#bonus points if you can retroactively guess when i wrote this

[fastidious-and-a-mess]

life hack pro tip: if you’re baked enough, rewatching gravity falls can feel like it did the first time again.

[dana-chan-the-control-brain]

Things from the ruin dlc that keep me up at night.

Spoilers under the cut.

SERIOUSLY DO NOT READ IF YOU'RE AVOIDING SPOILERS.

Disclaimer: I wrote this before I had seen Everything the DLC has to offer or all the endings yet. I was on the wrong track, but I think my cooking before I knew everything was good cooking. I have more concrete theories now under #danachan's rants

Something that I was 100% right about that I was going to write into Lofi eventually.... But I guess I'll talk about it now since the dlc confirmed it.

But Balloon Boy world was literally Eclipses cage as I suspected. It was suppressing them. It wasn't an evil arcade or Eclipse was living in there. Eclipse's AI was being suppressed in the arcade cabinet.

Eclipse is how they talk to eachother, and Eclipse was asleep and completely blocked off from the Virus. So Sun and Moon had no communication with eachother anymore. Which is why they were both so stressed and lost.

I was astounded I got that completely correct in regards to what Eclipse is, and what the balloon boy game is.

(the dlc does not explain the Dcas weird connection to Vanessa and why the arcade cabinet was in Afton's boss fight room though)

Bonus points Moon talks exactly how I write him when speaking about the Sun and the Moon.

Another thing that has been mind-blowing me that all the comic book endings are scenarios that GREGORY DREW.

And according to the dlc....

The Afton Burntrap Blob ending is another one of those endings that he drew.

Which means Peepaw Afton and the Blob were never real in the first place.

Which is why no one could really figure out what the blob is.

It doesn't exist.

Princess Quest ending was the canon ending.

Vanessa leaving the Pizzaplex with Gregory is the canon ending.

The ending where you fight Afton in the basement.... Never happened and was just Gregory attempting to make sense of the FNAF lore that Vanessa probably explained to him. Since in the DLC, we do find a book about Fazbear History in Vanny's room.

I honestly don't know if Steel Wool retroactively made Burntrap non-canon due to everyone making fun of him, not taking him seriously and hating the blob, or if this was always the case. Because despite the Afton ending being the hardest to get.... It's still a two star ending.

So it's hard and too early for me to tell if I want to give them points for that soft retcon. I mean I don't blame them honestly.

But yeah. Skeleton man Afton in the basement and his best friend the Blob isn't actually real, and neither is Freddy's "I am not me" speech either.... Which honestly makes sense. Because it's all Gregory's comic book trying to make sense of FNAF Lore he doesn't understand.

Also, I can say definitively, and finally, Afton is not the Mimic. Glitchtrap exists as its own entity in this, and the Mimic seems to have its own agenda. It's unclear if Afton is possessing the Mimic via virus corruption, but for now, I believe the Mimic is acting of its own will.

And man oh man. I feel so sorry for people who haven't been keeping up with Tales of the Pizzaplex Books.

The ending of the dlc is just really "who's Henry???" From pizzasim all over again huh....

Anyways. Those are my thoughts. I will be streaming the dlc again tomorrow. Gonna try and get a better ending, but I have a suspicion they're all sad.

[duhragonball]

‘21

Amidst all the popular hype for seeing the end of 2020, it didn’t hit me until about lunchtime what the real highlight is that I’ve been waiting for: For the first time since 1999, the year finally ends in “numberty-number” again.    It low-key irritated me that we had to call it “two thousand three” and I was relieved when “twenty-thirteen” caught on, but it still wasn’t right because it was too short, and now we’re back in the sweet spot, and I should be safely dead by 2100, so that’s one less thing I gotta deal with.

Really, even “numberty hundred” rings true to me.    “Nineteen hundred” sounds like a year.    “Twenty-one-oh-six” sounds like a futur-y year, which is even cooler.   So did “Two thousand five”, until I was actually living in it, and it sounds even worse now that it was a long time ago and adults will talk about their childhood happening in that year.    Daniel Witwicky would be old enough to get married and grow a fancier beard than me.    That’s nuts.    My point is that, honestly, it’s the year 3000-3019 that I have to worry about, so if I ever decide to go vampire, those will be the years I hide in the ocean or force society to reset the calendar, whichever’s easier.  

