#and there was the super tedious part of card hell

[thekenikaridevblog]

My computer is malfunctioning and my hard drive and all the data in it is at risk if I lose all the files of 4 years worth of game progress I'm going to break down I am this close to crying right now

[unhingedselfships]

5, 10, 13 :)

This got stupidly long. Sorry?

5. Does their existence make any major changes to the 'canon' story? Minor ones?

She inherently causes small tweaks simply by existing. You're throwing a whole new character, how ever minor, into the story.

With Daigo, its pretty consistent she keeps Mine alive.

Majima, I tend to default to the Y0 version, and she makes some changes here and there, not really altering things in a significant way, but making the road just a little smoother.

With Akiyama, honestly we probably see the fewest changes, but thats subject to change.

Kiryu, she honestly doesn't do much for him specifically, but she provides a much stronger support to the kids and Haruka, and absolutely goes over Kiryu's head when it comes to the orphanage.

When she flies solo, the options are nigh endless, from doing nothing but adding fun substory hijinks, to completely rewriting storylines in ways that make exactly no sense. (so yanno, perf for RGG lmlfao)

10. Who do they get along with? How close are they?

Her most notable non-romantic connections off the top of my head :

Nishikiyama : Makes the least sense from a narrative stand point, so I just ignore that part. She does the "talk-no-jutsu" in her own clunky way, and its basically just a big ol' rant about how he's been treated and it turns out basic respect and decency go a long way with him. She has no fear, she can get catty and snippy with him. And it works. She treats him like a person, an equal. They're "bitchy besties".

Saejima : She just kinda dubs him "bro" and refuses to let go. He accepts it. Ends up fairly protective of her. There might be some "lost a sibling" trauma bonding happening here.

Hana : It starts with Kimi just being generally helpful in ways Aki slacks on. Despite being just as lazy (read ; depressed) she feels bad about Hana's work load, so picks up where she can. Particularly in sorting and organization. The build a bond over time and "girls days out" become routine. (on Aki's dime ofc)

Mine : I love how complicated these two are. Calling them frenemies usually works. He loves and hates her in equal measure for her connection to Daigo. Hates that its her and not him, but Daigo is happy, and he can't hate that. When she isn't with Daigo romantically, they estabilish a friendship relatively similar to the one she has with Nishiki.

Nishida : Kimi just low key adores this dude. He's so reliable and he ends up something of a 'neutral party confidant' for her. She tries to make his life dealing with Maji easier where she can. Usually by distracting the man in question.

13. Do they have a fave 'mini game' activity?

There are so many mini games in this franchise. Lets get into a few more.

Poker/Black Jack/Roulette/Etc She doesn't hate card games, but they bore her fairly quickly and she's not very good at them.

Batting Cages She gets hit with the ball more often than she hits it. She tries but after a few bruises whoever she's with hauls her out.

Mahjong and Shogi Will try, and then get completely lost when people try to explain either one. "I'm too dumb for this, sorry"

Bowling, Pool/Billiards, and Table Tennis She is absolutely atrocious at both of these, however unlike the other games she's bad at, she has a ton of fun with them.

Pocket Circut She likes it, and she likes the tinkering, but she doesn't get super into it. She prefers to support someone else doing it, rather than participate herself.

Dancing/Disco Kimi can keep a beat pretty well, she has rhythm, but she's uncordinated as hell. She sticks to swaying happily off to the side. (she gets wigglier the drunker she is)

Darts She has piss poor hand-eye coordination, which makes her being pretty good at darts a surprise. She enjoys it, and gets smug when she does well.

Fishing Is the most tedious boring thing, and she hates it. (loves fishing mini games in video games though!)

MesuKing She finds it silly, and doesn't really play, but enjoys collecting things so she has a huge collection of cards just sitting around.

Karaoke She can actually sing pretty well. If she could stop crying. She has crippling stage fright and performance anxiety so its a no-go. She does enjoy tagging along to cheer people on though.

[inkmemes]

futurama  (  1999  -  2013  )  sentence  starters  ↪  taken  from  the  animated  science  fiction  show.  alter  as  you  see  fit  ♡

“let's get the hell out of here already! screw history!”

“when you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.”

“you have to use a light touch, like a safecracker or a pickpocket.”

 "stop! the spirit is willing, but the flesh is spongy and bruised."

"she's stuck in an infinite loop and he's an idiot. that's love for you."

"all i know is my gut says maybe."

“i've never seen a super nova blow up. but if it's anything like my old chevy nova, it'll light up the night sky!”

"every christmas my mom would get a fresh goose, for goose-burgers, and my dad would whip up special eggnog out of bourbon and ice cubes."

"what do i look like, a guy who's not lazy?"

“is heaven missing an angel, cuz you've got nice cans!”

“help! a guinea pig tricked me!"

"[name], if i said you said you had a beautiful body, would you take your pants off and dance around a little."

"drugs are for weirdos and hypnosis is for weirdos with big eyebrows." 

"[name], it would never work between us. you're a man, and i'm a woman. we're just too different."

“screw you, ill have my own contest. with black jack ... and hookers. forget the contest.”

“ah, she's built like a steakhouse but she handles like a bistro.”

"spare me your space age techno babble, [name].”

"it's sort of a two person pyramid scheme."

"i don't want to live on this planet anymore."

"you were doing well, until everyone died."

“if we hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominoes will fall like a house of cards. checkmate.”

“i am the man with no name. [muse name], at your service.”

“in the game of chess, you can never let your adversary see your pieces.”

"this is the worst kind of discrimination, the kind against me."

"you watched it... you can't unwatch it."

“valentine’s day is coming? aw crap! i forgot to get a girlfriend again!”

 "hold on to your dookie, it’s about to get spooky!"

"i'm tired of this room and everyone in it."

"i'm so embarrassed. i wish everyone else was dead."

"you can't just have your characters announce how they feel! that makes me feel angry!"

"i don't have emotions, and sometimes that makes me very sad."

"if, for any reason you're not satisfied, i hate you."

"that young man fills me with hope. plus some other emotions which are weird and deeply confusing." 

"i've dreamed about you a lot since you disappeared. what did you want to tell me?" 

"what do you think the meaning of life was anyway?"

“you're a pimple on society's ass and you'll never amount to anything!”

“life and death are a seamless continuum.”

“if anyone wants me, i'll be in the angry dome.”

“and the worst part is, i had to have the breakup sex by myself!”

“they said i was dumb, but i proved them.”

“what's the point of living if i can't say ass?”

“i'll be stuffing coal so far down your stocking you'll be coughing up diamonds!”

“we're all pawns in his diabolical game of checkers.”

"wait, i'm having one of those things, a headache, with pictures!"

“sorry, i didn't realize i was already here.”

"guess what you're an accessory to!"

"why does ross, the largest friend, not simply eat the other friends?"

“there's no scientific consensus that life is important.”

"we cooked our shoes in the dryer and ate them! now we're bored!"

“i'm just as important as him. it's just that, the kind of importance i have ... it doesn't matter if i don't do it.”

“oh what a foolish squid i’ve been.”

“my instinct is to hide in this barrel, like the wily fish.”

"that was bad, and you should feel bad!"

"technically correct - the best kind of correct!"

"and here is where i keep my assorted lengths of wire!"

"oh wait, you are serious! let me laugh even harder!"

"i gotta practice my stabbing!"

"that's the saltiest thing i've ever tasted! and i once ate a big, heaping bowl of salt!"

“i apologize for nothing!”

 "die young and leave a beautiful corpse! that's what i always say."

"here's to another lousy millennium."

“but i am already in my pajamas.”

“windmills do not work that way. goodnight.”

"you win again gravity."

"when push comes to shove, you got to do what you love, even if it's not a good idea.”

“but existing's basically all i do!”

“when will the killing end?"

"i'll be whatever i want to do."

"the use of words expressing something other than their literal intention. now that. is. irony."

"could you ask a little more sexfully?"

"hooray! i'm useful!"

"awesome. awesome to the max."

"some breaking occurred, the dolly was involved, that's about all we know."

“you want me to do two things?”

i love stealin', i love takin' things!

“i believe that qualifies as ill. at least from a technical standpoint.”

"that was the old me. he's dead now."

"jail ain't so bad; you can make sangria in the toilet. ‘course, it's shank or be shanked."

"one word. thundercougarfalconbird."

"of all my friends, you're the first."

“girls like swarms of lizards, right?”

“i lost it. in a volcano.”

"i'm gonna get you so many lizards!"

"who needs courage when you have a gun?"

“let's go! i've got jelly in my underpants!”

"interesting if true."

“i did do the nasty in the pasty!”

"something tells me i could easily beat those trained professionals."

"the two of you are good friends? but i thought we would be good friends!"

"it's like a party in my mouth, except everyone's throwing up."

“i'm shocked. shocked! well, not that shocked.”

“it's me! no one else look in this mirror!"

“you ever think you only like girls cause you're supposed to?”

"we don't gotta put up with this! we got poli sci degrees."

“sorry, i suffer from a very sexy learning disorder.”

“did somebody say something about a free hot meal?”

“you gotta do what you gotta do.”

"too many bones? not enough cash?"

“hey sexy mama, wanna kill all humans?”

"i don't know how you did that."

"the butter in my pocket is melting!"

"well ... first i got up and had a piece of toast ..."

“i can't wait til i'm old enough to feel ways about stuff.”

“interesting! no ... wait ... the other thing. tedious.”

"i knew you come crawling back, like a bird on its belly!"

“we both know you won't make it halfway before the craving sets in! then you'll come crawling back for another taste of sweet sweet candy. bam!"

“indeed so, most indeededly.”

"and by metaphorically, i mean get your coat."

“[vehicle]'s ready except for this cup holder, and i should have that done in 12 hours."

"stop. stop! i will destroy you." [ bonus if the receiver is doing something mundane to sender ]

“just make a simple cake. and this time, if someone's going to jump out of it, make sure to put them in after you cook it.”

“lies, lies and slander!”

“you raised my hopes and dashed them quite expertly, sir!”

“but going through a divorce together, you can't pretend that didn't bring us closer together.”

“when you say the human body is the most efficient thing to use as a battery, wouldn't anything make a better battery? like a potato? or a battery?”

“i'll have you know that i bejazzle my own underpants!”

“i'm sorry you had to see that, [name], usually i let my sadness fester quietly inside as a mental illness.”

“i'm not drunk, i'm mentally ill! but i agree with what, what you said.”

“this is a cool way to die!”

[muffetscollector]

What I want for AC Switch!

Island Bungalow- I think the idea of having a cute vacation house on the island would be nice.

Credit Card- I hope they bring this back because Im sick and tired of going through grinding HELL just to get enough bells for a princess lamp plus this gives you something to do after you pay off your house debt.

Paths- Make paths an official thing. Always wanted to do one didnt have time. Let us be able to store that pattern or give us more pattern inventory for it.

Gyroid Storage- Bring back Brewsters storage or make it part of the museum. Im using all the extra museum rooms in ACNL for gyroid storage and I think thats kinda dumb to do.

Art Gallery- 5 years later and I am STILL trying to complete my art gallery of the museum legit (waiting for Redd to come each week etc.) I hate how tedious that portion of the museum is! I hate how Redd doesnt bring you anything new for weeks/months on end and its just SUCH A HASSLE.

Baths- Let us swim or sit in the baths Nintendo. We can use the bathrobe clothing item to get into them! Just let me sit in these cool baths/pools already!

Cooking- I would love to be able to cook the fruit in AC and eat/gift it to my villagers and I really want to ACTUALLY cook on Turkey Day!

More Gardening Things- Let me grow vegetables or weeping willow trees.

Let me trade and send stuff to my friends offline it makes it super convenient!

Let me do MORE with my villagers besides send them letters and stuff. I want to have movie nights and sleepovers and game nights and lunch dates and all of THAT with my villagers!

Let me be able to give isabelle a day off or see the other NPCS doing casual mundane things! Let me have a friendship with THEM! I want to be BFFS with Gulliver!

And Finally, something thats bugged me for a long while....LET ME SEND LETTERS TO MY MOTHER NINTENDO LET ME CALL HER OR SOMETHING!

Thanks for listening to me go ham about Animal Crossing I can't wait for a release date!

[thesinglesjukebox]

HATCHIE - STAY WITH ME [8.08] The album's called Keepsake, and it's one we might want to hang on to...

