#but also maybe it didn't ring

[charri-fish]

Young Celeborn and Galadriel, dancing together hehe ^_^

I thought I'd post this for for celedrial week because I just found out it was happening. I actually drew this a few months ago, which is why it doesn't fit the prompt for today. I'm hoping to draw something new for one of the days coming up, but I thought this would be fun to share for now!

This one is a bit on the rougher side, and I wasn't as practiced with markers at the time, but I still think it's pretty cute.

[rorydrawsandwrites]

So we've all been having fun giving him bug wings right

(I gotta mention that this post in particular inspired me here... they're so little. His ass is not flying anywhere unless he's thrown)

And I do see the logic here. He has the li'l antennae after all (and him being a lightning bug would be especially fitting). But I'd like to point out that as a Fleischer-esque mix-and-match creature, he does also have a pig nose... therefore I suggest:

Pig. Hoofs.

I rest my case.

Also a little bonus... the touch-starved Luxposting has gotten to me. Pet the creature

[glorfindel-of-imladris]

Erestor and Glorfindel 🤍✨

[jenna-louise-jamie]

i think it's so interesting how different book!yassen and tv!yassen are.

first off how book!yassen sent alex to scorpia, it was a mistake because he wasn't thinking clearly. tv!yassen did it on purpose (to the best of my knowledge).

book!yassen did not want alex to kill. he tells him this twice, “killing is for grown ups.” and asking alex if he can really pull the trigger and shoot him, when alex breaks into the boat during eagle strike. going into great detail to dissuade alex from doing it, and all of me believes not just because yassen didn't want to die in this moment. this makes sense for book!yassen because he himself didn't want to kill. so he's trying to save alex from his own fate.

tv!show yassen doesn't seem to have any issues with killing. he doesn't particularly enjoy it, but it's his job and he does what he has to do so he can survive. so he's okay with encouraging alex to do it. by telling him he should view the people he's assigned to assassinate as nothing more than targets. tricking him into helping assassinate max. encouraging him to let go of his emotions. he wants alex to join him by his side.

ultimately while their methods are different, their end goals are the same. they both want to protect alex. book!yassen thinks he can achieve this by pushing alex away, and tv!show yassen thinks he can achieve this by pulling alex in closer. and both work because they're so compelling.

[swan2swan]

Every single shot in this three-minute span is absolutely insane,

[lastofthe20thcenturygirls]

there's sang-woo and the kid he played with there's the twins from the orphanage there's og paik sa-eon and the fake one there's also the pretty boy secretary the main kidnapper and the homophobia guy feeling like i need to make a flowchart or something

[bitchfitch]

Tbh this is more me bitching about once again wasting money on a game I probably won't be able to finish due to cripple-itus but we're going to pretend it's a serious discussion on game design.

So to preface: my vision is fucked. Irrevocably. Like get discounts on insurance levels of fucked. But games, even very difficult ones still Often very doable and fun.

One of my favorite genres is "white dot goes on a combat platforming adventure" Ie metroidvania/soulslikes that either Are hollow knight or heavily inspired by hollow knight

And I just want to compare a Good white dot, against an extremely irritating white dot.

This is yi. He is an edgy cat boy. he is a good white dot.

No matter the amount of bullshit on screen or the background color, you can always quickly find the white dot that is Yi or his lil robe.

This Bo. They are a bad white dot. they look like they'd be a Good white dot, what with the really clear silhouette of their ears and strong red markings

This is Bo in the game.

Bo breaks the number 1 rule of being a white dot: they end up the same color as the background because neat light effects which do look Great, were more important than the ability to find you're guy while doing minute long don't touch the ground style parkour sessions.

Like Hollowknight and Nine Sols, Path of the teal lotus uses a lot of forground and back ground layers to create a very nice sense of depth. However the foreground layers frequently completely cover the lower half of Bo's body. often making them a light colored dot on a noisy light colored back ground.

The fact background and play ground elements are often the same color does not help. Nor does the fact the camera is . Bad. it just is. It zooms in and out in the middle of a screen making it extremely difficult to keep track of an already hard to follow character in a setting where. losing track of your guy means getting sent back to the beginning of a tedious boss fight or a prolonged parkour session (which to be clear, would be good if you could track your player character. not the bosses though. They are. bad. they need to attack faster, have more than 2 attacks, or at least have a fraction of the HP they do. so you're not just standing around waiting for them to decide to start up another attack to open a vulnerability window.)

