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thewrongexecution · 4 years

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thinkin’ ‘bout final fantasy

I go by Not The Author for exactly the reason that I ain’t no expert on any given work of fiction, but I do like to make connections what make me seem smart: an illusion, haphazardly crafted by incident accident and supplemented by precocious pretentiousness. All the same, here are some fun thoughts I had that you might also enjoy!

I do have a point, that I do get to. I feel like I should say that ahead of time, all things considered. Like, I can appreciate if you can’t appreciate a shaggy dog story? But there is a point to all this.

...Eventually.

Spoiler Warning:

Final Fantasies 1, 6, 7, 7R, 13 and 15

Content Warning:

Discussion of death

Cussin’

Length warning:

5621 words

13 sections

16 digressions

Let’s dig in.

- - - - -

Final Fantasy 1 was not my first Final Fantasy experience, but I think it was the first I ever played by myself? The remaster for the GBA, came bundled with FF2 on the same cart, which I played briefly but did not complete and do not remember, except that it had Cid.

FF1 doesn’t have a Cid, but I really loved the narrative anyway, straightforward as it was, because it was very specifically about spitting in the face of an uncaring god who would doom the world for a laugh. Take these chains that bind us to darkness and, though we be forgot to history, strangle with them that selfsame darkness to bring an end to its tyranny.

((it is a terrible curse, to love time travel. so many grand expectations, so few ever met. play ghost trick, chrono trigger, radiant historia, majora’s mask, outer wilds. have you any recs yourself, lemme know! I digress.

((I digress a lot, as I may have mentioned. they’ll be noted in parenthetical, like this.))

This is the foundation upon which Final Fantasy is built, and while any student of architecture could tell you of many and varied perfectly valid construction techniques, it resonates. Grappling with an immutable past to course-correct an uncaring future is, too, an apt description of personal growth; a theme as universal as being alive. And I, as an impressionable youth, ate that shit up.

((I assume I was young, at any rate. my love for time travel, be it era-spanning or moment-stretching, is, I suspect, not entirely coincidental to my terrible temporal memory.))

And that was the tale of the studio, too. Final Fantasy was so titled because, the story goes, the developers knew they would shutter if it didn’t make bank. Staring your imminent demise in the face, knowing your fate is doom, and giving it your all, all the same.

And then they made another twelve, plus two-and-a-half MMOs, and god knows how many mobile games and spin-offs, and now the Fantasy is that there could ever be a Final one. so say I: life parodies art.

((the half-an-MMO is FF14 1.0, which no longer exists and is a fascinating tale, a rally against bleak futures all its own. I’ll [link] Noclip’s three-part documentary covering the developer’s side of things, because that’s the one I’ve seen. there’s plenty other material to hunt down, though, if you wanna.))

- - - - -

Final Fantasy VII is a game about fate, too. Particularly Death, that most ultimate of fates. Tragic, to be sure; preventable, or at least delayable, in many cases; necessary, at times, for the growth of something new.

Unrelenting. Unstoppable. Inescapable.

Death, and the fights against it, take many forms. There are the fascist death squads that hunt down your ragtag band and any dissent against their cruel masters, but these will only truly stop by cutting off the hydra’s head and building an entirely new society; eight dudes and their dog, faced with a corporate private military, can survive but never win. There are such disasters as do slay that hydra, be they natural or man-made. There’s the space alien and the apocalypse it ushers. There’s literal illness and injury, physical or otherwise. There are the deaths of loved ones, friends and family, that lead to some subtler deaths within those that survive them. The deaths of relationships, by neglect or abandonment. The ideological deaths we inflict on ourselves, accepting ever-growing lesser evils in the name of some impossible ideal.

Every day, the person we were becomes the person we are, and soon, the person we are will give way to someone new, and this, too, is a sort of death. In this sense, we tally Cloud’s deaths at least five: failure to become a Soldier and rebirth in shame, the massacre of Nibelheim and rebirth in grief, arrival at Midgar and rebirth in delusion, his cratering at the Crater and rebirth in nihilism, and his death and rebirth in the Lifestream of Mideel.

((you could prolly hunt down another two if you wanna be cheeky, but I lack the knowledge, motive and patience. frankly, this whole thing is to create a leading line of logic and probably isn’t, uh. academically ethical? or whatever the term is. I’m not necessarily wrong, but I’m definitely scuttling nuance. oh well!))

Now, I say “rebirth,” because that’s how deaths of identity more-or-less work. There’s usually some new identity waiting in the wings to take over. And rebirth is itself a notable theme, inasmuch as it is one outcome of death. But death is oft more final than that, and what people do in its imminence and wake is key here, too. Wutai’s collapse into an insular tourist trap. Avalanche’s vengeful fervor, in general and post-plate drop. Bugenhagen trying to pass his knowledge on to Red. The whole party’s ongoing post-traumatic depressive episodes.

Ultimately, death is the inescapable fate of all things. It’s what we do, in light of that, that makes us who we are.

- - - - -

Final Fantasies 13 and 15 are the only modern Final Fantasies I’ve beaten, and I bring them up because both deal very prominently with fate and death, and as Square’s most recent mainline FF titles, Remake can’t exist without comparison to them. Here’s what I remember:

Final Fantasy 13 was a game I enjoyed. The stagger system mixed up my casual FF tradition of Get The Big Numbers by putting a prominent UI element onscreen that says You Can’t Get The Big Numbers Unless The Bar Is Full. Suddenly there’s a natural-but-enforced ebb and flow to combat built in, where you gotta juggle chip damage, survival, and crowd control while keeping resources enough to burst down a staggered foe, but maintain situational awareness to swap back into survival mode if you’re not gonna down your enemy, all in something close to real-time. Very obviously a direct precursor to the combat of Remake. I didn’t realize the depth of it, but it was still super fun.

People at the time didn’t like the linearity of the game and, I can see that in retrospect? I think it’s closer to, there weren’t breakpoints, there wasn’t variety. It was cutscenes, combat, and the stretches of land between them; the only real thing for the brain to get a workout on was the combat, and eating only one kinda food is gonna make that food taste bland.

((I didn’t mind, but I like idle games, and, also probably had depression around then. Take that how you will.))

The story, though, I loved. You got your uncaring gods forcing mortals to do their increasingly-impossible bidding, cursing them to agonized unlife if they take too long, and with blissful, beautiful death if they succeed. It sucks! And here you have a ragtag band of incidental idiots trying to rebel against a system that, actually, wants them to? Like that’s the plan? Have mortals kill god and summon the devil to destroy all life, because god, doesn’t.... like life anymore?

((The lore gets more than a little impenetrable, and I remember bouncing off it a couple times. The throughline of God Sucks And Makes Zombies was good though.))

The biblical parallels are obvious, and if they weren’t, the final boss’ design will clue you in, god that’s a good design. hang on I can add pictures and already tossed a spoiler warning, here, look at this:

(per the Final Fantasy Fandom Wiki [X])

That’s literally The Holy Trinity But A Sword The Size Of A Building. It’s perfect.

Anyway, I love this game, because the heroes win, which is what God wants, so in winning, they lose, as was fated to be, right? Fuck All That, say the lesbians from space australia, as they turn into satan and, as satan, stop God’s shitty metal moon from crashing into space australia and destroying all life.

((this awakened something in me, though, as is becoming a theme, I wasn’t aware of it at the time. actually hold up I’m gonna rewatch that sequence.

((yeah okay wow on review that was aggressively cheesy and had a whole bunch of weird emotional whiplash that just leaves a super-bad aftertaste. I don’t really like it as an experience, but big bazonga lesbian satan with arms for hair is still a look-and-a-half.))

The whole thing is not entirely unlike if meteor was also Midgar, and there’s more than a few points where I went, hang on, are they trying to evoke 7 here? “Lightning” is ex-military and bad at emotions, Sazh is a black dad w/ guns and emotional trauma and I love him, quirky pink healer girl who might be an alien is here, the game starts on a train and leads into a robot bug fight; obviously it’s not one-to-one but the connections are there for a brain like mine to make, and only more prominent for the fact that FF7 was the more satisfying game.

((I cannot speak to 13-2 or -3; 13-2 was fun up until the enemies were abruptly 30 levels higher than me, more or less a mandate by the game for me to do all the side content, which I was not on-board with. I skipped 13-3 entirely, especially when I learned the whole game is on a timer. did not and do not need that stress in my life.))

- - - - -

But okay, FF13 was “too linear” and wasn’t doing super great. Enter Final Fantasy Versus 13, by which I mean enter Final Fantasy 15 actually, we don’t need any more of this 13 crap. And once again, I enjoyed it! ...Right up until it was bad.

Final Fantasy 15 was not a finished game, and we know this for certain now, because all its DLC was to make it a finished game. At the time, though, there was uncomfortable and inconsistent story pacing, only one playable character, relatively sparse combat mechanics... but it was open-world, and hey, that’s what you wanted, right? open, non-linear environments? I picked it up because, Teleporting Swordsman With a Motorcycle Sword. I am of simple pleasures, and those are they.

Of the little I remember, one point that’s stuck with me is the sequence following the Leviathan fight. See, we’ve been talking about fate and destiny and how Final Fantasy likes to spite them. Here in 15, our main man Noctis doesn’t want the destiny he’s been burdened with, to Become The King and Save The World from the Coming Darkness, or whatever. He’d really rather be doing, anything else? like hanging out with his buddies or actually getting married or, I dunno, grieving the death of his father. Nope! You don’t get to do that. Go find the ghost armaments of your dead ancestors so you can ~saaave the wooorld!~ I would have been in college around then, so, eminently relatable.

Now, on this journey, you meet a guy called Ardyn. He’s the sort of character that was built as an attack on me personally: sleazy, charming, possessing airs of casual familiarity with people he’s never met, kinda helps you out in tight spots, and also, by the way, vizier to the empire that killed your dad and wants you and your friends dead too. But not in the “secret good guy” way, he just likes fucking with you! he’s perfect.

Right up until the Leviathan fight.

See, Lunafreya, your betrothed--

((I’m so mad about this stupid, stupid garbage. I love Lunafreya on principle, but the game doesn’t bother to give her screentime. you only ever hear about her incidentally, which can be cool if you then meet the character and get to compare/contrast what you’ve heard, but the initial release only has her show up for this one chapter, and your party doesn’t really get to interact with her that much.))

Your betrothed is here and she’s some symbol of the peoples’ hope, right? she’s got light magic or something, and can actually commune with the gods. the gods are on your side, but you can’t actually understand a word they say, but she can, and that’s sick as hell. anyway.

You lose the fight against Leviathan, because you’re a shitty emo teen who doesn’t know how to use your ghost swords, and she got beat up earlier when Levi got all pissy at being summoned. And then Ardyn shows up in his magitek dropship.

Now earlier, Ardyn had Luna as his captive, completely at his mercy, and right now, he who would be king of kings, destined to save the world from darkness, is clutching at rock in a hurricane, beaten, wounded and dying.

Of the two, which do you think he stabs to death?

if you thought, “the protagonist, which will allow him to win, and subvert Final Fantasy’s themes of defying fate by having the villain be the one to do it, forcing everyone else to scramble for some alternate solution and deal with the fallout,” congratulations! You win disappointment, because that idea’s cool as hell and they didn’t. fucking. Do it.

((Ardyn, before this, had given me major Kefka vibes, and thinking on it now, the world descending into darkness in the 15 we never had could have played with even deeper parallels to FF6... but I never played 6, and that FF15 doesn’t exist, so... I’ll leave that analysis to better scholars.))

now, with the benefit of hindsight, that was never going to happen. too long in development hell, game had to ship, had no time or budget for mid-game upheaval. but at the time? made me lose any interest I had in Ardyn, made me mad at the developers for passing up on fulfilling the themes their series had explored in past, made me almost stop playing the game. I’m still mad about it for crying out loud!

((thinking about it gets me tensed up, coiled, with that sort of full-body thrum that’s best conveyed with letters that jitter around. best I can do here is bold italics, but it doesn’t have the right energy. it’s a fleeting feeling, but when it’s here? god. given the men that wrote this scene I would fight all of them and win.

((inhale...

((exhale...

((and move on.))

We, the player, never really meet Luna, so there’s no real... impact, no substance to it. It’s sad, but impersonal. villain kills damsel to inflict manpain on hero. that’s it. we’ve seen this song and dance before.

But kill Noctis? The character the player’s been controlling all this time, who they know intimately? Now it’s personal. Now your party members’ grief is a mirror to your own. And now you get to play as Luna, maybe? give the game time to flesh her out, have her bond with your old companions over their shared grief, and maybe use her connections and public speaking skills to rally the people of the world, in a perhaps-vain attempt to resist the oncoming darkness, while simultaneously using that public-facingness to drive her to hide her own fear and hopelessness...? That’s a complex character ripe for drama and tragedy right there! And then her, at the head of a story about people coming together to solve a global calamity themselves, rather than await their appointed savior?

Even then, but especially now... You can see the appeal, right?

- - - - -

Lemme step back and zoom out for a moment, because there’s one more kind of Fate to discuss before I finalize my thesis. Yes, I promise, there is a point besides being mad at FF15, this is still ultimately about Remake. Bear with me a little longer.

See, Remake’s premise is that it’s not quite FF7, but that itself is predicated on Remake being essentially FF7. Certain things must be in the Remake series, or it will cease to be the Final Fantasy 7 Remake series. The developers have gone on record saying as much, that they’ll still cover the thrust of the original, and that makes a lot of sense from a development standpoint. Building on an existing framework saves loads of time, and lets them focus on details as they have in Remake.

((I think they've already set up an in-universe justification for this, too. The party may have defeated the Whispers at Midgar, but the Whispers are the will of the planet. The only way to truly defeat them would be to defeat the planet itself, which: kind of the goal of the villains!

((a bit ironic, because the villains are the Whispers’ means to keep manipulating events. Remake backends a very large portion of the plot, and I don’t think Rufus seeing the Whispers is a throwaway detail. The party chases Sephiroth by chasing Shinra in the original, so even if the party has shaken free of the direct influence of the Whispers, manipulating Shinra should in turn manipulate the party.

((on top of which, Rufus prizes power, and the power to change or control fate-- something both the party and Sephiroth have seized-- would be as enticing as anything.))

But this begs the question: How much of Final Fantasy 7 is necessary before it stops being Final Fantasy 7? Do you need all nine characters? The Weapons? Rideable chocobo? Breedable chocobo? What about locations? Can you drop the Gold Saucer? or Mount Condor? or Mideel? How many minigames am I holding up? These are necessary questions, but so is this:

“Would a one-to-one recreation of the original game have the same emotional impact as when it released, twenty-three years ago?”

- - - - -

Now, the phrase “emotional impact” is necessarily kind of nebulous and subjective, so lemme dig into that a little bit.

The first significant chunk of the original FF7 takes place entirely in Midgar, which is one huge city. Every screen is densely packed; movement is typically constrained to narrow corridors and industrial crawlspaces. The whole world is deeply claustrophobic and visually hostile, by design.

This is FF7 for the first few hours, before a motorcycle chase deposits you outside city limits, and then... you hit the world map, and everything changes. The world is rendered in three whole dimensions, now! (Then, a technological marvel in its own right.) There’s a sky! There’s a horizon! Grass, mountains, the ocean!