Ian Mathers: I don't care what the lyrics say when you look them up, in the moment of listening I cannot decide each time whether "Stay With Me" starts with "it's all better, now you're gone" or "it's no better". I don't think the song can decide either. It's far from the first song to have that sort of power, just like the drum machine-and-synth, loop-and-swoop approach, while beautiful here, isn't exactly new. But I've heard dozens of songs like this (some even by Hatchie) since the last time one made me feel the way "Stay With Me" is making me feel right now. And isn't that maybe the only true miracle of pop music: that mere human beings can make "just another song," one that on the surface isn't that different than a bunch of others we merely like, and yet it can hit us just as profoundly, as heartwrenchingly bittersweet, as hopefully, as this one is hitting me right now? I could write an essay about the things in my life "Stay With Me" connects up to, people and times and places and songs, but it wouldn't make much sense to anyone else even if it wasn't incredibly, tiresomely self indulgent. But the experience I've been having with "Stay With Me" is among other things a reminder of the worth of staying connected and engaged with the world, in art as in all things, and not just going back to listen to all the things I already love instead. The chances of any other given human being having this reaction to this particular song today ("if I met you in a different moment/if I met you would I be this broken?") are small, sure, maybe even tiny. But god, I hope we all get to keep having those moments, and that we recognize the wonder of them in each other. [10]

Katherine St Asaph: I know this was written as a deliberate experiment in writing a pop song (or so they say; I too have claimed my paychecks as experiments), and thus I know the exact places the mechanics are there to get you (unending wistful chords, the yearning "Everything Is Embarrassing" vocal, with an octave jump exactly where it needs to happen), and the places the mechanics clank a bit too loud (the ending sags before the [perfect] bridge; "I'm not done / I've come undone" is kind of circular, kind of on its own nose). It's also been out for months. But the second time I heard this song it just happened to catch me at the exact moment of flood of memory, of accreted stupid unrequited crushes and breakups and failures and regrets, until I was in tears in a cab, which is really the ideal setting to hear this song. [9]

Edward Okulicz: Oh god, this hits me so hard in my heart, it hurts. "Stay With Me" would have been incredible had it been sung by someone like Foxes as a glass-shattering EDM epic, and it would have been incredible done as a shoegaze number by an alternative universe Lush, but it's also perfect as it is, midway between those two extremes. The lyrics are simple, but they're no more complicated than they need to be. It's some heavy-duty yearning but at the same time it's as light as air. I want to go dancing somewhere this is playing and stare down at my sneakers all night. [10]

Ashley Bardhan: This feels like pretty straightforward dream pop. Super soupy, drowsy vocals over a synth loop. It's very fine, very reminiscent of making out with a 23-year-old mattress boy named DYLAN. [6]

Julian Axelrod: Hatchie's ability to craft grand, immersive synthscapes is impressive, rivaled only by her commitment to pushing semi-formed lyrical conceits past the four-minute mark. [6]

Will Adams: There's a heartbreaking circularity to the lyrics ("you're the one who's won"; "I'm not done/I've come undone") that nails the sense of uncontrollable spinning that comes from an unrequited love. The vacillation between confidence and doubt, the paper-thin façade of indifference, the endless what-ifs and agonizing of what could have been had the cards fallen differently: they all add up to a devastating crush song that, despite never resolving, nonetheless sounds like a massive, necessary release. [9]

Alex Clifton: Drenched in reverb, gorgeous synths and a lovely vocal line, and feels like a beautiful dream. It sounds like the end of a movie where there's a montage of the main characters heading off into the sunset, unsure of their futures but exchanging significant looks with one another. I hope this blows up, makes it big, becomes as iconic as it sounds -- everyone needs to hear this song. [8]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: With a sturdy and prominent drum loop, "Stay With Me" brings to mind My Bloody Valentine's "Soon" and the sped-up Zeppelin sample on Chapterhouse's "Pearl." The key difference is how Hatchie's vocals are always front and center, clear enough that each word can permeate every synth pad and twangy guitar line and snappy kick drum with a melange of hopeful desperation and knowing despair. That spacious, ever-comfortable void that her voice rests inside reveals itself to be a place of unnerving contemplation. Despite this, Hatchie convinces you that this purgatorial dream state is far more desirable than the living Hell that is life spent all alone. [9]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: The art of the fadeout is an intentionally obscure one. It's the art of making the encroachment of silence into an instrument of its own, of stretching a song's end into a beautiful eternity. "Stay With Me" has a gorgeous fade-out, ending in a heartbeat of a drumtrack as its shoe-gaze-leaning guitars depart, but it in itself feels like a fadeout, taking the dying hopes of some vaguely sketched relationship and letting them sprawl out before you. It takes a while to get going (it didn't click for me until the bridge), but it's the kind of song that deserves your patience. [7]

Alfred Soto: So THIS is the synth pop bauble that Chvrches have failed to write for six years? It stinks of the past, peeks through v-shaped fingers at the future, and in Hatchie's sweet lies ("It's so better now you're gone") an ever-present present. [8]

Joshua Copperman: The tedious, nearly bass-less first half of "Stay With Me" surprised me, especially as so many TSJ colleagues were raving about this song. The lyrics are concise without being cliché, the production is a mostly interesting mix of Madchester drums and modern dream-pop, but I'm left living someone else's nostalgia. Like Snail Mail and other, similar acts, I'm an outsider for not having the same childhood as every other music writer. That doesn't make this a bad song: Once the live drums and harmonies kick in at 2:51, it becomes difficult not to fall in love with the song. But even that is probably because it evokes my own nostalgia -- it sounds like "Wake Up," and not the "Wake Up" indie rockers used to reference. (A bit like this pre-"Radioactive" Imagine Dragons song too, which I loved when I was 15.) And I still remain locked out; the YouTube comments claim that "listening to this song feels like being in a club on ecstasy in the 90's." But really, this feels like hearing someone else remember that oft-reminisced-upon time period, reminding me once more that things were apparently better before I got here. [6]

Vikram Joseph: From sixth form through much of my twenties, I thought I didn't really like dancing; far too late, I realised I just hated having to fake it in bleak, sticky-floored provincial or university clubs, damp with straight machismo and broken dreams. These days, I can lose my shit to "Dancing On My Own" and "Make Me Feel" in queer spaces I feel safe and happy in, and that's wonderful. It stings, though, to have missed out on a kind of transcendence I feel like I should have experienced on the cusp of adulthood, and "Stay With Me" speaks directly, powerfully to that part of me. Those "Born Slippy" synths feel soft-focus and hazy like inebriated happiness itself; Hatchie's vocals in the middle eight feel like they're grasping for something intangible and impossible, chasing every lost night and doomed love into the first glow of sunrise. This is slow-motion, tear-streaked disco-ball euphoria to remind you of nights you're not quite sure belong to you or to cinema; a fever-dream summer dance anthem that makes me believe that the perfect places we have always aspired to are eminently real, flickering in spaces that our younger selves could never have imagined existed. [9]

Iris Xie: When I review songs, I repeat them in order to sink in their atmosphere and be flooded into their sentiments, because otherwise, it doesn't come clear to me. In this discovery process, I often find myself compelled to sing and ad lib along. For "Stay With Me," at 2:50, I found myself unconsciously singing the bridge when the midpoint of the kicks off into the instrumental, specifically these two lines: "If I met you in a different moment/If I met you, would I be this broken?" I kept singing these two lines over and over again as each repeat occurs, and then I realized that the bridge is the verbal personification of the instrumental, and it is the underlying sentiment that drives all the stark, urgent confessions, so naked in their desperation and knowing that it is futile and they won't be heard, but nevertheless, they must be said. This stands in contrast with the first two lines, which put on such a brave face that contains a bitter heart: "It's all better now you're gone/It's all better on my own." When you sing these lyrics over each other, the synths are so lively and comforting in this melancholy and blend together with warm guitar strums, and solid drums to illuminate these sentiments. Hatchie is in pain from having to deal with such a broken void, and the vibrant singing of the bridge contrasts with the reluctant, forlorn sentiment of the initial verse, so it actually reads: "It's all better now you're gone/If I met you in a different moment/If I met you would I be this broken/It's all better on my own." Even though Hatchie acknowledges it feels wrong, saying "stay with me" is the balm that she settles on to ease this pain of her lover's departure because she's responsible for this pain. The beautiful part about the instrumental is that it reminds me of why music, and art overall, is so deeply important: when one is able to access the space of these heartfelt emotions, and to use the tools at your disposal to create the specific weight and textures of those experiences, it also can help give shape to those who are also feeling these certain ways, and allowing them to release and transmit it. I've shied away from my own private embarrassment and shame about this exact situation for years, and have only recently started talking about it with my therapist and supportive friends, but yesterday, I allowed myself to look through old journals and communications about that relationship. In reality, I never allowed myself to feel comfortable with the endless weight of these emotions and regrets, for I never wanted to be haphazard about the textures of this experience, even in making art about it. I feared it'd only sour the reality and aggravate my anxieties about people not taking the level of pain I had seriously and mocking it. Putting myself in that impossible situation for not wanting to mar those moments, I shut it down for the past few years. But I've had to let those similar feelings wash over me in the past few months to create art and even give justice to the reviews that I want to give on TSJ and elsewhere, so now I have to acknowledge that buried sadness. I no longer feel shame about that plaintive way to express my emotions about those situations, for this song's fuzzy, warm haze of disorientation is so familiar, and now I trust myself to just go, which is what I did with this review today. I guess that's one reason why pop is so lovely -- a salve for private hearts, not ready to debut, until they are. It's clear now. [8]

[Read, comment and vote on The Singles Jukebox ]

[pass-the-bechdel]

Marvel Cinematic Universe: The Avengers (2012)

Does it pass the Bechdel Test?

No.

How many female characters (with names and lines) are there?

Three (23.07% of cast).

How many male characters (with names and lines) are there?

Ten.

Positive Content Rating:

Three.

General Episode Quality:

It’s solid. Unpopular opinion? I don’t think it’s half as good as people made it out to be, back when it first hit cinemas and everyone was swooning. It’s solid, but that’s the best I’ve got for it.

MORE INFO (and potential spoilers) UNDER THE CUT:

Passing the Bechdel:

...

Female characters:

Maria Hill.

Natasha Romanov.

Pepper Potts.

Male characters:

Nick Fury.

Phil Coulson.

Erik Selvig.

Clint Barton.

Loki.

Bruce Banner.

Steve Rogers.

Tony Stark.

JARVIS.

Thor.

OTHER NOTES:

‘free from freedom’ is such a wanky piece of writing, man. It’s absolute nonsense, but it sounds vaguely profound if you don’t think about it at all. I thought about it. It’s idiotic. 

The very first thing we see of Black Widow in this movie is her being hit in the face, wearing a slinky little dress, tied to a chair being interrogated by a bunch of men. We’re supposed to indulge this excuse for hurting and objectifying a woman and then write it off as ‘empowering’ because she beats the Hell outta the dudes a couple of minutes later. That’s not a game I’m interested in playing. This is garbage.

The classical music over the beginnings of the Stuttgart attack is great.

All those German folks so confused by this Loki dude speaking English at them. What a tool.

I’m not sure I’ve ever heard ‘not today’ used as an effective badass declaration. It’s ALWAYS cheesy. Make it stop.

“There’s only one God, ma’am, and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t dress like that.” I don’t really like this line for Steve; he just doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who would play the ‘one true God’ card, and there was nothing in his origin story which implied that he’s particularly attached to religion at all; plus, he already read the brief on Thor, he knows this is literally the old Norse deity, there’s no question of whether or not they’re dealing with a God here. To argue the point (because he’s not MY God!) is meaningless in context, and feels like a weak attempt to correlate (Christian) faith with being ‘old-fashioned’, like OF COURSE Steve would defend the idea of the ‘one true God’, he’s from the past, not a cool enlightened atheist/agnostic modern man like the rest of us, right?

Thor and Loki are using such archaic phrasing, when Tony makes his ‘Shakespeare in the Park’ joke, it’s...more an observation than a quip. The Asgardians were not half as stuffy in Thor. It makes it seem like someone didn’t bother to see that movie first before writing their version of the characters.

Thor has to fight with the others when he shows up. He’s just gotta.

Gotta give a nod to Mark Ruffalo’s work here; I feel like I can see the clear comparison between his version of the character and Edward Norton’s in The Incredible Hulk, but at the same time there’s no sense of this being a Norton’s-Banner impression. Ruffalo is doing a sweet job of making the character his own without totally overhauling the template Norton laid down, and I dig it.

Oh, here we are. Loki calls Black Widow a ‘mewling quim’, which is just a fancy way of calling her a whiny cunt. Your gendered slur is still a gendered slur, movie.

