#and also lesbians <3< /div> Explore tagged Tumblr posts

[floofe-trans-doggie]

Oh, an invitation to ramble about Half-Life: Decay, just lying around? Well don't mind if I do!

Half-Life: Decay is my favorite game in the Half-Life series because it invented lesbianism encapsulates everything I loved about the GoldSRC era of Half-Life.

After the release of Half-Life in 1998, Valve had Gearbox Software develop several expansion packs for the game.

The first of these was Half-Life: Opposing Force, which despite its flaws is a deserving fan favorite, which not only brings in a wide variety of new levels, weapons, and enemies, but ties in very nicely with the original story of Half-Life, revisiting several locations seen earlier in the game, tying up a couple of loose ends, and even giving you a glimpse of Gordon Freeman himself.

The second of these was Half-Life: Blue Shift, which is perhaps the most underwhelming. Blue Shift was originally developed as a secondary campaign to be exclusive to the SEGA Dreamcast version of Half-Life, a version that ultimately never released. It was instead released as an expansion pack like Opposing Force, though it was often bundled with other games built off of Half-Life such as Counter-Strike, Team Fortress Classic, and Half-Life: Opposing Force to make up for its short length. It is very flawed and often looked down upon by the community, as it has a lot of waiting for NPCs, is quite buggy due to receiving fewer performance updates than the other expansion packs on Steam, and brings no new weapons or enemies. It's thought that Blue Shift may be made tamer in comparison to Opposing Force to get Valve to let them keep developing expansions, as Opposing Force took many radical directions with new story elements. What it does have going for it are new characters, including Dr. Rosenberg and the protagonist, Barney Calhoun, who would go on to play a more important role in Half-Life 2. Like Opposing Force, it ties in to the original game quite well, starting off retconning you the player as a security guard seen at the very start of Half-Life in the opening sequence and giving you a glimpse of Gordon Freeman several times throughout the campaign as well as the first look at Gina Cross outside of her appearances as a training hologram.

The final, most elusive one is Half-Life: Decay, my favorite of the series. Decay was a co-op campaign exclusive to the PS2 version of Half-Life. Half-Life: Decay never saw an official PC release, as Valve opted not to port it despite a completed version for the PC being made because Valve hates their fans more than absolutely anything in the whole entire world. Decay stars Gina Cross, who appears many times as a training hologram for the original game's hazard course, as well as Colette Green, who makes her debut here. The game is co-op, though it has the (admittedly rather poor) option of playing it singleplayer and swapping between the two characters. Decay ties the whole story together very nicely. It features Rosenberg, who we first see in Blue Shift after being captured by the military, except we see him before he's captured where he calls in the military to defend the facility (which makes him a spectacular accidental antagonist.) In this same chapter with Rosenberg, you tour the Uplink Center, a cut concept for the original Half-Life which has had elements of its design reused in countless ways, the most overt being Half-Life: Uplink, a non-canonical demo, making this a really cool thing to see. The ending of the game features a sequence with Barney Calhoun, showing a portion of Blue Shift from a different perspective via some sci-fi magic alien stuff that isn't that important to understand but also retroactively makes Blue Shift make more sense.

Aside from the callbacks to the other games, Decay also has the most interesting and diverse character roster of any of the GoldSRC games. Half-Life has no named human characters aside from the silent protagonist. Opposing Force has a few who are all fairly generic military grunts and a couple drill instructors as well as its own silent protagonist. Blue Shift has Rosenberg, some generic scientists with names (including Walter who is a beautiful nod to the Half-Life community), and Barney Calhoun, who would receive no solid characterization until Half-Life 2. Decay has Gina Cross and Colette Green, the first protagonists in a Half-Life game to speak and the only ones until Half-Life: Alyx nearly 20 years later. Both Gina and Colette have unique personalities as heard through their voicelines, though they do unfortunately only use these lines when not controlled by a player, making them somewhat obscure. Decay also features Doctor Keller, a scientist in a wheelchair who puts the plan together to help contain the Resonance Cascade (a plan which heavily ties in to Gordon's actions in the original Half-Life), and Doctor Rosenberg, returning from Blue Shift, who I still like despite what anyone else says.