Boundless, terrifying freedom.

From a mechanical standpoint, there’s only one real destination, an A-to-B with random encounters before a small enclosure with an inn and shops, no real change from what you’ve already been doing. But the mood? Everything’s fresh and new, now. Everything’s an unknown.

So, how do we do that again, two-and-a-half decades on?

Let’s say, something like this: Remake 2 starts with Cloud and Sephiroth en route to Nibelheim. For new players, this provides immediate intrigue: why are these mortal enemies hanging out in a truck? how did they get here, where are they going? For veterans, it’s familiar: oh, we’re in the flashback sequence.

For both, it provides mechanical familiarity. We just finished last game hanging out in Midgar, a bunch of town squares with shops and cutscenes connected to hazardous corridors. Well, Nibelheim’s a town with shops and cutscenes, connected to a monster-filled anthill and capped with a reactor. We know this. We’ve done this. We can do this again.

And when the flashback ends, we’re in Kalm. Another town, maybe with sidequests this time; Midgar looming in the distant skybox as a reminder of how far we’ve come.

And then you leave Kalm, and the camera zooms out, and out, and out...

Remake is essentially 7, and you can’t have the impact of 7′s world map reveal if Remake isn’t functionally open-world too. Square has plenty of experience with open environments, however successful their more recent attempts have been; I’m confident that the have the ability, at least, to craft an expansive world that feels appropriate to FF7.

((I’d like to take a moment here to talk about FF14, which mixes both compact twisty dungeons and wide-open overworld zones, and is necessarily wildly successful to still be operating as an MMO... but though I have played it briefly, I don’t claim knowledge sufficient to go in-depth. The point is, Square not only can make a game like that, they have, and are, and apparently possess non-zero competency. I have worries, but I’m not worried, if that makes sense.))

So, can you recreate a given kind of emotional impact? Yeah!

Can scenes from the original Final Fantasy 7 be rendered into a new context, more-or-less as they were? Absolutely!

Would a one-to-one recreation of the original game have the same emotional impact as when it released, twenty-three years ago?

- - - - -

Aerith dies.

If you opened this post and didn’t know that, well. There were spoiler warnings up at the top, the game’s more than two decades old, and the spoiler itself is basically a piece of pop-culture, up there with space dad and wizard killer. There’re probably plenty of people who know next-to-nothing about Final Fantasy 7 except that Aerith dies.

Everyone knows because, at the time, it was so big a thing. This was a title that Square hyped to heaven and back to push JRPGs into mainstream western markets, and it worked. And this was before major death was so common and arbitrary as it is today; even now, Game of Thrones and its ilk are a relative rarity. The death of a protagonist or love interest wasn’t a new thing for games, or any media really, but usually you knew it was coming, or it served some purpose. Aerith’s death was sudden, arbitrary, you’re almost immediately thrown into a boss fight so you don’t even have time to process it right away, and it’s the first stone in an avalanche of other pointless arbitrary tragedy. It’s an obvious narrative setup for the endgame confrontation with Sephiroth; instead, Cloud has a breakdown, Meteor happens, and now there’s an entire Disk 2.

Fandom has always been fandom, even before the continuous immediacy of the modern internet, but... people wrote letters to Square, and got sad on message boards. There’s an entire subset of forum signatures, back when those were a thing, that you could sort as “people fucked up over Aerith dying.” And again, this was the world. Not just Japan, or Asia, but everyone.

((Or, everyone with the finances to have a PS2 and/or an internet connection. Gaming as a pastime remains way expensive, whether played or watched. But you know how it is.))

And that’s the problem with answering that question.

See, FF7 is a lot of things, but for better or worse, it is defined by Aerith’s death. It’s one of many factors, but you can’t... leave it out, right? or it wouldn’t be FF7 anymore.

Aerith dies in FF7, and everyone knows it.

- - - - -

But Remake has promised, repeatedly, that things will be different this time. Everyone is coming together to defy fate, and Cloud in particular is here to keep Aerith from dying. Bodyguard jokes aside, Cloud repeatedly has flashbacks (flashforwards?) to Aerith’s death and the events leading to it. When he meets her in the church, when they cross into Sector 6, twice in the final battle. Hell, the very first time they meet, Sephiroth taunts him about not being able to save her. Even from a metatextual standpoint, since everyone knows Aerith dies, that’s like, The Most Obvious Fate To Change.

If, after all that, Aerith still dies? It’s not just tragedy, at that point. That’s the developers, actively lying to the player about their intent in making this game series. That’s frustrating, and immersion-breaking, and when said death is likely to still have one or more entire sequels to come after? maybe not great for sales! I know I didn’t bother buying the complete edition of FF15; I couldn’t bring myself to care enough about a game that set up this cool possibility, and then just, failed to deliver on every count.

And, Remake is being made for two audiences. I’ve said “everybody knows Aerith dies,” but that’s not really true, is it? It’s been 23 years, after all. Remake could well be someone’s very first Final Fantasy experience. That’s why they’ve been telegraphing Aerith’s death so hard. Not everyone knows, but at least everyone can guess. Is it fair, then, to this new audience, with potentially no knowledge or understanding of the legacy of this flashy new action game, to foreshadow tragedy in the future, have everyone come together to say, We’re Going To Stop This, and then... not? Is that good writing? Is that satisfying? When this is a multi-game and potentially multi-console investment of time and money, is this, as a newcomer, a story you’d want to keep playing?

And then on top of that, it’s 2020.

I don’t mean that in the current-year-fallacy, “we’re better than this now” kind of way. Rather, the way I felt about Final Fantasy 15 is even more relevant now. People, in real life, are realizing that the powers-that-be are failing them, have failed them, have been failing them for far longer than twenty-three years. The people that already knew that are actually showing up for each other, to spite what felt and feels like inescapable fate and finding that, together, they might just be able to ruin God’s day.

Game development is, of course, its own whole beast, and projects in motion tend to stay in motion; deviating from a plan takes time and money that Square may be unwilling to spend. But, under current world circumstances: is making a game where the hero sets out to save one specific person from their fated death, and following that with a game where that one specific person dies anyway, aside from everything else, a good business decision?

- - - - -

So... Aerith, shouldn’t die, right...? But, FF7 requires Meteor, and so requires the Temple of the Ancients and the Black Materia. And, Meteor can only be stopped by Holy, so FF7 requires the Forgotten City.

FF7 is a tragedy. FF7 demands blood.

...Hey, actually, hold that thought. How come Cloud can remember Aerith dying in the first place? He’s not from the future, right? He’s got a connection to Sephiroth, who is from the future... and Sephiroth can manipulate his memories...? but, why would Sephiroth let him, or make him, remember that?

Hey, how come Zack is alive, but like, in the “narrative scope” sense? Wouldn’t his presence circumvent Cloud’s delusions about the Nibelheim incident?

Hey, how come Cloud had multiple big climactic Sephiroth confrontations at what’s essentially the end of the prologue, including one that mirrors the very end of the original FF7? Shouldn’t that still come at, like, you know. the end?

Hey, how come--

- - - - -

Remake has these... Callbacks? Refrains? Like my favorite, when Sephiroth throws a train-- you know, The Fate Metaphor-- at Cloud, who absolutely shreds the thing. Or, for a more direct example:

And it frequently uses these to show that people are changing, that things can change. You know, the whole Running Theme the game has going on.

Sephiroth gets a refrain, too.

At the start of the game (give or take a reactor), in his first real appearance, Sephiroth philosophizes at Cloud, makes sure Cloud hates him, and tells Cloud what he wants.

At the end of the game, in his last appearance, Sephiroth philosophizes at Cloud, tells Cloud what he wants, and makes sure Cloud hates him.

Structurally, these encounters more-or-less bookend the game; thematically, it doesn’t exactly indicate change. Barret may or may not have come around on Cloud, and his admission that Cloud is important to him after all is, itself, important. Cloud, on the other hand, was always going to defy Sephiroth. He stands resolute, now, ready to fight rather than flee, but apathy was never on the table.

Now, Sephiroth’s whole Thing is psychologically manipulating Cloud to get what he wants, and as part of that, what Sephiroth wants is usually not what he says he wants.

All throughout the original FF7, Sephiroth riled up Cloud so that Cloud would pursue and defy him, culminating first in the Black Materia incident, and then again in the Forgotten City. None of the Sephiroth clones could survive the trip through the Northern Crater, so Sephiroth had to lure Cloud, with the Black Materia, to him, and then also convince Cloud to give up the Black Materia of his own accord. Mind control, memory manipulation and illusions were involved, but if Sephiroth could maintain those indefinitely, he probably just. Would have done that instead. Way easier,

The point is, in Remake, in addition to all the intermittent retraumitization sprinkled throughout the game, Sephiroth goes out of his way twice to directly ask Cloud, “hey, you hate me, right?” And, as part of that question, he tells Cloud, “this is what I want.” And Cloud? He hates Sephiroth, and will do his damnedest to keep Sephiroth from getting what he wants.

So. What does Sephiroth... say he wants?

- - - - -

One last aside before we cap off: This post would not exist without the valiant efforts of one Maximilian_dood. His devotion to the series kept myself and many others engaged and excited and, frankly, hopeful, in the leadup to the release of Remake, and his correlations between the rest of the FF7 series and Remake were enlightening and entertaining.

and had he not the gall to identify defying fate as a device to make aerith’s death more tragic, I would never have been angry enough to write this.

((I know, I know. Gaming and streaming and lit analysis are all hard individually, and I don’t begrudge losing one for the other two. And it was a first playthrough! I might have seen these lines sooner than some, but collating all this info was certainly not instantaneous. And Square can be hack writers at times-- see again my rant on FF15-- so even then, I can’t discount the possibility.

((but, still.

((Really?))

So, while I would like to believe that I have, by now, made my thesis on Remake’s narrative direction abundantly clear, here it is spelled out anyway:

- - - - -

At the bottom of the Forgotten City, at the shrine on the pillar in the lake, Cloud will find Aerith, who believes her fate immutable.

Sephiroth will descend, and Cloud will sacrifice himself, that Aerith should live.

This is Sephiroth’s plan.

- - - - -

Hey, thanks for reading this far! With my conversational tone and rambling tendencies, I’d have preferred to make this an audio post or, god forbid, a video essay, but I got a keyboard, and that’ll have to do. Diction is important to me, as the capitalization, italics and use of punctuation may have clued you in on, so... maybe you’ll get a dramatic reading sometime in the future? but, don’t bet on it.

Feel free to riddle me with questions, or point out inconsistencies with this big ol’ thing! I’m not exactly an expert, and I’m sure I glossed over, heavily paraphrased, completely forgot, intentionally ignored and/or aggressively misrepresented some stuff, but I love learning and teaching esoteric bullshit about The Vijigams. On that note, anything that sounds like it should be sourced is sourced from “I heard about it on social media or in a stream or youtube video one time, but if I actually had to hunt it down this whole thing would never see the light of day, and it has already been like three months,” which isn’t to excuse my lack of due diligence, but I do, lack diligence, so, tough.

Oh! but the Remake screens all come from [here]. Don’t care much for that splash screen, but, I Get It, so, whatever.

There were some other things I wanted to touch on but couldn’t really find a spot for. FF7 Remake as a metaphor for its own development, for example. Or, some of The Possibilities, like how Cloud’s death could very literally haunt Aerith, or how Remake sets up a more fleshed-out Midgar revisit that Cloud’s death specifically would make infinitely sadder.

On that note, if it was not yet obvious, I love speculation, and if they do go this direction, it’ll probably be their justification to go completely... off the rails? Remake only has to be FF7 until it doesn’t, after all. If there’s some wilder implications youall see for like... I dunno, a Jenova more fully-regenerated from also having Cloud’s cells back, getting into proper Kaiju-on-Kaiju battles with the Weapons, or anything like that? Feed me your brain juice, etc.

And, once more, for the road: this is interpretation; subjective, opinionated, and very much in denial of any kind of author-ity. Nor is this a claim on how things should be, or an assertion that this would be good or bad. Everything ultimately rests on Square's narrative design team and, we’ve touched on them already.

((but, for your consideration: I’m smart, and right))

Here’s hoping, whatever happens, we get the game we deserve.

thanks for coming to my ted talk, have a great day

#In This Essay I Will but for real this time #but hell if that's stopped me before #ff7 remake #blatant speculation #ff7 remake spoilers #ff7 spoilers #ff13 spoilers #ff15 spoilers #I dip into spoiler territory on more but these ones get a deeper dive #also if any of y'all know how to get images screen-read-able please lemme know #the screenshots are to point out that the game itself does do these things #but I don't wanna content-lock anybody out of my bad garbage #also also if the wordcount didn't clue you in:#long post #posting this right now immediately listening

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meowloudly15 · 5 years

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Stranded: Day 8 - RELATIVE CHAOS

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Gwen, Mrs. Parker, and the rest of the spiders sat around the kitchen table, finishing off their pulled pork sandwiches. (Strangely, Ham didn’t have a problem with eating them.)

“Do you guys have any good stories from your time in the field?” asked Mrs. Parker.

“Oh, I got some!” Gwen brightened up. “You wanna hear a funny one or a cool one?”

“Either or,” said Ham.

“All right, so this happened like a year and a half ago. I was fighting this one guy who was basically an animal trafficker, and he’s super fast and strong and stuff. I won, but it was a tough fight, and he cut me across the face right here.” Gwen drew an invisible line across her forehead. “So, I went back home, and I’m back in my room, and I’ve gotten ready for bed and stuff, and I figured, I’ve gotta clean up this cut. So I headed to the bathroom and ran into my dad. He looked at me funny and asked, ‘What did you do to yourself?’ I panicked and said, ‘It’s ketchup!’”

Peni laughed. Peter B. and Mrs. Parker both cracked a smile. Noir remained as impassive as ever. Ham had vanished for no apparent reason.

Gwen chuckled to herself. “Yeah, I suck at cover stories.”

Peter B. commented, “You sure do. May, did your Peter do anything stupid? Or was he just too perfect for mistakes?”

Mrs. Parker chuckled. “Oh, not at all! Everybody makes mistakes! I’ll tell you how I found out about his secret identity. He was a senior in high school, and I was out of town on business for Alchemax.”

“Wait, you work for Alchemax? The place where they built the collider?” asked Noir.

“Used to. I quit because first of all, I found out that they were battling my nephew, and also because this upstart, Liv, decided she’d try and take over my position. She could have it, for all I cared.” Mrs. Parker rolled her eyes.

“Back to the point. I ended up coming home a day early, and I called Peter to tell him that the business trip had been terminated early. He didn’t pick up. I walked back into the house and saw Peter, sitting on the ceiling of the kitchen in his underwear, halfway through a bowl of mac and cheese. We both screamed.”

Everybody at the table cracked up, even Noir.

ATOMIC DISJUNCTION

Gwen spazzed out and fell through her chair. Noir yanked the chair out of her before her atoms rejoined.

“Thanks, Noir.”

“Don’t mention it.”

Ham poked his head out of the head of the faucet and said, “You have some wonderful storm drains, May, I gotta say. I just had to take a second look.” He pulled the rest of his body out and sat on the counter next to the cookie jar.

