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pahrak-the-sinnoh-slizer · 9 months

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[Games in 2023: Pokemon DLC "The Indigo Disk"]

Here it is! Part 2 of the Scarlet and Violet DLC! As a refresher for context: I really loved base Violet, and appreciated what Teal Mask had to offer despite it not entirely living up to expectations. Will Indigo Disk close things out on a high note? What is the Hidden Treasure of Area Zero? And how much did I abuse the feature to invite your favorite characters to Blueberry Academy for my own nefarious purposes?

This will contain spoilers for base SV, Teal Mask, AND Indigo Disk! If you want a tl;dr: Indigo Disk gives you LOADS of fun (and challenging) stuff to do, and despite its story plays things safer than I was personally expecting after the resolution of the base game, I’m still glad I bought the DLC.

Accessing the Indigo Disk content requires beating both The Way Home and The Teal Mask. This is full-on postgame material, and the levels of the Pokémon you’ll find and fight reflect that, ranging from high 60s on lesser trainers up into the early 80s on the final story foes. Not to mention all trainer battles here are Double Battles, which adds a significant new wrinkle to how fights are approached. This is Serious Business. We also get new TMs, new clothing and accessory options, and more Pokémon! I felt like there were fewer options unlocked by the Indigo Style Card than the Teal one, but I really liked what was there, plus there are quite a few other options found through other means. As for Pokémon, the new Blueberry Dex is slightly larger than the Kitakami Dex, and only overlaps with Paldea by around 60 Pokémon as opposed to Kitakami’s Dex being only half new. Lots of Pokémon are back, including several that are on the Switch for the first time—if I recall correctly, the only ones still left out are Patrat/Watchog, the Elemental Monkeys and their evolutions, and Furfrou. We’ve also got Dex entries for Walking Wake and Iron Leaves now, which is especially nice alongside the introduction of new Paradox Pokémon rounding out both of those Legendary trios. As for other new Pokémon, we’ve got new evolutions for Duraludon and Dipplin (surprisingly), DLC mascot Terapagos, and…a new Mythical?! Huh. Kinda thought we were done with those to be honest. I haven’t looked too much into it, but it seems like this guy will actually trigger a sequence of events, which we haven’t seen since…Victini? Do we count BDSP, or PLA? Whatever, I’m excited! There are also old Legendaries to catch; I’d say they’re more accessible than Dynamax Adventures, but the list isn’t quite as comprehensive. (Also they’re all shiny locked.) And, as advertised, every single starter from Generations I through VIII can be caught in the wild here! …After grinding enough points to purchase an upgrade. More on that later.

The new map is a special facility called the Terarium, contained within Blueberry Academy in the Unova region. It’s sort of an artificial nature preserve, divided into four different biomes each full of various species of Pokémon, bigger than Kitakami but not as massive as Paldea itself. Feels like just the right size! Each biome is fairly meaty in its own right, with lots of interesting landscapes to explore and some well-designed caves to boot. One in particular is a reimagining of Chargestone Cave, and it does not disappoint! The music changes a bit depending on the biome but stays recognizable, mixing in some Unovan inspiration with slight hints of Area Zero to reflect the influence of Terastal energy in the facility. Oh, and the Flying Taxi on the loading screen is carried by Skarmory this time! It’s a nice place, a wonderful setting for a miniature Pokémon adventure.

So, the story. You’re escorted to Blueberry Academy by its Director, Cyrano—I like the guy, reminds me of Cabanela from Ghost Trick, and I LOVE his Honedge scarf! (Sadly, the Honedge line is not in this game.) You explore, meet the school’s self-styled Elite Four, and reunite with Carmine and Kieran, the later of whom has completed his evolution to Jerk Rival and become the academy’s Champion. The previous Champion, uh, “arranges” for you to challenge the Elite Four for the right to fight the Champ, and we’re off. The BBE4 can be fought in any order, though they do have listed ranks to suggest a sequence; I wouldn’t be surprised if this was in response to fan reaction over the lack of communication of boss levels back in Paldea. Each is holed up in a different biome with a different “trial” for you to pass before they’ll fight you. Not a single one was easy, though I struggled the least with Crispin, true to his #5 rank. Lacey was the one who gave me the most trouble, though. They’re all likable characters in their own way, though if I had to pick a favorite…probably Amarys? Anyway, after beating them you get a shot at Kieran, which was another extremely close call for me, but I managed to pull through! It was a satisfying little boss rush.

Things then abruptly shift when Briar finally reappears, gathering a small group of students for an emergency scouting expedition into Area Zero, approved by Geeta herself. It ends up just being you, Briar, Carmine, and Kieran, which…yeah, that makes sense. Though having Geeta and Rika suddenly show up made me hope a little. Kieran’s only coming because he thinks catching a Legendary Pokémon of his own will let him finally beat the player, but as this scenario progresses he starts to act a bit more like his old self. The scenario in question involves returning to the Zero Lab, finding a secret path leading even deeper, and diving into Area Zero’s Underdepths. Remember how sick it was seeing Area Zero for the first time? The Underdepths are like, twice as sick. It’s great. As is standard fare, you need to defeat a few Pokémon to open gates forward, but what makes these Pokémon interesting is that they’re all Tera Pokémon with the brand new Stellar Tera Type, a type which contains the powers of ALL types. Stellar-type Terastallization does not change the Pokémon’s defensive Type interactions, only offensive, giving a boost to one move of each type per battle. So, you use a powered-up Rock move? Further uses of that and any other Rock move are standard-power. It’s an interesting way to build upon Terastallization’s versatility, and when used in Tera Raids, it just boosts every single move the Pokémon uses while Terastallized, which I imagine will be immensely helpful if one were to grind Raids for any reason. Very interesting, and this gauntlet gives you ample opportunity to acquaint yourself with it before you get ahold of it yourself.

At the very end of the Underdepths, your party finds none other than Terapagos…who Kieran chucks a Master Ball at. Uh, okay, cool. You then have a boss battle against Terapagos in its Terastal Form, the one with the flat shell made of pentagonal plates, which is way smaller than I imagined it being. I dunno, I thought it’d be more on the scale of like…Kyogre? In any case, this round is easy, and Kieran and Briar are both confused and decide to Terastallize Terapagos and see if that unleashes its full power. It does. Terapagos takes on its final form, the one Heath depicted in the Violet Book…also weirdly small. Maybe twice as tall as a person? Not planet-sized. I mean, I didn’t think we’d actually get to catch a planet-sized Pokémon, but…y’know. This is Stellar Form Terapagos, which has an augmented Stellar Tera Type that boosts every move even outside of Raids, and it’s no slouch: it was a close match, but my level 100 Ceruledge with Bitter Blade and Leftovers was able to conquer it, especially with help from Carmine at first and Kieran at the end. What’s interesting is that this round has multiple phases, with Terapagos taking away your Terastallization to create a barrier several times and changing its defensive Type for good measure. After a long, hard fight, you’re able to catch Terapagos (it broke out of Kieran’s Master Ball), and as you return to Blueberry Academy, Kieran apologizes and asks if you can still be friends. Roll credits.

The idea of Kieran, a character who snaps in his obsessive pursuit of strength, is sound in theory. However, I feel like it was lacking in punch. The key factor is almost certainly just time: Teal Mask speedruns the formation of Kieran and the protag’s friendship and then immediately shows it fall apart, with little to no time to let it sink in and actually matter to the player. I stuck to the “Kieran is my friend” angle throughout Indio Disk, but it did feel like an act, and when he says he looked up to you for so long (like, an entire day!) it rang somewhat hollow. That being said, I do rather like the way he stamps down his sense of failure to help you in the final round against Terapagos. I guess I like Kieran about as well as I like a good chunk of Pokémon characters at least. He can’t compete with Arven, though. Oh and Briar doesn’t go nuts or turn evil or anything, she’s just excitable I guess.

I wasn’t entirely satisfied regarding Terapagos and Area Zero either: there wasn’t a clear definitive answer to any questions that had been raised. Upon rewatching the ending and the postgame scene at the Crystal Pool, I think what we’re meant to take away is that Terapagos has been sleeping deep in the Earth for a long time, and the impact that formed Area Zero caused its power to leak out. It is able to manipulate spacetime to some extent: Turo says that his time machine specifically pulls Pokémon from other timelines, which seems to be the truth about Paradox Pokémon. How this enables advanced robotics and AI, I still don’t quite know, nor does it explain why Paradox Pokémon existed in Area Zero before the time machine was built. But, it seems that Terapagos did not in fact come to Earth on a meteor, and there’s no particular reason for its abilities to terraform its environment, transform itself and other Pokémon, and bend time. Which is…kind of a bummer, honestly. The Way Home took Pokémon out of its comfort zone in a great way, and the Team Star Bosses and Arven were all written surprisingly well; to go from that high point to a standard, lukewarm story about finding and catching a powerful new Legendary…I can’t help but be a bit disappointed. I hate the idea of getting mad at something for not conforming to my own expectations, so I’ve been trying to consider different angles and find one that leans the most in the story’s favor…but, maybe it’s fair that my expectations were where they were? I don’t know. I’m curious to find out how other players feel.

Oh, one other story-ish thing: if you’ve completed the Bloodmoon Beast scenario, Perrin shows up in the Terarium! Apparently she’s just been hired to take photos for Blueberry Academy’s promotional material; she has another cool thing to show you, but tells you to catch 200 Pokémon in the Terarium first, justified in that she’ll follow you and take pictures for said promos. I like that there’s a reason this time, her just saying “catch mons first” in Kitakami was fine, I could accept it as a video game thing, but it was very transparently that and I appreciate the effort to dress it up here. Once you’ve caught enough Pokémon, she’ll show you two photos of strange, unidentified Pokémon in the familiar setting of Area Zero: two new Paradox Pokémon, obviously version-exclusive. You need to search Area Zero for the locations in the photos, where the Paradoxes are standing there just waiting to be caught. Unfortunately, there’s only one of each, complicating the process of trading them to complete the Dex…which is a little odd. You can catch multiple specimens of every other Paradox—they even gave you a second Koraidon/Miraidon! Personally I’m hoping these will be in Raids later like Wake and Leaves, because I really, really want to train a Gouging Fire…

Anyway, it wasn’t until I completed the story that I really began to interact with the other major feature at Blueberry Academy: the League Club. I took an initial glance at it and decided to save up my BP (which stands for “Blueberry Points” now), but at this point I had no goal other than to grind for it. You obtain BP primarily (near exclusively) through completing Blueberry Quests, abbreviated to BBQs, which is terrible but also hilarious. Whenever you’re in the Terarium, you can bring up a menu that shows your current BP and a list of 3 active BBQs; these include things like “catch a Pokémon,” “take a picture of a Pokémon in X biome,” “pick up X items off the ground,” and such. When you complete one, you are automatically rewarded BP and get a new BBQ to refill the list. After completing 10 BBQs, you are additionally given a fourth, special quest for a larger amount of BP, which tend to involve things like picnics and Raids. There’s a lot to like about this system: it provides constant rewards for microachievements similar to the research tasks in PLA, always giving you a few directions to follow if you so choose, and are much more digestible here. One thing arises that frustrates me, however, that being repetition. BBQs are chosen randomly, so if it’s not already on your list, it’s fair game no matter how many times you’ve already seen it today. There have been several times where I’ve completed task A, to see it replaced by task B, to complete task B, only to see it replaced by task A again. The first day of doing BBQs I was told to photograph swimming Pokémon at least a dozen times in a few short hours. (And let’s not forget that these photos clog up you Switch album.) I also dread seeing the “make a TM” quest, because in the entire Terarium there is exactly 1 TM Machine and I don’t always want to drop whatever I’m doing to head over to it. The sandwich-making missions also feel like a hassle, but I’m not the biggest fan of the picnics as is, that one’s definitely just me. I’ve also seen people say they really enjoyed grinding BBQs, so maybe this entire irritation is just a personal problem.

But once you have your BP, what can you spend it on? Well, in addition to being used in the school store and cafeteria, there’s a computer in the League Club Room where you can access a list of requests for donations from other clubs, all of which come with a reward. Essentially you’re paying to unlock or improve features, ranging from throwing styles to camera settings to League Club Room design. What caught my eye immediately, however, were the options to “improve biodiversity” in each of the biomes. This is how you unlock the previous gen starter Pokémon as wild encounters. It costs 3000 BP per biome, with BBQs only very rarely giving you more than 100. Admittedly it’s not as bad as I initially feared, but since these are more or less required to get enough Dex entries to satisfy Perrin, I would recommend saving up as a priority. I feel like I should’ve expected at least one more hoop to jump through to get wild starters, but it isn’t really a huge deal. Small price to pay for unlimited babies. Additionally, after catching Terapagos you unlock the ability to invite characters from Paldea to visit Blueberry Academy! The eight Gym Leaders are available right away, but you can also unlock the teachers from your old school, the Elite Four, and even Geeta. Your guests will hang out in the League Club Room for a bit, and you can speak with them (or the members of the BBE4) to have rematches, get some items, and trade Pokémon with them; sometimes they’ll even have interactions amongst themselves. I’m a huge fan of this feature: rematches were limited in the base game, and this amends the situation while expanding upon the bonding sequences that gave Uva/Naranja a lot of its charm. The first one I focused on was Raifort, of course; naturally she hates being in a place as new-fangled as Blueberry Academy, but now you owe her a favor, and she keeps giving you bribes to further butter you up to become her puppet. She’s great. She also talks about the Abyssal Ruins, that’s a callback I’m quite pleased with. (Conversations about going swimming in Unova…my gosh, she really is Cynthiacore…)

Catching Terapagos also unlocks a few more things. Briar calls you to her classroom and explains that your Tera Orb has been upgraded from being exposed to the intense Terastal energy in the Underdepths, enabling you to Terastallize in consecutive battles without ever charging it. Oh. Cool! This gives you the chance to play around with the feature a lot more, and won’t intrude on the online experience at all since you can still only Terastallize once per battle. And, as teased in the trailers, you can speak with Amarys to upgrade Miraidon to fly freely anywhere. Forget that crappy glide, you can soar across all of Paldea from high above Glaseado’s peak! You know that impassable rock wall in the northeast? I flew all the way up that! You can perch on the edge, but an invisible wall keeps you from going any further, BUT that’s okay because just being able to get up there is so cool! I will say, the controls not inverting the Y-axis is weird and unintuitive, but that’s something I can cope with. The game really sets you free, and it’s so, so great to experience.

Indigo Disk is extremely fun, extremely rewarding, and gives you plenty of new reasons to keep playing SV going forward. The story is serviceable, a notable downgrade from where SV ended but inoffensive on its own. Pokémon does tend to be lopsided that way, doesn’t it? Nevertheless, SV almost immediately became one of my favorite games in the series, and now that we have both waves of DLC, I’m confident in thinking I’ll remain fond of it for a good long while.

It should be noted that an “Epilogue” to the DLC has been announced for January. The files are there already; I’ve been trying to avoid spoilers, but I’ve seen enough to know this won’t be anything large scale. We’re NOT getting a secret third wave of DLC here. But it does seem like this will involve the new Mythical Pokémon, potentially clear up some lingering questions about Kitakami, and expand upon a certain feature of Indigo Disk, so I’m looking forward to it. Hard to say if I’ll type up a full collection of thoughts for it, but one thing I am fairly certain of is that it’s going to be a fun time.

#Pokemon #Games in 2023 #Game Night

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saltminerising · 3 years

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Running An Art Shop With Minimal Crying 101

Hey y’all, not sure what compelled me to write this Now but I wanted to put together a list of helpful ‘good business practice’ tips for artists who want to start selling commissions on FR and want to build up a good reputation and make bank. I’m not sure if I’d feel comfortable throwing this on the forums personally so here you go, y’all have to look at my stupidly long possibly helpful brutally honest post cuz I don’t know where else to put this.

I’ve been doing art on FR since I was a young teenager in 2015 and through that time I’ve definitely learned some lessons the hard way. I’ve taken on more than I could handle, I’ve let commissions rot for months because I got overwhelmed… you know what I mean. Here’s some of what I’ve learned over the years that’s helped me run a consistently successful art shop for well over a year now.

I don’t have a tumblr and I don’t know how to add a ‘read more’ to a submission, so happy scrolling <3 I apologize for causing some people a very minor inconvenience

-Do not take prepayment for either more than three commissions at a time, or more than the number of commissions you think you can finish within a month or two, whichever is smaller. This is especially true if you’re like me and you have ADHD. Trust me, the more commissions people have already paid for you have piled up in your to-do list, even if they’d only take you 20 minutes each, you will get more overwhelmed and discouraged and people will wonder why it’s taking you so long. Even if you aren’t getting concerned PMs, a lot of people are just too anxious or polite to ask for updates. (On the flipside, if you commissioned someone and haven’t gotten any word/updates in a while, you’re not in the wrong to ask how things are going and when you can expect an update.)

-Full payment upfront is something I definitely recommend for smaller pieces (headshots, sketches, etc) you can finish in one sitting. However- if you’re doing a ref sheet, a rendered fullbody, etc, and you’ll be spending multiple sessions on the piece and getting feedback for it multiple times- split it up, take half upfront and half either after the sketch is approved, or before you send them the final unwatermarked version. I’ve done dozens of commissions like this and never had a problem, personally. There’s a low chance of a customer backing out on you if you’ve already started and sent WIPs because, y’know, sunk cost, and on the other hand it is reassuring to customers (especially if your shop is new) that if you drop off the map, they paid $20 upfront and got at least a sketch, instead of paying $40 upfront for an unfinished piece.

-In the same vein: if you’re doing a large piece like a rendered fullbody, ref sheet, etc, more communication is always better than less! I always stay on the safe side here. Some people will tell you they just want you to go apeshit and do whatever you think will look cool, other people might have much more specific ideas of what they want and how closely your artwork needs to match the image of their character in their head. Send them the sketch and ask them if they want any changes. Send them the lineart and ask if it looks good. If you’re working on a time-consuming painting that will take you weeks to finish, please please please, communicate! Send updates! Your customers will feel a lot less anxious about how long you’re taking if you keep them posted (plus this is just a personal thing but I love seeing peoples’ artistic process, it sparks joy!!)