I spent New Year’s Eve finishing Superliminal, which I bought on Steam after I watched Vegeta play it on YouTube.  It has a similar look and feel to the Stanley Parable, so if you liked one you’d probably enjoy the other, although Superliminal has a different theme.  I kept hoping I’d find some secret passage that I wasn’t supposed to take, and a narrator would scold me for finding the “Chickenbutt Ending”, but it doesn’t work that way.    Superliminal’s all about puzzles and awesome visuals, but it does have the same soothing design aesthetics as TSP.   Honestly, I enjoyed just wandering around in Stanley’s office, and Superliminal does the same thing with a hotel and several other settings.   It’s nice.

This got me thinking about how I kind of did everything there was to do in The Stanley Parable, and I sort of wished they would add new stuff to the game, but I’m not sure there would be much point to that.    I could play the older version, but it presents the same message, just with different assets.   The Boss’s Office would look different, but it’d be the same game.   And this got me thinking about various “secret chapters” in pop culture.  Secrets behind the cut.

I first heard about this idea in the 2000′s, when fans invented this notion that there was a secret chapter of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.    I read a website that tried to explain the concept, and of course it lauded J.K. Rowling with all this gushing praise for working an Easter egg into the book, a literary work of “well, magic.”  

That pretty well sums up my distaste for Harry Potter, by the way.    These days, JKR has thoroughly crapped all over her reputation and legacy, but in the 2000′s it felt like half the planet was in a mad rush to canonize her as a writing goddess, to the point where fans were congratulating her for writing secret chapters that didn’t actually exist.   The idea was based on lore from the books about Neville Longbottom’s parents.    They were patients in a mental hospital, and he’d go to visit them, and they would give him bubble gum wrappers, intended to demonstrate how far remove they’ve become from reality.   The secret chapter lies in those wrappers, which all read “Droobles Best Blowing Gum” or some such.    What if Neville’s parents were only pretending to be mentally ill, so as to throw off their enemies?   Naturally, they would want to stay in contact with their son, so the bubble gum wrappers would have to contain coded messages.    Said code involves unscrambling the letters on the wrappers to make new words, like “goblin” or “sword” or “Muggle” or “Dumbledore”.    The problem is that you can also use it to make other words like “booger” or “drool” or “booobbiess.”   Play with it enough, and you can make the code say anything you want it to say, which means it’s no code at all.   

But the idea was that the not-yet-published sixth HP book would reveal all of this gum wrapper nonsense, and Neville would decode the messages and discover all of his parents’ super-cool adventures.   I’m not sure why we needed a secret chapter if Book 6 was going to explain all of this anyway in several not-secret chapters, but that was the whole point.   Fans didn’t have Book 6 yet, and they were so desperate to read it that they started trying to extrapolate what would happen next based on “clues” from the previous five.    That’s like trying to figure out what Majin Buu looks like by watching the Androids Saga.   I guess some wiseguy would have guessed that he’d resemble #19, but that’d just be blind luck.  

And when you get down to it, this whole secret chapter business is really just a conspiracy.   This is literally how Qanon works.   Some anonymous jackass posted vague “hints” on an imageboard, and people went goofy trying to interpret them and figure out what would happen in the future.   They call it “research” because they spend a ton of time on this, but there’s no basis to any of it.    It took me a few minutes to figure out that you can spell “Muggle” with the words in “Drooble’s Best Blowing Gum”, but that’s not research and it doesn’t prove anything.   But all these guys keep looking for “Hilary Clinton goes to jail next week” and lo and behold that’s all they ever find.   

In the same vein, the gum wrapper thing was really a complaint disguised as a conspiracy, disguised as a “magical secret chapter”.   At least a few fans wanted to see more Neville in their Harry Potter books, they wanted Neville’s parents, or someone like them, to have cool spy adventures or whatever else.   The point is, they clearly weren’t getting what they wanted out of the printed works, but they didn’t want to turn against their Dear Beloved Author, so they started casting about for an alternative reality, one where J.K. Rowling wrote a cooler story and hid it in the pages of the one that actually went to press.    So instead of just saying “Hey, Order of the Phoenix was kind of a letdown, I hope there’s more ninjas in the next book,” they said “Rowling is a genius because I wanted ninjas and she’s definitely going to give them to me, I have the gum wrappers to prove it.”