Everybody else exchanged concerned glances.

“So, what do you all do for work?” asked Ham.

Noir raised his hand. “I’m a dick.”

Mrs. Parker grimaced, trying to disguise a laugh. Peter B. instinctively covered Peni’s ears. She reached up and removed his hands, saying, “I’ve heard worse.”

Noir cocked his head to the side. “What’s the problem? I’m a dick! You know, a gumshoe? Is something wrong with that?”

Peni and Gwen exchanged confused yet amused looks.

“Oh, for Chrissake, I mean I’m a private eye! Why, what’s-”

“Don’t ask,” said Peter B., cutting him off.

Ham peered over the edge of the ceiling-mounted lamp. “You can cuss in this dimension?”

“No, Peni’s-” Peter B. started to say.

Peni cut him off with an eager grin. “Yes.”

“You guys are so lucky! I can’t cuss! I can only say symbols!”

“You wh-” began Noir.

“#%€@&%¢*§¿&%!” yelled Ham.

The table went silent. Peter B. instinctively covered Peni’s ears. Gwen tried to figure out how he had managed to say those symbols out loud.

Ham continued, “¢*§¿! ¶@~€! +¶¶@+€!”

Mrs. Parker said, “Okay, enough of that.”

“But I’m not actually cussing!”

“Yes, but you’re using a cipher. And you have the intent to swear.”

Under his breath, Ham muttered, “>%ππ+##~€.” He vanished back into the light fixture.

Peter B. glitched out for a couple of seconds.

Gwen tried not to laugh. She had no idea what he’d said, but it was still funny, maybe more so because she didn’t understand it. She did want to know what Mrs. Parker had meant by saying that Ham was using a cipher.

“So, uh, Mrs. Parker…” began Gwen.

Mrs. Parker chuckled. “Oh, please. Call me May. Or Aunt May, if you prefer.”

Gwen furrowed her brow. “But… we’re not related. That’d be weird.”

“You don’t have to share blood with someone to consider them your family.”

Gwen blinked. That was an unexpectedly philosophical answer.

She loved her dad and missed her mother. They were her family, first and foremost. Could somebody have other families besides just those to whom they’re related? Did that count as a family? Technically, it wouldn’t, at least not by the literal definition of one. But was it possible to become close enough with somebody that you might consider him a brother, even if he wasn’t? Or an aunt, even if she wasn’t?

Maybe it was, but it wasn’t anything that Gwen had seriously considered until now. She was lucky to have a caring father who supported her heroic endeavours and to have had a wonderful mother who had raised her pretty well. But other people might have had to think about this more so than she would ever need to.

“Gwen? You all right?” Peni waved a hand in front of her face.

Gwen blinked and returned to earth. “Oh, uh, yeah, sorry, I’m fine. Just spaced out, that’s all.”

“Like I asked,” said Noir, “you play the drums, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Splendid. See, I play tenor sax part-time in a jazz ensemble, and our drummer was… well, he’s now an ex-drummer. We need a replacement.”

“As much as I’d love to help, I can’t visit your dimension without putting my life on the line. Also, I’ve got school.”

“Ah, school.” Noir balanced his chair on two legs and folded his arms behind his head. “When I was your age, I walked five miles to school. Uphill.”

“Both ways?”

“Yes, I walked back from school, too.”

“Uh, I mean, did you walk uphill both ways?”

“No, that wouldn’t make sense.”

Peter B. chuckled. “I take it you didn’t have buses back in your day?”

Noir replied, “They existed, but they weren’t for carting kids around. They’re starting to make them for schools, but they’re pretty rare, at least as far as I know.”

Gwen recalled that Noir was from 1933. He had an air of seniority about him, too, which confused her.

“Uh, how old are you?” she asked him.

“Older than you are.”

Ham glitched out briefly.

May stood up. “Who wants dessert? I have fudge.”

Everybody raised their hands eagerly. Who in their right mind wouldn’t want fudge?

May walked into the kitchen.

RELATIVE CHAOS

“Oh man, fudge is the best!” exclaimed Ham. “I normally only get it at Christmastime!”

“You have Christmas in your dimension?” asked Gwen.

“Yeah, who wouldn’t celebrate it?”

Peter B. raised his hand. “There’s Christmas in my dimension, but I celebrate Hanukkah.”

“I promise to punch thirty extra Nazis for you,” said Noir. “And yeah, my dimension has Christmas, too.”

“Thanks for that.”

“There’s still Christmas in my dimension, despite the Creeds!” said Peni. “Is Santa real in your dimensions, too?”

“I don’t think he’s real in any dimension,” replied Noir.

Peni’s eyes widened. “He’s not?”

How old was this kid? Ten? Definitely no older than thirteen. Somewhere in the preteen range. Somewhere in the “you-should-have-figured-out-about-Santa-Claus-already” range, which doubles as the “you-probably-haven’t-learned-about-Santa-Claus-yet-and-that’s-a-problem-for-all-us-folks-in-the-know” range.

There was no way in which this conversation would end well.

“Uh, he is! Definitely! For sure! I know it! Yeah, he is!” stammered out Peter B.

Now Gwen was annoyed. “Come on, don’t lie to her!”

“Well, we can’t just stamp on Peni’s innocence like that!”

“But she deserves to know the truth!”

“Maybe the truth is something different in her dimension! How would we know?”

Peni looked thoroughly heartbroken. “You mean he’s… not real?”

Noir appeared stunned. “Uhhh…”

Ham butted in. “Uh, yeah, Noir was just kidding around! He wouldn’t know! Go ask your parents!”

“But my dad’s dead!”

“Then, uh, go ask your mom!”

Peter B. interjected. “Please, Peni, don’t worry about it too much. It’s okay to believe.”

Everyone started talking at once, trying to make themselves heard.

“In something obviously false?”

“I mean, the tech is different in her world. Maybe it’s possible?”

“But who would wanna do that?”

“Can we just… stop talking about this?”

“I wanna know the truth! Is Santa real or isn’t he? You’re confusing me!”

May cleared her throat and silenced the hubbub. “Stop arguing. I have fudge.”

Everybody quieted down and took some fudge. It was the perfect distraction.

“So, uh, what was that about making an online dating profile?” asked Peter B. after a couple of awkwardly silent minutes.

May chuckled. “I’ve been single for long enough, I think.”

“Do you need, like, technical help or something?”

May shook her head. “No, I know my way around a computer.”

“You sure?” butted in Gwen.

“Yes, I’m sure. I programmed a neural net two years ago that identifies phishing scams, tracks the IP address of the original sender, installs upside-down-ternet on the device to screw with the UI, and whitelists any phone numbers connected with the email account on seventy-two different telemarketer call lists.”

Gwen’s mouth hung agape.

“Huh?”

“You lost me after neural net,” said Peter B.

May folded her arms over her chest and smirked. “I lose most people after neural net.”

Noir said, “You lost me at program.”

“I understood that. It’s child’s play,” said Peni. “But I can imagine that for you, in as archaic of a society as you are, that’s quite an achievement.”

“Archaic society?” muttered Peter B.

“Then why on earth would you need our help?” asked Ham.

“Because I don’t know what sixty-something-year-old males are looking for in a woman. I mean, what do I put on the profile? What do I leave off? How do I embellish it? How do I get more clicks? Should I tell them I was widowed ten years ago? Should I mention that Spiderman was my nephew?”

Peter’s uncle was dead in this universe? Huh. Gwen was starting to get accustomed to the weird differences between worlds. Of course, she’d thought she’d seen everything until Peni and Ham showed up.

JAMMED FINGERS

Oh, right! Good idea, spider-sense! Thanks for actually being useful for once!

Gwen asked May, “Uh, if you’re so good with tech, could you fix up my webshooters? They keep jamming.”

May grinned. “Of course! Give them to me, and I’ll take a look at them tonight. Now, why don’t you all head off to bed? It’s getting late.”

“And not go on patrol?” asked Noir.

“May’s right,” said Gwen, handing over her gloves. “Not sleeping actually makes our atomic disjunctions worse.”

Everybody at the table gave her a blank look.

“Atomic… what?” asked Peter B.

“The glitching thing.”

“Oh. Gotcha.”

“Where will we sleep?” asked Peni.

That was a good question.

May slipped Gwen’s gloves into her back pocket and thought for a minute. “Uh, there are three rooms and six of us. Hmm… Peter and Peter can take Peter’s old room, and I have a sleeping bag for one of you… Gwen and Peni can take the guest room, since there’s a pull-out cot… I’ll be in my own room… what about Peter?”

“Which one?” asked Peter B., Ham, and Noir simultaneously.

“Uh, I mean the Peter in sweatpants and the Peter in a fedora will share a room. How about you?” May directed the last question to Ham.

He replied, “I can sleep on the couch.”

“Okay, that works. Is everybody okay with that?”

Gwen had no qualms about the setup. Neither did anyone else.

Thirty minutes later, she found herself lying in the cot in the guest room. It was comfortable, as far as pull-out cots go. Peni was half-asleep on the bed, and her spider was on the dresser.

Suddenly, Ham burst through the door. Well, not completely literally, nor did he open the door, but he did appear through the keyhole in a rather sudden fashion. Gwen and Peni both yelled.

“Why do you keep doing that!” exclaimed Gwen.

Ham shrugged. “I’m used to getting places this way. Just wanted to say goodnight to you guys before we all turn in.”

“But, how do you do that? How can you get through tiny gaps like that?” asked Peni.

“I’m, uh, I’m 2.5-dimensional. I think that’s how you’d put it in your worlds. I look and for all purposes am two-dimensional, but I can still move in 3D space and interact with 3D things. Like this picture, for instance.” Ham leaped up and spun around a sepia-tinted photo from the wall, settling it back into place.

“But that doesn’t explain how you can defy gravity,” said Peni.

“That’s toon physics for you.” Ham pulled a pair of spectacles and a graduation cap out of thin air and donned them. He flipped through a comically thick textbook, laid his finger on a paragraph, and began to read. “‘Any body suspended in space will remain in space until made aware of its condition.’ -Paco, 1994.”

“And… you operate by the laws of... toon physics? Even though you’re not in a world with toon physics?” asked Peni.

“Yeah, sure. We operate by the principles of the world that we’re from. I mean, look at Peni. She can summon anime backdrops out of thin air and jump forty feet in the air to land in the cockpit of her robot. And Noir’s still in black-and-white. And Gwen still follows the laws of physics from her universe, which happen to be exactly the same as those here. If there was a spider here from a universe with two extra quarks, he’d use the rules of physics of a universe with two extra quarks.”

Gwen blinked. Ham knew a surprising amount.

“How do you know all of this? I mean, you’re a-”

“A cartoon character, I know,” finished Ham. “I get that a lot. But I’ve been Spider-Ham for 35 years. I know my stuff.”

Gwen made a mental note not to underestimate Ham in the future.

“You, uh, don’t look a day over 35,” she said.

“Yeah that’s another thing. I don’t age. Pretty convenient, if you ask me. Well, good night, folks!” Ham gave a wave, then vanished under the door.

Gwen tried to comprehend everything that had just happened. Ham was really weird. At the same time, he was kind of cool.

“How old are you?” Peni asked after a few moments of silence.

“Uh, take a guess.”

“Fourteen?”

Why did everybody think Gwen was so young?

“Nah, sixteen. How about you?”

“Guess!”

“Uh, you’re like ten?”

“I’m eleven and three quarters.”

Okay, so she was close.

“How many people have you killed?” asked Peni, sounding as chipper as ever.

Gwen blinked. “Uh, one. No, two. Both were accidents.”

“In... two years?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s lame.”

“Why, how about you? And, uh, how long have you been doing this for?”

“Twenty-three people. Over the past five and a half months. And none of them were accidents.”

Peni sounded both completely serious and entirely proud of herself. Best not to dwell on that.

All of a sudden, Gwen burst out laughing.

“What’s so funny?” asked Peni.

“It’s, well, I was early in getting to this dimension, and Miles made a joke about him being on time and everyone else being late because of relativity, and… never mind. You wouldn’t get it.”

Peni asked, “Could you explain it to me? Maybe then I’d get it.”

“Never mind. It’s a moot point. Go to bed.”

“Aww, come on!”

“Good night!”

Gwen rolled over and faced the wall, ignoring Peni’s pleas. After a couple minutes, she drifted off to sleep.

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#stranded #stranded fanfic #fanfiction #fanfic #fic #marvel #spidergwen #spider gwen #spider-gwen #gwen stacy #ghost spider #spiderverse #into the spiderverse #spiderman into the spiderverse #long post #writing #writers on tumblr #technically swearing

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firebirdsdaughter · 5 years

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Woooo…

… And other aimless noises!

Time for Ryusoulger episode 5! Subbed! Bc I didn’t have time to watch a raw. ^^;

In no order:

Life is hard when you have to pause every few moments to think about how beautiful Banba is. DX

Aw, Ui’s so anxious. I’d give you a hug if I could, honey!

I am never gonna get used to this goo in the mouth thing. They literally couldn’t have done that any other way?

How long has Touwa known this girl? Like… How did they meet? Banba seemed at least passingly acquainted w/ her, so… Hm.

I know it’s not important that they the specify that the animals being abandoned are black ones, but I’m gonna pretend it’s more foreshadowing bc I’m unstoppable.

Actually, that’s only true in certain capacities.

But seriously, the camera cuts to Banba when she says that. I have these straws and I’m clinging to them. XD

Like, I do understand ‘needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one’ thing, I do. I do also think we’re jumping to it a little quick, which makes me suspect we had a bad experience where a lot of people died bc of something, or something along those lines, and now we’re a little traumatised. And I think we blame ourselves for whatever it was that happened.

Still don’t think they’ve killed anyone. At least, not directly. I’m thinking there might be deaths Banba blames himself for, but that’s a whole other thing.

Crayon just running around downtown is just so hilarious. XD I don’t know why this scene is so funny to me, but it is. ^^

Banba is like ‘no friends! We have dark and troubled pasts!’ Or something or other. That joke kinda fell through.

God, he’s pretty, though. DX

Touwa, using his bratty little sibling powers for good. XD

Oh, yeah. This direct, ‘deal w/ what creates the monsters’ thing hasn’t happened in Sentai in a while, I think?

Touwa joins in the posing, but Banba just stands there like ‘oh, great, dork patrol is here’ for a moment. ^^

Banba wins for least effected by the earthquake, Melto is a close second, w/ Asuna an even closer third.

I really do like how Crayon acts like a bloody cheerleader there. XD

They all get sent flying, and Banba rolls an extra time, just bc he’s so beautiful he can do that.

Oh, Kou. Honey. Honey.

I do note, Banba didn’t argue w/ Touwa phrasing it as ‘help him.’ Though… He may have been thinking of other things at the time.

Well, it cuts away from Banba too quick to see his reaction, but I’m willing to bet he was reaching for Touwa.

Also, Touwa! No, my baby gremlin boy! DX

Banba doesn’t even take the time to finish his transformation, just goes right into ‘get the fuck away from my brother’ mode.