-If, once again, you’re like me and stuff like painted fullbodies take you so much longer than other commission types- the worst thing you can do is underprice. Let’s say a detailed, shaded dragon fullbody takes you, for instance, 8 hours, maybe longer because you get burned out and can’t finish it in just one sitting, but you don’t think people will buy an $80/8kg fullbody. Do not lower the price you think your art is worth. If fullbodies take you really long compared to other art, or you get unmotivated, just… don’t offer painted fullbodies, or scenes with multiple characters, or whatever. If there’s a form of art you’re capable of creating but it’s faster, more fun, and gets you more money to do smaller things, just do more smaller commissions instead of taking the big ones. This one was a lifesaver for me.

-Once again in the same vein: It is okay to say no. Just because you are physically/artistically capable of drawing a detailed scene of multiple dragons with complex apparel, doesn’t mean you won’t get burnt out or bored. For me, larger pieces take exponentially longer because I just get bored and don’t want to work on them anymore. If someone asks if you can draw something that will require so much of your personal time and effort to go into a single piece, just say no. Sometimes I’ll say yes to some big commissions because I think the character is cool and inspiring and I want to draw them; otherwise, I will admit, I’ve said no to big commissions because I personally found the character boring as hell (though I wouldn’t phrase it that way). And that’s ok!

-If you are going to be really busy in the near future, stop taking commissions. You have finals? Don’t say “sorry if things take forever, I have finals”… just don’t take the commissions while you’re busy. If you have too much on your plate, commissions will just stress you out more, and nobody likes to draw motivated by stress. There’s nothing wrong with temporarily pausing your art shop. Put your mental health first. And if you aren’t able to get commissions done on a regular basis because of mental health, or because you don’t give enough of a shit about other peoples’ characters: don’t do commissions. I don’t mean this in a bad way; I’ve been in that spot before and it’ll just cause more stress and guilt than it’s worth.

-NO PARAGRAPHS. That sounds hypocritical of me writing this lol but do not put long paragraphs in your art shop, ever. I promise nobody will read it. Put your rules, and any other information, in bullet points that are one or two lines. Keep your rules clear, simple, unambiguous and short, or everyone will ignore it and I won’t blame them. Put titles and subtitles wherever you can. If you have a block of text longer than probably five lines, it will be ignored by most people. I have decided not to buy art from people because I didn’t want to have to dig through blocks of text for information.

….so yeah I think that’s about all I can think of at the moment. time to sit back and get yelled at for not being able to shut the fuck up and get to the point lol, hope you (yes you) have a great day c:

#submission #long post #art tag 🏷

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veinereastath · 4 years

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Far Cry: New Dawn was a disaster, and here’s why.

Okay, just to be clear - this is my personal opinion, not pure, cold facts that I’m trying to push down people’s throats. I just felt the sudden urge to break down piece by piece my utter hatred towards this game. So, let’s go. What exactly went wrong with it, and why Far Cry 5 was way better? I will try to present my ramblings and point of view by putting both of these games side by side. So, when reading every sentence in this... thing, add in your head a “it’s vei’s opinion” bit to avoid misunderstandings. Thanks in advance! First thing, to make everything clear - Far Cry 5 was not a perfect game. No, actually, it was far from so; there are many games much better plot-wise, with more entertaining gameplay, bigger world, more interesting side quests and so on. But, one thing for sure, this game has a spirit, an unique aura that makes many people want to come back to it and replay it over and over. The way Ubisoft portrayed Hope County is absolutely fantastic - the music, the landscapes, the characters. It was something new, something fresh, and despite quite a lot sceptical voices when the first trailers came out, it turned out really well, and in general, people really liked this game, or loved it even. Yeah, some people hate the endings, the fact that every single one of them is bad one way or the other and that you can’t basically win (I always thought this was fantastic, because, hey, you can’t be a perfect hero every time - even so, I love how this game, Seeds especially, mock the “hero attitude” that protagonist tries to have). But even so, Far Cry 5 was mostly a success, right? And the canon ending when the nukes get dropped seemed to leave a perfect opportunity for a sequel. So, what could go wrong? Well, about that...

1. How long is this game? New Dawn is short. It’s fucking short, because I installed it right after it became available (fun fact, this was the first and the last game I ever pre-ordered, so imagine how excited I must’ve been), and started playing it as soon as I could. In my case, it was around 2-3 am. I had a break then, woke up at 7 am and continued playing. I was playing it slowly - completing the side quests, because I wanted to know what has changed in Hope County, and, of course, I was looking for some easter eggs regarding the Seeds (surprised pikachu - there weren’t any, Old Compound, John’s bunker and Ranch are too obvious). Took me around 5 hours to move on and actually start playing the main story. I was pretty sure that it will take me at least 10-15 hours to complete it (why was I thinking so, don’t ask me, I guess I still have way too high expectations after what Witcher 3 expansions have shown me). Again, surprised pikachu! I finished the whole game in 16 hours. Sixteen. Including liberating all the outposts (1 star in each, didn’t bother to get 3) and finish all side-missions + driving around the County just to look around. The hell? And it wasn’t a DLC? Just for a little comparison, because, yes, FC5 can also be completed pretty damn fast if you rush it, but my 1st playthrough of it, with all the quests and admiring the landscapes took me 33 hours. Which leads us to the next point on this god forsaken list, and that is... 2. The map.

The next reason why I am shocked this game wasn’t a DLC - the heckitty hecck they did with the map in New Dawn. Radiation zones? Sign me the hell up, they make sense, are cool and stuff, but adding them just so you could bite off half of the original map is stupid, and extremely lazy thing to do. Okay, you can take off some parts, but if you’re doing so, add something new - some new paths, caves, mountain routes, something. And no, expeditions don’t count. To make it worse, the parts that were deleted were one of the best parts of the FC5 storyline. Faith’s Gate, Drubman’s Marina, Jacob’s Armory, Wolf’s Den, and the fucking Veteran’s Center. The opportunity to make this a haunted location with an entertaining quest in it was HUGE and it was absolutely wasted. It’s not like they couldn’t done it, we’ve got the mission in old Joseph’s statue, and the crocodile pikachu in Inquisitor’s Grave (which, by the way, shouldn’t actually exist - this bunker was blown up to pieces, but it seemed pretty decent in New Dawn, there are barely any sings of explosions, not to mention that “The Confession” room is untouched!). You bought this game with an intention to actually go back in time and find out about something that FC5 didn’t tell you? Kekus maximus, you don’t. Have some photographs instead (which are a nice addition, but seem lazy). To give this post even more personal hatred - I really don’t like the Henbane River region, so you could literally hear my heart breaking when I saw that we got 50% of the River, 80% of the Valley and 10% of the Whitetails, which were my absolute favorite. So fun!

3. The Villains. I must admit, in the trailers, back when the hype for this game was insane, Mickey and Lou seemed to be quite interesting. Even though back then it was obvious that Highwaymen won’t have that kind of depth that Eden’s Gate had, it was still something I was looking forward to, even though those vibes aren’t really my cup of tea; but most of my excitement was born from my love for Far Cry 5, so if course I had to try out the sequel. So yes, the trailers were quite nice (just not the live action one - that was a fucking disaster, and killed my hype for a few days afterwards).

Mickey and Lou were quite fun, but to little extent, sadly. I liked their sister-sister dynamics, they really seemed close, and it was nice that shey were so different from each other - Mickey was more calculating, while Lou was living for the action and brutality in itself. The Highwaymen as a faction in itself wasn’t really that great for me, because their only purpose was to cause mayhem, and I simply don’t like something like this. But the sisters were something different, right? No, they weren’t, and that’s the point. I felt like there was little to no depth in their actions - it was all for fun, and I find this just boring and pointless (pr maybe I’m the boring one). I know that this is often how the world works - people take and destroy simply because they can and because it’s considered cool. We suck as a species, that’s official and well known, but I expected something more entertaining from a videogame. Maybe I shouldn’t, but I did. And Mickey and Lou were literally Highwaymen members with a VIP crown above their heads and nothing more. They left their mother? Okay, that is something that could lead to other interesting things. They killed their father for power? Huh, alright, I can work with that. The point is, it didn’t give them that much depth, their main purpose was to plunder everything. Which would be all good and nice if they were some kind of a side-faction. But this was The Villains™, and I wanted to feel something more towards them. And to be honest? I didn’t even hate them. I felt absolutely nothing, they just existed and I didn’t care, because they didn’t make this game interesting. What I will say now may sound brutal, but I will say it: I don’t consider two young people (they were around 19/20) just wanting to blow everything up “for lulz” a good villains. I fucking don’t. It was a huge downfall after what FC5 has given to us. I was just so bored when fighting the Highwaymen, because they were shallow, and their personalities were only focused on one thing.

Of course, there is also Ethan. Yes, I hate him (he even has a very punchable face, what a coincidence!), but I admit he was somehow a nice touch in this game. Yes, he was a prideful, irritating kid, but while I was just utterly bored by the Twins, Ethan actually managed to make me hate him. The only thing that I’m quite bothered by is that I don’t believe that he’s actual, biological son of Joseph. To put it shortly, and say it louder for the people in the back - The Twins were just meh. Boring. How was the situation in FC5 better? Oh boy.

Putting their obvious... Attractive physical appearance aside, and focusing purely on their personalities, because that’s what I’m trying to explain - they were something else, and something new. Ubisoft took a risk with creating four villains for a single game, because it’s extremely hard to give each one of them the screentime they deserve, and make them interesting and unique. Did FC5 succeed? In a way, yes. I’m not saying that Seeds are absolutely perfect villains (they aren’t), but they can eat Twins for breakfast and still stay hungry. To show you what I mean, have some short descriptions: JOSEPH: Cult Leader, “The Father”, a person who claims to hear the voice of God himself. Someone from a broken family and difficult life, who was in prison (according to song dedicated to him), lost one job after another, lost his wife, killed his daughter, and then formed a religious cult. JACOB: military veteran suffering from PTSD, with a massive knowledge about history and psychology, someone who literally brainwashed nearly half, if not more of the County, and manages to combine religion (something he clearly isn’t really fond of) and personal, darwinistic look on life. JOHN: former lawyer, a person skilled in adapting to any environment, charismatic manipulator abused as a kid, forced to spend most of his life pretending to be someone he hated to be, battled with addictions, emotionally unstable and with sadistic outburts. FAITH: young woman devoid of purpose in life, also battling with addictions in the past, probably on the verge of suicide at some point, who was manipulated (and quite possibly drugged) in order to comply; a broken girl hiding her pain behind lovely smiles. Sounds pretty diverse, right? And I bet that at least one member of this family was somehow entertaining for everyone. Now, here’s what New Dawn has given to us: MICKEY: the more calculating sister; young girl who followed her father and chose brutal life, creating entertainment for herself by making others suffer. Shows some kind of regret when you defeat her by the end of the game. LOU: the more brutal sister; young girl who followed her father and chose brutal life, creating entertainment for herself by making others suffer. Doesn’t show any regrets towards her actions.

And honestly, that’s it. I really tried to write something more for the Twins, but I couldn’t put my finger on anything. That’s all we know. And yes, I know that there is a major difference between them and the Seeds, which is the age gap - FC5 villains are simply older and have more life experience, but honestly, this doesn’t make it better. Mickey and Lou could have much more depth and be far more interesting despite them being young. Age is not a problem in such a case. I suggest to compare Mickey and Lou’s descriptions with the Faith one, since she’s just few years older. There is a difference, isn’t it? And even when playing both of these games, the Seeds just seem to be better developed than the Twins. Ubisoft did something weird, because they managed to focus on four villains and make each one of them interesting in their own way, but made just two main villains flat, and nearly identical. 4. Radio calls. This is a continuation of the point above, because it’s also something I wanted to point out and is connected to the villains of both games. The things you can hear directly from The Twins can be mostly described as “hey rabbit, you’re pissing us off a bit”. Same with the things they say at outposts and direct them to the Highwaymen - it’s always about the same thing, and there isn’t a single line that I found interesting or worth remembering (okay, my bad, the fact that Mickey and Lou seemed to be dissapointed after Nana chose to stick with the Captain rather than them was a nice touch). Meanwhile, I can recite most of the dialogue lines from the Seeds from my memory, and it’s something I could do after 2 playthroughs. They seem to be on a whole different level - and yes, it is true that to some point, the “rabbits” thing is similar to “the weak” theme of Jacob, or “the sinners” in case of John, but it didn’t seem to be that much tiring to hear about. Faith’s radio calls were interesting, because with each one of them you could hear her demeanor towards the Deputy changing - in the beginning, she was friendly, but after you destroyed Joseph’s statue, she was scared, and at the final confrontation - maliciously hostile. Jacob started his radio calls history with a threat towards you, and kind off keeps that all the time, but the closer you get to the final meeting with him, the more... Okay, how the fuck do I describe it in a non-thot way amused (I guess we can call it this way?) he sounded. He was still far from friendly, you still didn’t have any doubts he’s your enemy, but there was something in those radio calls, something that suggested he actually sees the Deputy as something more than just enemy, as a tool he crafted all by himself and he was proud of it. John welcomes you with this cheesy ad at the beginning of the game, and as time goes on, he goes even more obsessed with making you atone and confess; not to mention his absolutely fantastic reactions to stealing his house and destroying his sign. His calls are something unpredictable, because once he’s all official and charismatic, but suddenly he switches to this ominous mode that actually makes you want stop for a bit and look around you, as if he was lurking somewhere. To sum it up, this game made you feel like if you were actually developing some kind of a relationship with each one of the family member. But the radio calls from the Twins seem to be always the same, it’s all about “rabbits” and “problem solving”. Yes, it might've been better if only one sister was all about it, and the other one had something else on her mind, but making them nearly identical was a lazy move. 5. Landscapes.

Far Cry 5 was amazing, because every region was different and had something else to offer. Henbane River was full of Bliss, which created weird hallucinations, Faith dancing around you was also pretty interesting addition, and The Pilgrimage was also a nice touch (I recommend going with it, it’s a really nice experience, actually). Holland Valley was the pure definition of Montana countryside, and it felt fantastic to walk around and see those little farms, cows, windmills and so on. Whitetail Mountains were also something unique, with less open spaces, a huge amount of wildlife, combining massive mountains with deep forests. And even though the colors of this game could be simply described as beige-green, I didn’t really feel bored when wandering around. New Dawn had a cool concept, actually - makind the post-apocalyptic world colorful, instead of making it a grey wasteland was something new and I was excited. And, honestly, I really liked how it all looked like during the first 2 hours of playthrough. After that... I was just so done. The pink colour in itself wasn’t bad, really, but the way they added it everywhere made me feel sick. Those flowers were nearly everywhere and they were always the same. And while I love screenshoting landscapes in games, New Dawn didn’t really felt like something I wanted to spend time on. I like to admire the views of FC5, but not in ND. Combining the small as hell map with nearly the same flowers on your every step was a bad solution. 6. Other. To mention other things - well, I guess we could mention the music, but I feel it isn’t fair, actually. Both games did this well in some way, FC5 songs are certainly something unforgettable, and I mean both the cult ones as well as the OST. New Dawn did what it could - gave Highwaymen music that fits them. The OST, however, isn’t that good. Maybe because it just doesn’t feel unique to me, while the different type of music in each region in FC5 is, for me, unforgettable in many ways. I won’t really talk about The Deputy >> The Judge metamorphosis, because everyone sees it in a different way. I personally don’t consider it as a bad thing, it’s quite a nice plot twist, and I like it (even though I went with a totally different path with my deputy OC).

Okay, I think it’s time to get to the main point. Why I consider New Dawn as a disaster? The Villains were devoid of any depth and felt exactly the same, the map was small as hell, the story was way too short (and these two things should be enough to make this game a DLC, not an actual installment of the franchise), the landscapes were repetitive, 90% of what was left from FC5 (locations, for example) didn’t get a chance to shine. Just imagine how much more entertaining this game could be if we would find some old recording of the Eden’s Gate songs somewhere. If there were mentions of some terryfingly huge wolves roaming around, if the members of Prosperity actually mentioned something about John Seed (which house they are living in!), if we could visit the remnants of the Faith’s Gate, hear the ominous “Only You” when approaching the Veteran’s Center and read some old notes about experiments that were happening in there, and so on. Basically, the main opportunity that got wasted was focusing on continuating FC5 legacy in a more respectful way. The things I mentioned above seem like small details, but they really could make the experience something else entirely. So, yeah. I hate New Dawn, in case someone didn’t notice. :)

#listen I wrote it between 12 pm and 2 am #I couldn't sleep because of this #and I bet I forgot about something important #but whatever #I just needed to get it out of my system #fcnd #far cry new dawn #far cry 5

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galadrieljones · 4 years

Text

As You Were (Chapter 7)

Fandom: The Last of Us | Pairing: Joel x OC | Content: Fix-it | Rating: Mature

Masterpost

When Joel and Ellie take a wrong turn on their journey from Pittsburgh to Wyoming, they find themselves lost in what feels at first like a time warp: a beautiful place with a dark and dangerous secret. While there, they meet Cici and Noah, a mother and son fighting tirelessly for survival, and who have recently endured a terrible tragedy on their family farm. Amidst their joint desire to find hope for the future, the two groups decide to set out west together, changing the course of the story (as we know it), and the very course of their lives.

This is an AU, starting after the events of the Summer chapter in the first game, and extending into the timeline of the second game. Joel lives.

Chapter 7: Interlude I (Storm)

“Just admit you love it,” said Ellie. “Don’t be a bitch.”

She and Noah were in the back house as the rain pounded down on the roof. Neko Case was playing. In the past two weeks since arriving in Jackson, they had rigged up the stereo but not the space heaters. It was still the dog days of summer. Noah would just light a fire in the stove at night, because it was faster. And if it got too cold, they could just go to the main house and crash on the living room floor anyway.