I know they’re playing the idea that the sceptre is causing the antagonism between the characters, but fuck, it’s tedious. It just feels like they’re all contrived petty versions of themselves, being shitty because it’s ~dramatic~ for them to not get along.

I didn’t see this movie until months after it was released, and people were raving about how crushed they were by the major character death in the film but they were doing a pretty good job of not spoiling it; good enough that for a moment, I really thought I’d get to enjoy the surprise/horror for myself. You know who spoiled it for me? In a tweet, no less? It was the 44th President of the United States. Thanks, Obama.

This guy is the MVP of this film:

You can chalk “Son, just don’t,” up on the list of Things Steve Rogers Would Not Say. Just because he’s technically in his nineties doesn’t mean he isn’t still in his twenties in his mind: I don’t buy that he’d go for a blithely patriarchal term like ‘son’, it seems like another poorly-considered attempt to make him sound old-fashioned. Juxtapose that with ‘just don’t’, which is very modern vernacular. It might seem clever to combine the two as a meta-expression of Steve belonging to two different times now, but in practical application it just sounds out-of-character, and there’s nothing clever about that.

I know I said after the last movie that I love it when someone gets hit and flies off-screen in an exaggerated fashion, but Hulk punching Thor off-screen after they finish working together to take down the big beastie is an exception, because there’s no reason for Hulk to decide to hit Thor in the first place, it’s just a gag for the sake of a gag. I can’t believe they messed up such a simple pleasure. 

I will forgive it, in return for Hulk smashing Loki all over the place. That was funny.

Back when this movie came out, before I saw it, I had people tell me - straight-faced, totally sincere - that it was one of the best movies they had ever seen. The internet was on fire with Avengers love. The film was rated in the IMDb Top 20. Admittedly, that all sets a pretty impossible standard for a movie to meet, and being at least a little disappointed in the result is probably a given. I was not particularly invested either way (I didn’t fall down the Marvel rabbit hole until later), so I didn’t allow myself to go in to my first viewing with such lofty expectations to be crushed, just the general assumption that this was gonna be good, it had to be good, at minimum. And it was that; it’s a good film. It’s entertaining. The plot makes basic essential sense. It’s easy to follow. There are some nice visuals, and most of the special effects are relatively clean, which can be a significant difficulty for big-budget extravaganzas that sometimes/often try to get way too much spectacle bang for their buck, so, a nice win. All in all, The Avengers is not a bad film. Sure is a bland one, though.

I know, I know, getting all these big-name characters from previous films together in one movie was a serious task and it’s hard to write a well-balanced script for so many leads, blah blah. Let’s put that whole equivocation to bed right now, because I honestly don’t think that balancing the big-name cast was the problem. All of the characters had something to do, no one felt like a random extra, I could quibble about certain places where I really wish things had been plumped up a bit (pretty much everywhere - the film is extremely low on meaningful character beats), but ultimately the characters are fairly evenly presented. What makes this movie bland to me is 1) the way that the personalities of the characters deviate from that established in their previous films, and 2) the simplicity of the story they inhabit. 

We’ll cover the Avengers themselves first: the good news is, Tony Stark is still Tony Stark. His personality is intact. Bruce Banner is, as noted, not exactly the Bruce Banner we met back in The Incredible Hulk, but that’s both a given and a good thing - the casting change is an improvement. Hawkeye was barely in the MCU previously, so we don’t really have enough to compare him against in order to make a judgment. Black Widow, however, is a bit of a mess; Joss Whedon’s special brand of misogyny is on display from moment one, as noted above (he LOVES writing women being brutalised because ‘how would we know/believe that they’re strong if we don’t get to see them overcoming mistreatment?’ - he tends not to feel the need to ‘prove’ his male characters’ strengths in this way), and Natasha’s personal story for the movie continues in a distinctly gendered vein: as is common for female characters being written by shitty dudes, her arc revolves predominantly around a man (Hawkeye), and she is ‘emotionally compromised’ by her attachment to him. She also zones out in the middle of an action scene and winds up in a corner shaking and traumatised (very out-of-character for a super spysassin), and particular emphasis is placed on all the bad things she’s done in the past and how she should feel bad about it, though no one does more than shrug their shoulders about Clint or Fury or any of the other SHIELD agents who are acknowledged as having dark and dirty pasts. Why is Natasha the one who is singled out to have her morality judged while her ‘arc’ focuses on her inconvenient emotional engagement? You know why. There’s no reason why this particular tack had to be taken in bringing her backstory into the film, and as a result of it we spend little time with Black Widow displaying the kind of cool professionalism and self-assurance she had in Iron Man 2. The inclusion of that vulnerability and backstory doesn’t make her feel more rounded or complicated because it is deconstructing the power and mastery of the character; rather than building upon the foundation set in her previous film visit, we’re questioning the stability of that foundation and seeing if we can get a few pieces of the structure to rattle loose. 

A big part of the trouble for Thor is that he gets saddled with that poxy Ye Olde Cliche dialogue, and there are few things worse for achieving character consistency than changing the way that they talk: no matter how hard the actor tries to play the character the same, they can’t compensate for the fact that the very structure of their sentences has been remodeled. They can improvise rephrasing the lines and/or argue the point if they want, but it’s hard to challenge every line, and if the director (who, oh look, is also the writer) insists you follow the script verbatim, there’s not a lot you can do with that. Poor Captain America suffers the same fate with the overt attempts to make him sound ‘old-fashioned’ by having him utter words and phrases that he never used in his origin movie. What’s worse is, this stilted dialogue is pretty much the sum total of the film’s acknowledgment of the fact that, oh yeah, Steve just recently woke up from the ice to find that seventy years has passed and nearly everyone and everything he used to know is gone. He has an exchange with Fury in his first scene, about ‘getting back in the world’, but there’s zero follow-up on how he’s handling it, what difficulties there might be, or even just how Steve is feeling about all of this on a basic emotional level. And yes, I am aware that there’s a deleted montage of Steve going about his day being isolated and out-of-touch, and it’s a travesty that they cut it because that’s essential character content, but it’s also a total bare minimum which has zero follow-up. Steve Rogers spends the whole film just being...there, speaking lines that don’t suit him or reflect the personality we just saw in The First Avenger, and not even in an understandable character-development ‘throwing myself into my work to hide from the pain’ kind of way. He’s kinda blandly self-righteous and all-business no-pleasure in exactly the way he was NOT in his origin movie; my impression is that Whedon doesn’t care for the character and wrote him off as the traditional patriotic cliche one might have expected him to be instead of the nuanced character that he actually is. As with Thor and Loki, it feels as if Whedon didn’t bother to watch the previous movies first in order to get a sense of the established characters.

Speaking of Loki: if there’s one character who really, REALLY suffered a personality change in this script, it’s him. None of what made Loki the highlight of Thor is in evidence here; where that character was a cunning plotter full to overflowing with complex and contradictory feelings for his family and driven to action by that same emotional cascade, this Loki...wants to rule the Earth. Because. He’s, like, crazy, the other characters all say so, even Thor - the only one who actually knows Loki and is fit to assess his mental state - says that his ‘mind is far astray’ (what Thor thinks of that, whether he’s surprised or concerned, whether he feels like he understands why this has happened to Loki or not, is unclear, because, I dunno, Thor having feelings is as inconvenient to the story as Steve having feelings - as Loki snarls derisively about ‘sentiment’, we must remember that being emotionally compromised is dumb and only for women? Hmm). Loki is just a placeholder villain in this film, driven to action by nothing in particular, it’s just a business arrangement with a mysterious third party that coincidentally happens to involve Earth. Loki prattles and hollers a lot about how ruling is his right and people want to be ruled and blah despot blah, and it’s both supremely uninspired, and not true to the character we met in Thor at all - the Loki we know was not obsessed with ruling, his motivations were all about his family standing and the things he was denied within those relationships and their implications. I remember fandom, back when this movie came out, scrambling with various headcanons about Loki losing his mind in the void or being brainwashed, ad nauseum, because no one really seemed to feel like they were watching a logical progression of the same character at all. 

Now, one of the main ways that the lack of character consistency contributes to narrative blandness is that it disrupts narrative immersion - we’re re-negotiating the way that we engage with the characters, and that distracts from engaging with the story itself. At worst, we may even find ourselves cynical about every decision that a character makes (whether it’s in-character or not), because we’re too aware of the man behind the curtain to buy the act. There are definite shades of that in this film, but the worst of it comes from the whole team-antagonism schtick that is vaguely blamed on ‘Loki’s manipulations’ and the sceptre. The thing is, this all requires the characters to behave out-of-character, and since they mostly already are out-of-character due to bad writing, the exacerbation of that by creating artificial conflict feels like more bad writing, not actual plot. Having the characters initially get along poorly before triumphantly uniting to win the day is such an overused device, it’s easy to construe the conflict as arbitrary, and as it turns out...it is. Loki/the sceptre causing the Avengers to argue doesn’t actually impact the narrative in any meaningful way, since they don’t start a fight or fracture over it, it doesn’t slow down Tony’s efforts to learn what Fury is really up to, nor does it prevent Steve from investigating the same thing in person. Them conflicting with Fury and questioning their decision to work with SHIELD, etc, is a normal thing to have an argument about, no magic-mind-stick required; the only mileage the movie really gets out of the forced-conflict ploy is that Steve and Tony keep pissing on each other, which is extremely OOC for nice-guy Steve and WOULD throw up a big red flag for mental manipulations if the movie weren’t already misrepresenting him as an insufferable stick in the mud anyway, and even for Tony it feels off - he’s generally a jerk as a rule, but he doesn’t pick unprovoked fights - but again, when the movie is already so left-of-centre on so many characters everyone feels off, so it’s easy to assume the characters are just falling victim to contrived drama, and not something in the actual story. As noted, it doesn’t end up mattering where the conflict comes from anyway; the bad news is, it takes until the halfway point of the Goddamn movie before the characters get their prescribed ‘rough patch’ out of the way. The fact that they were just being really annoying for no real reason and without narrative consequence kinda steps on the idea of it being ‘triumphant’ when they all come together at the end to fight Loki, because there was zero reason for the audience to ever legitimately doubt that it would happen, not even in a begrudging-putting-this-genuine-disagreement-aside-so-that-we-can-save-the-world kind of way. It’s just dead air with no weight behind it, and with characters reduced to such cliche versions of themselves that it’s hard to muster the will to care.

AND SO, we have a movie which, as previously noted, is awfully damn simplistic. That’s not a terrible thing, in and of itself - it’s all about what you do with an idea, and I would posit that a more complicated plot wouldn’t be a great idea here since there are so many primary moving parts in the form of characters to justify. But, the aforementioned griping about the skewy characterisation makes this film a bad candidate for character-over-plot, and if the shenanigans are falling flat, that’s when simplistic plotting becomes a problem. It goes like this: Loki shows up and steals the magic cube (action ensues). The avengers assemble to catch Loki (action ensues). The characters argue on a helicarrier until Loki’s goons show up to wreck shit (action ensues). Loki escapes and goes to New York to use the magic cube to portal an alien army to Earth. Action ensues until the portal is closed and Loki is defeated. The end. I’m not complaining about the action - it’s a standard facet of the genre, and most of it is entertaining enough (though the unnecessary Thor/Iron Man fight I coulda done without, and the battle of New York runs a bit long) - but the plot itself is pretty point-A-to-B-to-C without much in the way of surprises, and like I said, that’s fine so long as you’re delivering in another arena, i.e. STRONG CHARACTER NARRATIVES. And character is sooo far from being this film’s strong suit. The result? Is not very compelling.

It tends to wind up that, by the time I get to the end of explaining why I think a thing didn’t work (and this is...the abridged version), it maybe seems ridiculous that I’m also saying ‘this thing isn’t that bad’. The truth is, there’s nothing that I think this movie does impressively well, and there are a lot of pretty major things that I think were poorly handled. BUT, I still meant what I said: it’s entertaining. It makes at least basic sense, and flows easily enough. And while I have serious issues with a lot of the characterisation and feel that - though balanced(ish) in handling - the plot failed to take real advantage of any of the character resources at its disposal (except maybe Tony), the actors still brought the goods to the table, and those whom I enjoyed in their previous films (I mean you, Chris Evans) didn’t disappoint, even though the material they were handling did. It’s a solid film, it’s good fun, I don’t regret watching it, and while I am irritated by various aspects, I don’t feel the need to keep ranting about them. And hey; Mark Ruffalo is really very wonderful. They’ve got that going for them.

[adapembroke]

This is your brain on Saturn.