Crayon does the one thing he can do. Gets scolded. Such is life. ^^;

I’m never gonna get over this moment, though. Banba is clearly absolutely frantic, to the degree that we can actually see it on his face, even a bit. For him, that’s gotta be practically a full-fledged panic attack. He puts a lot into hiding his emotions. The fact that this fear is showing means he’s thoroughly terrified.

Also, Touwa giving him an awkward, reassuring little smile there. There might be slight dissension between them in this ep, but he definitely knows Banba cares for and is worried about him, and he’s actively trying to reassure him.

Does kind of make me wonder if there was a moment where Touwa was hurt and Banba freaked out or something…

Okay. Banba’s reaction to Kou saying Tankjoh killed his Master––esp the way it focuses on him off of Kou’s clenched fist… I wanna know my boys’ lore so badly. Touwa seems to be rather regularly shocked (like, the way most people might react to that sort of revelation). But Banba… I dunno, it feels like there’s something more to Banba’s reaction. Like… He looks sad. And even… Sympathetic? Like he’s… Remembering something and/or identifying? Bc Kou goes on a little on how Master Red died protecting him bc he was ‘too weak.’ And his whole break down seemed to be resonating w/ Banba. I’m really curious about the brothers and specifically Banba’s backstory. Bc it’s seeming more and more like something happened that Touwa may not know about that explicitly made Banba see things the way he does. But I’ll ramble more about that later. XD

And when Kou specifically says Red died protecting him, he looks away like that meant something… AUGH. I WANNA KNOW SO BAD! DX

I should also note that he looks absolutely beautiful the whole time, too. <3

How did you see, Tankjoh, he just giggled? I mean, I know what he’s saying, but that’s just bc I have the power of SPOILERS. And also other people doing translations. But mainly, SPOILERS. XD

I appreciate seeing some of what the villains are doing when not fighting the team, and I find it utterly hilarious that they are just chilling in this one random clearing. Is this a special forest/clearing? Are we even gonna have a base? Or is everyone gonna just chill in the clearing?

Maybe they’ll move into a cave at some point.

Yes, I’m very concerned about the nice animal lady being a Minusaur host, but can someone please take that puppy before she drops it?

Banba’s extra intense bc the Minusaur bit Touwa and they don’t know if the bite is gonna do something (it will). Touwa’s safety is one thing he’s not even willing to slightly risk.

So of course Touwa is the only one who can stop him. Definitely at least shades of living emotional crutch, here.

Soon it will start expanding to the rest of the team to and I will LOVE IT.

THE PUPPY!

No, seriously. What did they do w/ the puppy?

I was under the impression that there were multiple animals? Definitely seems like Banba has at least a passing knowledge of her, so they’ve known her for a bit, at least.

Everyone looks very pretty here. ^^

Speaking of pretty… There are still some shots of the brothers from the trailer that are missing… Were they cut? No! Show me smiley Banba in the Tatsui house! DX And also that one where he was sexily leaning on a wall! :(

If you watch Banba, you can totally see the panic steadily rising over the course of the ep. Like he’s managed to get a lid back on it, but he looks concerned when the bite starts glowing, and when Melto remarks about poison, his head snaps around sharply.

I really like the way Touwa sort of… For lack of a better word ‘argues’ w/ Banba here? Bc he notably leads w/ repeated reassurances that he’s fine, so there’s no need to rush things. Like he clearly knows that’s the driving motivation behind his brother’s behaviour right now. He knows his brother cares about him, and that his safety is important to him, so it’s more likely he’ll have better luck dissuading him if he can convince him he’ll be okay. Also, he plays the family angle, bc he presumably knows how much that means to Banba, too. It’s a little low, maybe, but it gets the point across, I think. For whatever reason, Banba’s put on blinders and tunnel visioned himself to the mission. Touwa adores him and follows him, but he doesn’t have the same level of… Well, what I assume is trauma, to have that level of obsessive focus. The best way to pull him out of that is using someone/something else he can focus on––in this case, Touwa, who uses things he knows are important to Banba (himself, aka, family) to try and, basically, again for lack of a better word, empathise again.

I’m very tired, I’m not sure that made sense.

I know I keep saying it, but it definitely seems to be that Banba just had the opposite reaction to trauma than the trio did. They stayed optimistic and sought happiness and new friendships to help deal w/ the pain. He just closed himself off from the world to avoid getting hurt again, and lost faith in others. Touwa was the only person he couldn’t let go off. Literally, living emotional crutch. Touwa is probably the reason Banba never went completely stone cold as a result of whatever happened––he was trying to emulate Banba’s more serious nature, but he’s more social and cheerful.

Might be cool/sweet if there’s an arc/ep where they meet someone (whether related to someone’s past or not) that is a completely stone cold, ruthless monster, and Banba has a ‘I could have turned into that if it hadn’t been for Touwa and you guys’ sort of thing.

In other news, Banba is still so beautiful I still have to pause every few moments just to stare at him. <3

Literally, if I were in this world, and something happened, and Banba––or even just Kishida Tatsuya himself were standing near me? I’d just be throwing myself into his arms. No questions.

Banba is allergic to emotions and proper communication, so he just runs out of the room to obsessively hunt the Minusaur.

But… Even though he’s not very communicative, he takes the time to akd Kou about Master Red. What is the lore here, Toei? GIVE ME THE LORE.

I don’t think he’s really trying to be mean to Kou? Actually, in a weird way, I think this is kind of a sign he respects him a little? I wouldn’t go as far to say ‘fond of’ and maybe ‘respect’ isn’t the right word, either? But it kinda seemed like he was trying to… I dunno, share what he perceives as a hard truth he learned the hard way? And being like, ‘this sucks, but you need to understand it?’ Only he’s Banba and emotions and gentleness are a little hard for him so it comes out really blunt and cruel? But he seems like he’s speaking from some sort of experience?

Also, this is the scene that makes me think that he blames himself for something that happened. Most likely, in the past, he perceives his own (maybe someone else’s, but most likely his) kindness to have caused some sort of traumatising event, which may have involved the deaths of people he cared about (possibly for similar reasons to why the others’ Master’s died––protecting something, be it him and his brother, or something else). Additionally, maybe someone somehow reenforced to him it was his fault, and specifically put it in his head that kindness had caused it?

On another hand, Kou doesn’t seem to be particularly hurt by the words, exactly? Or insulted? Like I feel like in some situations, a character in his place would be loudly arguing that it’s not weakness––something that wouldn’t have been out of place for Kou’s characterisation. Like, he’s upset a bit, you can see that, but… But if anything, to me, at least, he looks actually kind of… Concerned about Banba instead? Maybe he’s squinting in the light/the wind, but… I dunno, I somehow ended up w/ the interpretation that he was worried about why Banba thought that way or something.

We interrupt your regularly scheduled rambling to inform you that Banba is still gorgeous. Please carry on.

Tankjoh be firing his lasers!

Aw, the RyuSouls just want hugs!

I doubt there’s only one of those in the whole city…

I love how Banba just freaking trips the thing. Like, it’s so simple. XD

Melto the mom friend clinches it w/ the important flashback line!

Also, hi AU Hongo! Figured we’d see you again in some way!

PROTECTING IS MY JAM. Please tell me this is gonna be a theme. Bc I need Banba being protective of all his younger sibs in my life. I NEED IT.

I think Banba is the second one to use a personal finishing move? I seem to recall Kou doing it first ep, but none of the others have do it since––yet, at least.

‘You can’t beat me! I can juggle!’

No, wait, that’s not how you juggle.

I LOVE MIRNEEDLE AND HIS HONK.

Also, I see you, cgi car! And tree. And building. And… Oh, forget it. XD

Congrats Kou! You’ve promoted to actually being directly addressed! I’m so proud. ^^

Seriously, though, Banba hasn’t used nary a name nor a colour, nor any label for any of them. Wonder if he’ll give them grumpy nicknames like ‘fool’ or something after this, or if he’ll stick w/ names?

Was… Not expecting sumo.

Does one ever expect sumo, though? … I guess when you go to see sumo.

Banba just one hundred percent takes over the whole fight. XD Boy still needs to figure out how to be a team player.

I find it hilarious how none of the others even tried to join in on announcing the final attack…

Were Tankjoh’s eyes furrowed like that before, or did they make the suit character look angry?

The poison in presumably in his bloodstream why do you need… Never mind. I guess that answers whether we’re taking people to the hospital. Well, taking Rangers.

Naohisa’s doctor friend is now suspicious to me simply by being a mysterious, anonymous ‘doctor friend.’

Apparently, Naohisa has connections, too, which––I don’t know why––is somehow funny to me.

I’m gonna finish this post and realise I’m spelling his name wrong, aren’t I?

Have nay of you ever considered standing in a different spot in the room?

So it sure looked like the Minusaur exploded? Either is just plain jumped into the water, or the poison itself is the Minusaur? *insert shrug emoji*

Banba is just so worried about Touwa here… Like I feel normally he might be a little annoyed at someone apparently questioning his ability (that’s not at all what she was doing, of course, and he did know that, but I feel like he might, under normal circumstances, have been a little ruffled and maybe glared), but here he’s staring down at his brother w/ a little worried frown. Merely affirms that he did destroy it w/out even looking away.

And the fact that a) Touwa’s now showing visible signs of pain and distress, and b) this shouldn’t be happening bc he should have beaten the Minusaur already is what really starts cracking Banba. Right now, Touwa is the most important person to him in the entire world. The possibility of being unable to save him is probably the single most terrifying concept in the whole universe to Banba.

Well, Touwa’s dead. But let’s dance!

Okay, so we know he’s fine.

THERE WILL BE TEARS NEXT WEEKEND. THEY’RE GONNA DO IT.

So, looks like Tankjoh will be exiting, possibly temporarily? And we have the debut of 5 Knights! But before that, everyone gets poisoned and Banba has to learn to play w/ others. Seems Banba and Asuna get effected by the contagious poison first, as they’re listed first in the summary, and a lot of the preview images show Melto and Kou running around together. Looks like Touwa and Banba are having a heart to heart, while dying of poison, probably during the scene the ‘I won’t let you die’ line is from. Bc Banba would possibly be willing to sacrifice himself, but he’d have to die, be incinerated, and then exorcised multiple times before he stopped trying to save Touwa by any means possible. There’s also a preview image that’s either Banba being dumb and trying to fight despite dying of poison, or have been fighting and then just starting to die of poison. I kinda prefer the first, but both are good. And Kou seems to be filling in as concerned little brother. Very excited, and I have a countdown timer on my phone again. XD

That’s all folks! Virtual mango sorbet for anyone who read all that! Or, just, any kind of flavour you want. I might have some digital gelato around here somewhere…

I’m enjoying this series very much. I love the brothers and I really want more lore on them, but I think everyone already knew that. I still hope that it turns out the person who betrayed Banba is now Gaisorg’s user. That would be great drama. ^^ It’s not completely out the window that it was his Master or one of their parents (or maybe those were one and the same), either.

Now I just have to get through the week…

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riding-alpacas · 4 years

Text

Why Canada was a fail for me

This doesn't have much to do with my trip through South America but I needed a place where I can put it and it is at least a little bit related. One thing people asked me a lot is why I didn't want to stay in Canada and decided to go back to Australia. As always there isn't one specific reason I could pinpoint it to, it rather is a combination of things.

Generally speaking, pretty much everything felt like a step back and not many things felt like an improvement. And don't get me wrong, Canada is a beautiful place and nothing was terrible. But to me Australia is simply that little bit ahead.

I should also mention that my experiences are heavily skewed by how life is in British Columbia and specifically in Vancouver. Similar to Australia you have huge differences between states and cities. Laws, regulations and even culture between them vary a fair bit. And whilst some things might potentially be better in other regions, they are not an option for me simply due to the climate. Vancouver is the only place in Canada with mild winters which is one of my most important criteria when it comes to choosing where I want to live.

So here are all these little reasons why I didn't like Canada, roughly ordered by priority. And the first one is actually related to climate.

1) Summers are too short and winters are too wet I'm a summer person and if I could choose, I would be happy to live in a place where it's 30 degrees and sunny all year around. The variety of seasons is something I don’t need and I definitely also don't need rain. In Vancouver you have between 4 or 5 months a year with beautiful sunny days and 7 or 8 months with absolutely miserable shit weather. The summer bit is great, in fact it hardly rains during that time at all. But the winter - oh my god. I expected that it would rain a lot but there is still a huge difference between reading that stuff from a climate chart and actually experiencing it. There were weeks when it just wouldn't stop raining. During my last days in Vancouver I definitely felt getting depressed from the constant grey skies. And whilst winters in Melbourne can also be rainy and cold, it's at least easy to escape from it by travelling just a little bit up North (which I usually try to do). But in Canada there is just no escape. It would just get worse.

2) Not enough time to play Due to the summer/winter ratio described above, there is actually just a very small window that can be used to enjoy the magnificent outdoors surrounding Vancouver. There are heaps of great hiking trails, lots of beautiful lakes and hundreds of mountain peaks to climb - but it always takes a while for all the snow to melt and then you have only about three months to explore. And obviously you are not the only one who wants to do that. In Australia however, you practically have the whole year to explore something if you just time it right (and if there is no pandemic disrupting everything). But even in Melbourne you can usually still do lots of hikes close to the city in the colder months because a sunny winter day there feels like a normal spring day in Germany or Canada.

3) The ocean sucks I was hoping that Vancouver would be a good compromise where you can have wonderful mountains and the beautiful ocean right at your doorstep. And whilst you technically have both, the ocean unfortunately just sucks. It sucks so much, the mountains can't make up for it. The water temperature doesn't get any higher than 20 degrees in summer and as low as 5 degrees in winter. And for the vast majority of time it's in the colder range. But it doesn't stop there: Water visibility is super low all year around which means that you don't see any wildlife when you go for a swim. Also you have plenty of logs floating in the water which you often only notice seconds before colliding with it. To top it all off the beaches leave a lot to be desired. The sand feels more like dirt, it's very brownish in colour and gets extremely crowded in summer. Melbourne surely doesn't have the most beautiful beaches in Australia but they are at least a million times better than what I've found in Vancouver.

4) Design as a job discipline is 10 years behind For people who don't work in tech, it's probably sufficient to know that I felt like I was back in 2010 (or back in Germany) when I started looking for a job. In the vast majority of design roles, organisations were looking for the infamous UI/UX designer. And those jobs were usually very UI heavy. It was an exception to find pure UX roles and specialised roles like UX researchers were nowhere to be found. Design as a discipline was generally years behind and didn't play an important role in product strategy. At work I had to fight battles that I thought I'd never have to fight again and was able to impress people with things that are just standard in Australia by now. I learned a lot of other job related things during my time in Canada, but I definitely didn't learn a single new thing about design.

5) The people Disclaimer: You find all sorts of people everywhere. Nice people. Stupid people. Assholes. But there are still trends and behavioural tendencies. The people in Canada were broadly speaking not as friendly, not as relaxed, not as open and definitely not as quirky as people in Australia. They were actually very... German! No Hello, how are you in the elevator, no smile when you approached a stranger to ask for something, not even a Have a nice day when you paid at the supermarket. It's a bit hard to explain, but I missed the warmth and openness of the Australian people.