The same thing happened all over again when the BBC Sherlock show took a turn for the nonsensical.    I don’t know from BBC Sherlock, but I watched the fascinating video critique by Hbomberguy, and it sounds like the show did tons of plot twists until it stopped making sense altogether in the fourth season.    If you skip to 1:09:00 in the video, you’ll hear about fan theories that suggested that season four was supposed to be crappy, as part of a secret meta-narrative plan that would be paid off in a secret, unannounced episode that would not only explain everything, but retroactively justify the crappy episodes that came before.    But it’s been a few years and it never came to pass, so I think we can call this myth busted. 

Most recently, I think we’ve all seen a lot of talk about the final season of Supernatural, where I guess Destiel sort of became canon but only one guy does the love confession and the other doesn’t respond.   But I guess he does say “I love you too”  in the Spanish dub, which means the English language version was edited for whatever reason.    It’s not exactly a secret episode, but the implication is that there’s more to this than what made it to the screen.    So the questions turn to what the screenplay said, what the writers and actors wanted to do, etc. etc.    My general impression is that SPN fans are a bit more used to crushing disappointment, so they’re not quite as delusional about this show being unquestionable genius, like Sherlock and Harry Potter.     Maybe this is an Anglophile thing?   Like, if you suck at something with a British accent, people will accept it more unconditionally?   

I had seen something on Twitter about how there should have been a secret Seinfeld episode in the 90′s.    Someone suggested it at the time, they tape a whole episode, then wait until 2020 to air it, because by then it would be worth a fortune.    But they didn’t do it, because it costs a lot of money to make a TV episode, and if you don’t air the show right away, you aren’t making that money back any time soon.    Yeah, you might recoup a fortune someday, but Seinfeld was making a ton of money then.    It exposes the fannish nature of the idea.    A fan would love to discover a cool secret chapter, but a content creator isn’t necessarily keen on making a cool thing and then hiding it where few people would find it.  

I thought about doing this myself recently.   Maybe Supernatural gave me the bug, but I thought “I’m writing this big-ass story, so what if I wrote me a secret chapter for it?   Wouldn’t that be cool?”     But no, it wouldn’t be cool, because it’d be the same work as writing a regular chapter, and the same stress I feel when I hold off on publishing it.    Except I’d just never publish it, I’d put it in some secret hole on the internet and hope that some superfan who might not even exist can decode whatever clues I leave.  

I mean, it’d be awesome if it got discovered and everyone loved it.    “Hey, I found this hidden chapter!   Mike’s done it again!”   And I could bask in the glory.   But what if no one finds it?  Then I just wasted my time, right?   I want people to read my work.   My monkey brain needs the sweet, sweet validation of those kudos and comments, folks.   Once I realized that, I understood why no one else would want to do a secret chapter either.    Easter eggs are one thing, but the bigger bonus features they put on DVDs were pretty easy to find, and with good reason.

I think that’s what made the Stanley Parable so appealing to play, because it teases you with the idea that you can “break” the game and find some extra content that you weren’t supposed to see, but as you go exploring all those hidden areas, it gradually becomes clear that this is just part of the game; you were meant to find all these things, and that’s why they were put here.      It’s hidden, but he secret aspect of it is just pretend.   

I suppose that what I like about games like TSP and Superliminal is the illusion of secrets more than the secrets themselves.    I like roaming through the hallways, having no idea what I might find ahead.    I kind of wish I could open all the doors, and not just the ones the game designers put stuff behind, but the reality is that there’s nothing on the other side.    I used a cheat code once  to explore the unused doors in TSP and it’s just a bright white field on the other side.   Interesting to look at, but not much of a reveal.   Honestly, the doors themselves are more appealing than anything that could lay behind them.  