If you’ve decided to try out the first sentence of this post, you’ve probably heard of the Saturn Return, the time in your life when all of your friends have become immature assholes, no corner of your apartment is suitable for Instagram, and you can’t stand telling one more customer to wait until the light turns green before inserting their card. 

This post is about that time, but it’s also about other times when Saturn enters your life--when it passes over your Sun, maybe, or calls up Pluto and suggests that breaking up with your SO the day after your mom died is the best thing, really, for making you a functional human being. 

Right now my partner and I are having big Saturn transits. Saturn is currently aspecting my Moon and Pluto (after giving up on my Saturn return... then my Sun... Saturn transits don’t ever actually finish. They just sigh and walk away.), and it’s aspecting my partner’s pretty-much-everything, so I thought it might be a good time to give a glimpse into what a Saturn transit looks from the inside.

How it feeeeeeeels...

It’s Saturday afternoon as I write this. Right now, my partner and I are at a coffeeshop. They are doing the big headphones on the ears while coding thing, and I’m writing this post while thinking that this beepy 80s music sounds about like how my insides feel right now. I am drinking a drink with lots of espresso in it, which is fantastic because I never drink coffee, and I was up at 6 AM after going to bed at 1 AM because I woke up with an idea for a lecture that I just had to make a note about. Two hours and eight sticky notes later, the sticky note pad was empty, so I dragged my ass out of bed, and went to my office to get more sticky notes, intending to go back to sleep when my brain was empty. 

Four hours, 2,369 words, and a Tarot reading for a nice person with an ex who really needs to apologize later, I had a lecture on the Empress Tarot card that I had scheduled myself to start thinking about on Monday. Pleased with my shockingly unexpected productivity, I woke up my partner. 

My partner came out of their room rubbing their eyes while I covered my eggs with Sriracha hoping the pain would turn me into a human, and we did the, “How are you?” thing...after I shoved my laptop in their face and insisted that they See What I Did and listen to a very inspiring slam poem and see this hilarious tumblr meme. (I’m Leo rising, and they have a Leo sun, and we both have Mars in Gemini. This is how we do.)

“I’m depressed,” they said. 

“But you’re depressed all the time lately,” I said. “I know you have a Scorpio moon, but that Leo sun has got to be in there somewhere, doesn’t it?”

(Yes, this is actually how we talk.)

“Well, I’m not really depressed,” they said. “I want to be working on The App. But I’m so tired. I pretty much do nothing else but work on The App and work on work-work, and the sun is out, and I’m afraid that if I don’t get out in the sun, I’m going to be actually depressed, but I can’t think about anything else.”

“Let me see your chart,” I said. They dutifully pulled Astro.com up on their weird not really a phone thing with that sigh particular to people who live with doctors and astrologers, and I looked at it and shook my head and said, “It’s just what I thought. You have Saturn everywhere.” 

“What does this mean?” my partner asked.

“Well,” I said. “Steven Forrest says that when you’re going through a Saturn transit, you have a choice between being depressed and being exhausted.”

“What do you think I should do?” they asked. 

“Well, I’m going through a Saturn transit, too,” I said. “I got five hours of sleep last night, and I have this great idea for a post about Saturn, and I really should do my daily quota of readings. I only did one this morning, and I promised Odin I���d do four readings a day (except when [stuff] because you don’t make a promise to Odin and forget the “except when [stuff]”), and I’ve got this super-long lecture to write on the astrological signs that is getting kind of tedious, so I should probably get on that before I rewrite my syllabus. Again. Do you want to go to a coffeeshop and work?”  

Why the hell would Saturn anyone think this is a good idea?

Saturn is a little bit like that coach who knows exactly what you’re capable of and drives you to ride the limits of your endurance every moment of practice. Saturn is the part of you that says, “Alright. You’ve been saying that you’re going to write an astrology book for six minutes now. It’s about time you got on that. You have five minutes and fifteen seconds to get that done.” 

Other Saturn maxims are...

There is no time but the present, so you’d better do it now.

“Yes” is always the right answer. Until you reach your limit. Then stop.

Death is the final limit. Except you believe in life after death, so there’s no reason to stop now.

You don’t know what you’re capable of until you throw up.

If you were more spiritually evolved, you would be concentrating instead of humming “Beat It” and glaring at the Gemini woman who won’t stop talking about basketball.

Saturn transits are the things you’re really glad you went through in retrospect. Because if you’re thinking about a Saturn transit, it means it’s over now, and you’re sure, if you think about it for a minute, you can think of some kind of pithy cliche about building character. 

Or if you claim to be some kind of evolutionary astrologer, you can point to your chart and say, “Well, until Saturn passed through my House of Home, I moved every sixth months, and since that transit, I’ve finally gotten to the place in my personal evolutionary journey where I have the patience to spend five years with the same squealing ceiling fan in the laundry room whose switch I always bump when I’m carrying a load of laundry.” 

When I’m not going through a Saturn transit myself--I’ve been in a Saturn transit since I started studying astrology-- I expect I will say all of this in a serene astrologer voice that assures you I’ve been there and understand and know that everything is going to be okay. This is what I think because that is the voice every astrologer I’ve ever heard uses whenever they talk about Saturn. Until that happens, I’ll write about Saturn on the internet, and you all can supply the serene astrologer voice for your damned selves.

(Did you know that there are some astrologers who think that it’s totally weird that if you say Saturn really fast it kind of sounds like Satan?)* 

How do you know if you’re having a Saturn transit?

If you are between 27 and 30 years old (or in your 50s or 90s...in which case, I should probably tell you this isn’t Facebook...), you’re almost definitely going through your Saturn return. Some astrologers say that Saturn returns last from 27-35, but that’s cheating.

Another way to tell if you’re having a Saturn transit is find a chart of the moment. (There’s one on the front page of astro.com.) Look for the symbol that looks like a 5 that can’t quite get its shit together in the list and note the number just to the right of it. Then look at your chart and look for any planets that have the same number or +/- about 5. If you do, you’re fucked Saturn has your number I’m sorry.

* You just whispered “Saturn...Satan” in your head, didn’t you?

[pftones3482]

Fun add on to this post:

I used to work for Walgreens. Originally I was hired on part time as a cashier/floor person, but when I graduated school I moved to full time and asked to be trained in the photo department because I thought it sounded interesting.

Now heres the thing: Walgreens USED to have a photo tech position. Maybe some locations still do, but the majority of them have phased out that title. Photo techs were paid about one to two dollars more than the average cashier or floor person, and their ONLY job was to run and stock the photo department (and occasionally ring back up).

Here's a list of things I was trained on that were photo specific requirements for a tech:

Product ordering

Product making, including but not limited to: calendars, photo books, photo cards, canvases, wood panels, posters, ornamental cubes, standard prints, framed canvases (much more difficult than normal canvases), glass framing, the list goes on. Anyone who's worked in framing before can tell you how hard and tedious these tasks are.

Inventory

Cleaning

Stocking photo specific product

Mechanics knowledge, including: knowing how every machine (eight separate ones, at my location, more at others) and how they work, inside and out, paper/ribbon refill, interior cleaning, etc.

Fed Ex drop off and pickup

Passport photos, including how to take them and the specific requirements for different country's passports

Photo editing basics

Send out film and custom ordering

Knowledge on the basic mechanics of every model of phone you could possibly take a photo on, as well as cameras, memory cards, and flash drives.

Ability to run and maintain the photo kiosks provided for customers to use

Money sending service information, like Western Union (and I knew it in both English AND Spanish bc of how many Spanish speakers we had in our town)

There was definitely more, but it's been two wonderful years since I was stuck in that hell, so that's what I can recall. I could still make some of these things in my sleep, that's how often I did them.

Now take that list. That photo tech specific list. That list that I was trained in, to the point where people called me on my days off because I was the only person who knew how to do some of the tasks on that list. That list alone, not during the busiest times of year (Christmas and late spring/summer), is already usually a full days work. Take that list and add:

Ringing out customers

Stocking product across the entire store

Filling the cooler and freezer

Doing price changes

Storewide inventory

Tearing down and hanging new sales tags every week

Cleaning and maintaining the store

Unloading and putting away truck (a backbreaking task that can take multiple days when understaffed)

Covering breaks

Covering pharmacy when they need an extra cashier

Assisting customers

Changing displays (a usually several hour if not multiple day long process)

Covering both front register AND photo when you were super short staffed

Now imagine....you're doing ALL these tasks....you literally have the photo tech title....

But you're getting paid the same as every other cashier. You're getting paid to do three, four times the amount of work of the people who just ring all day (not to say that that's not its own kind of difficult, but that's for another post).

So yeah, no. I worked the jobs of five separate people while I was there, management included half the time. And I got paid entry wages.

Downsizing staff is absolutely killing people, and we need to talk about it more.

I wonder if work just.. got harder in the 2000s, comparatively.

[kayinnasaki]

This was a weird year in gaming for me. I played all of one game released in 2017. The bulk of the year was covered by weird hacks and modded minecraft, as well as the usual slurry of bad games. I don't want to frame this as 'best of list' because while I like... most of these games, it's honestly more 'games I remember playing that I have some thoughts about. Anyways

Stardew Valley

What a lovely game. Due to a lot of Zachtronics stuff and modded Minecraft I got a little bit of a taste for a slower experiences again. The farming was alright, but the characters were super lovely. The game had very simple but effective writing that had me change my choice for Farmer Naomi's wife multiple times. Even the characters on the bottom of my list were great. The only issue I had was... and honestly I didn't notice it much because I wasn't going for that content... that the guys were lame. Shane had a great arc that got me to befriend him, but the rest? eh. Also that super simple fishing game was so fun.

Biggest issue with the game was the lack of an end game. I feel like randomized goals in the style of the carepackages would have been lovely. But on well, you can't play every game forever.

Momodora: Reverie Under The Moonlight

I played this on my flight to Japan since I was going to meat Rdein and the game was on my list for awhile. The level design of it had this lovely Demon's Souls meets Knytt Story feel to it. The map they made for the game was lovely and the world felt tangible and sensible. It had a very Japanese-esque style without being generic anime. It had lovely but simple combat. Just one of those games that's just... simply solid and good? Just a game with a lot of soul.

Getting Over it with Bennett Foddy

Foddy is a cool guy I've gotten to hang with a few times. Just... smart and funny and of course he makes real assholish games. But I found Getting Over It to be the least frustrating. It, more so than QWOP or GIRP became zen like to me. I just let go of any stress immediately. Progress didn't mean anything until the job was done. I didn't get mad or frustrated once. It was all zen. And Foddy talking philosophically about the nature of art and hard games was wonderful and a lot of it really resonated with me. A pleasant experience for a masochist.

Also this is the only game I played this year that game out in 2017. Yikes!

Metroid Rogue Dawn

What a flawed but lovely game. This is a game I wish I could get a physical copy of (it's just a little too expensive). This romhack has a lot of rough edges but truly creates an alien planet. It also looks unlike any NES game. It's gorgeous and just feels.... uncannily out of place, graphics from another time... Because, well, they are. I played this at the beginning of the year so a lot of details are lost on me but it was rad!

Super Metroid Rotated 90 Degrees

It's what it says on the tin. Some parts of the game are tweaked to make it reasonable but for the most part it's for crazy bomb jumping and walljumping nuts like me. It's great to have something familiar yet different, where you can use your knowledge to help you, but it doesn't ever quite help enough. Which also plays into...

A Link to the Past Randomizer

I played a Super Metroid Randomizer and some DS Vania randomizers bu the ATTP randomizer takes the cake. These are addictive.  In Super Metroid, finding a stash of items meant either, depending on difficulty settings, finding a stack of nothing or find a ton of great stuff, ATTP has enough diversity in its chest drops to make every chest feel like the pull of a slot machine. Every little trick gets you a little bit further and nets you a few more pull of the slots.

I even did entrance randomizer once because I hate myself. It was... something to be making diagrams in photoshop to figure out what goes where.

Sylvan Tale

A weird Game Gear Secret of Mana/Zelda clone thing? Certainly the only Game Gear game I have ever beat. Never released in America and oddly charming and good. If this was a GBC game released by Nintendo, it'd be one of those games people say is overrated. It hasn't aged excellently but in its time it was surely wonderful. The game has a neat, curious world with a strange cosmology that, while nothing shocking, is just... nicely thoughtful. It has simple but memorable plot moments. It just plays -nicely-. Not excellently, but definitely nicely. Also you change forms and shit and its kinda annoying but it's one of those weird gems that Sega fanboys would likely clutch close to their heart if it got a US release. But sadly, despite being a SEGA game, it did not.

I replayed Circle of the Moon and Harmony of Despair thinking Circle was the "okay one" and Boy was I wrong!