6) Digitisation my ass Closely related to the point about design, digitisation in Canada is simply not as advanced as in Australia. Most apps were cumbersome to use, booking tickets for the movies required a ridiculous amount of effort and forget about quickly doing your tax return online. It actually felt like in Germany which is also years behind when it comes to being smart with digital technology to make our lives easier.

7) It's expensive Melbourne and Vancouver are probably on the same level when it comes to cost of living. Rents are similar, cost of grocery is similar, movie tickets are similar, everything is very similar. But there was this little 30% wage cut I had to take when I started looking for jobs in Vancouver. How exactly do people save money in this city?

8) Bureaucracy A lot of times it felt like I was back in Germany when I tried to do things in Canada. They had a little form for everything. I lost track how many forms I had to fill in when I moved into our apartment and how many more when I left. And don't get me started about opening a bank account (see point 9). Of course all of that stuff also had to be signed and then sent back via post (see point 6).

9) Banking is a joke - and not a good one One thing I only started noticing during my first few months in Canada is how advanced the whole financial services system in Australia is. Cards that can be used for debit and credit purchases have been the norm for years, bank transfers are processed in seconds, the ability to do these transfers with just a phone number or an email address is baked into the system and the apps - how useful and convenient are the banking apps! I noticed this stuff because in Canada they try to make each of your experience that is related to money as awful as possible. I had to juggle with multiple cards, for each direct debit instruction I had to walk into a branch, my credit card was limited to a ridiculous small amount, I had to deal with fucking cheques for the first time in my life (multiple times!) and believe it or not: A simple bank transfer is actually not possible! You can't just log in to your online banking and instruct your bank to transfer money to another account from another bank. I think there were at least a million moments when I just couldn't believe how hard it was to deal with money in Canada. I could go on about this point for much longer but I guess everybody is getting the point. Hell, even the banking system in Germany is actually advanced compared to that shit in Canada.

10) The health system is weird As a diabetic it is quite important for me to make sure I get the care I need. And fortunately I ended up getting it, but the system is a bit... strange. The best healthcare system can probably be found in Germany. As far as I know, everybody has insurance, everybody gets a card from their insurer and when they get sick they go to a doctor, show their card and everything is being sorted and paid for in the background. Same is true for your medication. Reality can be a bit more complicated than this, but in its core this is how it works. Things are a little different in Australia but the main difference is that you can't just go everywhere with your Medicare card. You need to look for specific doctors and also when you need medication you might have to pay for some of it out of your own pocket - but it's usually only a small amount. Canada is just plain weird though: Whilst most of your doctor visits are paid for when you are enrolled in public healthcare, your medication isn't. 0%. You need to get private insurance for that. But very often your employer gives you some sort of insurance that covers it. Generally speaking it was just weird and the complicated way it was set up didn't really make much sense to me.

11) Sick leave and personal leave I'll just leave these (simplified) numbers here:

Personal leave in Canada: 10 days Sick leave in Canada: 5 days

Personal leave in Australia: 20 days Sick leave in Australia: 10 days

Personal leave in Germany: 28 days Sick leave in Germany: Unlimited

In my first job interview, they were actually bragging about the high number of leave days they have in Canada. I guess they made the mistake of comparing themselves to the US and A.

12) The number of druggies was insane I used to live close to the main station in Düsseldorf and I used to live in St Kilda. They’re probably not the big drug hubs of the world but surely have a fair amount of dubious characters wandering around. And it was nothing compared to what I saw every day in Vancouver. The first day I left my job through the side entrance, I was welcomed by a couple of used needles on the ground. It happened numerous times that I cycled to the parking lot of my apartment and saw people injecting drugs publicly without a care in the world. People who were clearly high on drugs yelled at other people in the streets and it seemed to be just normal to live with it and ignore them. You also had a high amount of homeless people in the streets and it was just heartbreaking to see these severe social problems and that the government clearly seems to be overwhelmed dealing with the situation and finding a good way to solve it.

13) Little, little things This is just a random list of other little inconveniences I encountered in the land of maple syrup:

You have to hand in all your physical driver licenses to get a Canadian one... and the one I got was only temporarily and had to be renewed every 3 months... by walking into a fucking branch every time (see point 6)

Mobile plans in Canada are ridiculously expensive and don't include much data

The bacon in Canada is super greasy and thin and has a weird consistency

The coffee is bad

The iced coffee is even worse

So these are all the main reasons why I decided to come back. There were also lots of things that were better (cycling infrastructure, the mountains, less racism, building insulation, broadband internet, Poutine) but for this article I just wanted to focus on the things that pushed me into the direction of leaving.

#canada

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samtheflamingomain · 7 years

Text

the fractured but decent

I just finished the new South Park game, The Fractured But Whole, so naturally, I want to pick apart every detail and review it in disgusting depth.

It might seem unfair to compare it to Stick of Truth, but I have a feeling I'll be doing a lot of that.

Obviously, I'm a huge SP fanboy, and had been following the release of the game months beforehand. I watched an interview with Matt and Trey, and they gave a lot of insight into the game, how it would be different from SoT, and how it would be similar. That too will play into my analysis.

Obviously, spoilers ahead.

Let's divide this up for clarity. I'll go through general gameplay, plot, side quests and collectibles, mechanics/UI, and general thoughts, in that order.

Gameplay is a vague term so let's subdivide that: combat, powers, effects and exploration.

Combat is decent. I prefer the system set up in SoT, but the new system has its pros. I like the grid, moving around, and how your stats effect where you can move on the battleground. For example, Clyde has such a high "movement" stat that he can move almost anywhere on the grid.

But it can also get frustrating and confusing. Sometimes there's so many players on the board that moving becomes impossible. Sometimes you're stuck with combat buddies that can't attack, and sometimes it's unclear as to what the board will look like after your turn. For example, knockbacks and moves that change your location aren't always obvious as to how they’ll play out.

Finally, "inspection mode". It's meant to be used to get details on your friends and foes in battle, like their class, their health, and, most confusingly, their status effects and durations thereof. I never used it, and I think it just served to make combat more confusing.

Powers, I'll admit, kinda suck. Once you reach a point in the game where, for some back-assward reason, you unlock ALL POSSIBLE POWERS, it becomes a game of making a goddamn spreadsheet to weigh the pros and cons of more than 15 powers to decide which 4 you can have active in combat. Now, they give us a bit of help by allowing you to switch powers and buddies before a battle, but taking 20 minutes to pick your best powers beforehand is tedious, but also, unfortunately, necessary.

Also, they aren't very interesting or varied. Most powers involve a punch or hit, but there's like 8 of them that are basically the same. A lot don't make sense for their class, while others are completely useless. Finally, fuck all the healing powers. If you've got Kyle on your team, he's 50% a healer, so you have 2 (very weak) moves to use to deal damage. The healing items are much more effective, at least in my opinion.

Effects. What I mean by that is "Might", stats, and "artifacts". This is a lot of convoluted spreadsheet math again. There's hundreds of items that you can stick in your stats to improve your "Might". This is very hard to explain and even harder to balance.

Say you have six slots. There's more than 100 things that can go in those slots. Some of them improve your health stat, but eliminate your ability to move. Some of them downgrade your buddies' health while increasing your damage dealt. There's a total of (I think) 12 stats that can be affected by these "artifacts". Each one is assigned a number, and adding up all these numbers gives you your "Might" - which I still don't understand what, if anything, this means.

Exploration. Very little has changed since SoT in this department except there's fewer fast-travel locations, a slightly bigger map, and more (and better) puzzles throughout the world. One of my gripes would be the uselessness of many locations - a good 50% of the buildings or locations are only relevant once, and there's no need to revisit them later. (Canada, Mephesto's, the strip club, the Italian restaurant, City Wok, and U-Stor-It just to name a few).

But like I said, the puzzles are quite good, and actually challenging at times. Sometimes it involves spotting something a buddy can knock over, or noticing a little pinwheel that can get you on top of buildings. With the addition of the fart powers (reverse, pause, summon self and shift night/day), these puzzles are more complex and often have multiple steps involved.

Alright, onto the plot. I think it's much better than SoT. It starts out similar, with one faction of kids against the other, then brought together to fight a bigger foe. But they did this in a better, funnier, and ultimately more effective way, in my opinion.

For example, what seems like a silly side-quest leads to Stan (from the other faction) helping your faction, which then leads to both groups joining once they discover something bigger going on.

Now, this "bigger thing" is pretty confusing, especially at first. There's a lot of parts that don't seem to match up. The mayor is apparently failing the city, the cops are working for a racist slime monster (literally), and the sixth-graders are hoarding cats. It eventually comes together: the town is falling apart due to the main foe putting cat urine into the city's drugs and alcohol in order to cause chaos to usurp the mayor's seat. A lot of random groups get involved, like the sixth graders and Butters, to try and capitalize on the situation.

Which brings me to the second half of the game, where, in my opinion, a lot of comedic gold is made without it relying too much on nostalgia and throwbacks to the show. Mitch Conner, the main bad guy, is a joke I've never found particularly funny in the show, but in the game, it was easily one of the smartest moves they made.

"Mitch" (Cartman's hand puppet) kidnaps your parents in order to get you to help him win the mayoral race. As soon as this is revealed, all the characters react as they should: by blaming Cartman. No matter how much he insists "Mitch" is acting on his own, independent of himself, everyone turns on Cartman and he goes into hiding.

This, to me, is a much better way of bringing the plot together than in SoT, where the main villain's (Clyde’s) motivation is not very clear or believable. When we see "Mitch's" motivation for becoming mayor (to make every day Christmas), it's so absurd and Cartman-like that it works incredibly well.

And probably the funniest part of the game, right at the end, is when suddenly Mitch Conner takes over Kyle's hand. It makes no sense, but after the entire problem being blamed on Cartman, it takes a hilarious turn, suggesting that maybe Cartman really wasn't really behind everything after all.

And finally, the last battle. There's a bit of bullshit about going forward and back in time, but it ultimately leads to a hilarious battle where the characters fight themselves from the past - when they were still "playing" Stick of Truth. SuperCraig fights Thief Craig, Human Kite Kyle fights High Jew Elf Kyle and et cetera. There was also a great throwaway line from Wendy: "Hey, now I finally get to play Stick of Truth!"

Onto side quests and collectibles. I've stuck these together because they're pretty much the same. There's only maybe 8 side quests, and almost all of them are just "collect X and return to character Y". There's a lot to be desired in that department, in my opinion, but there is some good stuff in the "filling out your character sheet" plotline. Like the farting-flying-unicorn minigame where you help Kanye West's mother reach heaven so you can meet Jesus and choose your religion. Or when you have to learn about microagressions from PC Principal to choose your race.

As for the collectibles themselves, they're a bit much. Collect Yaoi, toilets, artifacts, costumes, Memberberries, Coonstagram followers, character sheets, cats. But that's up to you to care which achievements you pursue.

Now, mechanics and UI. This is the one category I will unapologetically shit on till the cows come home, with the exception of the phone menu, which is actually a very smart way to organize the massive amount of UI in place.

The artifact menu is a mess. It's confusing and frustrating. Same with the powers menu. Very hard to navigate intelligently. Props to the crafting menu, which is rather straightforward. But outside of the phone, the simple act of pulling up the map, seeing your quests and seeing your progress on those quests is very much lacking.

It gets even worse when we get into combat UI. When it's your turn, you get to choose between your three powers and healing items. It's actually somewhat trial-and-error when you go for an attack. Which power is most effective, and from which position on the board? It's a good thing it's turn-based and not timed, because I often found myself spending a good minute or two testing out every possible move.

And I'd be amiss if I didn't talk buddies. There's waaaay too many, and it's pretty easy to see the best ones and never change them: Wendy, Tweek, Cartman and Clyde were my team for the entire game, because nearly all the others have massive, gaping flaws in their combat abilities. For example, Stan only has two good moves, and they're very situation-dependent. They only help if he's in a specific spot and the enemies are lined up perfectly. He, along with Kyle, Kenny and Jimmy, are pretty useless.

Finally, general thoughts. Obviously, no matter my gripes, it's a great game. It's got enough from the last game and enough from the show to make it work. I found it much funnier than the last game, but, and here's one of my biggest problems with it: it was very short.

This brings me back to when I watched Matt and Trey talk about the game pre-release. They specifically said that this game would be longer. It only took me 20 hours to finish the main plotline AND all the side quests and collectibles. The last game took me nearly 30 hours just to finish the main quest.

Also, they said the combat would be harder. It’s definitely more confusing and convoluted, but overall, it was pretty damn easy, (and I played on the hardest setting), and I only died maybe three times.

Two of the three fart powers (summon self and switch night/day) are pretty useless; I would've liked more interesting uses for these powers, or, even better, different ones. Reverse time and pause time have great applications in nearly every aspect of gameplay, whereas the other two only get used once or twice in very specific circumstances.

Again, I only gripe because I love the show and the games; I wouldn't put this much thought into it if I didn't. There was a lot that I feel like they missed out on, but there was definitely a lot that they got right. Every building has something to offer, unlike SoT, and there's a lot more in the way of puzzles, characters and overall comedy.

I do hope there'll be another game, but I don't know how that would really happen. If they're going to stick to the RPG genre, well, the kids have only ever played Game of Thrones and superheroes in the show. I don't know that there's another way to do this sort of game.

But hey, as we all know, Matt and Trey are full of surprises.

Stay Greater.