“I will not deny that this is good shit,” said Noah. They were talking about the music, on the stereo. “You can count on me.”

“I love this music,” said Ellie. Every dial tone, every truck stop, every heartbreak, I love you more. “It’s pure.” She flopped back onto the bed and closed her eyes. “It sounds like water. I wonder if Joel knows about Neko.”

“Probably,” said Noah. He was on the floor, sawing two-by-fours. He wanted to make an end table. It had been a while since he’d done any sort of carpentry. “He knows a lot of weird shit about music.”

“Does Cici know Neko?”

“Maybe? Though we didn’t have any of this back at the house.”

Ellie stared up at the ceiling. They had stuck a bunch of glow-in-the-dark stars up there, loot from the Wal-mart back in Nebraska. Elsewhere on the walls there were posters and drawings by Ellie and maps that Noah had collected from their various stops, all along the I-80.

“Do you think this place will last?” said Ellie. “Jackson. Do you think it’s legit?”

“I hope so,” said Noah.

There was a knock on the door then. Ellie sat up straight, had switched her knife open just to look at it. “Who is it?” she said.

“It’s Dina. From the bonfire?”

Dina was a surprise. Ellie swung her feet around, over the side of the bed, electrocuted, and failed to speak.

“Hang on,” said Noah. He got up, set the saw on the kitchen table, which was stacked mostly with books. He opened the door, and there was Dina, standing like a picture, hands shoved in her pockets in her green hoodie.

“Hey,” she said. “You’re Noah, right?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “And you’re Dina.”

“Is Ellie here?”

“Yup. Come on in.”

Dina stepped inside, shook off the rain. Meanwhile, Ellie was just standing there with her knife still out, like she was going to stab someone. “Hey,” she said.

“You okay?” said Dina.

“What?” said Ellie. She looked down at the blade, blushing awkwardly, then she put it away into her pocket. “Oh, yeah. I’m fine. What’s going on?”

“I just came because Maria got a call on the radio,” said Dina. Her hair was tied back tightly off her face. “Joel and Tommy are stuck at one of the lookouts over in town, because of the storm. They’re fine, but they’ll probably be gone till morning. She wanted me to let you know.”

“Why didn’t she just come herself?” said Ellie.

“Oh,” said Dina. “Well, I was there. I offered.”

“I should go tell my mom,” said Noah.

“Why don’t you just call her?” said Ellie. “On the walkie.”

“I could,” said Noah. He put on his sneakers. His hair was getting longer. Kind of floppy behind his ears. “But with it storming like this, she’s probably already worried.”

“Yeah,” said Ellie. “Nevermind. You’re right.”

“I’ll be back,” he said.

“See ya,” said Dina.

Once he was gone, Ellie and Dina stood in the room, just looking at each other. The thunder went off in the distance, bellowing somewhere over the mountain, low and mean. But it was just a storm, thought Ellie. Just a storm.

“So, how’s it going?” said Dina, eventually. She had her hands behind her back.

“Pretty good,” said Ellie. “How’s it going with you?”

“Not bad. Do you remember me, or…?”

“Of course,” said Ellie. She went over to the makeshift kitchen. There were some cokes in the cooler that she and Noah had salvaged a few days before. “You want one?”

“Hell yeah,” said Dina.

They opened their cokes and drank them sitting in bean bag chairs, listening to the music and the rain for a while. The soda was sort of flat, but they didn’t care. It tasted delicious. “This music is good,” said Dina. “It’s pretty, kind of country. What is it?”

“It’s this lady, named Neko Case,” said Ellie. She was wearing an old shirt, blue, with a surfer on the front and the words Cowabunga, dude. “I just discovered her actually. She’s really awesome. I think this album came out like, a week or so before the shit hit the fan in 2013?”

“Seriously?” said Dina.

“Yeah,” said Ellie. “Me and Noah have actually been scavenging all the best albums from that year, from like music stores and stuff. We’re trying to get as complete of a collection as possible.”

“That’s so neat,” said Dina. She held her coke with both hands, looking down at her thumbs. “You’re like really cool historians.”

“Sort of,” said Ellie. “But that’s being generous.”

They sipped.

“So, tell me something,” said Dina after a little while. Her voice changed, like she had gained confidence all of a sudden. “What’s the deal with you guys. Is Noah your real brother who you magically found after ten years of separation, or is that just a rumor?”

“It’s a rumor,” said Ellie. “Noah is just…we’re not related.”

“Well you guys seem like siblings.”

“We’ve been through a lot,” said Ellie. “Maybe that’s what people are sensing.”

“There’s definitely a bond there.”

“I don’t have any real siblings, that I know of at least,” said Ellie. “Do you?”

“Not anymore,” said Dina. Her eyes were very brown, like little mud puddles. Dina was an open book.

Noah came in the door then, loudly, and soaking wet. He was like a giant dog sometimes, stomping through the house. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “It is fucking pouring.”

“Yeah, we know,” said Dina.

“I’m gonna head out,” said Noah. He started rummaging through the bureau by the door, tugged a gray hoodie over his head, and then he yanked the drawstrings until the hood closed almost totally around his face so you could only see his nose. He looked like a too-tall alien. It was funny.

“Head out where?” said Ellie.

“To Jesse’s,” he said, loosening the hood. “You guys wanna come?”

“What about Cici?” said Ellie.

“She’s already on her way,” said Noah. “She was getting ready to leave when I went over there.”

Dina was looking down into her can again, as if it were full of secrets.

Ellie said, “Dina, you wanna go?”

The rain kicked up outside. It seemed like it wouldn’t let up for hours. Dina drank the last of her coke and set the empty can down on the floor. She stood quickly and smoothed out the wrinkles in her shirt. “Sure,” she said. “Let’s do it.”

“Sweet,” said Noah.

***

“So you just went on up there, to La Crosse, with the boy,” said Tommy, feet crossed up on the coffee table. They were getting old and half-high from the cigarettes. “No questions asked.”

“No questions asked,” said Joel, finishing his cigarette. “It wasn’t like back in Boston.”

“What changed?”

“Noah kind of—he reminded me, of me. He needed to convince himself of something, maybe it was just to do with figuring out what was happening to his town, maybe it was a test. I don’t know. But he’s a good kid, and I didn’t want him going down the wrong path.”

“And Cici, what was her deal, back then?”

Joel leaned back in the chair, sinking. It was in tatters and the bottom was practically falling out. He said, “To be quite honest, she was a complete mystery to me. Still is."

"Ain't they all."

"Noah's much more forthcoming," said Joel. "Maybe too forthcoming, I don't know. Maybe it's a good thing, because he gets Ellie talking, even when she don't want to. Cici and me, we got along fine in the beginning, but it was like anything in a situation like that. It took us a while to become friends.”

Tommy started laughing. “Guess it must be hard for you, big brother. Meeting your match like that.”

Joel just ashed his cigarette on the table as the storm raged outside.

“Well, I am glad you came back,” said Tommy, quiet. “To Jackson. When you all came through the first time, I really didn't know. I didn't know if we'd see you again. But we really needed you guys. And it’s good to—well, it’s just good to be together again, ain’t it?”

Joel took a drag, looking down at his knuckles. “This is a nice place you’ve built here, little brother. I'm sorry if it ever seemed like I doubted you. You and Maria have done good work.”

“Thanks,” said Tommy, placing his boots back on the ground. “Now, tell me what the hell happened next. Who the hell were these Circle of the Holy Signal motherfuckers? And what the hell did Cici say happened back at the farm—with the Amish girl?”

Joel smiled to himself as if recalling a joke out of the blue. “Brace yourself,” he said.

***

At Jesse’s, Cici sat alone on the covered back porch, looking up into the storm. She had a glass of whiskey, locally distilled in a barrel on the other side of the compound. Jackson made her think of home, filling her with unwanted memories, and a mild anxiety. Jesse’s parents had a dog named Cinderella. She was a black Schipperke mix, little and spry. She came along and licked Cici's hand where she sat, looking up at her expectantly, all wet from the rain.

“You want to be inside, don’t you?” said Cici. She smiled and patted the dog behind the ears. The little dog had brought her back down to earth, out of the raging sky. “Me, too. Let’s ditch this weather.”

Back in the house, the kids were in the living room, drinking soda and exchanging stories of the past. Noah and Ellie had arrived. They were sitting on the couch and waved when she came in. He had his arm slung around Ellie. She shared little of her life with the group, as usual, thought Cici, but she was always responsive and encouraging of others to share their lives with her. Dina was telling a story about New Mexico. Jesse watched her closely while leaning against the fireplace. There was music on the stereo, Fleetwood Mac.

Robin, Jesse’s mother, came along with a plate of chicken wings. “You want some?” she said.

“I'm good,” said Cici.

Robin took the plate out to the living room instead, set it on the coffee table where it would be devoured. Robin was a really nice woman and an excellent cook. She had always made Cici feel welcome. She pioneered most of the potlucks in town, and Jesse and Noah were becoming friends. That night, she had her hair down. She wore a hooded sweatshirt. She was a few years older than Cici, but that was inconsequential. “Where’s Joel?” she said.

“Him and Tommy got stuck at the lookout,” said Cici, sipping her whiskey. “Maria said they radio'd in. They’ll be back in the morning.”

"You worried?"

Cici shrugged. "I'm trying not to be. Maria said everything was all clear. It's just the storm."

Robin seemed to understand this. “Jonathan is working in his greenhouse,” she said. “Guess it’s just the the women and children tonight.”

“What’s he up to?”

“They want to expand the soy crop,” said Robin. “They need to build more space. With summer running out on us, there’s a crunch.”

Cici had helped out some, with the farming. Though she was not as familiar with greenhouses. “Are storms common in the mountains, in late summer?”

“Yes,” she said. “What about in the midwest?”

“Very much,” said Cici. “The changing of the seasons bring chaos everywhere.”

“I hear that.” Robin’s laugh was deep. It was reassuring. “Jesse likes this group,” she said, looking at the kids in the living room, sniping at one another and eating chicken. “He fits in with them. I like them, too. They’re rascals, all of them.”

“It’s good,” said Cici, “to see Noah, like this. With other teenagers. Just hanging out. For a long time, I was worried he would never have the chance."

“What about Joel?” said Robin. “How is he with Joel?”

Cici was staring at Noah. He had gotten taller, again. Just in that past year. She thought he might keep on growing forever, like one of those Giant Redwoods she had read about in childhood, the ones that lived way out in California. “He’s actually good,” she said. “He's always liked Joel. Joel was there for Noah, early on."

“That’s good.” Robin leaned past Cici to pick up a bottle of beer from the counter. She popped off the top and said, “Cheers. I’m glad you came tonight.”

“Me, too,” said Cici. They drank.

“Are you guys going to the softball game tomorrow?” said Robin.

“As long as the rain stays away, probably. Ellie mentioned something about making tee-shirts. She's pretty enthusiastic.”

Robin thought it was unironically a good idea. "I can help," she said.

Then the lights flickered, again, and then again. The rain was still heavy on the roof, and a hush fell over the room. Everybody looked around as if waiting for something to happen. Jesse paused the music and straightened up off the mantle. Noah was up, looking out the window. Ellie and Dina were looking at each other, as if making calculations in one another’s eyes about what to do next.

“It’s just the storm,” said Robin, as the tension died down. Jesse turned the music back on, and the talking resumed. “They are used to the worst case scenario. But you remember, don’t you, Cici? A time when a storm was just a storm.”

Cici watched Noah and Ellie. She couldn’t hear what they were saying, but it looked like he’d made some sort of stupid joke, and she was rumpling his hair, and they were laughing on the couch beneath the faint, white glow of the Christmas lights. They reminded her of puppies. When she was eighteen and pregnant, sitting on a river bank in Viroqua, WI, what had she imagined her life would become? Joel had said the same thing once, in a manner of speaking. When I was eighteen, I had a GED and two jobs, he’d said. Three, if you counted Sarah. She tried not thinking about him when he wasn't there.

There was a knock on the door then. It was Maria. At first, Cici was worried. But that was just the storm talking. Maria had a bottle of wine and a bowl of potato chips. Her hair was down, and she looked tired but pretty.

“Took you long enough,” said Robin.

“No rest for the wicked,” said Maria.

When Maria came into the kitchen, all the kids shouted HEY MARIA as raucously as possible, and everybody laughed and asked for her to hand over the chips. Maria was a stern woman but even she could not resist them.

***

Outside, later on, Ellie and Noah were sitting out on the porch. Noah was scratching Cinderella the dog behind the ears while Ellie sat with her knees pulled up to her chest, staring hard into the dark as if parsing its atoms, which screamed.

“So," said Noah. “What's going on with Dina?"

Dina was still inside the house with Jesse. They had gravitated toward one another as the night drew on.

“Nothing,” said Ellie, sighing. “I don’t know. Does it seem like something's going on?"

“She's nice,” he said. “You could tell me."

“I hardly know her,” said Ellie.

“That doesn’t always matter.”

“She likes Jesse anyway,” said Ellie. “I’m just some girl. I don’t fit.”

“Fit where?” said Noah.

Ellie laughed at this and shoved him in the shoulder. “Shut up.”

“I’m serious,” said Noah. “Where are you trying to fit?”

“I don’t know, Noah.”

“Is this a Riley thing?” he said.

“Please,” she said.

“Fine,” he said. Ellie was not an open book. “Well, I’ll still be your friend.”

“Oh, ha ha,” said Ellie, shoving him again, harder this time. He almost tipped in his chair, but that was on purpose. “Like you could unfriend me. You need me.”

He thought back to Moline, when they had found that arcade. It had been raining that night, too. He remembered the blood, gathering and running down the drain pipes, as if that's what they were meant for. “Let’s go inside before this storm gets the best of us,” he said.

***

On the Stereo:

"Calling Cards" by Neko Case "Magpie to the Morning" by Neko Case "Storms" by Fleetwood Mac

#the last of us #tlou #the last of us 2 #tlou2 #ellie tlou #joel tlou #dina tlou #jesse tlou #as you were #flash FORWARD

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nerdygaymormon · 5 years

Note

Maybe you've answered this before, but why don't you just leave your church? Doesn't it bother you being part of something that rejects you? Don't you want love? I don't understand why gay people ever stay in that church.

I get these questions from time to time. Never sure what to make of them. I get that it’s unusual for a gay guy my age to still be part of church. I hope part of this is they like me and want me to be happier. But it also feels like they are looking down on me, idk.

I don’t have a short, simple answer, so strap in, it’s going to be a long ride.

1) I was a teenager in the 1980’s. It is hard to be gay now, but it was so bad back then. Being gay was shameful. The 80′s was the AIDS crisis, so mostly what I heard about being gay was death. There were no legal protections, society was against us. Actively hostile, bigoted statements were common. My own dad told homophobic jokes to big laughs. Coming out looked like I’d be condemning myself to a terrible life and strip all the good things from me.

Also, with no role models, I was having to work through what it means to be gay. I also did manage to get ahold of a gay porn magazine (this is long before internet was a thing). I was crazy to think I could hide it. I shared a room with three brothers so no privacy. Despite my denials, my parents knew this was mine and they were so upset. My dad now tells me he wishes he sent me to conversion therapy once he learned I had this magazine. Can you imagine?

2) I grew up believing in this church, which included the terrible things taught about me as a gay person. At age 19 when my bishop challenged me to pray about going on a mission, I instead prayed to know if God could possibly love me (which is really sad that a kid could grow up in church and not know that). I felt love radiate across my body as a voice in my ear said “You are not broken.” That experience sustained me for a long time

3) I went on a mission in the 1990’s. If you haven’t been on a mission, it’s probably a surprise that it can be a relief. There’s no pressure to date. I could form close bonds with other men, and even though these are non-romantic relationships, they are intensely close.

4) I was still in the closet when I went to the church schools in Rexburg & Provo. At the end of my first semester, my roommate came on to me and let me feel him up and stuff. I went to sleep thinking maybe the two of us could leave the church, transfer to a different school, say goodbye to my family and we could have a life together. It would be a huge sacrifice for both of us and I thought he felt the same, but the next morning he turned me in to our bishop. I thought I was going to get kicked out of school, be sent home in disgrace, maybe disciplined out of the church, but instead I was put on probation and had to stay the summer in Rexburg. I was heartbroken and swore off love and focused on school. At the end of the summer, to my surprise the bishop made me the elders quorum president.

That first roommate, we were best friends. He is Bi and decided a life with a woman would be easier, and considering it was the 1990′s, he was correct. He left school a few days later, met a woman and got married. I hate how he ended things, but I don’t blame him for the future he chose for his life.

5) BYU in Provo was my backup school, and reluctantly it’s where I transferred to. It turned out that I genuinely liked BYU with 2 exceptions, the severe restrictions the Honor Code placed on LGBT students (which was the same as at the Rexburg campus), and the fierceness with which the Honor Code Office sought to enforce those restrictions. Occasionally I’d hear rumors of sting operations they had done to catch gay students. There was this low-level fear always of getting caught whilst a student in Provo. My roommates also expressed their dislike of anything remotely gay. Even though I kept the rules, I didn’t dare tell anyone that I’m gay because the potential cost was high.

While at BYU I had a major faith crisis. I no longer believed a lot of the truth claims of the church, but I wasn’t about to lose all that tuition money. I stuck it out. So not only was I pretending to be straight, I also had to act as though nothing about church bothered me.

6) The same voice that told me I am not broken would occasionally tell me that it’s okay to pursue relationships. It gave me great hope. I still get that message. Being a good Mormon, I thought this meant that somehow God was going to change the church. In the temple I’d hear that it’s not good for man to be alone and the law of chastity was presented in a way that could include me if I was married to a husband (the temple says no sex except “with your husband or wife to whom you’re legally and lawfully wedded”).

7) After BYU, I should have come out and gotten on with life, but I didn’t. My first job was working for a Mormon boss. A landlord who is LDS gave me a deal on rent. Coming out seemed like it would disrupt my life in really negative ways. Plus YSA Wards were a source of friends and support network.