I didn't remember either of these games being great. In fact, I remembered Harmony of Despair being downright awful and ugly and Circle of the Moon being... odd but playable...

Oh my god Circle of the Moon sucks. I know there was some article claiming it was secretly The Best Portable Castlevania, but it is just... awful. Bland in looks, bland in level design, tedious to transverse. The DSS system is garbage, saved only by the fact that you can use a glitch to use any card combination. Finding them in the wild? Fuck that. You move weird. You jump weird. You're like a slug who can somehow jump 100 feet in the air. There are no items to pick up besides Health and MP ups so there is no real discovery -- just tedious cleanup work to maximize your stats. The only things that don't suck about this game: The monster choices are odd and there are a lot of them. A lot of classic enemies are replaced by oddbalsl like... archer wolves? Sure, okay, that's better than just another skeleton. And some of the bosses are okay? Sometimes? Maybe? Even if Dracula sucks horridly.

Harmony of Despair by contrast was much better than I remember. And by much better it was "Okay". I won't be itching to replay it any time soon and it was a number of steps below Aria of Sorrow but it was.. fine? A little bloated and with a few advancement triggers that defy reasonable design but... it's fine and... looked much better than I remember? Likely because GBA emulators are better about colors/backlight compensation so the game looked much less overblown than I remember. Hell at its best, it looks better than Aria, though Aria is just more consistent. Also it has a weirdass soundtrack. At first I hated it, but over time it oddly grew on me. The sample choices are weird but I guess kinda match the "Dissonance"? But the important is the soundtrack leverages these grainy, awful sounds in awesome ways. It reminds me of the horrible Demon's Souls trumpets. They're so bad. But so good. God I love them. Anyways here have my favorite HoD track.

Devil's Crash

There is something captivating about this stupid pinball game. Naxat has a skill for making games just... feel nice. And they never got to stretch that muscle much but this pinball game from the guys who made Rekka is awesome. It just feels cool, has a lot of energy, lots of little subboards to find. It's impossible to really explain. Just try it. I don't know if, as a kid, I'd be down with paying full price for a single board pinball game but hey it somehow works.

Also known as Dragon's Fury in the US, where it is on the Genesis rather than the PC Engine. Both versions are good. I feel like I slightly prefer the PCE version, but the Genesis version looks and arguably sounds better (which goes against my usual Anti-FM Synth bias). Also the main song is awesome.

Golden Axe Warrior

I can't believe there is a Golden Axe game that is a flat up clone of Zelda 1. Like almost nothing tried to clone Zelda 1. It's like a weird look into an alternative history. It's not particularly -good- but it's educational. Never beat it because my save corrupted but w/e.

This Fucking Thing

My uncle got me this weird crappy handheld thing for Christmas loaded with old NES games that is various minor tweaks of Super Mario Bros, Adventure Island and Contra, a few other random old shitty games and a TON of AWFUL chinese games made in the 2000s. They're awful and awesome. I just load it up sometimes and pick a random game and groan at how bad it is... but a good groan. An oddly... exciting groan.

Modded Minecraft

I played a ton of modded minecraft this year. Too much, really. But the engineering you can do in modded minecraft is just wonderful. It's weird because no other modded game I can think of regularly assembles mods under 'mod packs' (without it being a huge community drama thing). So you get these weird custom play experiences made up of multiple peoples work. The integration a lot of time doesn't make sense but all things considered it works really well. Modded minecraft, with all its pipes and machines isn't even the same game. It feels like a sandbox Zachtronics game or something.

https://www.youtube.com/user/kayinnasaki/videos I've been uploading base tours and stuff so if you wanna get an idea of what I like doing, that'd work. But yeah, it's oddly infection. Sometimes I worry it's slowed down BEP but then when I cut myself off I just refresh reddit for 4 hours, which honestly is a huge downgrade. JUST GOTTA WORK ON MOTIVATION, SEE YA ALL NEXT YEAR.

[duhragonball]

One interesting thing about DBZ is that while it has some very emotional scenes, they're all about relationships a child could understand. Goku's sacrifice is all about father-son, Piccolo's sacrifice is all about a mix of father-son, student-mentor and older brother-younger brother, and Vegeta's sacrifice is of course all about father-son. Which is why it's kinda funny when people point to these scenes as examples of how DBZ was meant for older people than DBS...

I haven’t actually seen anyone try to make that case.   It wouldn’t surprise me, though, since fans always try to suggest that the older material was more mature than the newer stuff.

Way back in 1997, all these old farts on the comics newsgroups would piss and moan about how comics aren’t as good as they used to be.   This is why I’ve been reading old X-Men comics, because I never read them much at the time, but I was genuinely curious to see how the 80′s stuff held up compared to the 90′s stuff.  Turns out, the dinos were exaggerating, at least as far as I can tell.  The Claremont run (1975-1991) was groundbreaking, but it was also wordy and tedious, especially after the dust settled and the “All-New, All-Different X-Men” stopped being new and different.  Whenever a new writer would take over, I found I was always thrown off by how much more human the dialogue sounded.   Louise Simonson made the teenage girls on the New Mutants talk like actual teenage girls.  Scott Lobdell had Iceman tell a joke in one issue, and it was like finding water in a desert.     The 90′s comics have problems of their own, but a lot of the things people whined about on Usenet were things Claremont practically invented: constant plot danglers, excessive angst in place of character development, characters randomly switching allegiances, and everyone being snippy and self-righteous to one another.  The post-Claremont X-Men writers were just taking the ball and running with it.  

None of this surprised me, since I knew the Usenet dinos were full of it all along.   Because I was reading Superman comics in the 90′s, and so whenever they’d complain about Superman I’d know if they had a legitimate beef.  This one time someone waxed nostalgic for the days when Superman used to use his head and think out a problem instead of just relying on brute force.   And I pointed out that he just did that in Adventures of Superman #554.  In that issue, Superman was trying to stop this sewer-dwelling monster called “Ripper”, because the monster would sign its name whenever it killed people.   By the end of the story, Superman deduced that the creature was actually trying to communicate.   What everyone thought was the word “Ripper” was actually a pictogram that everyone had tragically misinterpreted.   And the guy I told this to was like “Oh, sorry, I misspoke.”   

That issue has stuck with me for a long time, and I’ve tried to be mindful of that lesson as I’ve gotten older.   Because these days I don’t know what the hell is going on in Superman comics.   I dropped them in 2009 because of a terrible storyline where Superman stopped appearing in most of his books, and then when he came back I realized that I wasn’t nearly interested enough to dive back in.  The reality was that I lost interest in Superman some time around 2004, but I just kept buying all his comics out of intertia.   So my knowledge of Superman continuity is about 14-years behind.    What this means is that I have no business lecturing any current Superman readers about what’s wrong with the books they’re reading.   I wish Superman would read the red underwear again, but it’d be foolish of me to say “Well, Superman should have the Fortress of Solitude in Antarctica like he used to.”  Because for all I know the modern comics have put it back there already.  And even if it’s someplace else, how do I know that isn’t better?  If the current audience likes it, and I don’t keep up with it, what does it matter if I approve or not? 

That’s the bullshit older people like to peddle.  It’s just egocentrism disguised as “elderly wisdom” or “tradition”.   The only reason I liked the Fortress of Solitude in Antarctica is because I think Antarctica is cooler than the Arctic Ocean.    The Fortress used to be at the North Pole, which always bugged me because the South Pole has a continent underneath it.  Also, Antarctica is much colder and more remote, so it just makes more sense to me as a place for Superman to go when he wants to be alone.   But it’s purely a matter of opinion, and there’s no factual basis for one location being better than the other.  For a while, Superman had his Fortress inside a tessarect, like Doctor Who’s police box, so he could literally put it anywhere he liked.  For a while he had it stowed in the globe on top of the Daily Planet building.   

Now, I could try to suggest that’s a more “adult” way to approach the lore, but it’s not.   A tessarect is just as immature as Superman living next door to Santa Claus.   But I could try to play the age card and say “Well, I’m a mature adult, so if I think this then it must be the more mature approach.”  That’s crap, because in the 1940′s Superman didn’t even have a Fortress of Solitude.  If the oldest solutions are best, the whole idea of a Fortress is dumb.  The whole idea of Superman is dumb, since in the 1920′s he didn’t even exist.   By this line of reasoning we should be talking about the Rover Boys instead.  But when old people try to play that game, they’re not thinking about things older than their own experience.   They’re just trying to put their own experiences on a moral high ground. 

I think there’s a similar thing playing out with Dragon Ball this decade.  DBS is hit or miss, and fans are struggling to accept that their faves aren’t always going to be presented in the best manner possible.   I suppose I have seen people argue that DBS is nothing more than a cash-grab, a way for Toei to sell merchandise and toys, which would suggest that DBS is written in an overly childish way to appeal to the most impressionable demographics.  But that ignores the fact that the original Dragon Ball was a for-profit enterprise.    It’s not like Akira Toriyama was solely concerned with quality storytelling.   He was trying to sell comics to make a living, and a lot of what he did was designed to cater to his audience, just as DBS is trying to do now. 

It does sort of amuse me to think that DBZ is the more mature show, after years of hearing people complain that it’s too goofy or brainless.    Is it better than Dragon Ball Super?   Yeah, easily.  But it’s silly to try to reduce that comparison to a quick soundbyte.   The worst parts of Dragon Ball Super were boring, or had low production values, or the story just didn’t make a lot of sense.  Call it out for what it is.  Don’t try to turn it into some grand generalization about how they jest don’t make annie-may’s like they used ta. 

But a lot of people just can’t handle that concept.    I remember this conversation at work years ago when Harry Potter-mania was at its height, about reactionaries who thought the HP books promoted occult practices.  And I’m like, why can’t people just complain that they’re really badly written?  Not everything has to be about the corruption of the youth, or the decline of civilization.    Sometimes a piece of art is just a stinker, and nothing else needs to be said. 

[killscreencinema]

Super Mario Sunshine (Gamecube)

I didn’t realize, until the release of Super Mario 3D All-Stars, just how neglected Super Mario Sunshine was.  I remember when it came out in 2002, it didn’t exactly make a “splash” (pun wildly intended).  One of my most vivid memories is watching wrestling on TV at the student university center at my college (because our dorm rooms didn’t get the channel), and when the Mario Sunshine commercial came on, one of the other spectators going, “God, that looks so gay...”. 

It was a different time, kids. 

...but he wasn’t necessarily wrong.  I don’t think the commercial did any favors towards properly marketing the game.  First of all, it made it seem as if the entire game is just Mario cleaning sludge, which to be fair, seems lame.  However, that is only a very small fraction of the game, and even then, it’s rarely if ever the objective of the level (except maybe once).  Secondly, this was in a time when games like Halo and Grand Theft Auto were in their PRIME and there was a certain, snooty hostility gamers had towards Nintendo for being too juvenile for their developing tastes.  I mean, that attitude still exists today, practically any time Nintendo releases a new console, but still it was much more rabid and mean back in 2002.  Back then, Nintendo had made a crucial misfire sticking to cartridge based games with the N64, so when the Gamecube came out, while PS2 and XBox held a solid grip on the market, they seemed tragically late to the dance.  They seemed like “The Dud” card in that dating game from The Simpsons:

As it turned out, the Gamecube was a damn good console with an interesting library of games still worth checking out today - including Super Mario Sunshine, which I would argue is in many ways superior to Super Mario 64.  Obviously it’s graphically superior, but it also has much tighter controls, and an infinitely better camera.  All that is technical stuff that kind of goes without saying though.  Gameplay wise, well...

...I may have to give that up to Mario 64, but not by a landslide.  Mario 64 has way better level variety and a pretty solid, simple gameplay loop that makes it easier to replay.  The levels on Mario Sunshine, on the other hand, can be pretty homogeneous.  You like tropical themed stages?  Well, Sunshine’s got you covered and then some!  As far as replayability is concerned, though, Sunshine’s difficulty is such that replaying it isn’t as fun or fulfilling as Mario 64.  It’s just sorta... annoying. 