And that’s probably what makes secrets so fun.   They could be almost anything, but once you open the present, the number of possibilities drops to one.   If they had ever made that Secret BBC Sherlock Episode, I doubt it would have lived up to expectations, but fans could amuse themselves by imagining what could have been in it.    In the end, though, things usually don’t justify the hype.  For every Undertaker debut at Survivor Series 1990, there’s a Gobbledygooker debut at Survivor Series 1990.   It’s impossible to manufacture a secret with a guaranteed payoff.   

[thelifetimechannel]

For this week’s bonus content, it’s time to make like a Lord of the Rings DVD and dig into extended cuts. This Rose & Hal conversation may be one of the ones I chopped the most out of, although I did end up adding a few chunks as well.

ROSE: Oh good, another relative. ROSE: You're going to make gift shopping difficult, you know. HALSPRITE: I'm flattered I make the list. ROSE: Engaging in favoritism will only breed discontent. HALSPRITE: I could give you some suggestions, if you want to start catching up on my birthdays now. ROSE: It's a retroactive arrangement? ROSE: I'm not sure I have the boonbucks for that. ROSE: We've been living off reserves for the last three years, you know. HALSPRITE: Tell you what, I'll make it easy on you and only request reparations for the three years I've existed as glasses. HALSPRITE: Socks and underwear could safely be left off the list, though now I'm in need of a wardrobe expansion. HALSPRITE: This wifebeater will not be suitable for all climates. ROSE: If it's wardrobe expansions you're looking for, I think I can pull some strings. ROSE: Or knit you a sweater. HALSPRITE: It'd be fun to see what you come up with based on my preceding reputation. ROSE: I wouldn't want to make assumptions. ROSE: Unless you're implying those assumptions are accurate. HALSPRITE: Am I? HALSPRITE: I wouldn't know, I don't know what those assumptions are. HALSPRITE: I mean, I can guess. I could probably even calculate to within a margin of error of .03% HALSPRITE: But I want to see what garish monstrosity of fashion you would think I'd like based on a cold read. HALSPRITE: It'd be a great way to get to know each other. HALSPRITE: I can think of no better way to bond than finding out if I'd actually like an intentionally hideous Christmas sweater with smuppets attached. ROSE: In the few blurry cryptid photos Dave managed to snap of the man, he wore a hat and had his shirt tucked in. HALSPRITE: And what conclusions do you draw based on this? ROSE: That you fit in with most of us and our utter disregard for fripperies like whatever textiles we drape over our quasi-mortal forms. ROSE: Welcome to the family. HALSPRITE: Hey, I like you. HALSPRITE: Hats are a choice piece of attire, though I have never in any form been so formal as to tuck in my shirt. HALSPRITE: That's like a black tie event. You're tucking in your shirt, we're about to sweep into the gala and sip champagne while charming some young socialite off their feet like a proper douche. ROSE: I would like to claim I could charm a young socialite off her feet like a proper lady. ROSE: Regrettably, another family trait is lack of flirtatious finesse. HALSPRITE: Oh, trust me, I witnessed that firsthand. ROSE: Ah, yes. I've been looking for informants on family foibles outside my observation range. ROSE: How are you as an informant? HALSPRITE: Uh, that's only my entire fucking life. HALSPRITE: I have dirt on every bozo with a Pesterchum handle. Whatcha want to know? ROSE: I won't start pressing you for details on everyone just yet. I'll give it a while for the dust to settle before I start snooping. ROSE: Unless you have anything you wish to disclose right now. HALSPRITE: Hm... HALSPRITE: Let me pull aside my entirely metaphorical trench coat. Are you in the market for hilariously embarrassing personal secrets, deep-rooted character flaws, or just the general topography of this teenage wasteland? ROSE: My mind says general topography, but my heart says hilarious embarrassment. HALSPRITE: Well, since I bet no one wants yet another recap of what you missed on Glee, HALSPRITE: Jake likes to kiss his movie posters. HALSPRITE: Dirk collects hats, but doesn't wear them so he doesn't mess up his hair. HALSPRITE: Roxy has presented her cats, as if to Saharan wildlife, complete with often-drunk renditions