Decay also has a cute bonus mission with two Vortigaunts who are fully playable wherein you must steal back the Xen crystals the Nihilanth uses in the final boss of Half-Life, which takes place in the parking garage seen near the end of Opposing Force, which is really icing on the cake.

Overall, Decay is the absolute pinnacle of the style of writing and game design seen throughout the Half-Life expansions that I absolutely love where four connected stories happen at the same time, influencing each other in subtle (or not-so-subtle) ways and making the entirety of Black Mesa feel alive and real.

(And for a fun fact I neglected to squeeze in earlier, Doctor Keller was originally going to be Doctor Kleiner, who was originally mentioned in an in-universe letter seen in the Half-Life 1 instruction manual as Gordon's mentor. Valve rejected the idea of using Kleiner for this as he was going to be taken a different direction in Half-Life 2.)

forget your icon forget your url fuck it forget your blog title. reblog with why is your bio what it is.

no tricksy business, if its just your age and/or pronouns i want to know why are you that age.

[butchfalin]

the funniest meltdown ive ever had was in college when i got so overstimulated that i could Not speak, including over text. one of my friends was trying to talk me through it but i was solely using emojis because they were easier than trying to come up with words so he started using primarily emojis as well just to make things feel balanced. this was not the Most effective strategy... until. he tried to ask me "you okay?" but the way he chose to do that was by sending "👉🏼👌🏼❓" and i was so shocked by suddenly being asked if i was dtf that i was like WHAT???? WHAT DID YOU JUST SAY TO ME?????????? and thus was verbal again

[zaahvi]

GLORY TO THE RISEN GODS

[puppyeared]

renaissance dogys

characters belong to @canisalbus

[kosalus]

bicep meme 2 electric boogaloo with dame aylin and isobel

[inkskinned]

so one of the things that's so horrifying about birth control is that you have to, like, navigate this incredibly personal choice about your body and yet also face the epitome of misogyny. like, someone in the comments will say it wasn't that bad for me, and you'll be utterly silenced. like, everyone treats birth control like something that's super dirty. like, you have no fucking information or control over this thing because certain powerful people find it icky.

first it was the oral contraceptives. you went on those young, mostly for reasons unrelated to birth control - even your dermatologist suggested them to control your acne. the list of side effects was longer than your arm, and you just stared at it, horrified.

it made you so mentally ill, but you just heard that this was adulthood. that, yes, there are of course side effects, what did you expect. one day you looked up yasmin makes me depressed because surely this was far too intense, and you discovered that over 12,000 lawsuits had been successfully filed against the brand. it remains commonly prescribed on the open market. you switched brands a few times before oral contraceptives stopped being in any way effective. your doctor just, like, shrugged and said you could try a different brand again.

and the thing is that you're a feminist. you know from your own experience that birth control can be lifesaving, and that even when used for birth control - it is necessary healthcare. you have seen it save so many people from such bad situations, yourself included. it is critical that any person has access to birth control, and you would never suggest that we just get rid of all of it.

you were a little skeeved out by the implant (heard too many bad stories about it) and figured - okay, iud. it was some of the worst pain you've ever fucking experienced, and you did it with a small number of tylenol in your system (3), like you were getting your bikini line waxed instead of something practically sewn into your body.

and what's wild is that because sometimes it isn't a painful insertion process, it is vanishingly rare to find a doctor that will actually numb the area. while your doctor was talking to you about which brand to choose, you were thinking about the other ways you've been injured in your life. you thought about how you had a suspicious mole frozen off - something so small and easy - and how they'd numbed a huge area. you thought about when you broke your wrist and didn't actually notice, because you'd thought it was a sprain.

your understanding of pain is that how the human body responds to injury doesn't always relate to the actual pain tolerance of the person - it's more about how lucky that person is physically. maybe they broke it in a perfect way. maybe they happened to get hurt in a place without a lot of nerve endings. some people can handle a broken femur but crumble under a sore tooth. there's no true way to predict how "much" something actually hurts.