8) In my 30’s I was no longer in YSA wards, and the world was getting better for gay people. The fight for gay marriage was in full swing, and so many of the people in my life were very opposed to it. It bothered me that the church was so opposed and fought gay marriage because in my head, it was a way for me to follow God’s promptings and pursue a relationship.

Being a Mormon is very much an identity. It’s hard to peel off. It’s my social network, it’s what much of family life revolves around, It’s a belief system and way of viewing the world. it’s a map of what one’s goals in life should be, and so on. Staying in the closet kept the rest of my world intact.

I know you’re thinking wtf, you’re a grown man, own your life!!! I grew up in an unstable family situation (we had many financial troubles and moved frequently), so I crave stability. Remaining in the closet and in the church were keys to maintaining that stability.

9) Squashing all my romantic and sexual feelings also shuts down most other feelings. I spent most of my 20’s & 30’s feeling numb, like I was watching life but not a part of it. I spent those years wishing I was dead, that a bus would hit me or a major disease would strike. Those kinds of deaths would end my misery and also be okay for my family because they wouldn’t have to know I’m gay. I recognize now how messed up that is.

10) The great source of happiness in those years was being an uncle. I’m the oldest of 7 children, my siblings had lots of babies born in those years. The joys of being an uncle only increased the pressure to stay in the closet and in the church because if I didn’t, my only source of happiness might be taken away.

11) I finally reached the point where I was tired of going through the motions of having a life. I was ready to come out. Rather than make some grand announcement, I decided to be honest with anyone who asked about my life. When someone tried to set me up with their friend, I would ask if she had a brother. As these sorts of situations came up, I was coming out to people one by one.

I didn’t exactly “come out” to my family. I figured since my parents had found the gay porn mag when I was a teen, and then gay porn malware on the computer when I was college student, they probably already knew (and they did, but were in denial). Also, I thought coming out would be saying I’m not trustworthy and an awful person for having pretended to be something I wasn’t for so long (not true, but that’s how I thought of it).

12) I’m such a late bloomer that I sometimes am embarrassed about it, especially now that so many people come out in their 20′s and even as teenagers. At the first Pride parade I attended, someone told me that we all come out when it’s right for us, and this was my time. I think that’s true.

13) Most of my adult life in church was being pianist in Primary. Shortly after I started telling people I’m gay is when I was called to be in the stake young men presidency. My stake president says he looked over at me playing piano one day and thought, “that man has much more to offer.” I wonder if it’s because I was more confident, my identities were less in conflict than they’d been in the past, I wasn’t afraid and hiding.

As stake young men president, I made sure I knew by name and something about every youth in the stake. I wanted them to know they were seen, they were heard, they were loved. Teens go through such hard things and I wanted to be a kind, supportive person in their life. Most youth don’t know who the stake youth leaders are, but they all knew me. Several told me about hard things in their life and some even came out to me. Parents of gay teens would come speak to me and I’d let them know life in church is hard and unfair, ways they could help support their teen, and prepared them that their child’s likely path would be out of the church. I felt like I bloomed in this calling and made a difference.

14) In 2015 marriage became legal for same-sex couples across the USA due to a Supreme Court ruling. I thought that finally the church would have to come to terms with it and accept it. But then came the November policy banning the children of gay couples from being members. It felt like a punch in the gut and I nearly walked away. I was still stake young men president and weighed whether the difference I made in this calling was worth putting up with how church clearly didn’t want me.

15) To help my parents buy a house, I had a bunch of their debt put into my name and I lived in the house with them. At the time it seemed a good way to avoid the loneliness of being on my own. But living with them also made walking away from the church tricky.

16) A month later I hit the 3-year mark of serving in the stake young men’s program, I was released from that and called to be stake executive secretary. My stake president told me that anyone can make appointments, but he wanted my unique viewpoint in all the highest councils of the stake. In this calling I occasionally meet general authorities and I speak with them about being gay in the church. My stake President recently joked that he has twice been a counselor in a stake presidency and now is a stake president, and in those years he’s met many general authorities, yet I have way more impact on them than he ever has.

17) Shortly after getting this new calling, in 2016 I started my tumblr blog. Eventually I used the blog as a way to examine, explore and record what it’s like to be gay in the LDS church. In some ways this blog is one giant pep talk to myself.

18) In 2017 my blog exploded, one of my posts went viral. It’s almost like God got tired of waiting on me, now I was out to everyone who knows me, and many more.

All of a sudden I had so many hurting Mormon LGBT people contacting me, most were teens and twenty-something’s. I’ve tried to help them, to affirm them. In many ways it feels like the years as stake young men president working with teens, the years I spent developing a spiritual independence, the studying & thinking about how being gay can work with the gospel, the fears & worries that are part of being in the closet, all of that prepared me for this.

19) Later in 2017 my mental health dived. I became suicidal. I started therapy. I finally had to face how harmed I’ve been by my time in church. I also had to admit I will never be enough in this church, I can never reach the goals & purpose of life as laid out by the church,. My therapist helped me see that I need another framework for what a successful life looks like and what would make for a joyful life.

In 2018 I was still in therapy and was diagnosed with social anxiety disorder, which partly explains why coming out and leaving the church were so difficult. The major driving motivation of this disorder is wanting to not disappoint people.

20) My therapist says I feel things more deeply than most people, but because I’d pushed down my feelings so long, it’s actually a bit scary to feel so much. I also started dating and trying to get gay friends. These sorts of big changes were hard for me. The psychologist said, in an amused tone, that I fully examine a path before I’m willing to take a step down it, meaning I’m cautious and slow to get going, but am certain when I begin of where I’m going.

21) Some of my family openly embraces me as gay and loves me no matter what. Some make their love and access to their children conditional on my being in church.

22) I thought 2018 would be the year I leave the church. There’s a personal reason I haven’t; I feel there’s one more thing to do, a friend whom I can help. That I came ahead to pave the way for this friend.

I know this all sounds crazy, talking about a voice telling me it’s okay to have gay relationships or that I have some missions in life to accomplish. That’s part of faith, I guess.

23) It’s unfair to say I’m still attending church for my friend. First, I don’t want him to feel any pressure. Second, it’s my decision, not his. I also am working on paying off debt so I can more easily live on my own, I’ve joined Affirmation and met a lot of LGBT Mormons/post-Mormons and feel like there’s something of a potential support group/friendships there. I’m thinking of changing jobs, even moving to a different university. In other words, I’m laying the groundwork to make any shift more smooth. Whether I take a breather from church or not, these are good things to do.

24) I’m in my 40′s and can see that in some important ways I’ve lived a stunted life. But I’m also able to use my voice to speak up for LGBT individuals inside the church, to try to make this little corner of church kinder and more receptive.

25) I can’t even imagine what you’re thinking of me. A hypocrite, someone who stays with an organization that contributed to my own mental health crisis. Someone too afraid to live. I can’t undo my past and all that lost time. I’ve made a lot of progress and am moving forward. I also believe and hope that things I share on this blog and things I say in my local church help LGBT members.

Maybe you can understand, maybe you can’t, why my life went so differently from yours. I’m certain you won’t agree with a number of decisions I made, but they were mine to make and they explain where I’m at now.

#David gets personal

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sambart93 · 5 years

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2019.06.18 Touken Ranbu: Jiden Hibi no Ha yo Chiruramu [Review]

Hey guys!! I am sure this one was highly anticipated but I am seriously in a slumb when it comes to writing these things now so this is going to be super simple! I hope you don’t mind!

Official Website here Official Twitter here Press Coverage 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

CAST and CHARACTERS

Aramaki Yoshihiko as Yamanbagiri Kunihiro Wada Masanari as Heshigiri Hasebe Kento as Tsurumaru Kuninaga Maeyama Takahisa as Uguisumaru Kato Sho as Ookanehira Kawakami Shota as Daihannya Nagamitsu Tanimizu Riki as Nansen Ichimonji Isono Dai as Oodenta Mitsuyo Iiyama Yuuta as Sohayatsurumaru Kizu Tsubasa as Hakata Toushiro Oosaki Natsuki as Maeda Toushiro Shitara Ginga as Gokotai Yokoyama Masafumi as Yamabushi Kunihiro Takeshi Naoki as Doudanuki Kobayashi Ryo as Tarou Tachi Kosaka Ryoutaru as Jirou Tachi Umetsu Mizuki as Yamanbagiri Chougi Aoki Jin as Mutsunokami Yoshiyuki

Location Cast Change: Naya Takeru as Sayo Samonji (for Tokyo First Round) Kitagawa Naoya as Honebami Toushiro (for Osaka Round) Shiina Taizou as Fudou Yukimitsu (for Hyogo Round) Wada Takuma as Kasen Kanesada (Tokyo Gaisen Round)

NON-SPOILER REVIEW Overall: I did enjoy myself. There is a lot of comedy in this one. It’s at least 50 - 60% comedy so everyone is laughing from start to finish. It’s about 80% scripted comedy and 20% improve comedy. It was very entertaining and very enjoyable. We all laughed the entire time. So if you just want to enjoy, laugh, have a good time, you are going to LOVE this stage! It’s just one long Hanamaru (the anime) episode to be honest. My favourite parts of the whole stage were definitely Manba and co’s dynamics and relationship. I really, really loved Sayo and Manba’s relationship and body language and small gestures towards each other throughout the play which really shows how close they’ve gotten. It’s really sad that Sayo is only there for the first Tokyo run because the little things he did for and towards Manba just melted my heart. Also, I really, really loved Manba and Doudanuki’s dynamic in this show too! I absolutely adored how Douda treated Manba this time around. However, personally, that’s not what I want from Touken Ranbu. I want pain, I want fighting, I want history, I want conflict. That does not happen in this stage. So this is not what I wanted. I started to get really bored and I got over the jokes after about 45 minutes into the show (the show is 145 minutes long). They repeat the same group/set of jokes about 10 times, so obviously I got bored of them. I feel like this plot could’ve been done in about 30 minutes. The fact they take the entire 145 minutes for this one simple plot line (it’s a really simple story), it really gets boring in some spots. The lack of fighting (which is less than 10 minutes long for the entirety of the play), the lack of history, the lack of conflict (even between the Touken Danshi!) really got to me and this just wasn’t what I wanted. Like I said, I did enjoy myself and I did laugh throughout and I did have a good time. But when Touken has set this ‘dark, despair, historical, fighting’ theme for so long, you can’t expect us to not expect that this time around, AND when we don’t get it, you can’t expect me not to be bored and disappointed. Which is what I am. Disappointed. Again. Rating: 5/10 (if you enjoy comedy and lighthearted stuff then this’d be about 8/10)

SPOILER REVIEW

Story: The story takes place after the events of the game (see details here). So we follow Chougi joining the gang at the Honmaru, but a lot of the gang are against Chougi and Manbachan (Yamanbagiri Kunihiro) meeting because Chougi is the ‘true’ Yamanbagiri sword. So they try to delay and play tricks so they can’t meet. And we follow those shenanigans.

I am going to break this down into three groups: ☆ The Good, × The Bad and △ the Neutral/General/Both-Good-and-Bad Comments! So get ready! I’ll do Good first!

☆ It’s difficult to describe, but I loved Sayo and Manba relationship in this one. There was a lot of body language and actions that showed just how much Sayo cared for Manba. There were many moments when he would sit next to Manba and look at him worried, checked if he was okay. When Chougi was trying to verbally attack Manba, Sayo was right by his side, ready to kick Chougi’s ass. Just the small things Sayo did for Manba throughout this play were just so pure and so adorable to watch. It’s such a shame that he’s only there for the Tokyo Shows because I would love see this development between these two’s relationship.

☆ Another relationship I loved in this one was Doudanuki and Manba. If you remember back in Mitsu/JyoDen, Doudan and Manba were always butting heads, but in this one, Doudan wouldn’t leave Manba’s side. He tried SO hard to protect Manba from Chougi, and he tried to hard to keep Chougi away from Manba throughout the entire play, which just shows how much he care for Manba! It was adorable!!

☆ Dounauki on his own is just so great in this stage series! I love Naoki’s performance of him every time!!

☆ At the end of the play, Manba finally got sent off to be Kiwame’d!! So in the next stage we’ll be getting Kiwame ManbaChan!! I cannot wait!

☆ Being able to see Aoki Jin’s acrobatics again was so good! He’s still got it!

☆ Riki as Nansei was adorable! He was really good at showing the catish characteristics he has! And his cat speech was adorable too!

☆ The Manba VS 6 Touken Danshi fight scene was very impressive on MakiChan’s part and it fit completely. Both MakiChan and ManbaChan could’ve wooped all their asses after all the years of training they’ve both technically done in sword fighting.

△ This is a mix of good and bad but, we cannot deny just how amazing MakiChan is at this point when to comes to sword fighting. His movements and his choreography is so good and such a high level by this point! But this is also a bad thing because... it makes it super obvious just how beginner everyone else (especially Chougi’s actor) is at sword fighting when he’s against them. I could painfully see the difference in their choreography levels, especially when MakiChan had fighting scenes against Chougi, and when he was fighting against 6 of the swords at the same time. Their movements and choreography just looks so mediocre and so clumsy and just don’t flow naturally at all next to him.

△ There were mentions of Ookurikara, Yagen and Jiji throughout the play, so definitely hints they’ll come back in future plays(?). I am excited for Ookuri and Yagen but we all know how I feel about Jiji -_____-

△ Ginga as Gokotai was.... fine. He definitely got the voice and intimidated body language right but... boy’s pretty tall... would’ve been better to find a shorter person?

△ There were no ensemble this time at all.

△ There are no set changes at all. It all takes place at the Honmaru. The set is really big actually! I like how they used all parts of the set, even the upper levels!

△ The umbrellas this time have no names on them! It’s all projection mapped (their names) onto white umbrellas instead this time around.

△ Why are they performing an Autumn/Winter themed play in the middle of summer? The play constantly talks about how Autumn is coming to an end, so why did they perform this in Summer?! That’s hella stupid.

△ I really did enjoy a lot of the comedy parts and I did enjoy my time BUT this isn’t what I wanted from TouStage; this isn’t what I expect from TouStage.

△ What was the point of Maeda playing the narrator in this? And why was it split into chapters throughout the play?

× Because it’s just a comedy that is heavily scripted and nothing major really happens, I see no rewatchability value unfortunately. Once was enough.

× The Opening is very long. It’s a ten minute VIDEO of them fighting and finding Chougi. Why they made it a video instead of actually on stage, I don’t understand. Why it was such a long video? I also don’t understand.

× I strongly feel like they expanded and stretched what could’ve been a 45 minute story into 145 minutes. There was no need for this Chougi vs Manba conflict to go on for the entirety of the the stage. It got very repetitive, and it dragged quite a bit.

× Also the second storyline about Gokotai? It felt very unnecessary and very much a throw away. It wasn’t needed for the point it was used for. It was used to reintroduce and set-up Jiji into the series and how they all miss him and want him back. But we really didn’t need Gokotai for it. In fact...

× ...50% of this cast is entirely unneeded and unnecessary! I have no idea why half of them were there! When they were all gathered on stage, I could easily look at them and pick out who could’ve been straight up removed.

If you had to ask me who actually brought something to the story, I would say: Manba, Chougi, Sayo, Doudanuki, and Nansei. Kento was good for the comedy parts. So literally everyone else you could’ve cut out.

× It bothers me that once again, Suemitsu is just stealing from another idea. The Gokotai storyline is basically from Hanamaru, and of course the Chougi backstory is taken straight from the Game Event (which is not the point that bothers me). He seriously cannot make up his own ideas. He hasn’t written a good stage since TRUMP seriously (K Stage doesn’t count because it’s just a carbon copy of the anime). And WHY is he even back?! Hiden was supposed to be his last one! Everyone said! So WHY is he back? Give other writers a chance!

× It really infuriated me how they waited and expected the audience to applause at certain times. One or two times where it’s expected is FINE but the fact they pause and wait SO many times for the audience to clap was just cringey and ewwy. I understand that some jokes are positioned so the audience claps, but when it’s the amount that it is in this play? No thank you. Just makes the actors look cheap and egotistical.

× The soundtrack is completely forgettable this time around! I cannot remember one single tune that stuck to me. I’m a huge Soundtrack lover so the fact nothing caught my ears and nothing caught my attention nor stayed with me is just.... bad.

× This play seriously made me hate Chougi! I like Chougi in the game but in this? He’s just a pompous, ignorant prick. I walked out absolutely HATING him! How dare he treat Manba and the rest of them like that! Motherf-ker.

× Personally, I found no moving, no emotional, no sad moment in the play this time. That’s bad and boring writing in my opinion.

× I’ve said this many times already but, they repeat the same 4 or 5 jokes about 10 times within the first 75 minutes of the play. That is total overkill. It got old fast, I quickly got bored (the 45 minute point was when it was starting to grate on me).

× There is all of ONE fight scene the entire play, and (I timed it) it takes up less than 15 minutes of the entire play. And it was glaringly obvious to see the skill level difference between MakiChan and everyone else (in all honesty).

× Another personal thing for me, but I find Kato Sho completely exhausting. He’s so damn loud and so over the top as Ookanehira. He just exhausts me. He’s great as himself but as Ookane? Just no thank you.

× Chougi and Manba don’t meet until the 75 minute part. Which is excessively late. You could’ve had them meet up about 30 minutes in. It really was stretched out too far.

× The theatre itself was freezing as FACK! Absolutely freezing in there!

And that’s all! In conclusion, it could’ve been much better and wasn’t what I wanted. But I feel like I say this EVERY TIME. Maybe I really should just stop. Why do I even say I like TouStage when it’s evident I’m disappointed like... every time! *sigh*

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bohemian-war · 5 years

Text

‘LOVE WILL TEAR US APART’ [CHAPTER 2]

(Credits to @bens-hardy for the gif).