The game begins with Mario and company arriving on the beautiful Isle Delfino for a vacation, but upon arrival Mario is immediately arrested for smuggling cocaine.  No, just kidding, he’s arrested because a shadowy doppleganger has been vandalizing the island with mysterious, toxic sludge.  As part of Mario’s sentence, he is given a water shooting device called FLUDD and tasks with not only cleaning up the mess but finding the mystical Shine Sprites, which have been stolen by Shadow Mario, consequently causing the sun to dim.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s fun to be had with this game, and if you play it straight through without collecting all 120 Shines, then it might be even more fun.  However, completionists will have their hands full with this game, tackling some of the more difficult challenges and completing some of the more irritating fetch quests, such as finding all the blue coins in each level (Noki Bay being the absolute WORST).  Then there’s finding the “Secret Shines”, which aren’t very intuitive unless you have a walkthrough handy.  As of right now I’m at 108 Shines in my attempt to complete the game, putting off the dreaded bonus level where you first have to LABORIOUSLY take Yoshi on a series of ferry boats to a remote island off the coast of Delfino (the hub world of this game), being careful not to fall into the water or Yoshi disintegrates.  Once reaching the island, you have to use Yoshi’s ability to puke juice (that’s a thing) to melt the barrier on a green pipe that leads to the actual bonus level.  If you get a game over in the process of trying to beat the bonus level (and you will), look forward to doing that entire process AGAIN before you get another shot.  Oh, and the bonus level involves using FLUDD to carefully direct a leaf over rapids, which kill you immediately should you fall in (and you will), so you can collect red coins to make a Shine sprite appear at the end.  It’s extremely difficult to navigate the leaf and an absolute chore to complete (hell, it’s a chore just to access the goddamn level). 

Sorry, had to vent.

Anyway, the FLUDD gets a lot of shit, but I actually rather enjoyed it.  The hover ability makes it so much easier to jump with better precision platform-to-platform.  I mean, yeah, it’s basically a Super Soaker in backpack form, and an excuse for Nintendo to demo the Gamecube’s graphical power (look at all that pretty water - oohhhhh), but its absence is felt during the bonus levels where you have to platform without it. 

While Super Mario Sunshine is at times ridiculously hard or tedious to the point of being a micro aggression, it’s still a solid 3D Mario game and deserving of the second chance (or, for many, FIRST chance) that it’s getting due to being in Super Mario 3D All-Stars. 

[terselylove]

35 Mistakes You Will Regret Making Today, Tomorrow, And The Next Day

1. Take your days off, take your sick leave, and most of all save up money and take your vacations. Companies want you to think you are invaluable to them but in the end they will let you go and forget you as soon as you are gone.

2. Keep a close eye on your relationship with substances. Many of you will have serious problems with them and won’t realize until you’re in very deep.

3. Always watch how your love interest treats other people. The day will inevitably come when that person will treat you the same way.

4. Don’t waste time being “anti.” I spent a lot of time in high school looking down on people’s choices of music, movies, hobbies, friends, etc. I said things like, “They only like it because it’s popular. This thing I’M into is clearly better.”

I was a bit of a dick and later I realized it’s ok to let people enjoy things that I don’t. I wasted a lot of opportunities to learn new things and make new friends because of that attitude and I regret it a lot.

5. Avoid staying in a job where you’re totally bored or hate facing it every day.

Some people stick with it endlessly because “it takes too much effort to find something new” (or because they believe an alternative will probably be no better in the long run than where they are).

6. Take risks young, before you have kids, because then you are taking a risk on your family too. Plus risks are super fun and empowering when all the consequence is on you! After kids then the exhilaration becomes guilt. Not as enjoyable.

7. Triple redundancy… back up ALL your photos, videos etc, I lost about a year of photos which included a couple of big life events, mostly I backed up but got sloppy.

Cloud storage is very cheap but don’t rely on just that, put it on a hard drive as well and a few other places.

Also for those who are a little older check all those old DVD/CDs you burnt as they’re degrading and data is being lost.

8. Don’t date someone because you are lonely. Date someone because you see a future with them.

9. Not forgiving my best friend for something really minor. I stopped talking to her, even though she apologized a million times. Now, I don’t even know where she is anymore. She was a really good friend, and I was an asshole.

10. Don’t eat out of boredom or to make yourself feel better when you’re down. A slice or two of pizza on occasion is OK; a whole pizza, not so much. Also, go easy on the sugary drinks and alcohol.

11. Not breaking up with a guy immediately after he hits you for the first time. I’m sorry doesn’t press the reset button.

12. Do not lie to your S/O. They’re supposed to be your best friend. If you lie, trust will break down, the relationship will start to suck, and then you will end it due to their seemingly unwarranted paranoia, or they will end it because they cannot trust you.

13. Don’t self harm, or do drugs. If you have a crush and it’s obvious they don’t like you back, get over it. If you think you or a friend may have depression or any other mental disorders, please get help. If you’re thinking about suicide, DO. NOT. DO. IT.

14. Marriage and children are not for everyone. It’s bliss for some people. It’s absolute carnage for others.

One glove does not fit everyone. If you are happy and content being with yourself. Accept it, enjoy it. Don’t let the world let you take on a responsibility that has no expiration date.

15. When you get cheated on, don’t try to fix it and give a person another chance, just leave. It will hurt and it may seem that what i am saying is pointless but you will thank me soon and also after you get cheated on. Work on yourself first before looking for another one because if you rush it you are more likely to fail.

16. Not putting effort and the focus that was required for school. Yes, I’ve ended up doing extremely well for myself within a few years after high school. But I sure as hell wish I actually paid attention. I thought it was cool and fun to just hangout with a bunch of losers who would smoke weed all day and accomplish nothing. Late into senior year is when I made the change, although late on the school part. I began finding new people that were purely dedicated. It rubbed off on me, and now I can say that I’m glad I had a moment of true realization.

17. Love is a two way street. Not realizing that lead to many, many relationships that should have ended but didn’t because of the fear of being alone. On a related note, the fear of being alone is both real and powerful.

18. Don’t marry the wrong person. And don’t marry the wrong person’s family. That’s right, when you marry someone, you also marry their family. When I married, we lived hundreds of miles from her family, so I didn’t know them well. Things changed, and we were living within 5 miles of her family. Disaster struck.

19. Don’t show loyalty where it isn’t deserved, that applies to people, brands, companies you work for.

20. Don’t put too much thought into what people think about you. Just be a good person and have good intentions and realize that you can’t please everyone.

21. Don’t associate with those that don’t have your best interests at heart when it matters.

That usually becomes quite evident when you do something that they don’t like, they start to pick holes with everything to try and manipulate you back, or they just generally aren’t there when you need help.

22. Learn to communicate effectively. Seriously. You’ll lose good people from your life if you can’t do it right, so learn.

23. Credit cards are not free money. You may need one to build credit but be careful how much you use it, and pay it off every month. It’s so easy to charge “just this one little thing” over and over until the card is maxed out.

24. Take care of what you have before it becomes what you had.

25. Working in a family-owned business (as an outsider) can go really fucking south. You will get the silent treatment, in the worst-case scenario I’ve experienced. There will be loads of clique behavior and just the general vibe of “if we weren’t shorthanded, we’d have kept it in the family”. In general, there will always be underlying tension and loads of unprofessional behavior. I’m personally never doing it again, if I can help it.

26. Brushing your teeth might seem minor but if you don’t holy shit its finna come hit like a truck. And also makes finding a soulmate a whole lot easier.

27. If your grandparents/older relatives are alive and well, spend some time with them, call them to say hi, just check in with them. When they are gone you’re going to be the one left with regret, not them.

28. If the group of people you’re hanging around at school (or elsewhere) always make fun of you in a “joking” way, stop hanging out with them. If everybody gets their share, then it’s alright but if you’re the butt of every joke then it’s not really friendship. You’re just a lightning conductor for all their insecurities. Have some self-respect.

29. If you are pregnant and think something is wrong, please, please, PLEASE find a doctor who will listen. My last pregnancy, I was in excruciating pain, losing weight and wasn’t hungry. My OBs brushed off my concerns, just saying every pregnancy is different. I was in the ER twice with upper abdominal pain. Neither time did they check my son. I had undiagnosed HELLP Syndrome. Because the doctors wouldn’t listen, my son died. You know your body. Don’t let doctors ignore you.

30. Read your insurance policies. Know what’s in there and if you have enough or too much coverage.

31. If things come easy to you and you can pass all your classes in high school on tests alone, don’t. Do the homework, even if it’s just tedious busywork. Keep all your handouts organized and neat. Do projects and papers step by step. Once you hit college (especially in upper level stem classes) you’ll regret not having made those habits earlier. High school isn’t about learning material as much as it is teaching you HOW to learn material.

32. For the love of everything that is good, don’t ever take up smoking. Doesn’t matter how good that nicotine rush feels, sooner or later you’ll end up regretting it, and quitting is… well, a bitch.

33. Don’t ever think you still have some “fun time” left and avoid your responsibilities. It’s a slippery slope.

Like, it starts by thinking “oh, I got a few more hours before I have to worry about that report” and gradually turns into “I’m only 21, what’s the deal if I need one more semester to finish school?”. And then you wake up one day and realize you’re 24, all your friends have graduated and you’re still jerking off.

34. When picking a career it’s best to focus on what you’re actually good at than something that just sounds more interesting. Regrets have been made.

35. Follow your intuition. We are animals that have been taught to ignore our instincts. Following my instincts has save my life before.

[lunakinesis]

All of the Howarts Asks. I want to know everything.

Let's talk about life as a student in Hogwarts.

Under a read more for the length omg 

1. What house will you be in?

Slytherin! (Which is my actual House, going by my Pottermore sorting.)

2. If the sorting hat was on you and it said you'd be great in a house you didn't consider before, will you follow his advice or choose what house you want?

Eh, maybe? Would depend on the reasoning and how convincing it was. But I’d probably go with my gut, whatever felt right above all else.

3. What kind of animal would you bring to school?

A dog or a bat. Listen, if Ron gets to bring a rat (which weren’t one o the three ‘allowed’ animals), I’m bringing a doggo (or yeah, a bat.)

4. If you were in class, where would you normally sit?

As close to the back as I could get lmao.

5. What do you think you'll be doing right now?

Either sleeping or in Astronomy class.

6. What's the core of your wand?

According to Pottermore, it’s a phoenix tail feather :3 

7. Do you think you'll be part of the quidditch team?

Hell nah, I’d rather not all several hundred feat from a broom in the name of entertainment. 

8. Will you be part of any organization???

Maybe??? I’m a shy bean so it takes a lot to convince to join up to stuff.

9. Will you go home during holidays?

Probably, yeah. When I could, anyway.

10. Do you think you'll have friends from other houses?

I’d certainly hope so. 

11. What will you pack for school?

All the stfuf listed as needed or the year alongside personal effects and a bloody pen set. I’m not using a quill to write everything lmao. 

12. How about when going home for holidays, what will you bring home?

Casual clothes, any work I have to do, any photos I’d brought with me ect.

13. Would you consider studying in another wizarding school?

Maybe? Not going to lie, Beuxbatons is tempting because the place itself just seems so pretty and their uniforms are cute af.

14. Do you think you'll be a prefect or head girl/boy?

Not a chance. 

15. Are you going to be a pure-blood or half-blood or muggle-born?

Honestly, probably muggle-born but maybe half-blood? Like, I can believe my granny was a witch, that’s for sure. 

16. Will you be related to any wizarding family?

Well, even if I was muggle-born I’d be distantly (like, super distantly) related to some family given muggle-borns come from wizarding squibs. 

17. Will you be a student who gets into trouble a lot?

Not really. I’d probably just be a frustration because o my terrible memory and procrastination. 

18. Do you think you'll get a lot of detention? For what reason/s?

If it’s for anything it’ll be for not doing homework. 

19. On hogsmeade visits, what shops will you go to?

You could not get me out of Honeydukes.

20. Will you be supportive of your house's quidditch team?

Maybe? Honestly I’d probably just use Quidditch matches as an excuse to stay in bed or get some privacy in my room. 

21. Will you read Hogwarts: A History?

Yeah! I love history in general so you can bet your butt I’m going to read about a segment of magical history. 

22. Do you think you'll get a lot of letters from home? How frequent do you think you'll get them?

Probably not, I’d imagine one a month, if that. My granddad would probably try to text lmao.

23. Will you subscribe to the daily prophet or the quibbler or other wizarding world media?

Eh, probably not but I’d read them if they were lying around. 

24. Which part of the castle will be your favorite?

Honestly it would probably be Hagrid’s hut, not the castle proper. 

25. When sleeping in your dormitory, will your four-poster bed's curtains be drawn or closed?

Closed, give me my little cube of privacy. 

26. If the team your house played against wins, do you think you'll be bitter towards the other team after the game?

Nah, it’s just a game and I don’t care about sports all that much, magical or not. 

27. Do you think you'll be a fan of wizard music?

I have a really wide music taste so there would probably be some of it I enjoyed.

28. Will you be curious enough to try and explore the whole castle, even if you know you can get in trouble for visiting some parts of it?