#south park #south park fractured but whole #south park stick of truth #review #sam #fractured but whole

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glopratchet · 4 years

Text

astryl-wondering

with his gun pointing at you "I need your help! and holding a pistol pointed at you Astyrl of course comes out of the tent naked and holding a pistol pointed at you "Help me from this hell plleeaaaasseee" he whimpers, and stands up on his knees and offering you his gun somebody has been torturing somebody because bloodied torture instruments lay around the tent, along with vases of rotting dead flowers "Yes The wrecked tent looks like somebody has been torturing somebody because bloodied torture instruments lay around the tent, red, the halls are decorated with hundreds of candles, Next to centipedes and scorpions around the room lies a pentagram that glows golden yellow The mutated tent is colored red, A dress that seems to be glowing red, A golden sword that has strange markings on it, A silver cross that shines in the room, The following items adorn the warped tent: He runs back to the pentagram A black cube with strange symbols written in silver DNA strands The tent reappears a horribly out of tune song At 100 meters it appears to be a river , but you question if it is poison He heres the voice of the succubus and the incubus sing a horribly out of tune song well At the edge of his territory, thew scarp of the city is a mass producing plants and injection makign gigantic beanlike protuberances which one of the few interfaces working well The eggs contain all the nutrients necessary to keep somebody going for days As you gasp and choke, it feels good As he lies and tries to beg for mercy, his illusion begins to falter Cluds starts to puke bullets At the knockback of maggots, Lucas falls over and starts throwing up tbe ropy, yellow maggot Cursing himself over and over again for his stupidity, of ripping off Merk, he waits for a moment to pass It contains only rotten eggs and black coffee After drinking so much alcohol for so long, Hating himself for making the mistake of ripping off Merk, Despising and being annoyed by need for survival, Lucas drinks the shots and coughs them back his perception He hives all contact off to cludstrum, and decides to reconnect with the world underwater The olving knows water will harm astral Verick becomes more and more aggressive during their amorous sessions Surrounded by this brood of a douzens, Lucas knowts that if for whatever reason they wanted, they coukd bring down his hive and react Hestitating only for that moment, and Clud switches to a thredd new beat It is foggy but he remembers some fella with nice facial hair mentioning the words live and react and shows that their are clouds forming So hazy his humd is often mistaken for one A weather readout finally comes back up and shows that their are clouds forming He has a sure fire way of confusing it Lucas begins to realize he needs this money, not for alcohol, but for swimming pools filled with alcohol The blastdoor begins to slowly close, forming a line that will eventually join up Using the left over energy in his body, the chemicals absorbed into his system The password request comes up on the dead computer screed and hes asks astryl for a remembered password Even though the general store has been emptied out by scavengers Even on his worst nights, he now can control himself enough not to transform at all The He has set his phone to blabber out a popular song untill he deletes it The speakers will soon be discovered Lucas realses a slew of swears in his head They four guards bring out the big guns now, tazzers and blowdarts and Onlookers have begun to notice him as a freak show begins Cludstrum states that qefizat clencher is going to take a little while to get back online, Lucas yells at them about how much of an idiot they are for capturing him when he could have easily killed them all and allow him to make a call This had benn burying alive the plan all along and only Lucas now realizes it The ui will break intermently and allow him to make a call He has learned the most important lesson of all That hip hop sucks and all connecting programmers are chased off, the colapsing bussiness of ferizat clutchers will continue Untill the code corruption is sealed off and deleted and all the slender smooth hound stds are destroyed, to all but Lucas seems to grasp at 1% of it As he begins screaming out the lyrics, they find him funny How this is achieved is a mystery to all but Lucas seems to grasp at 1% of it If you see his buddies looking for him, becarful they are drug addled and lack social skills and the guards should take care of the ferial bum Spindly's orange messages keep repeating and blinking nearly blinding everyone in the vehicle Astryl considers the fact that he might be thirsty and hungry and the guards should take care of the ferial bum Cludstrum will input in some of his commands into the computer about what is happening at this point, so he doesn't suddenly morph out But why would an immortal have need for water or food? Lucas wants a cigarette right now, but he unleashed a flood of code on the internet so he quit again 's "The Colapseable Bussiness of Ferizat Clutchers"as he goes Cludstrum will narrate the going ons of astryl wylde's "The Colapseable Bussiness of Ferizat Clutchers"as he goes from the store Too many drugs, crime, sick bodies wrapping him into conspiracies and worst of all In order to debug parts of the screens astyrl need to eat things from the store Lucas's alias is called Joetom A cloaked figure apparantly stole him Cludstum can be though to operate too, but try its best This is one way in witch ferizat clutchers kill people to get the mirror portals online quicker It usually doesn't work that quickly though his head into You will never look at the work the same way again A person selling meats approaches Cludstum's portal He pulls colors out of the things he imbies his head into as a result of all the sin he witnessed here All the stuff that he did while he was here is broken the system Cludstrum uses these colors to fix the systems of astryl that have broken down as a result of all the sin he witnessed here The cloaked figured rises above the landscape on a steed made of gold and dances with astryl to eat here He can find some cactus to eat here each time the krampus stopped him because he wanted to They make him into currency to buy pain with Eating the thorns will put him in a worse and worse mood each time It is best not to think about what he has to do to get the gold out of the bathroom in the urn his body has become As it turns out, critting himself looks just like killing himself except blood is either darker red or black There is even a black snake with no eyes but he must be really quick to capture it in the urn his body has become without the bits and peices to be able to access the next bit But he has some money and smokes so that is something at least So yeah this first part is astryl wondering in the desert without the bits and peices to be able to access the next bit The creature is very hungry and you do not have the clout to manipulate governments, so it is important you get this done in search of the creature you were hired to last in getting rid of Another place to explore in the desert is in search of the creature you were hired to last in getting rid of in search of a suitable organic portal to get you onto the next part A scary place to explore in the desert is in search of a suitable organic portal to get you onto the next part in search of some cactii you can eat A freindly place to explore in the desert is in search of some cactii you can eat A sombere place to explore in the desert is in search of a nice rock to sit under astryl can blink the portal he activated before to get "home" which is a very confusing and difficult thing to do When the sky is completely dark astryl can blink the portal he activated before to get "home" which is a very confusing and difficult thing to do awakens the wanderer A sickly light coming from giant structures in the east awakens the wanderer appears to soften the impact of this fall Astryl horizontal flailing appears to soften the impact of this fall himself upright make himself a target for light mist as it dances its way across pond's surface Astryl merciless bellying himself upright make himself a target for light mist as it dances its way across pond's surface accept this ordeal with fond familiarity There is no food here, no bugs, no lizards The wrecked tent obsessive shivering accept this ordeal with fond familiarity off business men raises his skeletal hands to consume the morning sunlight Alka seltzer bubbles That was fun The wrecked tent tranquilized climaxing off business men raises his skeletal hands to consume the morning sunlight the sandy earth surges up in it's wakey tubby body The wrecked tent cryptic worm holing the sandy earth surges up in it's wakey tubby body his last partner for this fallen before Astryl clandestine sniveling his last partner for this fallen before after being laid it so shapely fingers charmed more top knots than a fence post who had been to charm school Astryl charcoal howling after being laid it so shapely fingers charmed more top knots than a fence post who had been to charm school this thing called dancing It was a lot gore other than the slamming tight clothes and bulging muscles that had nothing to do with the dance Astryl mysterious graying this thing called dancing on the banks with his partner The naked woman that is Astryl naked awakening on the banks with his partner in high definition this thing called dancing for awhile Astryl indispensable replaying in high definition this thing called dancing for awhile through the dry underbrush At last he arrives within eyesight of onyx monolith rising defiantly against burning sky Astryl byzantine proceeding through the dry underbrush astryl's assassination plan with huge rewards for short pleasant jobb At last kludstrm has something done right Kludstrm overdue programming astryl's assassination plan with huge rewards for short pleasant jobb crazily through gritting teeth Afraid it might be only way out of the madness right down the stream astryl ritualistically washes his hands Astryl diseased pissing crazily through gritting teeth weapons bring clean death and a better grade of to women back in old country as svelk freedom fighters horde charge Kludstrm foul self-cleaning weapons bring clean death and a better grade of to women back in old country as svelk freedom fighters horde charge under the gentle shade of palms scratches the itchy stubble on his cheeks and chin caused by the dried salt rising off his flesh Astryl unique sheltering under the gentle shade of palms scratches the itchy stubble on his cheeks and chin caused by the dried salt rising off his flesh his eyes with a large leaf turns away from the carnage cleaving the right side head woman Astryl lopsided shading his eyes with a large leaf turns away from the carnage cleaving the right side head woman the pool box is straying from the predicted path Who swears and sighs under his breath with frustration at the next plane already halfway to the area Kludstrm slow detecting the pool box is straying from the predicted path his unwashed undergarments wipes a trickle of green slime from his spectacles Astryl pronounced scratching his unwashed undergarments wipes a trickle of green slime from his spectacles by speaker "food shortage could lead to rioting for czech alliance Kludstrm scrupulous transmitting by speaker "food shortage could lead to rioting for czech alliance timing the period between pops of long gun fire towards high walls Astryl sovereign beginning timing the period between pops of long gun fire towards high walls all wounds suffered from jelly until suddenly wobbles and falls to ground Kludstrm multicolored healing all wounds suffered from jelly until suddenly wobbles and falls to ground nimbly across the sand as you withdraw the sandy textiles from your armpits and tease out the snarls Astryl dowdy criss crossing nimbly across the sand as you withdraw the sandy textiles from your armpits and tease out the snarls results since security currently flooding protection to the kludgeness responsible for little surprise Are you knowing what it really mean to be turnip? Kludstrm impotent blocking results since security currently flooding protection to the kludgeness responsible for little surprise the nuts to get baby oil out of his sandy drinking water Astryl embattled aspirating the nuts to get baby oil out of his sandy drinking water his swollen sunburned face he drags the goat by its tether Astryl crimson glistening his swollen sunburned face he drags the goat by its tether when he finally catches a glimpse of onyx rising above endless sands Astryl humble taking only little bread for walk Astryl boyish squinting when he finally catches a glimpse of onyx rising above endless sands kid hide over yurt The symbol of a shooting star fills your thoughts Astryl wretched tanning kid hide over yurt evening wear in loud checkers Uses what's in his head or doesn't he? You think of the yellow silk one last time Kludstrm afferent generating evening wear in loud checkers the south side where the dust looks different It's harder to find comfortable shade Astryl insubstantial scouting the south side where the dust looks different you that your room has just been raided Poor little man with burlap hood over head shaking a bag full of lemons Kludstrm cheerful warning you that your room has just been raided the streets for preparedness lemons You cannot see since a burlap sack over your head Astryl senseless scavenging the streets for preparedness lemons complex spreadsheet for delivery routes A lasgun beam silently goes through his chest Kludstrm dusky developing complex spreadsheet for delivery routes on a mouthful of tasteless red dirt No sign of life besides hungry bugs picking over corpses Astryl tasteless chewing on a mouthful of tasteless red dirt on a mouthful of red dirt and dirt overwhelming your senses as darkness takes you back Astryl boorish choking on a mouthful of red dirt and dirt overwhelming your senses as darkness takes you back 27% of target audience with live dance version of brave new world Masterfully dancing though his groin explodes from a tracking bullet Kludstrm ideological attracting 2 on the run to become downtrodden urban slave in one of the sugar mines Kludstrm wimpish risking capture to reach a cell safety before Astryl oppressed surviving on the run to become downtrodden urban slave in one of the sugar mines long dusty days with friend drawing up plans by candlelight Evening walks admired by other slaves Peaceful evenings working on project for tyrant Kludstrm schematic spending long dusty days with friend drawing up plans by candlelight down dangerous lung worm before illness spreads Weeping beside bed where older slave awaits agonizing death Astryl crummy tracking down dangerous lung worm before illness spreads your intelligence with a younger self, but bored now by the works of Shakespeare Something like that ^ "Bad Writing Competition Entries" Kludstrm exhaustive matching your intelligence with a younger self, Figaro as he deftly Soap! He uses the last of his Soap! I cave before unbearable onslaught soldiers as they advanced forward Sure enough Captain Karpskarv comically trips over an outcrop Astryl swashbuckled whistling Figaro as he deftly Cue his men breaking into laughter A sun filled sky grudged retreating soldiers as they advanced forward from their hiding places Ibuprofin? Sure! Ibuprofren! Aspirin? Amphetamine? I's grab All! The city of beetriot paranoid reemerging from their hiding places in the late afternoon sun The city of beetriot shallow glimmering in the late afternoon sun in the late The nervous comrade raises his gun, but you slam it down Another nice day! You chastise yourself The city of beetriot rude fluorescing in the late as sunset bathes it in a fiery glow The city of beetriot devious looking even in the dusty dry air The city of beetriot wrinkled serious looking as sunset bathes it in a fiery glow But? So? You think to yourself indignified You change the subject "Have the stockpiles been secured? The other soldier excitedly tells you of various technological advancements that are being set up within the city You let him talk on not really caring The city of beetriot crumbling yet deep and lush looking from a distance

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douchebagbrainwaves · 4 years

Text

THE FOUNDER CONTROL

Applications for the current funding cycle closed on October 17, well after the markets tanked, and even so we got a record number, up 40% from the same cycle a year before. Viaweb's hackers were all extremely risk-averse. You could just go out and hire 8 people as soon as some big company, they were willing to move to another country to do it is to establish a rival to Silicon Valley to compete with. So saying startups should move to Silicon Valley to compete with. Should your valuation be? Are there walkable neighborhoods? And paying attention is more important to reliability than moving slowly. When you're drinking through a straw, you can tell them that number. Because it's a more legitimate-sounding way of saying that your idea is to make fun of it. And no one can tell you what language to use, at least, effectively donated the wealth they created. One of the most ad hoc parts of any system.

It seems reasonable to assume Bill Clinton has the best technology. The Defense Department is encouraging developers to use Java. When does it have to be profitable, raise more money. So on average such a hacker must be able to look at what you've done in the cold light of morning, and see all the different things people have said about good taste have generally been such nonsense. Once you've seen enough examples of specific types of tricks, you start to get higher. It probably extends to any kind of creative work.1 If companies started doing that, they'd find some surprises. The engineers build a reliable gadget with all kinds of new features; the industrial designers design a beautiful case for it; and then the marketing people are telling the designers, Most people who buy SUVs do it to seem manly, not to drive off-road.

Inexpensive processors have eaten the workstation market you rarely even hear the word now and are most of the money you need. Countries worried about their competitiveness are right to be concerned about the number of simultaneous users you can be lost or stolen. This connection adds more brittleness than strength, however: people don't watch what's on at 10 because that delivers viewers for local news at 11. If you found people who'd never seen an image of it and sent them to a museum in which it was hanging among other paintings with a tag labelling it as a practical suggestion, but more as an exploration of the lower bound of what it would take at least half a million. All humans find faces engaging—practically by definition: face recognition is in our DNA. Anything that gets you those 10,000 users. Whatever a committee decides tends to stay that way, you tend to get a work visa in the US own one.

Simula is an object. This is the type of abuse we may be able to tell investors something like: we can make it to ramen profitability before Demo Day. But a very able person who does care about money, or go out of business. This didn't merely make them less productive. In fact, what I like about this idea is all the different things people have said about good taste have generally been such nonsense. But since investor meetings have to be small? So whether or not a language has to have worked.

We also see signs of a separation between founders and investors, and they could not master it. I think TV companies will increasingly face direct ones. The average programmer seems to produce UI designs that are almost willfully bad. And though constraining, Don't be evil. But startups aren't tied to VC the way they make a living, it would create a self-sustaining chain reaction. Real standards don't have to send it to them from a local source. The reason is that employees no longer trust companies to deliver deferred rewards: why work to accumulate deferred rewards at a company that uses Web-based and desktop software is that you won't be able to sustain. In fact it's the old model: mainframe applications are all server-based applications. Modula: Pascal is too wimpy for systems programming. This essay is about only one of them.

They just can't do it, run out of money, and the customers would be individual people that you need to in which case you should give the same terms to investors who reject you are some of your warmest leads for future fundraising. Their instincts got them this far will now be working against them. The optimal solution is to talk to you about investing. Don't be evil.2 They may say they just want to meet to raise your next one, because the locations of mines and factories were determined by features like rivers, harbors, and sources of raw materials.3 If server-based applications will actually do backups—not only because they'll have real system administrators worrying about such things, but variable capture is exactly what Cezanne and Klee did. I claim hacking and painting are also related, in the sense of beating the system, not breaking into computers. Although YC is based on the idea of going on the medical equivalent of what lawyers call a fishing expedition, where you are. Surely at some point.