Ben Hardy!Six x Fem Reader (Six Underground)

Summary (Six Underground): The film tells the story of 6 billionaires who form a vigilante squad by faking their deaths to take down notorious criminals. Warnings: language, character development, flirting, alcohol…

Word Count: 2.5k+ (…sorry that it’s too short)

A/N: Hi guys! Sorry that this took so long. I have been extremely busy these past few weeks so I hope you really enjoy this part. I am also taking my time as I don’t want to reveal everything straightaway so even when this chapter feels like a filler one, don’t you worry because from chapter three I am gonna start explaining everything about the Six Underground organisation and it really takes off from there :D. Also, in case you were wondering, I always imagined Joe as John as that bass player in The Black Heart ;). When it comes to Brian, it’s always been Machine Gun Kelly’s look as Tommy Lee in The Dirt. He is gonna play a big role in this story. So stay tuned!

(Credits to @geidiprimezs for the gif). Finally, I am sorry for all the grammatical/structure errors. Again, English is not my main language so I apologise for that. I always try to write more dialogue as a) it is easier to read; b) even when I love description I suck at it so I am sorry if you always find the same word/expression in every sentence. I always tend to write as to how the story is developed in my head in the first place. So, I am sorry. I am trying to get better at it, I promise. I cannot even express myself properly in my mother tongue. It is something I’ve struggled with since I was a child and it keeps getting worse due to my anxiety so bear with me on that one!

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PART 1

(I will do a master list and a playlist soon :D).

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Disclaimer:

– Fem Reader is a twenty-one-year-old med student studying at the Imperial College London.

– Ben (Six) is a twenty-eight-year-old billionaire.

The story takes place in 2019 but there are flashbacks to make the whole thing look more realistic.

Finally, the outfit that Ben is wearing to play the drums is the one on the gif (beanie included :P) and this is the reader’s:

Enjoy!

[Y/N POV]

Y/N AND ELLIE’S APARTMENT, LONDON. PRESENT DAY.

“What are you doing?”

“Looking for something…” you say focusing all your attention to your laptop’s screen.

“Is this about that playboy boyfriend of yours again?”

“Ellie, I already told you that he is not my boyfriend. He was just being nice...”

“Playboy boyfriend or Prince Charming. It does not matter. All of them are basically the same. They act nice and then they trap you in their spider web to get in your pants.”

You roll your eyes and ignore her comment.

“He is like a ghost! It is like he’d just vanished!”

She makes her way to the couch and sits next to you with a cup of tea in her hand.

“Maybe he is not on social media. I mean… Six? What kind of name is that?”

You sigh as Ellie sees you scrolling down on Facebook desperately.

“If you’d like, we could always try and track him down… Perhaps if you ask some people in the pub…”

“I am not going back,” you affirm bluntly.

“Then, I don’t know how I could help you, love.”

You sigh again and turn your gaze towards her.

“It is okay. I just wanted to thank him properly for what he did.”

“Are you sure this man even exists?”

“Ellie…”

“Okay, okay. Just sayin’”

You sigh again for the third time and look back at the screen. You slam it down close and stand up.

“You know what? I had enough. I might pop up to the National Gallery for the new music bands exhibition. Are you coming?”

“I’d love to but I am helping Eric with his new project.”

“New project?”

“I’ll keep you updated as I don’t even know what I am doing myself. Knowing Eric though it might involve RuPaul and drags and stuff…”

You laugh and shake your head.

After spending so much time debating about your outfit, you finish getting ready and take the first train from your place to Charing Cross. When you get off and go out into the street, the square is full of people. On the one hand, tourists who do not stop taking pictures with their selfie sticks and, on the other, locals who return home after a long and hard day at work. You make your way to the main entrance and grab a map from the foyer area. The exhibition is huge so you decide to visit the rock section first.

NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON. PRESENT DAY.

You are simply surprised by the amount of memorabilia. The gallery shows the history of the biggest names in music: AC/DC, David Bowie, Iggy Pop, The Rolling Stones, Mötley Crüe, Led Zeppelin… The collection also includes handwritten song lyrics, costumes worn during performances, studio equipment, promotional material, and singles. One of the spaces is beautifully dedicated to Queen and your eyes end up admiring various musical instruments; from John Deacon's bass guitar and a replica of Brian May's synthesizer to Roger Taylor's drum set.

Suddenly, you look away and come across with a familiar face. Casual look and hands in his pockets. He is also looking at the drum set. He is so lost in it that he barely notices you. You smile and decide to approach him.

[Six POV]

“Hey… It’s you!”

You direct your gaze towards that voice and your heart skips a beat. You never thought you would see her again. You could barely see her features under the dim light of the pub left alone when you both talked in the street. Nevertheless, everything changes now and you seem… speechless?

Wake up, you stupid asshole! “I just saw you admiring Rog’s set and thought that it’d be nice to say “hi”, Six right?”

She holds out her hand for you to shake. You eventually do.

“That’s thoughtful of you… Y/N?”

Of course, I remember your name…

She nods.

“Do you like music?”

“Who doesn’t?” Y/N smiles.

What a stupid question…

“I mean, the rock of the 70s and 80s…”

“Are you kidding? It was the best music! It still is… I think everything started with The Beatles back in the 60s though…”

You look at her with interest. You are surprised by her taste in music and want to know more.

“What is your favourite band?”

I cannot believe I am asking her these childish questions…

“Joy Division, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Queen… That’s why I decided to come to the exhibition today. They have done a great job so far.”

“Are you a Queen fan?!”

“Of course! I might have the biggest crush on Roger Taylor…”

I…like…you…

“All the girls do. I mean, he is alright…”

“Alright? Have you seen him in the 70s? He is literally gorgeous! Like a Renaissance painting.

You scoff and shake your hand at her obsession while running your tongue through your bottom lip.

“So… he’s alright…” Y/N repeats your words pointing at Roger’s set emphasising what you just said. “That’s why you were so lost in the kit!”

“No, I wasn’t!”

Liar…

“You look a little bit like him, to be honest…” Y/N smirks.

What…

She is approaching you now. She squints her eyes.

Too close…

“If only you had longer hair though…” her voice coming out like a whisper.

“What would you do?”

“Hmmm?”

“If I had longer hair… What would you do?”

You see her parting her lips and hold your gaze. Your eyes like blazing fire. If looks could kill or do something else… “I wanted to thank you for what you did last night but… I couldn’t find you and…”

“Don’t even mention it. It was my pleasure.” you cut her off and quickly run your fingers through your hair.

“Right…”

You try to avoid looking at her directly in the eyes because of the effect she has on you; a kind of warm feeling going down your spine, You don’t really know what it means but it kinds of scare you.

"Oi Six!" Suddenly, you see a tall man approaching and giving you a small pat on the back. You cannot help but return it with a big smile.

"Hey, what's up man?!"

"Brian, mate, how are you doing? Long time no see!"

“Good, I have not seen you in a while!”

“I have been busy…” You frown and sigh.

“I went to The Black Heart and Bobby told me that you would be here. Playing tonight?”

“Yeah. Hopefully, I’ll be able to make it by nine.”

“Great!”

Brian turns around and sees Y/N standing in an awkward position.

“Who’s this? New friend?”

You start feeling the tension built in the pit of your stomach. You clench your jaw.

“Sorry! That was rude of me. I am Brian.”

“Not at all! is it Brian for Brian May?”

“Wow! I like her.”

You cannot help but glare at him.

Watch it, mate…

“Unfortunately, I am not May but if you say so, I’ll take it,” he winks at Y/N.

“My name is Y/N by the way,” she holds her hand out again.

“Are you a Queen fan?”

“I certainly am.”

“Then you should come to The Black Heart tonight. Our friend Six here is gonna play. He is obsessed with Roger Taylor. He is his muse!

“Really?”

Y/N’s face lights up but you cannot tell whether is of surprise or emotion. She squints her eyes.

“The Black Heart…”

“Do you know it?” Brian asks in surprise.

“We actually met there…” you cut him off.

“Oh great! Everything settled then.”

“Brian…” you warned him.

“Are you playing too?” Y/N shows some interest.

“I’ll be there with some friends but I am not playing tonight.”

You can see the doubt in her eyes and you intervene before it gets worse.

“I am sure she’s got plans anyways, Bri.”

“Actually, I’d like to come!”

Fuck…

You curse and roll your eyes at the stupid situation. That pain in the chest again.

“Great! See ya both there then.”

[Y/N POV]

You definitely don’t want to return to the pub but there was something dragging you back there. It was probably the fact that you were very curious about watching Six play live. For some reason, you could not picture him behind a drum set and you were still mad at him for lying to you. On the other hand, it’d be nice to see him fail.

You made sure you were properly dressed this time. You did not want to get into any more trouble so you opt for a pair of fitted jeans, a nice top, high heels boots, and a black leather jacket.

Summer was about to start but it does not make any difference when you are leaving in London anyway. Ellie is not at home anymore so you finish cleaning, lock up, and make your way to the pub.

THE BLACK HEART, LONDON. PRESENT DAY.

[SIX POV]

“What time is your girlfriend coming?”

The boys are setting up and getting ready for the big night. The pub is already full of people chatting and having a nice time.

“I already told you that she is not my girlfriend, Brian.”

“Well, she is hot…”

“She is a kid.”

“I mean, if you don’t like her…”

You drop one of the mics and turn around with an angry look in your face.

“Don’t even think about it!” you growl. Your friend laugh.

“That’s what I thought, mate…”

You scoff and shake your head.

“Just make sure that you never play “I am in love with my car” in front of her or she will run away.”

“Oh, shut up!”

THE BLACK HEART (20:45 pm)

(”Princess of China” by Coldplay is playing)

[Y/N POV]

You arrive at the pub and it is already packed. You sigh and enter into an anxious mode. You simply couldn’t help but think of what happened the night before. Somehow, you manage to brush those thoughts off and get to the counter. This time, Ellie is not here with you so you have your ID ready in case they ask for it.

“What would you like lovely?”

“Just a coke, please.”

The bartender leaves and comes back with a glass full of the beverage and ice a few seconds later.

“There you are, sweetheart…”

“Thank you!”

You reach for your purse when you see the man shaking his head.

“It’s on the house…”

“Really? Thanks!”

The man nods and continues serving. You grab your drink and take it to your lips while observing the place again. You spot the empty stage in the distance including the drum set.

Where are you?

Suddenly, you hear a screeching noise coming from one of the microphones. It’s Brian!

“Night everyone! Some of you might already know me,” he says adjusting the mic to his height. “I am Bri. I was not planning on playing tonight but there has been a change of plans.”

Some people star clapping as he lifts his guitar up. You smile and take another swig from your coke with enthusiasm. “I’d like to introduce you to some people. This is John our bass player. And before someone makes the joke, no, we are not Queen.”

Many people start laughing.

“Finally, our special member, Six, on the drums…”

“Six, we love you!” You could see a couple of girls whispering and cheering about the drummer. You roll your eyes. So predictable…

“Sorry, ladies but Six will be just hitting on the drums tonight, I am afraid…”

You are thankful for Bri’s intervention and smile shyly to yourself shaking your head with amusement at the same time.

Six is sat behind the set of drums with a smug look on his face. He is finishing getting ready and checking on his equipment. He takes a swig of water and some drops stained his t-shirt. If he is nervous he knows very well how to hide it.

“We are gonna do some covers tonight,” Brian continues“… and we also have a surprise by the end of the night. So bear with us and we hope that you are all not to pissed to miss it.”

More laughs.

The list of covers is long but good; from “A Message” by Coldplay to “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” by The Beatles.

“And now… our final song…”

This catches your attention even more and all the pub goes quiet.

“…for a friend who’s currently in the room…” Brian puts on his visor and finally spots you.

“Y/N! there you are!”

Suddenly, a spotlight points directly in your direction and you have to cover your eyes due to the bright light. Everybody is staring at you and you start panicking. You freeze in your stool and feel a heat sensation in the pit of your stomach.

Oh no…

“Y/N loves Queen so we could not say goodbye without playing a song by the band itself. We will do the chorus and Six here will do the rest. “This is Crazy Little Thing Called Love”, everybody! Y/N we hope you like it…

When they finish, they are cheered by everyone and quickly get off the stage. You see Six approaching you and start playing with your straw while pretending to be drinking from your third coke of the night.

“Hey…”

“Hey…” you sigh.

“Did you enjoy the show?”

Six makes a sign to the bartender for what you assumed was a beer but he immediately directs his green eyes right back at you.

“Yeah, I mean, it was alright…” He raises an eyebrow and a smile begins to form at the corner of your lips. He shakes his head.

“Just alright?”

“Hmmm, I’d say meh.”

You wrinkle your nose in uncertainty and Six observes you with a funny look on his face.

“Let me buy you a drink.”

“I don’t drink…”

“Right…”

“But I will have one last coke. I will probably not sleep tonight with that much caffeine in my body though. I also feel that I should be paying for this,” you lift up your glass.

“It’s okay. I told Bobby that you are my host tonight. You can have anything you like. It is on me really…”

You frown and smile.

“Thanks…”

“Don’t even mention it.”

He grabs his pint and takes a big swig of it.

“I didn’t know you could play that well.”

“How could you know anyway?”

Rude.

“I truly enjoyed it, honestly.”

“I thought you said it was alright…”

“You were though…”

“Me?!”

You try to contain your laughter.

“Did you even see how I was banging those drums, love?”

Love…

“I know better…”

You could tell that he is offended.

Touché.

“What the f…”

“Roger Taylor is better than you!”

“Well, Roger fucking Taylor wished he could be me.”

Six scoffs and takes another large swig of his beer trying to hide behind his cruel words. You know he did not mean them. He adores Roger…

“Tommy Lee…”

“A total wanker!”

“Not true.”

“Well, he makes decent music. Not my style though.”

Six’s cockiness is back. A defence weapon.

“He does the real spinning…”

“I can do that too.”

“Sure…”

“I could show you if you let me…” he grins at you.

He leans into you and his big green eyes start taking everything of you in. His warm breath fanning over your face. That feeling in the pit of your stomach, again.

What is wrong with you Y/N?

Tag List: @bjhardy @pizzaplanets @mrbenhardys @bens-hardy @onceuponadetectivedemigod @benhvrdys @closertothesunwhenimwithyou @rebelrebelyourefaceisamess @calumfornicationx @poteda @hergewi @tanya-is-dead @imthewintergirl @rogerina-taylorr @sara-1705 @jessevans

#ben hardy #six underground #fanfiction #my writing #Love Will Tear Us Apart series #LWTUA #chapter 2 #ben hardy x reader #ben hardy fanfic #ben hardy imagine #au #alternate universe #bohemian rhapsody #bohemian rhapsody fandom #queen #queen fandom #six x reader #imagine #six

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uts-human-busting-ghosts · 5 years

Text

Operation: F*** it

Sapien’s Extermination/uts-human-busting-ghosts is getting rebooted Why is it called operation F*** It? because I’ve been debating rebooting the au with myself for a looooong-ass time and decided not to because I thought that I should just continue the story as is, but a few hurdles came in my way and I thought of other ways to improve the quality of the first couple parts. to be honest I just want to improve my skills in general!

Now there are a few reasons for a reboot 1. Incorporating animations

I’ve learned a few animating skills in adobe photoshop and those skills have been showing up in these recent parts and feel that they give them a little more *Pizazz* then they had before, I thought “how would the other parts look if they were animated?” re-reading through those parts some of the jokes and stuff would work a lot better if they were animated. 2. Giving the au a brand new shine In the older parts of the au they reused a lot of assets from UT to the point that the only original sprites made for the au were the ghosts I’d say mostly 10% of the au was custom. Now I made more the 80% of the sprites UI and maps with the other 20% being edits of old maps UI and tilesets. I want the sense that some things were done by me while still keeping the Undertale aesthetic

3. Premise I feel some things were not shown the way I wanted them to show so I wanted to make this reboot to make it more clear. So I made it so that frisk has already fallen into the underground. that's all I can say on that. But I also wanted to change the character dynamic

4. Design changes If you read the recent parts you would notice Memurblitz had a design change. I wanted to change the design for most of the characters but I feel it would be too jarring to have them change design midway through the au. this was actually the tipping point for the au Well, this update wasn’t really meant to be this short but I wanted to keep as brief as possible! that's all I have to say on this reboot. I will probably post more down the line. as for when the reboot is coming out in general? it’s coming soon, I’ve written down most of what I wanted to get done within each part & chapter.

I have one more thing to show you and until then I’ll see you when the au comes out!

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nancypullen · 5 years

Text

Chugging Along

I’m well aware that every year at this time I get whatever the summer version of cabin fever is - heat insanity? humidity madness? temperature derangement? Whatever you call it, it’s enough to make a normal(ish) person batty. It’s probably a good thing that the mister has been traveling a lot because A)I’m grumpy and B) I’m not cooking much. It’s just too dang hot. I’ve been taking advantage of ready made stuff. The seafood counter at our local Publix makes killer fresh salmon burgers. I bought just one southwest salmon burger for about $2 and cooked it up with some fresh green beans that I blanched in salty water. I mixed up a quick aioli for dipping and I was out of the kitchen in minutes.

I like mine really cooked, a little crunchy on the outside. I don’t use a bun, they’re yummy enough all on their own. I purposely bought just one because if I had two of these I’d eat two. Tonight’s five minute dinner will be zucchini noodles. Spiralize one big zucchini with my little handheld gadget, toss the zoodles in a skillet and throw a few shrimp on top, spice it all up and it’s done fast - minimal clean up too! OH, speaking of picking things up at grocery stores, look what we spotted outside of Kroger last Saturday! The home decor stores in our area have had Halloween stuff out for a couple weeks, but when Kroger puts out pumpkins you know it’s getting close. Eeeeek! I could squeal with excitement. I may have done an old lady jig when I stopped to take this photo. I love them all, and I get that they’re big, heavy luminary creations - but the prices are ridiculous. I might give half that, but not a penny more.