And I'm just going to say it, Someone on the team knew the game had this issue. Because they gave you a fix that doesn't work. You can adjust brightness, contrast, and saturation. None of these fix the issue of Bo disappearing. The game is so blown out that no combination of settings produce a result where bo is consistently visible, and also you can tell whats background and what's something you can stand on.

Anyways Demos are an accessibility feature, and when they're not available don't be lazy like I was and just pirate it. If the devs aren't going to give you a way to check if their shit is busted or not, you'll just have to find one yourself.

Anyways anyways tldr absolutely Gorgeous game, Should've been a silent animated movie instead because it's nearly unplayable and the translators either did a Really bad job, or the writers just didn't get why the jokes they're copying were funny

[creativesplat]

ok... so Lambert x Eve...

Eve and the two Blaiddyds

Lambert and the two Fierenes

The step-siblings

@blaiddydbrokeit and I were talking, and they have now sent me down the wonderful rabbit hole that is Eve and Lambert getting married and looking after their children.

[seaofreverie]

Today I want to share the joy that Reading A Newspaper has brought me recently (yesterday).

Because you see, it's not very often that I can read a several pages long good quality feature on a band that I'm something of a fan of, considering that until last year at best, all and any musical favourites I had were next to unheard of in the, let's call it, professional music business. And said feature also gave a few mentions to the one and only fav band of all time which I'm also still not used to being able to read about in my language (because it only happened like 5 times in total so far anyway, but still). And I can buy the newspaper in my local store in this minuscule town and find Sparks inside, like wow, it really is My Sparks, in this real life physical newspaper that I just got. This was like a belated but very epic christmas gift for me and I'm not kidding.

But well yeah getting to the point now, Franz Ferdinand are starting their tour soon promoting their upcoming new album and they're stopping in Poland too, so there was this whole 14-pages long overview of their whole career, and while I was obviously interested in the whole thing I was most hyped about the fact that there would have to be something about FFS and Sparks there and this brings me to my delighful observation that wow, all of this is so, connected in a way. Like how there are these connections in inspiration and collaborations between many of my favourites that I didn't even think about probably being a thing before, but when I think about it it just makes so much sense. Like how in this interview with Alex Kapranos, the interviewer brings up Talking Heads and specifically Fear of Music, because the new Franz Ferdinand album also has this sort of overarching theme of fear. And it's funny because that's the first Talking Heads album I've ever listened to and still my favourite from them to this day and overall one of my all-time favourite albums. And I guess it shouldn't be that shocking that it'd come up here because Talking Heads were super influential and inspired thousands, but also until now I didn't think about how both these bands share the general direction of creating dance-able type of rock with lyrics that are often on the more reflective and "intellectual" side. And also that album has been recommended to me as the most TMBG-like of theirs so. Wow I wonder why I like it.

Ok there were also all these other things that I want to mention too, so, other miscellaneous points of interest:

In the debut album review, the reviewer said that during Tell Her Tonight Alex sings a lot like Russell Mael, who likes to sing in falsetto. And well I know there's also the Sparks connection in the form of FFS to come later but still, this was such a great SPARKS MENTION!!!! moment for me anyway. But also they got one thing wrong, because it's not that Russell likes singing in falsetto, Ron forced him to sing in falsetto by writing all of his songs in this crazy uper range of notes, and that's a very important detail !!!!!!

And ok I had no idea that Piss Off already existed in some form as far back as 2004!! Or I knew about this and then I forgor. Either way, fascinating piece of information

I need to know more about how these star-based ranking systems work because why would you call FFS an "excellent album" and then rate it 4 stars. Instead of, I don't know, 4 and a half or 5 maybe?? Especially since it apparently has only 2 "weak songs". And I have some major objections when it comes to this too, because we're calling Things I Won't Get a weak track now?? It's just underrated as heck, and that's a hill that I will die on

Also I could never be a music reviewer because these people can fit their whole commentary on one song within one sentence and I feel like I would have to write at least 3 paragraphs on even the least exceptional of songs on a given album before I can feel like I did it justice. I mean, this whole post itself shows how much of a problem this is for me, lol

Also guys were we all aware that FFS turns 10 next yeah. Oh god. Well I need to remember to keep my tradition and preapre a cool piece of fanart for that occasion then. Maybe they should give us FFS 2 to celebrate, I'm pretty sure there'd be lots of interest among the fandom in something like that. Anyway