in no other situation would it be appropriate for doctors to ignore pain. just because someone can break their wrist and not feel it doesn't mean no one should receive pain meds for a broken wrist. it just means that particular person was lucky about it. it should not define treatment.

in the comments of videos about IUDs, literally thousands of people report agony. blinding, nauseating, soul-crushing agony. they say things like i had 2 kids and this was the worst thing i ever experienced or i literally have a tattoo on my ribs and it felt like a tickle. this thing almost killed me or would rather run into traffic than ever feel that again.

so it's either true that every single person who reports severe pain is exaggerating. or it's true that it's far more likely you will experience pain, rather than "just a pinch." and yet - there's nothing fucking been done about it. it kind of feels like a shrug is layered on top of everything - since technically it's elective, isn't it kind of your fault for agreeing to select it? stop being fearmongering. stop being defensive.

you fucking needed yours. you are almost weirdly protective of it. yours was so important for your physical and mental health. it helped you off hormonal birth control and even started helping some of your symptoms. it still fucking hurt for no fucking reason.

once while recovering from surgery, they offered you like 15 days of vicodin. you only took 2 of them. you've been offered oxy for tonsillitis. you turned down opioids while recovering from your wisdom tooth extraction. everything else has the option. you fucking drove yourself home after it, shocked and quietly weeping, feeling like something very bad had just happened. the nurse that held your hand during the experience looked down at you, tears in her eyes, and said - i know. this is cruelty in action.

and it's fucked up because the conversation is never just "hey, so the way we are doing this is fucking barbaric and doctors should be required to offer serious pain meds" - it's usually something around the lines of "well, it didn't kill you, did it?"

you just found out that removing that little bitch will hurt just as bad. a little pinch like how oral contraceptives have "some" serious symptoms. like your life and pain are expendable or not really important. like maybe we are all hysterical about it?

hysteria comes from the latin word for uterus, which is great!

you stand here at a crossroads. like - this thing is so important. did they really have to make it so fucking dangerous. and why is it that if you make a complaint, you're told - i didn't even want you to have this in the first place. we're told be careful what you wish for. we're told that it's our fault for wanting something so illict; we could simply choose not to need medication. that maybe if we don't like the scraps, we should get ready to starve.

we have been saying for so long - "i'm not asking you to remove the option, i'm asking you to reconsider the risk." this entire time we hear: well, this is what you wanted, isn't it?

[idolomantises]

i never liked the idea that good trans rep has to be so subtle its easy to miss. nothing wrong with a character saying "im trans" or dealing with their experiences as a trans person.

just let them have a personality too, don't tokenize them. And make them a weird freak. we need more trans characters that are weird freaks.

[hikarosknight]

Amity after grom

[lesbianwyllravengard]

It's truly so funny letting Astarion drink your blood when you aren't romancing him and absolutely do not want to. Like I'm so sorry man I know you're really laying it on thick with the "sweet thing" and "darling" and lascivious innuendos but I'm literally just being a bro. I don't mind you drinking my blood because I care about you, as a homie tho. Sorry.

[skeletood]

[kingzombear]

remember that one post you did a while back with pomni and jax’s personalities swapped?

can i have more of that, my good bear?

She likes to sneak in his room when he's sleeping w an airhorn and when he jolts awake screaming she decks him in the face with a pie lol

[dykealloy]

whatever. fem law be upon ye

[uncanny-tranny]

Periodic reminder that unless a person specifically and clearly tells you it is okay to tell others they are trans or queer, you should err on the side of caution and assume they do not want you to tell people (especially random people!) about their transness or queerness.

You have no idea, generally, why somebody doesn't talk openly about their trans or queer status, and you have no idea, truly, how somebody might react to that information. The most progressive person out there is still capable of harbouring incredibly negative thoughts about somebody's queer status.

[deklo]

MMMUAH!🫶

[napping-sapphic]

Take my hand and i’ll show you something amazing (the amazing thing is that we are now holding hands🥰)

[stardial]

fit for tha school dance today… who wants to duel me sexually