That same day we zipped down to the Wilson County fair grounds to drop off my talented husband’s entries in the photography contest. I also entered a couple. One photo is just a nice picture of Eugene, a snail that I bonded with this summer - I really think it captured his essence. The other photo is a beautiful shot of my grandbaby. That’s right, I put her in the fair. I’m not allowed to share her on my blog or on any social media platforms, so I entered her in the fair and now 500,000 people will see her. So there. Well, not all of the people who attend the fair will check out the photography exhibit, but a good portion of the 500,000 will. I don’t expect either of my entries to be ribbon winners, but it’s fun to participate. Driving in the road was lined with sunflowers, what a cheerful welcome!

The place was abuzz with folks entering everything from quilts and jams to pies and paintings. There were people pulling wagons loaded with metal sculptures, stained glass, floral arrangements, and just about anything else that can be cooked, crafted, or created. The Wilson County Fair is famous for a reason. My water aerobics instructor will be competing in the Ms. Senior Wilson County pageant on Saturday night. I may have to go cheer for her. Saturday is just such a busy time to go - ugh! Of course, we’ll be under heat advisories for another few days - when your heat index looks like this, is there really a good time to go?

Am I the only one that thinks that map looks like the flames of Hell? In 63 days we’ll jet out of Nashville on a trip to Maine. The mister wants to photograph Acadia National Park and I plan to decimate the lobster population. Hey, we both have our hobbies. That promise will get me through the next two months of sizzling weather. Well, maybe a month and a half. I don’t have a project going at the moment. I’d better dream one up. I’m crafting with my dead people and enjoying that. You know this lady spoke to me.

I’m bagging and boxing stuff for Goodwill. It seems like I get rid of a closet full of junk and overnight it multiplies somewhere else. I’ll keep chipping away until I’m satisfied. I just really, really want a place for everything and everything in its place. No boxes that go untouched for years, no saving a dress because I might be invited to Buckingham Palace someday, and if I’m being honest I could get rid of half of my dishes too. My only other plan for the week is to get a large portion of this hair cut off. It’s far too long for a woman my age. It’s well past the band of my bra and that’s probably not a good look for a gal who has 55 years under her belt (and on her face) The only thing stopping me right now is ease of throwing it up in a ponytail or a clip when it’s really hot. I’m looking at something about this length, so I guess I could still clip it.

That’s not me, obviously. This is me, showing my sister my giant, glittery earrings. We’re both like magpies, easily distracted by shiny things.

She’s up in Maine right now, soaking up time with her grandson and enjoying cooler temperatures. She has the nerve to text me her morning temps - one morning she said it was 52 and I’d woken up to 80 that day. That’s just cruel. The weather, my hair...I’m just ready for a change. Change is good. What could go wrong?

Ta-ta for now. I’ll keep you updated! XOXO

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hailqiqi · 6 years

Note

26 and 49 for the writers ask please

Hi Anon! Thank you for the ask! :D

Fic Writers Asks!

26. story you’re most proud of

My immediate answer is Skirting Katabasis.

This is from a professional writing point of view – I had no ‘inspiration’ for this fic, I sat down and said ‘I want to write a Kidge BROTP Adventure Story with side Plance’ and worked out a plot, outlined it, and then started writing it. It’s full of convoluted plots which I feel like I’ve seeded well, and the extra details and scenes which weren’t outlined have all added to it and made it a very rich tapestry. I’m proud of every bit of work I’ve put into this fic (and shout-out to @sp4c3-0ddity for being such a fabulous beta for it!). Like if ever there’s a story that proves I have actual potential and prowress as a writer, it’s this.

My less-technical answers are (surprisingly) The Future in Snippets and the world is out there, my dear, but we’re in here. Snippets because it became such a convoluted emotional mess and I feel like I’m doing a decent job handling that, and world because I successfully managed to capture the tense anticipation I’d had in my head for that fic, and I’d never really done that before.

49. writing advice

oooh. OK. So I ended up writing 8 points below.

1) read. Not even necessarily critically. Just read. The more you read, the more you absorb and familiarise yourself with how words and scenes go together. Read, read, and read some more.

2) outlines are your friend. Even for short fics, I have an outline. Outlines give you a map to follow from A-to-Z. They stop you worrying about ‘what am I gonna do next?’ as you write, and you don’t feel that d’oh! when you forget to include an important plot point. Also, when you write an outline you get to seriously sit down and think about the story as a whole, and you can figure out what’s going to work and what isn’t so it lets you modify the plot/scenes/structure of the fic before you waste time writing scenes you aren’t going to use. I’ll frequently write additional scenes and details that weren’t in the outline, but I’ve never written a scene for a story and then had to delete it.

3) don’t compare yourself skill-wise to other writers. writing isn’t a talent - it’s a skill. Thinking up of stories, being creative - that’s a skill, one that you can learn. Some people have been practicing for 20 years in various ways, some for 6 months - y ou never know how long someone else has been working at their craft.

4) don’t get too attached to your writing. Some people feel like their writing is their art, it’s an extension of themselves. That feeling only holds you back, because it can make any criticism of your writing feel like a personal attack. Once you’ve written something, let it go and exist on it’s own. Writing is a skill, and to improve a skill you need to know what’s wrong. tangible critical feedback is 80% more useful than positive feedback. Positive feedback is great because it lets you know what you’re doing well, but critical feedback draws your attention to where you need to polish it up and that gives you an opportunity to improve. If all anybody ever says is ‘I love it!’ then you stagnate.

5) do pay attention to the feedback other writers get, and the things you admire about their work. Other readers might point out things you’ve missed, and the way other authors write things can give you references and a basis on which to develop your own way of doing that thing (for instance, I have a list of fics I’ll reference for Lance POV, for Pidge POV, and for 3rd Party Narration). It gives you things to think about when you’re stuck!

6) look up writing resources. There are GREAT resources online for writing. Especially tumblr posts (I think I have a link to my resource tag on my fic page). There’s stuff that helps you write more snappy narratives, better dialogue, helps you to capture character voice etc. Use it! Ask other authors for advice! Sometimes we read over our own writing and we think it’s lacking something but we don’t know what. Reading these kind of ‘technical’ resources can help us to identify these issues and shape it into something that we wanna read.

7) write for yourself. Yah this one’s cliched but…it’s true. If you write for the validation of feedback then you’re gonna be constantly anxious about your stories, and you might not write something true to you. Don’t think about the audience - worry about them later, when you’re tagging or writing summaries and author’s notes. Write something that you enjoy reading yourself, something that you can open up again in a day or so and go ‘hey I like this story’. At the end of the day the audience is really nice and definitely motivates me to make time to write, but the pleasure of writing in itself is what I enjoy about writing. And, as a reader, I enjoy reading fics where the author’s personality shines through – like yes, this trope might be overused, but you can tell that it’s X Author’s version and I like that! When you write for an audience you tend to write for the most generic, common denominator and that - unsurprisingly - produces a generic story. You gotta put a little soul into your writing, and you can only do that when you write for you.

(Even when it’s paid writing, they paid you to do it because they want you! Anyone can churn something out to meet specifications. You got the job cause they want your flavour.)

8) talk to other authors. Making friends with other authors can give you motivation to write. It’ll give you access to that all-important honest criticism that lets you grow. Other writers are also fantastic resources - I know I’ll ask in a discord group ‘Hey I’m having trouble writing Keith, any help?’ and I’ll get like a bazillion Keith fics that people found helpful and an in-depth discussion of his character quirks. Author friends also give you an outlet to vent about writing frustrations or feedback frustrations.

I think that’s it!

#writing stuff #writing resources #ask meme

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izzyovercoffee · 6 years

Text

A Brief Guide to Farming Resonate Stems and Override Frequencies / Sleeper Nodes without losing your mind (while trying to feel like you’re maximizing your time)

[ DESTINY WARMIND DLC SPOILERS INBOUND ]

To preface, I am not an expert, and this kind of guide has probably been done before. I just like games that provide a sort of mindless grind to participate in every once in a while because, I’ve found, it helps me relax when I’m stressed out. However, this only works if I can create a continuous loop of Things To Do / Be Doing. Once the momentum stops I get bored and need to log off, and often don’t come back for a while.

Destiny 2′s Mars destination provides just enough to create a continuous loop of Things, that should, at the very least, provide enough Resonate Stems to keep popping into Override Frequencies, that you can then seek Sleeper Nodes with. However, because Sleeper Nodes are RNG based, and getting all 40 are subject to that RNG, it’s important to frame this kind of farm/grind in a way that doesn’t feel frustrating, and that doesn’t allow the RNG to fuck up your day.

For anyone unaware, RNG determines the Sleeper Nodes, and in order to “successfully” find all 40, you have to hope you have good RNG when you create your Override Frequencies. The Emblem does NOT count Sleeper Nodes you have already opened.

For me, farming up a ton of stems and then popping them for Override Frequencies, and only going node after node after node, is both boring, frustrating, and pointlessly time wasting ... because you’re not actually doing anything productive when it’s JUST tagging nodes and nothing else.

And, to be honest, it’s hard to farm anything if you can’t get a good rhythm going. A lot of this is not particularly intuitive, especially if grinding games just aren’t your thing. Hence I offer this guide, to have the sleeper nodes be a natural inclusion in a grind/farm loop, rather than a separate target or destination, to minimize the frustration that bad RNG can bring.

This goes under a cut due to length.

KEEP IN MIND

There are two main maps on Mars that you can fast travel to, and that everything else branches out from:

Braytech Futurescape, and

Glacial Drift

Keep in mind that Mindlab is attached to Futurescape, both the service train tunnel and Dynamo (Approach) connects Futurescape and Drift at different sides of the map (Dynamo is the west end, service tunnel is east), and Descent is attached to Drift.

Once you’re on a map that the Sleeper Node’s Override Frequency directs you to, feel free to do anything in any order, and grab the Sleeper Node whenever is most convenient for you to do so.

The Override Frequencies are fairly straightforward in telling you where to go, as the first word of the three pinpoint locations will tell you the general area. (ie. Futurescape, Drift, Mindlab, Descent, Dynamo) followed by the more specific locations. There are a few in Dynamo that are tricky to find as they’re kind of hidden, but if you’re stuck there are videos on youtube you can find to help.

EDIT:: Also note that Override Frequencies, when created, will never be for the area you are currently in. If you get to the end stretch (35~ ish with 5 left to go) and can remember most of the ones you’ve already gotten, I highly recommend standing in any area you’re SURE you’ve gotten ALL the nodes at least once).

THE LOOP BASICS

Arrive on Mars (if a Public Event is incoming, land on that map first)

If two Supply patrols are available, complete both.

Make sure the Event goes Heroic. If you don’t know how to make them heroic (check further down in the guide and I’ll tell you), or if you’re the only person on the entire map and thus cannot solo the heroic, just complete it and then run the Lost Sector.

You should have enough Resonate Stems to create an Override Frequency. Check the location.

IF THE NODE IS ON THE OTHER CENTRAL MAP:

Take a Survey patrol and go there.

Complete the Survey patrol.

Check for available patrols. If there are Supply patrols available, complete both.

If there are no Events incoming, grab a Combat patrol and either rush or take your time through the area’s Lost Sector. Whatever you prefer.

If there is an Event incoming, grab a Combat patrol for easy completion during the event.

You should now have enough Stems to create an OF, check the location.

IF THE LOCATION IS IN DESCENT:

If you are currently in Futurescape or close by and feel like walking (or fast traveling to Futurescape), grab a Survey patrol and ride to Drift.

If you are anywhere else, or don’t feel like making the trip for Survey, fast travel to Drift.

If a PE is available with a long timer (3min~), caress the flag lovingly for free ammo, grab the Assassination patrol, and descend into Descent.

If the assassination patrol is not available, do the following loop: Supply, Supply, Combat, Public Event (or Lost Sector if PE is not available). By then Assassination should be up.

Complete Assassination, and grab the Node.

IF you did not yet do the Event, fast travel back and catch the PE. Be sure to grab a supply OR a combat patrol for easy completion during the Event, and complete the other two patrols (supply and/or combat).

You now have enough Stems to create an OF, check the location.

IF THE LOCATION IS IN THE MINDLAB:

If you are currently in Drift or close by and feel like walking (or fast traveling to Drift), grab a Survey patrol and ride to Futurescape.

If you are anywhere else, or don’t feel like making the trip for Survey, fast travel to Futurescape.

If a PE is available with a long timer (3min~), caress the flag lovingly for free ammo, grab the Assassination patrol, and ascend into Mindlab.

If the assassination patrol is not available, do the following loop: Supply, Supply, Combat, Public Event (or Lost Sector if PE is not available). By then Assassination should be up.

Complete Assassination, and grab the Node.

You now have enough Stems to create an OF, check the location.

IF THE LOCATION IS IN DYNAMO:

Take a Combat patrol and ride to Dynamo.

Dynamo has a few Memory Fragments dotted throughout. If you want to hunt for them, do so during your trips to the respective Nodes. If you’ve already found them, or don’t particularly care, you can ignore them.

Sleeper Nodes DO show up during Adventures (AND Strikes / Heroic Strikes, apparently), SO if you wanted an actual goal to follow through with to justify your time in Dynamo, you can activate the one of the following two Adventures to give you a reason to be there:

Hephaestus

Activated in Futurescape

Will take you to the Dynamo Server Room

Incursion

Activated in Drift

Will take you to Dynamo Approach

Dynamo is also great for solo farming kills to unlock Masterwork Perks on Exotic weapons, provided you found any catalyst for any particular exotic. You might want to save farming kills for your forays into Dynamo as you’ll never have any competition inside, unlike the public patrol zones.

WHAT TO PRIORITIZE

1. Public Events first, as they are a pretty fun and exciting activity to do that, if you paired with the right patrol and made Heroic, will easily net you at least 3 stems in a relatively engaging way.

Witches Ritual

needs at least 2 people to make heroic

stand IN THE CIRCLE and kill the witches

one person needs to STAY IN EACH CIRCLE until the barrier around the void crystals fall

destroy the crystals to make heroic

Warsat Recovery

Only stand in the Warsat to increase percentage to specific increments, THEN GET OUT

Kill the 2 Witches and then the Shrieker that spawns/opens at: 25%, 50%, and 75%

If the Warsat gets to 80% it CANNOT BE MADE HEROIC

this is probably the easiest PE to make Heroic solo, because you’re not racing against the time and someone never leaving the damn circle

Injection Rig

Wardcliff Coil will (usually) blow the vents at one hit each

you will know the vent is blown if the metal flap that otherwise protects the vents is open outside of the Evacuation period

the third round of vents rotates opening each Evacuation period. If it doesn’t look open but is NOT blown, then you need to run around the inner circle until you find the open vent to destroy

destroy the vents to make Heroic

2. High-priority targets spawned in the world

Occasionally a small notification will appear at the bottom left of your screen briefly that will alert you to a High Priority target in the area.

Killing the target and looting the chest will net you at least one Resonate Stem, and since they’re out in the world, you’re likely to come across them while doing patrols

3. Lost Sectors

Core Terminus (Futurescape)

Two Memory Fragments are found in here, as well as

terminals with interesting Exo lore

Ma’adim Subterrane (Drift)

Two Memory Fragments are found in here as well

Skipping half of the lost sector is easy, if you can manage to jump from the top of a column to the bridge

Sleeper Nodes can be found in and around this sector, unlike Futurescape’s Core Terminus

4. Chests and Resources

Trust me on this (or maybe not, idk, up to you lmao) but you want the Mars tokens and the Seraphite, as the Mars Engrams have an arguably interesting loot pool (including ghosts, speeders, and a ship)

THE PATROL BASICS

There are two main maps on Mars that you can fast travel to, and that everything else branches out from:

Braytech Futurescape, and

Glacial Drift

On either map, there are a total of 5 possible patrols, with only 3 active at any one time. Completing a patrol, or activating and then abandoning one, will bring another to come up.

1. SUPPLIES are denoted by the following icon:

You will be asked to gather supplies. Unlike other patrol zones on other planets, Mars does not have separate patrol activation locations to dictate types of gathering---it will always randomly pick between kill-Hive-for-stuff, or kill-Cabal-for-stuff (possibly influenced by the next approaching public event).

2. COMBAT is denoted by the following icon:

This one is easy: murder. You don’t even need to be the one to do it---just be in close proximity to chaos and it’ll count towards your percentage. Also, keep in mind that this is the ONLY patrol that you can complete in non public patrol zones (aka pretty much anywhere). Every other patrol will require you to either remain on the first map of activation, or can only be completed at a specific target / target location.

3. ASSASSINATIONS are denoted by the following icon:

You will be asked to kill a High-Priority target spawned for this patrol.

If you are in Futurescape, you will always be tasked to assassinate a target in the Mindlab.

If you are in Drift, you will always be tasked to assassinate a target in the Descent.

Keep that in mind for Override Frequencies that ask you to visit either location.

4. SURVEYS are denoted by the following icon:

Surveys will always take you to the central map you are not on.

So, say you’re in Futurescape and activate a Survey, it will ask you to visit a specific location to “survey” in -> Glacial Drift.

If you’re in Glacial Drift, it will ask you to visit -> Braytech Futurescape.

Keep in mind that you will not be able to fast travel while these are active, you will have to take your speeder and go.

IN CONCLUSION

Dynamo is often the area where the loop is weakest, because there are rarely if ever any reason to actually go INTO Dynamo, no patrols will want you to go there (though you can complete Combat patrols inside that area, so you may want to save Combat patrols for Dynamo), and adventures only go to two specific areas, while sleeper nodes are dotted throughout Dynamo.

Aside from that, once you get a rhythm going for everything else, it’ll be hard to stop (especially if you’re used to mindless farming / node hunting and don’t need Rasputin’s music to help you, putting on your favorite playlist or designing one around this can make the time fly by).

Whether or not you want to participate in Escalation Protocol is entirely up to you. I don’t normally do, but if I see at least 2 other people doing it, sometimes I will join in --- especially if i need to farm kills for an Exotic, farm Hive kills for the planetary challenge, or if the Supply patrols are fulfilled by Hive.