I’d try but knowing my luck I’d end up getting lost.

29. How frequent will your visits to the library be?

At least once a week. 

30. If someone was to form an organization similar to dumbledore's army, will you join?

Maybe? It would depend on why they’d formed it and if I was invited.

31. If you were to get detention, what task would you prefer? Would you want to scrub cauldrons or clean trophies or sort through unlabeled books or…?

Sort through the books, it might be tedious but it’s not all that difficult.

32. On your o.w.l.s, what subject/s will you get an O in? Which ones do you think you’ll get a T on?

O in: Care of Magical Creatures, Astronomy and Herbology

T in: Transfiguration & Arithmancy

33. How about in your n.e.w.t.s?

Same as above lmao. I’d also probably be really terrible at apparating. 

34. If you were a pure-blood, would you take interest in reading muggle literature?

Definitely! Books are books and I’d still want to read pretty much any I could get my hands on.

35. At what time do you think you'll go to bed on weekdays?

Honestly it would probably be like how it is now: Whenever my body just crashes like ‘time to sleep’.

36. Would you prefer firewhiskey over butterbeer?

Nah, give me all the butterbeer.

37. What wizard snack would be your favorite? Or which one would you like to try?

Probably pumpkin pasties or the Slytherin cake (the one from the 1994 welcome east)

38. Will you collect chocolate frog cards?

I love to collect things and I’m already hoarding Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, Top Trumps and amiibo cards so why not add some more to the list?

39. Will you keep track of which flavor of beans you already tried?

Yeah so I know which colours to avoid in the future. 

40. What quidditch team (excluding hogwarts houses) will you support?

Honestly? None. I honestly wouldn’t care about quidditch.

41. What classes will you take for n.e.w.t.s?

Care of Magical Creatures, Astronomy, Defence Against the Dark Arts, Herbology, Charms & maybe History of Magic or Alchemy. 

42. What will your boggart be?

Probably my dad’s corpse ahahaha

43. Will you stay in the hog’s head or the three broomsticks?

The Three Broomsticks maybe?

44. If you are of age, will you try to enter the triwizard tournament if they ever host one again?

No way, I would honestly probably die. 

45. What do you think happens during graduation?

Given it’s Hogwarts, I’d say ‘expect the unexpected’ because some crazy shit probably happens.

46. Will you see the thestrals carrying the carriages?

Yup. 

47. If you were invited to join the slug club, will you accept the invitation?

Maybe??? Yeah... I guess??

48. Will you consider becoming a professor in hogwarts after school?

Honestly I’d just wanna teach Care o Magical Creatures so either I’m helping Hagrid or taking over from him when he passes or retires. 

49. What would your patronus be?

It’s a Brown Hare (According to Pottermore) but ailing that, probably a sparrow. 

50. What memory will you think of when making a patronus?

That time me and my parents went to Disneyland (Paris) and I got to eat a giant, hot Belgian wadfle that was swimming in chocolate and my poor dad ad to scrub my ace clean before we rode one of the rollercoasters so many times I nearly threw up lmao. Despite how it sounds, it’s a really fond memory of mine. 

51. What year are you suppose to be in right now?

Well I’m 22 so I would’ve graduated by now. 

[cyanpeacock]

It’s a day where I’m less pissed at my mother but like, you know. I’m still fucking fuming, just more quietly. I’m still like, oh, yeup, that was abuse. Just... different, because the Pure Unbridled Rage isn’t as close to the surface today. 

I owe her some credit on here, because Recent Posts re: my mum have been me pure going off, but I really am that mad, just, trying to work through that shit so I can try and reach a point of reconciliation within myself. That would be nice, if such a thing is possible.

So yeah: she really did try, bizarrely, infuriatingly.

It’s part of why I’m so goddamn angry, because on some level I knew that, but I was still being harmed in ways she could never help me with (because she was dealing the damage), and there’s that bastard part of me that says “stop whinging! just be grateful for what you have!” as soon as I acknowledge she really did try, and I know that’s her words, and I also know that’s one of the Dubious But Erring On The Side Of Unhealthy Things she gave me, so, yeah, case in point.

Me rephrasing that for myself: I can whinge as much as I goddamn like, so long as I take my surroundings into consideration. I am grateful for what I have, despite it having been implied that I’m not. I find there’s still always something there/missing to complain about. I’m grateful for the space to complain/express emotional pain. Let me moan and gripe and bitch. I’m still frightened somebody is going to take that avenue of expression away from me, man. Let me have this. 

But yes. Credit where credit is due. Like, nothing was ever stable, or predictable, and she couldn’t console me on matters of importance for shit after the whole, you know, forming an insecure-avoidant attachment with her infant thing, but at least there are some memories of happier summer days in the back garden, and baking random shit in the kitchen with her. I value those.

Although, I then think about it too hard, as I can’t stop myself from doing, and it hurts again, because I never really got to be a little boy. I was, obviously. But everyone saw a little girl. That’s a whole thing, huh.

It’s confusing as hell, because the source of so much pain is also the source of some perfectly innocent and gentle love. She tried to erase/deny/minimize the fact that she did cause me pain, largely emotional, but also physical, but that doesn’t just leave the lovey bits. If only it did. Instead, you get dissociation and confusion and this horrible sense that nothing you ever remembered happening was ever real. 

I don’t know. 

I’m going through it because it’s part of my figuring-out-my-next-step process. It’s tedious. It’s the best, and quickest(!), way I have of doing things right now. Unfortunate. Necessary. 

Argh, fucker. I will see her again, at some point, I’m just reverting like hell to my shitty avoidance mechanisms, especially when my feelings get super intense. 

I don’t know what conversations will be had, but I’ve been feeling in need of a heart-to-heart with her, the uncomfortable kind that’s unpleasantly-pleasantly-weirdly cathartic. I don’t know. It may or may not happen, that’s the problem, and the good thing. Arghjhdgdfhakjbhdfjdknkjsnfkjndkjfnkdjsfnkjdgnkkkkk.

Then, there’s the other part of me that wants, like, A Long Silence, again, but if it comes to that I’d prefer it was mutually discussed and agreed upon first. It’s very complicated and painful and there’s no Right Answer. There’s no revision guide for this shit. I don’t know what to do. 

Oh. I have to put the goddamn SIM card in my phone and... communicate?

I need, like, help with that. Support yk. Somebody there so I don’t literally hurl the damn thing or myself out of a window or break something else trying to avoid that eventuality.

UGH yeah fucking. emotions. bastard things. can’t run away from them. can’t fight them. can’t hold them still. can’t Love Them All. i mean, you can, but not for long. 

ok. ok. ok.  Ok. 

YEah. yep. I’m a brainsmart man who is heartstupid and trying his goddamn hardest. I’ve reached a point of “OK this helped” w/ this post so. yea. Alright. I Don’t Like It But. Alright

[yelloskello]

so. I bought Fallout 76 on launch. I also have been keeping up with the shit about it every single day. Here are my thoughts on absolutely everything:

1: In terms of gameplay, FO76 isn’t bad.

I’m one of the lucky people who actually haven’t experienced much in the way of bugs. That isn’t to say I haven’t experienced any, but at no point have they been so bad that the game has literally been unplayable for me. Beyond that, with the patches that Bethesda is actively dropping like every week, i’m hopeful that these bugs will actually be fixed pretty quickly. It’s an optimistic view, but right now it’s looking good, and i’m sticking with that. I cannot speak for the people who *have* been experiencing such huge bugs that they can’t play, but i’m hoping that within the next few months, it’ll be fixed.

Outside of bugs, there are definitely some issues just in terms of gameplay and UI that make it... Frustrating, but once again, i’m hopeful that Bethesda is actively going to be tweaking this and making it better. They’re already adding new features to make base-building less annoying, increasing the stash size, etc. So long as they keep up with that, I can live with some features being mildly frustrating for now.

All this being said: this shit should’ve been fixed before launch. I’ve been saying since the moment they announced the release date that the beta was mindbogglingly short, why would they run such a short beta, and... I stand by that, because i feel like what we’re experiencing now is what the beta should’ve been. I’m a chill person. I’m okay with shit getting fixed as I play it. I don’t mind. But objectively, what they’ve done is a poorly thought out and outright bad business practice. I do not blame people for not supporting that.

But anyways. Gameplay.

In terms of what the game is actually supposed to BE... I think it’s fine. If you want to play a lite survival game where you explore a super cool setting and build a neat house for yourself, with the occasional bit of storytelling, it’s good. If you wanna be a bog witch with electric powers and talons who goes on long walks to collect wood to sell to the local robot vendors, play a post-apocalyptic slice-of-life game, it’s good. If you wanna live out the life of Jeff Goldblum, Post-Apocalypse, it’s good. If you are playing this game because you wanna play a fallout game, you’re gonna be disappointed, but that’s just... Expectations. It’s taking a sip of water and expecting it to be coke - of course it’s gonna taste like the worst coke you’ve ever had, it’s water. If you know what you’re getting into, the game is totally fine for what it is. Multiplayer hasn’t been an issue. I’m one’a the people who wasn’t at all stoked for the idea of multiplayer, and i’m still not, but honestly this multiplayer is so unobtrusive that I don’t mind it. I RARELY see other people, and when I do, it’s usually just quickly running by each other. I’ve only been griefed by someone once - and getting away from a griefer is as easy as logging out and popping onto a different server, never to see them again. On the other side of the coin, if you’re a person who *does* like multiplayer, hilariously, the game currently isn’t great for it - mostly because quests don’t sync up with your party, so one person completing a part doesn’t complete it for everybody in the group. I can’t imagine this is a feature that will be around too long. Nukes aren’t an issue either. If a spot’s getting nuked, the game tells you, and you have 2 minutes to get outta dodge. If you have your house built on a spot to be nuked, once again, all you gotta do is log out and back in and, boom, on a different server, no longer getting nuked. That also fixes the issue of if you have to do some quests somewhere that’s been nuked - can just go to a different server. Surprisingly, I also don’t mind the lack of human NPCs either, and actually feel like the utter, destitute loneliness of the game fits fallout’s setting well. It’s different - again, if you’re going into this wanting the storytelling of 3, NV, and 4, you’re SOL - but it’s a new aesthetic that still kinda works. ...Even so, if Bethesda decided to retcon the no-human-NPC’s and pop them into the world, I wouldn’t complain either. The perk card system is actually really cool and lets you be successful at the game in a myriad of different ways - and the fact that they’re letting you respec your SPECIAL points in the near future is awesome. The survival mechanics are neither too difficult or so simple they’re just tedious. Even though there are no human NPCs, there’s still a number of very charming robot NPCs and really interesting quests. (That being said, the ‘main’ questline is pretty weak.) And the world is just... Cool. It’s probably cooler than any fallout game i’ve played before. They just included a lot of really cool places. A few days ago, I described the experience to my sister, and she said ‘so it’s like subnautica’. I haven’t played subnautica, but I guess? Like a currently unrefined subnautica that, with any luck, will get refined. So if you like subnautica, you’ll probably like this. But I haven’t seen mothman yet, and i’m very unhappy about that. 2: Bethesda PR what the FUCK are you doing This shit is an absolute clowncar shitwreck and I literally just google ‘fallout 76′ every day to see what the hell they fucked up today. Offering 500 atoms as compensation for the dropped price difference + the nylon bag is downright insulting. Like, offering in-game currency alone is insulting, but if you’re gonna do that, do something more than the equivalent of five dollars, what the fuck.  Whoever the hell they got handling Customer Service needs to... Not. I have literally never seen customer service handled so badly for a videogame.

They need to be WAY MORE TRANSPARENT with a LOT of their policies and changes. Before I bought the game, I dug my way through their refund policy just in case, and came out with only a vague guess that if I bought the game and actually played it I wouldn’t be eligible for a refund. While they sort of touch on digital purchases/digital codes, it was not stated nearly as clearly as it should’ve been. Talk to me like i’m FIVE, Bethesda. C’mon. Obviously the changing of the bag is a huge fuckup too, they need to communicate or plan shit better. Like. Watching them stumble over themselves feels like this is babby’s first venture into actually communicating with their audience, which I guess? It kind of is? Which is embarrassing when they’ve been making games for how long, again? Maybe stop relying on your fanbase to fix all your problems, Bethesda. I think the lawsuit shit isn’t going to actually have anything come of it and it’s being blown out of proportion. I think the ‘cardboard card in the physical PC case’ is also being blown out of proportion - PC games have been doing this for a while, and as my friend pointed out, lots of computers don’t even have CD drives anymore, and console versions are indeed getting actual CDs. For every person who has been denied a refund, there’s another who said they got their refund just fine, it’s just that the people getting denied are going viral and shit’s getting worded like absolutely nobody’s getting their refund. That doesn’t mean this is being handled well - there’s a LOT more to say on how Bethesda’s fucked up their policy and the intricacies of how this shit works - but it’s not going as a lot of people are painting it. Basically, holy shit, get your shit together Bethesda. - Basically that’s what I got at this current moment in terms of thoughts: Bethesda’s fucking up bigtime at PR, the game is a mess but is fixable and otherwise is fine for what it is so long as you know what you’re getting going in. I don’t blame people for vehemently being against it and fighting Bethesda’s bullshit, and I don’t blame people for enjoying it.