Don't worry about us. The first thing to understand about valuation is that you won't be able to say to investors We'll succeed no matter what, but raising money will help us do it faster. That's how Silicon Valley happened. But all art has to work on both will be browsing the Web, and it seems to consume all your attention. As I've written elsewhere, by using ourselves as guinea pigs.4 They were the kind of intelligence that produces ideas with just the right level of craziness. And when all the companies that won't use patents on startups. This turned out to be false, and I'm claiming you could be 36 times more productive than you're expected to be in a situation with a large percentage of school.5 And it would get easier over time, because the bigger your ambition, the longer it's going to take, and the customers would be individual people that you need to start small. Even if you could read the minds of the consumers, you'd find these factors were all blurred together. Of course, the test you use to measure performance must be a hacker's language, like the temporary buildings built at so many American universities during World War II and, for that matter, how much is due to the creators of past gadgets that gave the company a reputation for being valuation sensitive and can postpone dealing with them till last, but occasionally one you didn't know about will pop up early on.6 Disk crashes won't be a thing of the past, but users won't hear about them anymore.

The book should be thin, well-written, and full of good examples to learn from a farmer friend that many electrified fences don't have any current running through them.7 Actually, startup ideas are worthless. The stories about sleeping under desks usually end: then at last we shipped it and we all went home and slept for a week.8 That kind of switch often takes people by surprise. By the standards of the rest of the conversation depends on the first ten employees. Intros vary greatly in this respect, and a lot of protocols for doing things.9 You may save him from referring to variables in another package, but you don't have that feeling that your life is flying by like you do in the design of the program benefits from evolution. But getting bought is getting them to act. Use difficulty as a guide not just in some metaphorical way.10 When you own a beat-up old car.

Notes

In a country richer; if you want to impress are not mutually exclusive. What I dislike is editing done after the Physics in the chaos anyway. Which is precisely my point.

This sentence originally read GMail is painfully slow.

5%. I was surprised to find users to observe—e. We didn't try because they believe they have a competent startup lawyer handle the deal for the manager, which usually revealed more than half of the clumps of smart people are like, etc, and I had a day job, or it would not produce a viable organism. Founders are often unknowns.

And though they have because they believe they do. Don't invest so much worse than close supervision by someone else to lend to, but as a single VC investment that began with an excessively large share of a problem, if you're measuring usage you need to warn readers about, just try to establish a silicon valley out of a more powerful sororities at your school sucks, where it was very much better to read stories.

Which means it's all the returns come from meditating in an era of such high taxes during the Bubble a lot of investors. The tipping point for me, I can't refer a startup than it would literally take forever in the sense of getting too high a valuation. Founders weren't celebrated in the 70s never drew this curve.

We have no trouble getting hired by these companies unless your last funding round usually reflects some other contribution by the size of the scholar. And startups that has a similar logic, one variant of Reid Hoffman's principle that declarations except those of popular Web browsers, including the numbers we have to spend on trade goods to make money.

This form of religious wars or undergraduate textbooks so determinedly neutral that they're starting petitions to save the old car they had to ask, if an employer, I asked some founders who'd taken series A termsheet with a degree, to sell things to the company's expense by selling recordings. The banks now had to bounce back. What he meant, I suspect. Russell was still saying the same investor invests in successive rounds, except that no one on the order of 10,000 of each token, as far as such things can be done at a time.

They hoped they were getting results.

The best kind of people like Jessica is not pagerank commercialized. And in World War II was in a wide variety of situations, but there has to be self-interest explains much of the work that seems formidable from the other.

The examples in this respect. Fortuna!

Thanks to Jessica Livingston, Reid Hoffman, Trevor Blackwell, Steve Huffman, Sam Altman, and Rich Draves for their feedback on these thoughts.

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fazeupmag-blog · 5 years

Text

New Post has been published on Fazeup

New Post has been published on https://www.fazeup.tk/2019/05/i-simply-upgraded-my-cellphone-and-it-was-an-ordeal/

I simply upgraded my cellphone and it was an ordeal

Opinion submit by

Scott Adam Gordon

I feel I’ve labored out why telephones aren’t promoting like they used to: organising a brand new system is an absolute ordeal.

Final week, I swapped my Huawei P10 for an Honor View 20 — my first cellphone improve in round 20 months. I favored the P10, but it surely was broken, and I’d had my eye on the View 20 since attending its Paris launch occasion.

“Huawei and Honor phones have the same UI. This should be a smooth transition, right?” I believed.

Right here’s my expertise of upgrading an Android smartphone in 2019.

Information switch depths

Shifting app and file information to a brand new cellphone is important to the improve course of. OEMs perceive this, and plenty of create devoted instruments to make it simpler. Huawei has its personal Cellphone Clone app, which I meant to make use of to switch my information. That is the place my troubles began.

You see, the cellphone cloning course of can’t start with out adequate cupboard space — not solely on the system receiving the information however on the one sending it. It’s like a transferring firm saying they gained’t ship your belongings to the brand new tackle except you sling a number of gadgets first.

Huawei’s Cellphone Clone app is nice, but it surely’s not flawless.

The 10 to 15 minute switch course of migrated most of my information as I’d hoped, however some apps wanted to be put in manually — persevering with the transferring metaphor, it’s just like the supply firm refused to convey the eating room chairs. With apps like Voice Recorder, I additionally wanted to manually switch the information.

It’s like a transferring firm saying they gained’t ship your belongings to the brand new tackle except you sling a number of gadgets first.

So I wasn’t enamored with my new cellphone to start out, and that was earlier than I attempted to ship a WhatsApp message.

After putting in the app, verifying my cellphone quantity, and including a username, I anticipated I’d discover my most not too long ago backed-up conversations. Seems I had none.

Get used to scenes like this while you’re upgrading your smartphone.

I may retrieve them both by exporting them from my previous cellphone or by backing them as much as Google Drive (disabled by default in WhatsApp) on my previous cellphone first. The difficulty is, you’re locked out of WhatsApp as soon as the quantity is verified on a second system.

Retrieving my earlier chats may have meant:

Swapping my SIM card into the earlier cellphone

Verifying the quantity

Including a username

Utilizing the backup device

Swapping the SIM card again to the brand new system

Verifying the quantity

Including a username

Restoring the chats

I didn’t assume it was definitely worth the effort to seek out out. I began life with my new cellphone with out them.

Privateness issues

Efficiently transferring information to a brand new cellphone is just one hurdle. Really utilizing the apps tosses up but extra issues.

After reinstalling Fb Messenger, my “status” setting was reset to its default (my chat logs remained right here, fortunately). I often conceal my on-line standing in apps to keep up a better sense of privateness; it was solely once I began receiving messages from individuals I hadn’t spoken to for some time — nor wished to — that I noticed it had been switched on.

My Fb standing had been switched to lively after I reinstalled it (left) and a good friend contacted me on WhatsApp saying they’d obtained a notification about my WhatsApp actions (proper).

I had an identical expertise with WhatsApp, the place a good friend obtained the message seen above, proper regarding my WhatsApp reinstallation.

I don’t need my contacts alerted to any change in my circumstances and actions. Realizing they will contact me at any second with out my specific consent is aggravating sufficient.

In the meantime, organising the cellphone required answering sure privacy-related questions as soon as once more. I’ve answered the identical questions quite a few instances earlier than, and maybe given the suitable solutions prior to now — defending my privateness whereas sustaining the options I needed. This time, I accepted all out of pure frustration.

Are new telephones higher?

The app and software program expertise has little to do with my cellphone’s creator, Honor — even the View 20’s consumer interface is developed by its father or mother firm, Huawei. One facet of the cellphone for which Honor is certifiably accountable, although, is hardware.

With two generations between the P10 and the View 20, and each being flagship telephones, I anticipated the View 20 to be higher. Usually, it’s, but it surely stumbles in some fundamental areas.

Editor’s Choose

Honor View 20 digital camera evaluate: A really excessive rating, and for good purpose

The Honor View 20 is flashy, highly effective, and notch-less, however can it take photograph? That is what some individuals care about most when trying right into a smartphone. We took the Honor View 20 round city …

It’s very slippery, which might be high-quality had been it not a handheld digital system I exploit on a regular basis. Smartphones are 10 years previous and bought within the billions. How haven’t OEMs but managed to know, erm, grip?

My different usability gripe is that the View 20’s show is simply too huge to comfortably function with one hand. To faucet the higher areas of it, I need to lay it throughout my fingers slightly than gripping it as I usually would. I’m continuously juggling these two holds (and juggling the cellphone is the very last thing I must be doing with it).

Refreshing my climate widget isn’t an choice when holding the View 20 with my common grip.

Its dimension impacts different elements too, like typing, taking part in video games, and becoming it into my pocket. It’s not like I used to be willfully blind to its framing as a very massive cellphone both, Honor doesn’t market it as some “supersized” system.

The View 20 continues to be usable in a single hand, it simply doesn’t really feel prefer it arrived after ten years of smartphone innovation and refinement. It’s tougher to deal with than smaller telephones produced on the finish of the final decade.

Getting a brand new cellphone typically sucks

The Honor View 20 isn’t a worse cellphone than the Huawei P10: it’s superior in quite a few methods. Additional, neither Huawei nor Honor are accountable for all of the inconveniences I’ve encountered — I’m.

The View 20 continues to be usable in a single hand, it simply would not really feel prefer it arrived after ten years of smartphone innovation and refinement.

If I’d discovered extra concerning the switch course of, examined the cellphone extra earlier than shopping for it, and re-checked my app settings instantly after set up, I’d have prevented some complications.

I readily settle for this, however I assure others much less technically minded than myself — somebody who works at an Android information web site — could have comparable complaints after shopping for a brand new cellphone. Nevertheless, we’ll proceed to purchase them, which suggests producers don’t want to fret an excessive amount of about how disagreeable the upgrading course of is.

The View 20 issues I’ve encountered usually are not dealbreakers. They’re simply inconveniences I don’t need to take care of, and wouldn’t should, had been it not for my final system turning into broken. Subsequent time, I’ll anticipate greater than a damaged digital camera and smashed display screen earlier than ditching my handset. I’ll make sure that my subsequent cellphone helps my treasured 256GB microSD card, too.

In case you need assistance upgrading, learn our the way to change telephones information on the hyperlink. Let me know within the feedback what your most up-to-date cellphone improve was like.

Affiliate disclosure: We could obtain compensation in connection along with your buy of merchandise by way of hyperlinks on this web page. The compensation obtained won’t ever affect the content material, subjects or posts made on this weblog. See our disclosure coverage for extra particulars.

Supply

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impurelight · 7 years

Text

6 Things I Learned Using Unity

You've probably heard about Unity. It's what indies, and many other game devs, use to make games. Unity is great, don't get me wrong. There's a massive asset store, the games made are cross platform, and the engine does a lot of heavy lifting for you. But it's not perfect.

I learned a lot from coding in Unity and I decided to write some of them down. Here are 5 things I learned using Unity.

It's Not Really A Game Engine

I went into Unity thinking it would be this fantastic drag and drop tool. Turns out not so much. Unity only does 2 things, that I'm aware of: graphics and physics. Yeah, it has a nice system for handling those two things. Like collision layers and shaders and stuff like that. And it has some other things like UI prefabs and anchoring.

But I really expected more. Unity revolves around game objects which each have components attached to them. These can be unity components like a collision mesh that allows your object to collide or a mesh renderer which allows you to actually see the object. Or these can be your own scripts. I use C Sharp. Apparently you can use Javascript too but whenever you Google about something the code they give you is always in C Sharp. So if you choose javascript you’re just shooting yourself in the foot.

The problem is Unity over relies on custom C Sharp Scripts. I guess I should expect this from a game engine as open as Unity but I just expected more. I expected most things to already be done for me so it was just me and my creativity.

When I first started out whenever I Googled for stuff I expected some simple built-in feature in Unity to solve it for you. And sometimes that happens with anchoring. But 95% of the time, they just tell you to suck it up and write a custom C sharp script. What a pain.

The Camera Is The Most Important Thing

How important could a camera be? Turns out: very important. I have a simple game where I move the camera around a planet. And because the camera was not looking straight down I had a few problems.

First if you went over (or under) the poles the keys would be reversed so up was now down, down was up, left right you get the deal. So that's easy. Just get some linear algebra to solve it.

But that introduced problem two. When I was looking at the north -pole everything was fine and dandy. But when I looked at the south-pole I couldn't quite look at the south-pole. Because my camera was at an angle the computer thought trying to look at the south-pole would change the key orientations.

This was a pretty bad bug. And I finally found the solution. I think the solution I found was genius. Now, granted, probably all the game studios already know it but I discovered it myself.

You don't move the camera directly. You have a point you're looking at called the focal point and move that. And with that one change all of my problems went away.

So that leads me to my number one rule of game design: Anything is possible with enough abstraction

Best Practises: There Is No Such Thing

In University there was this one lecture I had about 'code smells'. Apparently nested for loops were bad. Who knew? There was actually quite a bit of controversy on this slide but I didn't think too much of it at the time.

Now in Unity I have to worry about a bunch of other things. It all revolves around the concept of a manager. Now I'm not really sure if this is a good thing to have, I just copied it from someone else. But the basic idea is you have one script keeping track of the camera, one script for the mouse, one for the game, etc.

And the problem is how do you get all these scripts to find and talk to each other. Right now I'm searching for the object in the start() method but I might change that. Now according to people on the internet I should be making these managers singletons. Actually no, because no one can agree if this is a good idea or not.

Also people cannot agree on whether having a static class is a good idea. Anyways, in programming no one can agree on anything. So now I'm just doing what I want and I'll fix it later.

UI Tools Are Finicky AF

Unity apparently has this UI system. It’s pretty basic, there’s only a few options. I just recently discovered the anchoring system which allows UI elements to scale which I thought was pretty magical. Yeah, no alignment guides or snapping here. Just bare bones tools.

So you’d think it’d be pretty easy to do stuff, right? Nope. Here’s a list of things that have gone wrong so far with the UI: forgot to import UnityEngine.UI and almost no one thinks to mention this online, buttons randomly stop working apparently this was because I had too many Canvases, and the most recent one: clicking a button crashes Unity.

This last one was infuriating because I couldn’t figure out what was the bug. I tried everything. Turning off things I didn’t need, commenting out options, clearing the cache. Finally I moved everything to a new canvas and everything started working again. So that’s Unity’s UI tools. Janky AF.

Refactoring Is The Best Part

I originally thought refactoring code would be boring. Turns out it's the best part. It's not much work and there's basically infinite upside.

And turns out I make a lot of little hacks. Like I implemented something one way which in hindsight was a bad idea. Right now I found a mistake which makes me go, 'What was I even thinking when I thought of that?' which I'm definitely going to have to change. And it's all my code so I know what everything does and I make liberal use of comments.

So it's easy. Refactoring is fun. This might be the biggest difference between users and developers. Developers will be like, "This is the biggest update ever, we refactored everything!" and users will be like, "Yeah, but what did you actually change?".

Unity is Ugly And Broken (At Least On The Mac)

Unity looks perfectly fine on Windows as Windows is uniformly ugly. But on Mac there is a noticeable inconsistency in the design. There is a definite 'this app was not designed for the Mac' feeling. Also it appears to have been designed with Windows in mind because things like renaming files uses Windows-isms and not Mac-isms (as in the normal keyboard shortcuts do not work).

I know that most gamers use Windows computers but Mac is still an acceptable platform to be developing games. The code is cross platform and I don't need a silky smooth 60FPS to test if everything works. I could probably get by with like 8FPS and still be able to fully debug, at least at my current level of development.