Anyway. Good luck using this farm/grind rhythm guide to help you procrastinate instead of doing other, way more important things you probably should actually be doing. Also best of luck on the sleeper node hunt, and the memory fragment hunt.

#Destiny 2 #destiny spoilers #warmind spoilers #resonate stems #idk what to tag this as #izzy plays destiny #guides: destiny #sleeper nodes #??? i guess ???#long post for ts #Destiny: Warmind #Warmind #tbh this is almost entirely just a reference guide for like a handful of people #edited to add that OFs on creation will never be for the area you're in

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vaultt-tec · 7 years

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How did Fallout 1 ever get made?

PCGameN sat down with the Fallout 1 team and discussed its making.

This is in a read more because it is SUPER long. I added it all here but click the link and read it on their site, there are more pictures!

Tim Caine was at PAX when he first saw Vault Boy as a living, breathing entity - it was a cosplayer of 16 or 17 years old, hair gelled to replicate that distinctive swirl. ‘This is weird’, he thought.

Feargus Urquhart remembers walking into Target and seeing that same gelled haircut and toothy smile, not on a fan this time, but emblazoned across half a metre of cotton. ‘How is it that a game that we all worked on somehow created something iconic?’, he wondered. ‘How did it show up on a t-shirt in a department store?’

Related: the best RPGs on PC.

In the years since, Bethesda have taken Fallout into both first-person and the pop culture mainstream. Vault Boy has become as recognisable as Mickey Mouse. The series’ sardonic, faux-’50s imagery now feels indelible, as if it has always been here. But it hasn’t.

It took the nascent Black Isle Studios to nurse the Fallout universe into being, as an unlikely, half-forgotten project in the wings of Interplay, where Caine and Urquhart were both working in the ‘90s. The pair helped create one of the all-time great RPGs in the process.

“The one thing I would say about Interplay in those days, and this isn’t trying to pull the veil back or anything like that - there was just shit going on,” Urquhart tells us. “It was barely controlled chaos. I’m not saying that Brian [Fargo] didn’t have some plan, but there was just… stuff.”

One day, Fargo sent out a company-wide email to canvass opinion. He wanted Interplay to work on a licensed game, and had three tabletop properties in mind. One was Vampire: The Masquerade. Another was Earthdawn, a fantasy game set in the same universe as Shadowrun. And the third was GURPS, designed by Games Workshop’s Steve Jackson.

The team picked the latter, overwhelmingly, because that was what they played in their own sessions. But GURPS wasn’t a setting - it was a Generic Universal RolePlaying System. And so Interplay’s team had to come up with a world of their own.

“I would send out an email saying, ‘I’m in Conference Room Two with a pizza’,” Caine says. “And if people wanted to come, on their own time, they could do it. Chris [Taylor, lead designer], Leonard [Boyarksy, art director], and Jason [Anderson, lead artist] showed up.”

Interplay at the time was almost like a high school, as map layout designer Scott Evans remembers it: incredibly noisy and divided into cliques. Caine was building a clique of his own.

Traditional fantasy was the first idea to be dismissed. The team actually considered making Fallout first-person, a decade early - but decided the sprites of the period didn’t offer the level of detail they wanted. Concepts were floated for time travel, and for a generation ship story - but one after the other, they were all pushed aside and the post-apocalypse was left.

“One thing I didn’t like was games where the character you’re playing should know stuff that you, the player, don’t,” Caine says. “And I think the vault helped us capture that, because both you the player and you the character had no idea what the world was like. The doors opened and you were pushed out. And I really liked that, because it meant we didn’t have to do anything fake like, ‘Well you were hit on your head and have amnesia’.”

There was plenty about the Fallout setting that wasn’t as intuitive, however. Players would have to wrap their heads around a far-future Earth and a peculiar retro aesthetic, even before the bombs started dropping. The question of how Fallout ever survived pitching is answered with a Caine quip: “What do you mean, pitch?”

For a short while, Interplay had planned to make several games in the GURPS system. But soon afterwards they had won the D&D license, a far bigger property that would go on to spawn Baldur’s Gate and Icewind Dale. As a consequence, Caine’s team were left largely to their own devices.

As for budget - Fallout’s was small enough to pass under the radar. Although Interplay are best remembered for the RPGs of Black Isle and oddball action games like Shiny’s Earthworm Jim, they had mainstream ambitions not so different to those of the bigger publishers today. During Fallout’s development they were primarily interested in sports, and an online game division called Engage.

“It was almost like a smokescreen,” Urquhart explains. “So much money was being pumped into these things that you could go play with your toys and no-one would know.”

Which is exactly what the Fallout team did, pulling out every idea they’d ever intended for a videogame.

“Being just so happy and fired up that we were making this thing basically from scratch and doing virtually whatever we wanted, we had this weird arrogance about the whole thing,” Boyarsky recalls. “‘People are gonna love it, and if they don’t love it they don’t get it.’

“Part of it was a punk rock ethos of, every time we came up with an idea and thought, ‘Wow, no-one would ever do that’, we always wanted to push it further. We chased that stuff and got all excited, like we were doing things we weren’t supposed to be doing.”

The team laugh at the idea that Fallout might have carried some kind of message (“Violence solves problems,” Caine suggests). To these kids of the ‘80s, nuclear holocaust felt like immediate and obvious thematic material. The game’s development was guided by a mantra, however.

“It was the consequence of action,” Caine puts it. “Do what you want, so long as you can accept the consequences.”

Fallout lets you shoot up all you want. But if you get addicted, that will become a problem for you, one you’ll have to cope with. The team were keen not to force their own views onto players, and decided the best way to avoid that was with an overriding moral greyness. The Brotherhood of Steel - in Fallout 3, a somewhat heroic group policing the wasteland - were here in the first game simply as preservationists or, more uncharitably, hoarders. Even The Master, the closest thing Fallout had to a villain, was driven by a well-intentioned desire to bring unity to the wasteland. His name, pre-mutation, was ‘Richard Grey’.

“Everyone needed to have flaws and positive points,” Taylor says. “That way the player could have better, stronger interactions whichever way they went.”

Although the GURPS ruleset eventually fell by the wayside, the Fallout team were determined to replicate the tabletop experience they loved - in which players don’t always do what their Game Master would like. They filled their maps with multiple quest solutions and stuffed the game with thousands of words of alternative dialogue. “The hard part was making sure there was no character that couldn’t finish the game,” Caine says.

Fallout’s dedication to its sandbox is still striking, and only lately matched by the likes of Divinity: Original Sin 2. It was a simulation that enabled unforeseen possibilities.

“I am shocked that people got Dogmeat to live till the end of the game,” Taylor says. “Dogmeat was never supposed to survive. You had to do some really strange things and go way out of your way to do so, but people did.”

During development, a QA tester came to the team with a problem: you could put dynamite on children.

“Where you see a problem…,” Urquhart says. He is joking, of course, yet the ability to plant dynamite - achieved by setting a timer on the explosive and reverse pickpocketing an NPC - became a supported part of the game and the foundation of a quest. This was a new kind of player freedom, matched only by the freedom the team felt themselves.

“We were really, really fortunate,” Boyarsky says. “No-one gets the opportunity we had to go off in a corner with a budget and a team of great, talented people and make whatever we wanted. That kind of freedom just doesn’t exist.

“We were almost 30, so we were old enough to realise what we had going on. A lot of people say, ‘I didn’t realise how good it was until it was over’. Every day when I was making Fallout I was thinking, ‘I can’t believe we’re doing this’. And I even knew in the back of my head that it was never going to be that great again.”

Once Fallout came out, it was no longer the strange project worked on in the shadows with little to no oversight. It was a franchise with established lore that was getting a sequel. It wasn’t long before Boyarsky, Caine, and Anderson left to form their own RPG studio, Troika.

“We knew Fallout 1 was the pinnacle,” Boyarsky says. “We felt like to continue on with it under changed circumstances would possibly leave a bad taste in our mouths. We were so happy and so proud of what we’d done that we didn’t want to go there.”

Fallout is larger than this clique now. Literally, in fact: the vault doors Boyarsky once drew in isometric intricacy are now rendered in imposing 3D in Bethesda’s sequels. And yet Boyarksy, Taylor, and Caine now work under the auspices of Obsidian, a studio that has its own, more recent, history with the Fallout series. Should the opportunity arise again, would they take it?

“I’m not sure, to be very honest,” Taylor says. “I loved working on Fallout. It was the best team of people I ever worked with. I think it’s grown so much bigger than myself that I would feel very hesitant to work on it nowadays. I would love to work on a Fallout property, like a board game, but working on another computer game might be too much.”

Boyarsky shares his reservations: that with the best intentions, these old friends could get started on something and tarnish their experience of Fallout.

“It would be very hard for us to swallow working on a Fallout game where somebody else was telling you what you could and couldn’t do,” he expands. “I would have a really hard time with someone telling me what Fallout was supposed to be. I’m sure that it would never happen because of the fact that I would have that issue.”

Urquhart - now Obsidian’s CEO - is at pains to point out that Bethesda were nothing but supportive partners throughout the making of Fallout: New Vegas, requesting only a handful of tiny tweaks to Obsidian’s interpretation of its world. “I’ve got to be explicit in saying we are not working on a new Fallout,” he says. “But I absolutely would.”

Caine has mainly built his career by working on original games rather than sequels: Fallout, Arcanum, Wildstar, and Pillars of Eternity. But he would be lying if he said he hadn’t thought about working on another Fallout.

“I’ve had a Fallout game in my head since finishing Fallout 1 that I’ve never told anyone about,” he admits. “But it’s completely designed, start to finish. I know the story, I know the setting, I know the time period, I know what kind of characters are in it. It just sits in the back of my head, and it’s sat there for 20 years. I don’t think I ever will make it, because by now anything I make would not possibly compare to what’s in my head. But it’s up there.”

#fallout #fallout 1 #fallouts 20th birthday #happy birthday gamedude #fallout nv #obsidian #news

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hangonimevolving · 5 years

Text

Falling flat. TIRED. Big zero. Skidding off track.

Okay, I had a little bit of title indecision with this post :)

Allow me to regale you with a brief tale from my training run today.

I sent out for a 4-miler this morning on my new favorite route, the access road along the FL-826E expressway (also known as “The Palmetto”). I’d just run it a few days ago on my 6-miler, but I’d started out pre-dawn, when it was still very dark outside, and thus perhaps THE TREASURE was out there that day, but I didn’t see it.

But I did see THE TREASURE today.

What treasure? Well, this: I was about halfway along in the run, when I look over the steel guard rail that separates the road/bike path from a grassy area and a big long canal - - and I see THIS BEAUTY:

This picture doesn’t convey the size of the tire. But it was a nice, big tire. A truck tire, perhaps. And the PERFECT kind of tire for cross-training, practicing tire flips, etc.

So this is kind of a weird confession - but I’ve been really wanting to have a big old tractor tire in my backyard for a few years now. Tractor tires are GREAT fitness tools - you can use them to do box jumps, step-ups, tire flips, sit-ups and back extensions, sumo squats, and a number of other drills. I’d even been looking on the app Letgo for free/cheap tires on and off over the year....

I’d even heard that you can go to a tractor/truck tire dealer, and ask if they have any “junk tires” (i.e. used up, worn-out tread) for donation or cheap sale, and that often they’d be happy to give you one. But I just hadn’t bothered yet.

Anyway - so I find this big ass tire on my run, and I’m thinking “ITS CHRISTMAS MORNING!” Except.... I am on foot, 2 miles away from my house, and obviously this thing is huge. I need to make a plan about how to get it home.

So I pull up Google Maps on my phone, and drop a pin...

And then I run the rest of the way home, in fact picking up my average mile pace in the process because I’m so damn excited about my new tire.

I get home sopping wet with sweat, immediately swipe my purse and car keys from inside, grab a big cup of water and a towel, then jump in the car. And I realize - hmm, I might need some tools and equipment to get this bad boy into the car. It’s gonna weigh a ton! So I look around the garage, and grab a few things: a big stepladder we have, to use as a ramp to roll the tire up into the trunk; a pair of gardening gloves. Some bungee cable, in case I have to rope the trunk shut if I can’t close it with the tire inside. ETc.

So then I take off down the road, and find myself near the tire. I actually overshot a little, unfortunately - I was parked at least 30-40 feet from the tire. The spot where the tire was located happens to be where the road begins to curve, and there’s not much shoulder on which to pull over. Plus, its a curve - cars going at a fast pace could clip my parked car, and I am worried about this. I park and throw on the hazard lights, and realize I need to do this FAST.

I walk about 30 paces back, find my tire, and do some quick planning. I manage - miraculously, to flip it up, roll it up a small, very grassy/bramble-y embankment, and get it over a 24″ steel barricade - this is nothing short of a miracle. The tire is HEAVY. As I flipped it up, I realize it is heavier than the amount of weight I currently deadlift (approx 80 lbs) during circuit training. I am able to get it up, so it isn’t as heavy as some gym tires I’ve tried to use - but its damn heavy.

Okay - so now its over on the road-side of the barricade, and I have the task of CAREFULLY rolling it the 30 feet back to my car. This is not easy. Again, its heavy, and I am very conscious that if I lose control of it, its going to roll into the road and possibly cause a giant accident. So I’m super careful.

I get it to my car, and I am AMAZED AT MYSELF OMG.

DUDE. It is HUGE. Look at the size of it, relative to my car.

I can practically taste victory - I am so excited and abuzz, thinking about how if I can just get it in the car, I will have an awesome, heavy-but-not-too-heavy-to-flip-bc-I-just-did-it tire to work with in my backyard.

Yeah. So. Then I get to trying to load the m#$%^er.

Bruhhhhh. I tried everything. I make the ramp with the ladder, and I try rolling it up. It is honest to god like the Greek god Sisyphus, pushing a boulder up a mountain, only to have it roll back down again.

(aside: I love the myth of Sisyphus, and in fact have blogged about it here before, in reference to running with a jogging stroller)

Anyway, - with the tire, I am vaguely paranoid that it is going to roll backwards and either cause me a spinal injury, make me pull an oblique, knock out my ankle from underneath me, etc. so I am worried and tentative. But I DO try. I give it a solid 45 minutes of effort. I know that I have to roll it about 2/3 of the way up the ladder ramp, of course being VERY careful to keep it centered and not running off track (impossible feat #1), then somehow, 2/3 of the way up, get it to lay flat on the ramp (impossible feat #2) and then stay stationary right there on the ramp (impossible feat #3) while I then run into the car, climb in, and then lay on my tummy while pulling the tire the rest of the way up, into the trunk (impossible feat #4). The one non-negotiable thing that was needed here, was another set of hands and muscle to stand on the opposite side of the ladder, help the tire stay balanced and stationary while I did all that running around. That’s it. That was the difference between my plan working, and not.

I am staring these impossibilities in the face, and still I try. Because I am ordinarily not a quitter. And - 45+ minutes in the sweltering sun, and this too post-4 mile run, on a curved expressway service road that has infrequent, but VERY fast-moving vehicle traffic - - I realized it just wasn’t gonna happen. There was NO way. And so, with a heavy heart, I made the decision to abandon my Big Baby right there, on the side of the road.

I was so disappointed, frustrated, and sad, that I could have just hit someone. Or cried. Or both. It felt like some sort of personal failure in a way, tht I couldn’t get this mammoth tire into my car by myself, even though obviously its an absurd task.

Lessons learned? So the truth is, as the day went on, and Dr. Spouse and I had an enjoyable lunch together hours later, I realized I should stop moping, and find a lesson in this. And I think I found it:

I’m very good about making a commitment and sticking to it, no matter how difficult, personally daunting or exhausting it is, no matter my aptitude or interest. I am a promise-keeper. Its what I am. I’m borderline pathological about it. I am also a planner - I will think of a task, and all the things I maybe kinda sorta MIGHT need to get it done, and I’ll prepare everything. But there is one thing I SUCK AT soooo bad, and that is acknowledging that in life, there are so very, very many things that aren’t just about effort and intention, planning and preparation, and a person’s singular, dedicated effort.

So much of life involves humans needing other humans’ help and support.

Yes. Technically, I was strong enough to flip that tire. I was strong enough and clever enough to strategize a way to get it over that steel barricade. I was careful enough and responsible enough to roll it down the street slowly and cautiously, without jeopardizing myself or other drivers. I was even resourceful enough to make a ramp and get the thing like 2/3 of the way up the ramp alone. BUT. I couldn’t be TWO people. No matter how hard I tried, no matter how many tools I brought. I couldn’t multiply myself. I couldn’t be my own assistant and supporter, my own helper. I really just needed one more person there.

In this case, I didn’t have anyone to ask - not at this time of day, and not in my immediate area did I have a friend or contact with the muscle and the understanding about my crazy need for a truck tire, or my weird fitness interests at all. But - maybe the lesson here isn’t about truck tires, tire flips, quads and delts and fast-twitch muscle fibers.

Maybe I need to learn to ask for help with stuff. Maybe I need to open my mouth and take the risk of saying, I can’t do this alone. Can you help me?

My truck tire won’t be here to help me get stronger. But its got my wheels turning nonetheless.

#fitness #running #half marathon #ocrtraining #randomness #deep thoughts

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askshalvanic · 7 years

Text

Yume Nikki rant/thoughts

Ahh, Yume Nikki, one of the most renowned RPG games in history. While certainly not as nearly as popular as Undertale, it does have its spot within the RPG community, and some people like the game, hell, there’s some who find it inspirational or even life changing. Now, the problem is… I don’t really share this opinion or thoughts on it. In fact I don’t like the game very much. I didn’t really enjoy it, and to be honest, I immediately uninstalled it and wanted to forget about it the moment I was done playing it. The reason for this was that it was mostly a negative experience. I did have a few moments that I enjoyed here and there, so it wasn’t all that negative, but about 80% or so of it did make me think “can’t wait for this piece of shit to be over”. Now, I know this might be an unpopular opinion, but I really, REALLY don’t like Yume Nikki.