[someonetotaketheedgeoff-blog]

22.08.2017 – Journal; Don’t Fuck Where You Eat, Work, Tasmania & Friday Night Open Mics

Don’t Fuck Where You Eat

Like life relationships become stale. You run out of motivation to push forward. Everything becomes boring. You suck each other dry. Maybe you only have so much ‘intimate’ love. You eventually annoy each other.

We love our parents and siblings but fuck they can annoy you. I think it’s hard to live with anyone unless you can fuck them to relieve the tension of living together - it’s why it sucks to live with your parents.

I lay under the table. She lay next to me. The laptop on the table playing music. I lay awkwardly, back to the couch. Bit of crying, bit of talking. Playing the same song over and over. Being sad and stoned is weird. Like being sad in slow motion. You think of drugs as a short cut to happiness but then when something jarringly sad happens during the high it amplifies the pain.

‘Please don’t kiss or fuck my best friend/roommate now we aren’t together’. I said.

‘…We… We… don’t do that much anymore… we don’t do that much anyway…’. She said.

Bad answer. Bad opener. Bad closer.

It’s just courteous - don’t fuck where you eat.

I joked that I could trade rooms with my roommate/best friend and we’ll go about life like nothing happened. Then I joked that I’ll just kill myself and he can move in to make things less awkward.

All of this is better I think. I can be a much better friend to her than a lover. Sexually I’m so fucked up and haven’t wanted to fuck her for ages anyway. Which depresses the fuck out of me because she’s very beautiful.

Maybe we spent too much time together.

After 6 months of fucking and spending time together secretly, then agreeing to be together we’ve spent nearly every day together for the last 3.5 years. Days and nights. Mostly it’s been great. Never really had a fight - argued of course. Never any intense disagreements.

After the break up I decided to have a short break from stand up – it wasn’t 100% because I was sad. I just didn’t have any jokes about the break up. Didn’t do stand up for about 3 weeks. In that time, I could feel myself becoming more and more full of shit. Saying things that I didn’t fully agree with and feeling fraudulent - you need stand up to kick you in your teeth.

Most people’s lives, mine included, are about avoiding failure. Trying to build a comfortable space for yourself. Stand up, if you’re trying, you’ll fail at it. You’ll eat shit and bomb but that’s a good thing. I learn more and more that you should shower yourself in failure. Find new ways to fail. Find innovative ways to get crushed, let days pass, have a wank in the shower and get back out there. The less bombing hurts you the better you’ll be. Just get back on that horse. That dead fucking horse. Stand up - the most brutal of the arts; sky diving for theatre kids and painters.

I went busking a few times when I was 16 at Salamanca market in Hobart. A great market, mostly for tourists on Saturdays. My parents were overly supportive, buying me a camping stool to sit on while I played guitar and my mum telling everyone she knew that I was busking.

It was before I sang. So, I just played guitar. I played Jazz standards on a steel string with no amplification. No one’d really be able to hear me over the noise of the market. I was super nervous and would play for only 40 minutes, making measly change.

I remember going once. I’d sat down after moving to a new area thinking it’d be more lucrative. I played for 5 minutes and my entire family turned up, their faces irritatingly beaming. As they walked closer and leaned over the guitar case I watched their faces lose their excitement as they all looked at one singular $2 coin.

My dad said something to the effect of – ‘Is that all you’ve made?’.

It paints a perfect picture of the arts. We all do it - when we walk past a busker. You try not to let them see as they play their shit cover of Wonderwall but you’re looking at their guitar case – your looking to see their worth.

When you talk about doing stand-up people ask if you make money. It doesn’t annoy me but when you say you don’t they look at you slightly less enthusiastically - it’s annoying.

I see it the same as studying. It takes years to become a practising lawyer but no one’s ever going to ask if you get paid while you’re studying to be one. It’s ridiculous to think anyone would make money out of an unconventional skill off the bat but I guess it’s how the world sees shit.

***

Walking through the city midday. Windy as fuck but the air had a warm comforting quality. I listened to Homebrew in my headphones and walked towards Flinders St. station. My bottom jaw lightly clenched in a smile that I couldn’t stop. The I-just-got-laid-smile.

Melbourne’s really an insanely colourful place. Crossing the road, a guy walked towards me from the other side. He looked rough and angry. He held a Buzz Lightyear action figure in one hand and angrily muttering aggressive shit to Buzz as we walked past.

I thought about last night as I slurped udon noodles. Did karaoke for the first time. Sang Radiohead’s Creep as hard as I could to a bar of strangers. A blokey dude slapped me on the arse when I finished – ‘Mate, bloody beautiful!’ he slurred.  

Work

At work, I filled up a tray of drinks and went to the foyer - 4 of us lined up in a row aligned with the entrance so guests could grab drinks as they came in. I was third along so fuck all people took my drinks.

Holding the tray quickly became utterly painful. I have OK arm strength but combined with maintaining balance it became increasingly brutal. I looked at the glasses. Maybe this is what hell is? You hold a tray of glasses in a lobby that no one ever drinks as you uncomfortably sweat into a white button up shirt.

Working this job (catering for weddings and events), you get to experience a lot of inner worlds that you wouldn’t usually see. Rich people, cultural weddings, people that take themselves very seriously. Working a charity fundraiser for super rich white people I took gluten free bread to a table. It was for a guy named ‘Theo’. I asked if there was a Theo on the table. An old grey dude was like - ‘a CEO?’. How corporate do you have to be to think I meant to say ‘CEO’. Struth.  

When I started this job, it was kinda brutal when you made mistakes. People of more authority would shred you verbally. To deal with this I pretended I was into being dominated in that way - that secretly I’m getting some sort of sexual satisfaction. So, I win.

After work. Sipping some decent champagne sitting at a desk covered in pens, an upper staff member, a predatorial gay dude, fiddled around in his suit jacket on the back of his chair. He walked a few steps over to where we sat, shuffling a wad of $50 notes like he was about to do a card trick.

‘Alright let’s see who’s got the biggest cock…?’ He said.

Light pause then a ripple of laughter. Funnier because he was serious. We sipped and sat uncomfortably. The conversation gained momentum again, ignoring what was said. Like a cyclist that’d fallen over, painfully getting back on their bike and pushing forward. I love the forwardness of gay dudes.

***

Depression’s inherently selfish but also a natural reaction to reality. The world we live in, the existence you’re dealt, a body so plagued with desires, the impossible grind for happiness, the potential for bad shit to happen all the time.

Hard to say whether it’s a half empty glass or half full when the glass doesn’t exist - or filled with tears.

When I feel positive or make myself feel positive I feel like a fraud, a fake, a liar because I can’t help believing everything’s fucked. When I commit to being negative I ultimately feel worse, I justify bad behaviour, I take more drugs, I neglect my friends, I drain people, I don’t follow my dreams.

Depression’s basically a mindset you can’t see a way out of. A narrowing of your mental peripherals. It’s a justifiable response to reality so it can be an effort to heave yourself out. Actual clinical depression’s quite rare I imagine. But every second person I know is on pills. Makes you wonder what the fuck is going on? What happened? Did life suddenly become shit? No, they just created a pill that makes you not notice – true virtual reality.

Everything’s work. Nothing comes for free - especially not a good mental state. When you see someone happy – they worked for that shit. Or maybe they paid for it. If you know them well and they’re smart and aware - the harder they worked for their happiness. When you see someone happy all the time and you’re a miserable cunt you either look at them and think what a blissful dumb fuck or you wonder what they know that you don’t.

All my heroes were/are depressed, dry, cranky, alcoholic, drug riddled motherfuckers.

I’m thinking about being depressed for a while. Just casually. Maybe part time. Never go full time depressed though – the hours will kill you.

Tasmania

Went to Tasmania for 6 days. Just to hang out really. See my friends. I drank nearly every day and chain-smoked like an animal. I had a many great conversations. I saw a lot of people. Did a gig. Went to the yoga with my sister. Went to Hobart’s infamous basement of sweat, Cascade Larger and chlamydia - Mobius night club.

Tasmania’s small. If you’ve grown up there – going out drinking becomes like this unwanted school reunion – in fact everywhere becomes an unwanted school reunion. Living there you get very good at clocking people from a distance and ignoring them in the mall. It’s not even because you don’t want to see them. It’s just tedious when you’re trying to buy bread and see 7 people from grade 4 in the process.

Coming back, I welcomed this. It’s taxing when you live there but visiting I embraced it. Getting off the bus in the city I walked around aimlessly knowing I’d see people I knew. I saw 4 people I knew. We punched darts under a bus shelter in the wet air and talked shit – it was beautiful.

The gig I did in Tassie went well.

After the gig, I stood outside smoking with friends. An intense dude wearing a trench coat and a child’s backpack walked around the court yard. We watched him disappear into the bushes and return to give everyone a rock he’d found.

‘One for you there mate…’.

‘One for you, one for you…’.

‘…Ah and one for the lady…’.

Even when it’s not an open mic mental illness inevitably gravitates to comedy.

My friend with zero streets smarts and/or awareness of reality jokingly told the guy to throw one of the rocks through the window of the bar.

‘No. Don’t do that’. I said firmly, stepping forward.

‘What the fuck are you saying man?’. I asked. ‘The guys obviously high as fuck… Jesus fucking Christ’.

My friend just laughed and shrugged it off.

After I’d performed the same friend came up me to me.

‘You did really well… I see a man that no longer cares about his own happiness only his success’. He said.

I didn’t know how to answer that. I paused for a bit.

‘My happiness comes from being honest on stage… If that brings me success then… great… I still care about my happiness though man…’.

Coming back on the plane, I got on the train home. Looking out the window I played back a montage of all the goodbye hugs that I’d had in Tassie. It made my eyes water and gave an intense feeling of optimism – A rarity to me in the past months.

Friday Night Open Mics

Sitting in the front row of a Friday night open mic waiting to go on.

I sat there overthinking everything. Thinking about the history of stand up and all my favourite comedians. Going through my set in my head. Re-wording a bit in my mind – a bit where I shit on a dude that looked like a dude sitting behind me in the audience. I changed my description to something that wouldn’t create attention.

I over thought everything until my tension plateaued and I felt calm. A calm I used to feel doing comedy in Tasmania. It felt good and my set went OK.

I missed out a bit about breaking up with my girlfriend. The bit leading into it talked about using my girlfriend’s vibrator to fuck myself while she’d been away. I forgot the bit so it seemed like I still had a girlfriend.

The MC got back up.

‘Liam Donnelly everyone!’. People clapped. ‘… He shouldn’t fuck his arsehole… He doesn’t even have a girlfriend! Hack!’. He said.

I laughed somewhat sheepishly.

I knew he had no idea if I had a girlfriend or not but my mind spun. Does he know? How does he know? Does he read my shit? Na he’s just ripping shreds. Surely.

Hours later into the morning I smoked on Flinders St. steps. A woman with a face like a clenched fist comes by and sweetly asks for a spare smoke. I smiled and said I didn’t have any.

I watched a young couple across from me sitting on a cube of concrete. They smoked and smiled. Usually after a break up seeing couples is a sad reminder of what you don’t have anymore. But I felt nothing watching them. Wasn’t bitter or sad. The idea of ‘being’ with someone now seems strange to me. Like a hobby I don’t understand. Like windsurfing or cheerleading.

Maybe it’s because I don’t feel lonely. If I felt lonely I’d be fucked.

I fell in and out of sleep on the replacement bus. Dangerous thing to do. Could wake up anywhere, be completely fucked and be forced to Uber home.

My head pounded so hard when I got home. 2 ibuprofens, protein shaker full of water, 1 reluctant cigarette and a wank for desert. Phone on 9% - enough for a wank. My head pounded so hard I had to grip my forehead with my free hand to stop it throbbing.

I spend so much time drunk. Why? Am I bored or scared of my own brain?

I don’t know if you can be creative for your whole like and be happy.