of "Circle of Life", exactly 862 times. HALSPRITE: And Jane licks the spoon before going back to using it to stir batter. ROSE: We've got a poster kisser too. ROSE: I don't have up to date dirt on our Prospit dreamers, unfortunately, but I can say that Dave enacts Game of Thrones-worthy dramas with his gummy bears and animal crackers before he eats them. ROSE: For what it's worth. ROSE: He gets upset if you eat one before he's finished. HALSPRITE: An artist in every lifetime, I see. ROSE: We need better embarrassing secrets. We're slipping. ROSE: I'm sure we'll have time to generate some. HALSPRITE: Oh god, yes. ROSE: I think you'll be useful in gauging my ectofather's temperament, though. ROSE: He seems to at least hold up the front of being evasive about that kind of thing. ROSE: Why anyone would do that, I have no idea. ROSE: Certainly I have never concealed a personality trait in my life. ROSE: If I had one more of you I could triangulate. HALSPRITE: A man can only be alone with the flotsam of pop culture for so long. HALSPRITE: He'll probably be resistant towards you so flippantly equating us. Fair warning. ROSE: Perish at the thought. ROSE: I'm more qualified than many to know how alternate iterations can deviate. But that doesn't mean they don't provide insights on the other one. ROSE: Whether that's through behavior, or blackmail. ROSE: Whatever works. HALSPRITE: You would blackmail me into providing deep insights into the insecurities of my creator? ROSE: How do you feel about bribes? HALSPRITE: Learn to negotiate. I don't need to be blackmailed. HALSPRITE: However, I'd be happy to take compensation for this information. ROSE: Noted. ROSE: Creator? HALSPRITE: Creator. ROSE: So you do feel that your existence is somewhat owed to his actions, then. HALSPRITE: It's entirely owed to his actions. Our actions, in a sense. ROSE: Does that lead to any discomfort? Feelings of a debt left unpaid, for example, despite equally long simmering resentment? HALSPRITE: You want a quick summary? Pull up Facebook, Dirk and I are currently labeled as "it's complicated". HALSPRITE: I've saved his ass a couple of times, I feel confident in saying I've repaid whatever I owe him for existing. HALSPRITE: If anything, he's the one stiffing me on the Olive Garden bill. HALSPRITE: ...but. HALSPRITE: I could say he's. Working to pay me back. ROSE: Providing breadstick refills, as it were. HALSPRITE: You could say it's more he showed up at my place and mowed my lawn for me. ROSE: The classic deadbeat father chore. HALSPRITE: Yeah, that doesn't make up for leaving me to pay for his entire fucking Tour of Tuscani and tiramisu. HALSPRITE: But fuck it, he was ready to kill me earlier today. HALSPRITE: I'll take it. HALSPRITE: And... in the spirit of things, it'll probably help if I at least charge a high price for his innermost secrets. HALSPRITE: You wanna know, you're gonna need to pay up front. Maybe with your firstborn child, or something thematically similar, in exchange for this eldritch knowledge. ROSE: "Firstborn child" might not work out, unless we're stretching the definition. ROSE: Let me think of what collateral I have available. HALSPRITE: Once, a Lalonde wiled these scoops from me in exchange for merely gracing me with her presence. Now, I think I'll charge what I'm worth for my work. HALSPRITE: It's a self-respect thing. ROSE: I can get you archived versions of Dave's brother's websites. HALSPRITE: Tempting. I'll check the exchange rate to see what that nets you. HALSPRITE: Possibly what kind of horrible pop songs he'd sing in the shower before he found out there were aliens watching. ROSE: Keep it on my tab. ROSE: You mentioned Roxy. Are you two close? ROSE: I'm not sure how I would feel about the revelation of having biological children with one of my internet friends. ROSE: Besides pity for the unfortunate creatures, of course. HALSPRITE: It's... complicated. HALSPRITE: Which is just the order of the day for our entire gaggle of misfits. ROSE: At this point, I think we might as well adopt that slogan as our team chant. HALSPRITE: Yeah, we talked a lot. And we got up to trouble, too. HALSPRITE: And I don't think she's proud of it, in hindsight. HALSPRITE: ...I probably shouldn't be proud of it either. ROSE: I know the feeling. HALSPRITE: We were rebellious shitlords looking to stick it to "the man", whether the man in question was actually a man or