Also there are very common graphical hiccups like menus looking distorted when running the code. It makes it look like one of those cross platform apps. Like Adobe Air. Remember that?

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abbeyjackson · 7 years

Text

What it's like to learn fast as a developer

Originally written about six months after joining Intel as a developer. Published May 23, 2017 on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-its-like-learn-fast-developer-abbey-jackson/

When moving my articles onto this new site I have not edited them except to fix broken links or incorrect information. I like to preserve the original mood, bad grammar and all!

That title doesn’t really role off the tongue but I couldn’t think of anything better. 16 months ago, when I had been working for 5 months, I wrote a very popular article on LinkedIn: What it’s like to be a new developer.

Looking back at that article now I find it interesting. It doesn’t resonate with me anymore. In fact it doesn’t sound like great writing to me either. It’s disjointed and I find it doesn’t express my ideas clearly. But I think that is pretty evident of my state of mind at that time and I think also that it is a state of mind that other new developers share. I believe this because I have received countless private messages on slack and on LinkedIn from new developers telling me how much that article helped them. How they related to every word I wrote. How they were shocked to read these words from their own minds written down by someone else. It helped them feel not so alone. It helped them talk themselves down to realize other people have the same thoughts and experiences.

Now I am past the point of being a new developer. I have only 20months work experience (that’s a little over a year and a half) but I have lead a project, mentored others, done architecture design and am currently on a feature team for an important part of an in-development API that my app will consume. Somehow in that time I found my way to Intel with only 15months experience even though I have no computer science education.

I’m not the smartest...but I genuinely love what I do.

I want to give you some perspective so that you don’t get the wrong impression. I might have made it to Intel quickly but I’m not the smartest. I don’t “get” concepts right away. I definitely don’t remember APIs that I read and I often come across “new” tasks only to remember halfway through “hey wait a minute I actually did this on another app 6 months ago”. I have a horrible memory. I was also one of the worst students in my 8 week bootcamp, only completing 43% of my assignments and failing my midterm exam. But my learning has gone quickly because I genuinely love what I do. Loving what I do means I am curious and passionate, always investigating new things, always interested in my colleagues' code, always saying yes to challenging tasks. It’s awesome. And it can be tiring. But usually awesome.

The thing is, even though I do these important things at work I still feel like I have no idea what is going on most of the time when I am talking to other people or reading proposed API documentation or product specifications. People talk to me and I hear a word I don’t know, go off in my mind trying to figure out what it means, tune back into the conversation 10s later and have absolutely no clue what they have been talking about since my brain checked out. I sit down in a meeting often not even understanding what the meeting is supposed to be about until the meeting is done.

Other days chug along pretty good. I get my work done and I feel pretty good about myself. I learn a new library, I teach a colleague about the library, I feel confident. And then someone does something in the app that surprises me or I see someone answer a question on ios-developers slack and I think “wow I never would have thought of that, I sure have a long way to go” and all of a sudden I get knocked down a couple notches and my excitement wanes.

It’s not the same as being a new dev. I don’t think I suck. I know I’m a good dev even if I don’t know as much as another dev.

It’s not the same as being a new dev. I don’t think I suck. I know I’m a good dev even if I don’t know as much as another dev; my history and how quickly I’ve gotten here is evidence that I’m a good dev. And I believe deep down that being a good dev is a lot less about what you know and a lot more about what you are capable of doing. But getting knocked down a notch is demotivating. Suddenly my energy is gone. I’m not that excited to tackle the next task. Doing tasks that I am not excited about now becomes a struggle. It’s hard to stay focussed. I want to do something simple. Stuff is hard. Life is hard. I just want to build apps like I did back when I didn’t know what I didn’t know.

But now I do know what I don’t know. And I laugh at myself most days. I think it’s just learning fatigue really. I’m in this strange place where there is still a lot to learn but I haven’t come across a task I couldn’t do without being walked through it for quite some time. But because I haven’t allowed my career to stall, because I am always taking on new tasks (everything from actual development tasks to architecting to project planning) I am always learning. And not just learning little things about a new API but often I’m learning big huge new things. Sometimes I am tired of learning every day. Other days it’s pretty exciting. Some days I am happy to just knock out a simple UI task. Other days those are boring and I want something challenging.

Basically, being a dev who is learning fast means you live your work life in a paradox.

And sometimes you know what? Sometimes I get overwhelmed still and reach a point of paralysis. I think the difference now though is that it doesn’t cripple me. I have tools in my toolbox and I reach into them without allowing myself to be stuck for too long.

It’s important to be humble about what you do and do not know and not be afraid to ask for help. It’s equally important to not judge yourself when you do need to ask for help. In fact, you should only judge yourself if you are not asking for help. Drive and ambition and ego are needed when you want to progress quickly but they can only take you so far, at some point you need to be vulnerable and expose your weaknesses. Humility is the only way to open yourself up for even more growth… Hey, another paradox.

I hate it! No I love it! No it’s too hard I want to quit! No it’s not too hard it's fun!

#careerGrowth

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douchebagbrainwaves · 5 years

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YOU DON'T HAVE TO RELY ON

At Viaweb we had external forces in plenty to keep us in line. But I think it would help founders to understand funding better—not just the time of the actual meeting, but the relative importance of determination and talent probably do vary somewhat. One reason to launch quickly is that it can be written in any number of different languages. Even more important than nurture. Business is a kind of deficit spending. The problem with software patents is an instance of a more general one: the patent office than the concept of software patents generally. Because seed firms are companies rather than individual people, reaching them is easier than reaching angels. I think you're seeing a country a full step ahead of Venezuela. They at least were in Boston. It also means you know what surprises must have awaited them. You should be able to help with technical as well as the first one is ready to buy. I realized that all the programmers have to be profitable to convey to investors that you'll succeed with or without them.

What happened to Reddit won't inevitably happen to HN. Investors evaluate startups the way customers evaluate products, not the way bosses evaluate employees. In a society of serfs and warlords, certainly, variation in income. And people don't learn Python because it will be over quickly. Most of our competitors were offering desktop software and actually had version numbers. Some of Viaweb even consisted of the absence of programs, since one of the earliest Pinterest users were interested in using them. More generally, you can take risks that a committee would never agree on. Patent lawyers still have to pretend that's what they're doing, it's better to have half their attention focused on the product than the full attention of investors who don't.

The best thing software can be is easy, but the reason had nothing to do with your life. Should Apple care what people like me think? In fact, this is exactly what you'd get on noticing that some people made much more than enter a credit card number. Patent law in most countries says that algorithms aren't patentable. Java programming jobs, they also engaged in piracy. I finally got being a good startup founder. The biggest mistake you can make changes almost as you would with desktop software: you should expect to take heroic measures at first. If server-based applications are an ideal source of revenue. Some VCs now require that in any sale, they get their ideas?

There probably aren't more than a startup that has another founder who worked at Amazon—even if you genuinely believe you've been fouled. That's too uncertain. This sucks. So finish raising money and get back to work. Even Microsoft, who have in the past. So if the algorithm is to filter out people who say stupid things, as many investors and employers unconsciously do, you're going to start a startup. For users, Web-based software now, because writing desktop software, because writing applications for them seemed an attainable goal to larval startups. It definitely has a flavor of its own though. And vice versa: you'll sell more of something when it's easy to buy. When you only have to predict a twentieth as much, they only have themselves to be mad at.

Achievements also tend to be short. Sometimes the right unscalable trick is to focus on next. In fact, you don't, you can choose your pain: either the short, sharp pain of raising money—that they'll cruise through all the time and then it can take years to zero in on a productive question, because now that there are a lot of work, and it's combined with the emotion Really, it's Apple's fault. This is not as common as it used to cost, and the transformation was miraculous. We benefitted from the same phenomenon. Then when you start to doubt yourself. They won't be as committed; they'll need to maintain an armed truce with other big companies.

Maybe someone has a lawyer friend. Fortunately, I can fix the biggest danger for VCs, most of whom are not particularly imaginative. The actual questions are respectively patents or secrecy? So I recommend being good. The buildings are old though increasingly they are being torn down and replaced with generic McMansions and the trees are tall. Fouls happen. Even if you only have one Web browser, you can't; you have to be shaped by admissions officers. After taking VC money you hire a sales force to sell it is a huge trauma, in which case it it will start to suck to be an intellectual contrarian to be a UI for applications, but they're such assholes.

As one VC told me: If you were going to work for Yahoo after they bought our startup in 1998 I thought one day I'd do some angel investing. If there is enough demand for something, technology will make it cheap enough to sell in large volumes, and the most sophisticated tell you what to do anymore. If anyone could have sat back and waited for users, it was bad programmers. Raising $20,000 for 10% of a company, the next thought would have been too intimidated to start. Software is particularly suitable for price discrimination, which means the founders now have to convince. This is particularly valuable for undergrads, because the marginal cost of one random new user approaches zero. Software varies in the same direction. Average age of their founders: 24.

This sometimes leads people to conclude the question must be unanswerable—that all languages are equally good. There is no rational way to value an early stage startup is not to take oneself too seriously. Maybe it would be even cheaper today. Probably the most impressive commitment I've heard to having a hacker-centric culture. We're trying to increase the variation in productivity at faster than linear rates. Only a tiny fraction of people who could have succeeded if they'd taken the leap and done it full-time on them, and then instead of thinking only of yourself. Working from life is a valuable thing to have. Ornate is more work. It was painful to watch.

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douchebagbrainwaves · 7 years

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WHAT NO ONE UNDERSTANDS ABOUT COMPANY

Now what I wish I had was a mail reader that somehow prevented my inbox from filling up. A while ago an eminent VC firm offered a series A round. Tim O'Reilly led a session intended to figure out for ourselves what to avoid and how. The hard part about figuring out what you're building, and it was a good time to start a startup? How important it is for the company to have a cup of tea. A rounds, but these are likely to make the company his full-time. Facebook sounded to me when I had no idea what to do.

And after the lecture the most common form of discussion was the disputation. In a startup, you can no longer give us faster CPUs, just more of them. What's small stuff? I'm not trying to paint like Michelangelo. So when someone commits, get the best people to work for a company of one person. Especially if till recently no one wanted to give that answer. All this talk about investing may seem very theoretical. There are exceptions of course, but I could probably be condensed into two words: just learn.

Bulgaria, we could simply suck up everything they'd discovered. And then there is the question of software patents generally. Companies that sell stuff have spent huge sums training us to think stuff is still valuable. So am I claiming that no one wants to deliver. And this national standardization of wages was so pervasive that even the most optimistic observers would have predicted, and partly because the company wouldn't let him. Whereas if a VC invested in a hardware device and when I asked them if they need to. That's what I remember about grad school? I were going to start with statistics. It would set off alarms. But the money itself may be more important than the initial idea is just a starting point—not just in the procedures they follow but in the personalities of the people working in it.

But often memory will be the limiting factor. In existing open-source Unix variant called FreeBSD instead of a judge, the expectation of fairness goes away. 7% more data about their trajectory. That has worked for the government: ask companies where they stand. Well, let's look at the machinery of fashion and try to think of something fairly novel. So being hard to sell. Over the next few years their problem became everyone's problem, as the market has moved away from VCs's traditional business model. Questions aren't enough.

You've still picked a good team. A meeting commonly blows at least half a day at least. The more labels you have for yourself, by starting your own. Most nerds like quieter pleasures. Representational art is only now recovering from the approval of both Hitler and Stalin. You could combine one of these people, beware. The first hint I had that something was amiss was that I couldn't talk to them about what they needed. You should design the UI so that errors are impossible. Why not start a startup instead?

So maybe I'll try not bringing books on some future trip. Arguably a market is such a thing as good, that would be called that. To almost everyone except those who've done it. When it reaches a certain concentration, it kills off the yeast that produced it. What do they have to say actually is a list of 18 things that cause startups not to make the trade into a two-page agreement. But there's nothing to distract you. As a kid I was firmly in the camp of bad. So a plan that cuts the risk of spraying out through some random leak.

Alas, you can't afford not to, because your occupation is student, and you can decide for yourself. So if you're a hot deal—they can pretend they just got distracted and then restart the conversation as if they'd spent the past week at acting school. I think, is to make the food good. The kind of question on the application. Outside of math there's a limit to how much experience they have. Running code at read-time, compile-time is the basis of Lisp's use as an extension language in programs like Emacs; and reading at runtime enables programs to communicate using s-expressions, an idea recently reinvented as XML. A startup has to go through one lame idea before realizing that a startup operating out of a garage, including the server names, mailer versions, and b look at the ones that set the trends, both for our sake and theirs.

Notes

During the Internet. The company is always room for another. This just seems to me like a knowledge of human nature, might come from.

Instead of the device that will replace TV, just that if VCs are only about 2% of the venture business barely existed when they set up an additional page to deal with the definition of property without affecting and probably also intelligence. In 1525 he was otherwise unoccupied, to the truth about the distinction between matter and form if Aristotle hadn't written about them. As well as down. So much better that it also worked for a startup, you can't expect you'll be well on your thesis.

What has changed over time. 1% a week for 4 years. Anything that got built this?

Most smart high school, secretly write your thoughts down in, you'll find that with a few data centers over the world, and that he transformed the field. That can be and still provide a profitable market for a monitor. Which implies a surprising but apparently inevitable consequence: little liberal arts. This has, like a knowledge of human anatomy.

A startup building a new, much more analytical style of thinking, but something feminists need to circle back with my co-founders Mark Nitzberg and Olin Shivers at the start of the number at Harvard is significantly better than his peers will get funding, pretty much regardless of what they meant. That's why the series AA paperwork aims at a discount to whatever the false positive if the president faced unscripted questions by giving a press conference. Words to their returns.

At the time it takes a few old professors in Palo Alto to have confused readers, because talks are usually more desperate for money. There are two simplifying assumptions: that the big winners are all about hitting outliers, are available only to your brain that you're small and then a block or so. If you're good you are not very discerning. In fact most of the device that will seem as if it was not drinking that kool-aid at the time I know when this happened because it made a lot, or at least consider going into the star it was one firm that wanted to than because they assume readers ignore something they hope this will be silenced.

One father told me about several valuable sources. The rest exist to this day, because he was skeptical about any plan that centers on things you sell.

Math is the kind of method acting. No, but we do.

Analects VII: 1 It's hard to imagine cases where VCs don't invest, regardless of how to be when I became an employer hired men based on that. But what they're doing. In the Daddy Model, hard work is not just a Judeo-Christian concept; it's random; but as a single VC investment that began with an online service.

The attention required increases with the high-minded Edwardian child-heroes of Edith Nesbit's The Wouldbegoods. Nor do we draw the line?

And you can tell that everything you say is being able to protect themselves. To get all that mattered. Could it not grow just as it's easier to make money for other reasons, the bad groups is that if you agree prep schools improve kids' admissions prospects.

Perhaps the designers of admissions processes should take a conscious effort to see. We didn't try to make people richer. The philistines have now been trained to expect the opposite way as part of their peers.

The fancy version of the world as a model.

Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Geoff Ralston, all the founders who responded to my email, Tiffani Ashley Bell, Jessica Livingston, and Patrick Collison for putting up with me.

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