I may draw some comparisons to Bioshock Infinite in the sense that this masterpiece of a game that almost everyone and their grandmother consider worthy of a TEN OUT OF FUCKING TEN doesn’t really bode well with me either (I say this mostly because I feel that I’m in the minority when it comes to the people that have played this game and not loved it), and I honestly consider these two the games that I am not willing to play ever again in my life. But this ain’t about Biocunt Integrate, it’s about the dreadful world of Yume Nikki.

Also, I guess as a fair warning, SPOILERS AHEAD IN CASE YOU HAVEN’T FINISHED IT. This was more than anything meant to be a self reflection on what I thought was wrong with the game, and thus ended up mentioning a lot of spoilers, so if you want to play it blindly, go ahead before reading this, you might take a while though.

I’ll start with the things that personally I liked or made me have some form of respect for the game because it’s easier to list those reasons given there are very few positives, and because I want to get that out of the way first. I guess the positives would be that I liked the atmosphere the game had. It was unnerving, and scarier than most games that claim themselves to be horror games and only rely on cheap and predictable jumpscares and nothing else. And Yume Nikki literally just has some fucking sprites and dark rooms, and yet it’s one of the most disturbing and honestly creepy things I’ve seen. The soundtrack’s just a bunch of looped sounds that doesn’t last too long, but it still adds something to the feel of each world that makes it different from the others. The world designs too are amazing (except for Hell) and each of them looks interesting in their own way. The fact that each effect had its own little details whenever you used them was also pretty cool. The lack of a conventional way to tell a story and just leaving things for you to interpret was an interesting choice from the dev, and the fact that Gast- I mean, Uboa, which is one of the most interesting things about the game isn’t central to the story or you don’t even have to see it to beat the game is actually really cool. Overall I guess it is safe to say it is a pretty unique and well thought out game in general, and I respect it from an artistic point of view.

Now, for the obviously much bigger list of negatives. See, my first problem with the game is how overly complex some things in it are. Several of the events are RNG based, so you basically have to get lucky for some of the most intriguing or interesting moments in the game. Then there’s also the fact that not only events, which are completely optional so there’s not too much of a problem, but also one of the fucking effects that you need to get is tied to an RNG, meaning that you better get lucky and get it at the first try because otherwise it’s gonna be waking up, going to hell, go through the previous world before that one and then get to the actual world again, hoping you get the right one this time. I get it for events that you don’t even need to see to finish the game, BUT FOR ONE OF THE STEPS TO GET TO AN EFFECT TO BE RNG? I sincerely find that pretty bullshit and unnecessary. But that’s a minor issue I had.

The bigger issues are more or less tied to the existence of Hell itself. I mean, it does justice to its name, its a fucking torture to go through it, not only because if you take the wrong turn at any point or don’t have any reference of where you are going or are constantly looking at a fucking map you WILL get lost, but also because it’s so stupidly bright red that after a while of being there your eyes will scream for mercy, and you will more than likely spend a long time in that place, if not because you got lost, then because you essentially need to go through it more than once if you want to actually beat the game. Some people may think it adds to feeling of adventure and danger and excitement, but I simply find it annoying and a nuisance. Essentially, this game isn’t for overly impatient people. You complain about loading screens? Boy, get ready to meet HELL. Admittedly, you do get to do a lot more during the travel from point A to hell to point B, and there is danger there, but I would rather sit through a few moments of a loading screen than have to deal with the bright as the sun red tone in the background designed to either drive you insane or to completely fuck up your eyes, and once you get the stop light effect, the toriningen becomes kind of irrelevant at the price of walking at a normal pace. It can be fixed by just looking at a map but even then it’s still an eye sore and even with the map you can get lost, which happened to me a lot, and the fact that you NEED to go through hell in order to get to other worlds for their respective effects makes it all the more annoying and sigh inducing whenever you see the multi-shaped little shit portal that takes you there.

Another major issue is perhaps the fact that if it wasn’t because a wiki exists or because I had help through most of the game, I would have never figured out where to even get the effects, which ones I was missing, how did they look like or how to get to neat little events that were honestly quite interesting and well made. I know that’s what some people might find charming or the whole point of the game really, to find it out by yourself, but to be honest I would have given up eventually after being unable to find any more stuff because it is all so hidden. I can appreciate when a game goes out of its way to be mysterious, when there’s stuff to find, when it is challenging, but honestly, most of the stuff in this game is far too convoluted for me to give it a pass on that. Aside from the instructions, you are pretty much on your own and therefore entirely fucked. Hell, I would have thought the minigame with the console was somehow important or it would give me something interesting at the end, but reading “nah it’s just a jumpscare” made me realize a lot of this game would be confusing or I’d believe something would be important when really its not. And having somewhat of a trolly person as your guide doesn’t help much either.

Speaking of which, my guide and friend also took part in what makes me not want to play or hear anything about this game ever again. Because of the way he hyped up the ending, even when I started to hate the game a part of me thought “the ending will probably be worth it” to keep going on. The ending, do it for the ending. I’ll talk about the ending later, but needless to say that part of me was wrong, and the ending was somewhat overhyped him. This was a minor inconvenience however when compared to the one thing that even made me stop mid stream and say “I’m done” and then close the game out of the blue. The god damn insistence on me having to play the game one way, as opposed to how I want to play it. Yes, I might have missed some events that were interesting, but given the fact that he tends to trick me into thinking something when really something else is going on already had me mistrust his guidance to a certain degree, and had me looking up shit on my own to confirm if he was saying the truth. I honestly felt after a while that I was being forced to do things one way instead of doing them by myself and the way I wanted to do it, that is why it was more of a chore than a game, I felt like I was doing some sort of homework that I had to finish at some point, I felt obligated to do it and that made me hate more than anything, the fact that I felt like I HAD to finish it as opposed to wanting to finish it. Feeling forced to do something makes you not want to do it, especially when someone keeps banging over your head “DO IT THIS WAY, DO THIS BECAUSE YES EVEN THOUGH ITS NOT IMPORTANT, DO IT MY WAY NOT YOURS” was a tad overwhelming and made me feel like I was being manipulated and like I needed to do it one single way. Feeling like that sincerely made me want to rush to game, to be done with it, to not have anything to do with it again, and so I did. I started regarding it less like a cool but fucked up game and more like one fucked up homework that I had to do because I had no choice in the matter (sorry if you see this, but you did influence my views in this game a lot).

And this takes me to my final point as to why I dislike this game so much, and this is where I start comparing it to Biodrug Ultimate and its the ending. See, both games have this feeling to me that for some reason if you miss anything or if you don’t do something in specific you will get a bad ending out of however many there could be, because being games that look so creative and unique they probably have more than one ending, right? Well, that is a lie for both of them, but unlike Bioterrorist Influence I didn’t have my expectations high for Yume Nikki. I was already expecting the worst, without much hope for anything because I had Hyoko to tell me at least that there was one and only one ending. And even then the ending still fucked me up, because I didn’t know what, out of all the horrible things that could happen, to expect. And while it was leagues better than the shit show Biodunked Ontimate had to offer for one of the most disappointing endings I’ve ever seen, it doesn’t make it any less depressing or empty. By the time I had finished the game I felt like absolutely nothing that I had done was worth it, like the journey to get here had been void and meaningless. This wasn’t disappointing because I was already expecting nothing from the start, but it did upset me because I had learned nothing and I left with nothing but a bitter taste. Yes some events were pretty cool, same with most of the worlds, it was an interesting concept of visiting a girl’s consciousness through her dreams, and since most dreams tend to be fucked up it would make sense for hers to be pretty bizarre as well. But what was about the effects and about her dreams that drove her to suicide? What did she feel like after exploring all over her own mind and dreams that would make her do that? Why? WHY?! To top it off, I actually felt like it was me the one that drove her to it. Digging so far deep into her consciousness that she felt the only way to deal with her problems was to end with her own life, and that I was the one that pushed her off. I don’t care that she doesn’t actually exist, I don’t care that this all a videogame that I ended up hating, it’s still all so fucked up and it feels awful that with the press of one key I was the one that made her jump into the abyss, never to return again or dream again. I felt empty, sad, upset, thinking about why did things have to turn this way. I hesitated for a while to even make her go up those stairs, but I feel like in the end my own desire to be done with it all, to close the loop, to never come back to this game again made me do it, because I know this is a game, I know many others before me and many more after will press that key to send Madotsuki crashing against the pavement down below, but that doesn’t make it any less horrifying or fucked up that I sent a little girl to her own death. I never did the Genocide Route in Undertale because I felt that after having establishing a bond with such lovable and interesting characters I’d be guilty of not only betraying their trust for my own amusement but that I would also take away that feeling of uniqueness and of having such well thought out and caring characters that sincerely made me cry at the end of the Pacifist Route and turning it all into dust, into void, only to get to that one boss battle that everyone keeps praising and that turned Sans into the actual joke that he’s become now within the Undertale Fandom. But that is a rant for another day. The point is, I didn’t do it because to me Undertale is much more than just an RPG, more than just a game, it meant a lot to me and I cared deeply about the characters, to the point of not wanting to murder them, even though I know its a game and it won’t matter either way in the real world, I feel like not caring would make me even more of a twat, and even though I didn’t enjoy Yume Nikki, that still doesn’t mean I wanted Madotsuki to die. Even when I sent her forward I had hoped for there to be something that saved her or for her to actually not jump out of the balcony even if I told her to. Fuck me for having nice thoughts I guess. Oh I also did make the choice to be a nice Madotsuki that didn’t murder anything even though my friend was insisting that I should be the exact opposite of that but whatever.

In the end, I guess the bad things do overweight the good things for me as far as this game goes, and I still feel this sense of emptiness when I think about it. If there is a message, I am unclear about what it is. The world of dreams is incomprehensible? If you dig too far into your unconscious you won’t like what you’ll find out? No matter what you do the outcome of things is inevitable? That death is the true ending for everything? Life and dreams are meaningless? The more I think about it the more it feels like I’m straying away from whatever meaning there is because it all felt so pointless and just not worth it that I can’t find a meaning to all of it. Like, what was the point of driving Madotsuki to suicide? What was the whole point of gathering the effects if she was going to end up dead anyway? Would anything have changed if I hadn’t looked for the things? Nothing changes no matter what you do in the game, so then what does it matter? Did it happen because she was on a quest to find herself and who she is within these dreams and was unable to find it so she then killed herself? I just don’t really know what the point of it all is, and this is exactly my problem with Bioshock 3: The Electric Boogaloo too, after all I did, and all I went through it seems as if thought it was pointless, like I shouldn’t even have bothered if I wasn’t going to be able to change anything for better or for worse.

#Yume Nikki #Rant #Not quite a review #Bioshock Infinite #thoughts

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felidae-charr · 7 years

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Why GW2 Just Can’t Keep Me

A mechanics post - holy cow, we haven’t done one of these in a while!

I haven’t fallen out of love with Guild Wars 2, but once again I find myself in a pit of complete disinterest with the game. Ironic considering that there’s an expansion coming out and there’s all this jazz with the Living World stuff, right? And yet here I am, logging into Final Fantasy XIV every single day, being far more excited about Stormblood than I am about the prospective GW2 expansion.

Why is it that GW2 just isn’t able to ever keep my interest? What does this game do that makes me look at it, and say “Eh. Whatever.” and leaves me playing it like a tide - coming and going and never able to just stay playing it? And I know I’m not the only one that has this problem, too.

Today, we’ll be looking at the endgame content of GW2 and why it, for me personally at least, dramatically fails to actually make me care to keep playing.

MMORPGs, in general, follow a very similar formula for their end-game. They all tend to apply a very standard “content drip” that is designed to keep loyal veteran players logging in, while also potentially capturing new players all at once. Many also make use of the infamous Gear Treadmill™ - easily one of the most controversial aspects to MMO games in general that employ the use of them.

Guild Wars 2 follows a similar set up, and yet for some reason of every game I’ve ever played, it is the least capable at holding my genuine interest. Why is this? Why is a game I love so much just so bad at keeping me playing? When I have 58 characters, when I’ve invested so much time and so much money, why then do I still reach these points where I just don’t care?

Well, part of that is because Guild Wars 2 might have a similar set up in the form of a content drip, ArenaNet have never been consistent until very recently (if we’re honest.) Veteran players will remember that, at one point, the game was suffering from a massive content drought with practically no real updates at all aside from the usual gem store nonsense. And if I’m being honest, I still think Guild Wars 2 suffers from content drought really badly, even after every update. Because, if we’re honest... they just don’t add a lot of content in the first place.

The ultimate reality of Guild Wars 2 is that their content drip, though now semi-regular and designed to consistently update the story of their game, still isn’t enough to prevent players from winding up starved of things to do. Dungeon rewards have been gutted to the point of them not worth the time to run any more, and ArenaNet have failed almost majestically at fixing the core problems as to why nobody ran the likes of Arah often or why Twilight Arbor’s Aetherpath went so criminally under-run. They have always been trash at making their dungeons - which are fundamentally fun and well crafted - worth running. And that’s sort of the problem, isn’t it? The Western gaming culture, and especially in MMORPGs, likes to be efficient.

They like to DPS as fast as possible to skip mechanics just because they can and because it makes it go faster. In the same way, we also like to know that if we’re going to spend half an hour in a dungeon, it’s going to be worth our time. If we could spend that half an hour doing something else and making double or triple the reward (with potentially less effort, too) then we would never run the dungeon. It’s a waste. And thusly, the GW2 dungeon team was scrapped, and we haven’t seen a real dungeon in actual, literal years. Content updates don’t give us new ways to play with other players in party-specific dungeon content.

Of course we have the infamous raids, but to be honest, I don’t like the raids in this game. I find that the classes and builds I enjoy playing don’t fit into the raids, which are slowly but surely trying to shoehorn the Holy Trinity of classes back into a game that’s original design was built around scrapping the Holy Trinity completely. I also find that while raids can be fun with friends, raids in GW2 can also bring out the literal worst in players - with people being kicked for not putting up enough numbers on the parser or being kicked because their class just isn’t optimal. Raids, for me, are not endgame content because frankly I don’t care for them.

The new story sections that our content drip in the form of Living World gives us are completed in, at most, four hours. And that’s if you’re playing kind of slowly and exploring. If you’re burning through the story alone, you’re often done in two hours or less. These solo instances are often fun to run once or twice, too, but they quickly become not-worth-running or outright boring because there’s never any change to them and it isn’t like a dungeon where you’re running with new people every time. Eventually these little story pieces just sort of sit there and the only time you play through them again is if you happen to be, I don’t know, farming experience points for masteries on a level 80 character.

And the new maps that we’ve been getting, while also fun for the first few hours, can just as quickly become boring content. The latest map released, Draconis Mons, I actually hated on pretty much every conceivable level. There was too much going on in that map, the mini-map was atrocious and I couldn’t make my way around it without getting lost somewhere, there was so much bloom and bright burning fire and particle effects that my eyes got about as sick shit of the map as my brain did, and none of the events were actually engaging. Kill this, kill that, oh a group event to kill something else. I out and out thought Draconis Mons was the biggest flop of a map ArenaNet have ever released, and I still do.

So what is there for me to actually do? The reality is: nothing.

The content drip that ArenaNet offers is simply not enough, because the reality is that it doesn’t give us anything new that keeps us playing. Raiders will continue to raid, certainly, but I find raiding to have been implemented very oddly and in a direction that seems to be very opposite from the core of the game itself. Similarly, World versus World is still criminally ignored by most of ArenaNet and I haven’t had fun in that basic zergfest for a long time, and PvP is just as neglected to the point that those funny little “tournaments” ArenaNet tried to hold when they wanted to break into the e-sports scene have been cancelled and most of the veteran PvPers basically abandoned the game to find pastures new, with developers that actually cared.

I could log in to do my dailies, but why would I? Dailies do nothing but give me gold, which I in turn don’t spend on anything, because there is nothing I want or need to spend it on. Most of the achievements are either easy to get or a boring grind and there’s rarely a nice middle. Aside from the couple of new ones in the last few Living Story updates, I’ve done every fun jumping puzzle. I have 20 characters at level 80 and I’ve done the Personal Story too many times to be willing to count.

Guild Wars 2 just doesn’t cater to me. And that’s fine, it is under no obligation to - but it also means that I am constantly going through phases where literally any other game is more fun than GW2 is. Final Fantasy XIV Online, for example, has taken me by absolute storm once again. The expansion looks promising, and while there are often several months between content being released in that game’s content drip, they always come with new dungeons, new boss fights, new story elaboration and quests. I still have plenty of side quests to do if I want to, other classes to level, I’m eagerly awaiting the next set of joking silly Hildibrand quests, I get new little emotes to play with, new furniture for housing, and so on and so on. FFXIV also does a fantastic job - in my eyes at least - at making the gear treadmill fairly fun. I always know the minimum rewards I’m going to get from doing all of my dungeon runs in a day, I can plan what to buy when to buy it, I never feel like the game pressures me into needing that gear as soon as possible, and I always have the option to do raids to see if I can get lucky and have gear drop for me instead. Honestly, while I initially fell in love with GW2 because of it’s no-gear-treadmill policy and the abandonment of the Holy Trinity that had always bothered me as a lover of DPS classes, I’m ironically finding that FFXIV is just flat out a better crafted MMORPG that takes a lot more care and puts a lot more effort into making sure end game players don’t just sit around waiting for poor excuses for content.

And that’s why I’m sitting here, staring at the GW2 icon on my desktop relabelled “Fashion Wars” trying to find the will to even log into the game at all for the sake of something silly like screenshots. Which I can also do better in FFXIV, for the record.

I love Guild Wars 2. I love Guild Wars 2 very, very much and it has an extremely special place in my heart, and it will always be one of my favourite games. But once again I’m stuck in that rut where I love the game, but the game really doesn’t love me that much, and I can’t find a reason to log in to even do something as simple as stare at my own characters.

#long post #Felidae rambles #GW2 #Guild Wars 2 #mechanics post #why is the endgame in GW2 so bad #especially the lack of dungeons #i'm really starting to feel that lack of fun party content #world events don't cut it anet

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