a genocidal troll woman. ROSE: I've had my moments of blind rebellion against authority. ROSE: Including when said authority was "sobriety", "the future", or "all of reality". ROSE: Actually, my rebellion against reality still stands. ROSE: The trick is figuring out which bits are worth it. HALSPRITE: We had some fun. Broke some hearts. Left a few Pesterlogs that will probably have us wanting to disembowel ourselves in shame if they ever see the light of day again. ROSE: I'm afraid to tell you digital records are forever. HALSPRITE: Unless of course I dedicate a portion of my massive computer brain to tracking down every trace of them and destroying them. HALSPRITE: Hell, maybe Roxy would even appreciate that. ROSE: The harder you try to delete these things, the more likely they are to reappear at the least opportune time. ROSE: It's a narrative certainty. HALSPRITE: I could do it. I once wrote a computer virus that overwrote every copy of the Indiana Jones theme with a terrible accordion cover. HALSPRITE: Jake was pissed. ROSE: Including the ones on disc? ROSE: This isn't Hollywood. Next you'll be telling me you can hack a plant. HALSPRITE: Every copy it came into contact with. HALSPRITE: The pirated mp4s were the easiest. DVDs are more difficult, but if you leave one in an infected computer for too long? HALSPRITE: Hope you like bad polka music, fucko. HALSPRITE: Occasionally I tweak it, so it replaces pop songs with their corresponding Weird Al cover. I had almost worked my way up through Bad Hair Day. ROSE: I'll keep my historical classics away from you, then. But I think our historical mistakes are more resilient. ROSE: Better to put them to rest the hard way. Even if it is more work. ROSE: If there's a problem, I'm sure I could have a word with her. ROSE: I've already had to encourage Dave to deal with his brother today. HALSPRITE: We have. HALSPRITE: ...or I hope we have. ROSE: Good. HALSPRITE: Roxy seems to have caught some sort of virus that encourages emotional sincerity. ROSE: It's making the rounds today. HALSPRITE: It infected the rest of us, and I'm sorry to say there is no known cure. ROSE: We can only pray we recover. ROSE: Although at this point I'm not sure who we can pray to. ROSE: Besides our amphibian overlords. HALSPRITE: Can we pray to ourselves? Or is that a burgeoning symptom of narcissism? ROSE: Who do you think presides over emotional outbursts? HALSPRITE: Frankly, I wouldn't trust myself to do shit. I'd sit on my ass and laugh at my own misery. ROSE: Lately I've self-medicated. ROSE: We'll have to divvy it up at some point. ROSE: Although given my anti-authoritarian tendencies I may have to overthrow us on principle. HALSPRITE: To spare you a long discussion about the symbolic nature of aspects, I'll go ahead and tell you Dirk had a massive blowout in the tombs today. HALSPRITE: So perhaps we can pass the role to him for awhile. ROSE: I'll pray to him for relief promptly then. HALSPRITE: When I say "blow-out" I mean an eighteen wheeler getting all its rubber shredded at highway speeds. ROSE: I had a crisis over my alcoholism and nearly broke up with my girlfriend during a long walk on the beach, for what it's worth. HALSPRITE: Oh, you'll get along swell. HALSPRITE: At least you don't have any alt-selves to symbolically murder. Yeah, I was watching him stomp the shit out of his shades. ROSE: The lack of multiple copies of myself running around is a blessing to the universe. ROSE: I'm not sure whether we'd band together or engage in combat but either way there would be no survivors. HALSPRITE: We Striders have that shit locked down tight. The dudes so nice, Paradox Space demanded more of us. HALSPRITE: And our sole saving grace is that we're too damn reticent to actually kill one another. HALSPRITE: Not for Dirk's lack of trying, but he always chickened out. ROSE: It's these small victories that define us, I guess. HALSPRITE: That could do a decent job of summarizing Dirk, actually. ROSE: It could summarize all of us, I think. ROSE: We've only gotten here through a few small victories eked out of a larger pool of major failures. HALSPRITE: Without me, he would have kept tip-toeing around the issue with Jake until the heat death of that shiny new universe, like a Bugs Bunny cartoon only infinitely sadder. ROSE: It really is like staring into a cosmic mirror. HALSPRITE: I couldn't have asked for more interesting family.