time," Winnie corrects him. "The other idiots were trying to wake them up for a long time, apparently. They're convinced that the guys who fell asleep were just pulling a prank on them, and maybe they were, but that's when the ball really got rolling."

Out of everything Phil has heard today, this is the most compelling story so far. Maybe that's a good indicator of the Manchester students being full of it - maybe there truly is nothing to find in the Wilkins place - but it piques Phil's interest anyway.

"For someone who only believes in cold, hard science, you're good at telling ghost stories," Phil says.

"Thanks," Winnie says, sounding pleased with themselves. "Learned from the best."

Phil is suddenly very, very glad that this isn't a video call, because he can't stop himself from smiling like an idiot. "Oh, is that what they're calling me?"

Another cackle. Phil doesn't remember the last time he made someone laugh so much without tripping over his own clown feet.

"I never said I was talking about you."

"Uh huh."

"Oh, shut up," says Winnie, and Phil can still hear the laughter in their voice. "Don't you have a bunch of questions to ask or something?"

Phil does. He has a whole list of questions that he should be following. He chews on his pen and looks at the doodle-covered list of things he's meant to ask Winnie. His head still hurts - maybe the extra caffeine didn't help after all - and all he really wants to do is take a nap.

"Yeah," Phil says, reluctant. "I've just got, like, a migraine. Can I call you back another time? This was a really great start."

"Oh, yeah, sure," says Winnie. They've dropped their voice down to something soft, like they're worried that they'll make Phil's headache worse.

"I'm actually going up to check the place out this weekend." Phil isn't sure what makes him say that. He meets up with sources in person, sometimes, but usually only if they've seen something with their own eyes. He just feels comfortable talking to Winnie, far more than he'd felt talking to the other students he'd interviewed today.

Phil doesn't actually extend the invitation, and Winnie either doesn't pick up the hint or doesn't care to.

"That'll be good," they say, still soft. "Get some rest, Phil, you can call me back when your brain stops trying to drill a hole through your temple."

After Phil says goodbye and hangs up, he sits at his desk for a long moment. It feels too quiet, all of a sudden, his padded headphones blocking out all the ambient noise around him. It's good for his head, but Phil is still weirdly disappointed.