Well also this wasn't the only article in this whole thing of course and CAN YOU BELIEVE IT, there was a little bit on the Harrison & Belew Remain In Light Tour, which I will also be attending!!! Lots of great stuff is cooking for the first half of 2025 for me musically I can't lie

And also CAN YOU BELIEVE IT, that a year and a half since it was supposed to be released "worldwide" and long after I already lost hope that I'd ever see it in a cinema, they're releasing Stop Making Sense in cinemas over here too. Fucking finally!!! By gods and heavens, that rare moment when you learn about something crucial through a goddamn instagram ad of all places. And then they also reminded me about this in an actual article so well wow. Can you believe this. I can't. So stocked for next saturday when i'm seeing this movie the way it was always supposed to be seen hehehe

Ok I think that's it. Thank you for reading and maybe I should really make that personal website for my rambles in the new year. I'd definitely put that thing to use.

[elvenchevalier]

Fire Emblem Fates

You are the ocean's gray waves.

Wow. What is there to even say about this game that hasn’t already been said a thousand times?

Full disclosure, I played the fan retranslation patch which, hilariously, is unfinished, so while the main story and 1st gen supports were all done, some of it simply remained untranslated, and a lot of what is was unpolished. As such I won’t be discussing localization here too much. Just a couple points, really.

1) The name changes were silly. “Kazahana” and “Suzukaze” are not overly complex for English-speakers, to say nothing of Midoriko or Mozume. Nishiki and Kinu also fit the characters much better than Kaden and Selkie. Benoit is also not that hard! It’s just French! And then WHY on God’s green earth did they change Harold’s name to Arthur??? That man is the most Harold man to ever Harold!

2) Screw Treehouse for not only removing Saizo and Beruka’s C support for a lame-ass “haha ninjas quiet funny” joke, but also removing Niles and Rhajat’s unique same-sex support chains with Corrin and copypasting in the opposite-sex ones. Not cool, Treehouse.

So, with that out of the way: The music is not one of the game’s flaws. Lost in Thoughts All Alone still stands up there with Edge of Dawn as some of the best music in the series and I will die on that hill. (I do prefer Edge of Dawn, though.) I have nothing much to add about the music, I just wanted to say I liked it.

The main gimmick in Fates is the Dragon Veins, special tiles that characters with dragon blood can use to make changes to any given map. Every map does something different with the veins, which some might argue makes the game too gimmicky, but I actually appreciate the Dragon Veins for setting Fates apart from the rest of the series. With effects ranging from covering water with ice to activating healing tiles to burning deep forest to create new pathways, the Dragon Veins run the gamut of special map effects and as a result, Fates maps work in a way that they can never work in other games.

That is not to say the map design is always good, however. Even with the fun Dragon Vein effects, some maps were simply godawful, with some actually made worse by the Dragon Vein effects. Kana’s recruitment map, for example, is one giant plains with a few rivers acting as a barrier against the enemies trying to come beat up your kid. The Dragon Veins here act individually for one of the three rivers, either draining or filling them to allow for manipulation of enemy placement (you can force the enemies to bottleneck on the bridges, or drain the rivers to let them come impale themselves on your swords). It’s almost unilaterally better to keep the rivers full, making the Dragon Veins effectively worthless unless you’re going for low turn counts which I literally just thought of as I wrote this paragraph so maybe there was something there.

Some maps don’t need the Dragon Veins to make them worse, though. There are two very good examples that I can think of off the top of my head: Revelation Chapter 10, wherein the boss, Zola, covers the entire map in ice and you have to effectively dig through it to reach him to clear the map, and Selkie’s recruitment paralogue which is positively covered in forest tiles and a ton of bottlenecks. Movement on Selkie’s recruitment paralogue is torturous without fliers, and fliers alone aren’t going to clear the stage.

The weapons see a pretty big change in Fates; weapons no longer have durability, but they do have different effects. Steel weapons reduce a unit’s effective speed by 3, making it easier to get dual-attacked and harder to dual-attack themselves, silver weapons actually reduce Strength and Skill by 2 points per use (recovering by 1 each turn), there are weapons that reverse the weapon triangle, weapons that debuff (Kunai and Shuriken, which didn’t make any further appearances)… I actually like the lack of durability, but the caveats make the weapons a bit harder to use effectively.

Story time. Let’s start with Birthright.

Birthright is a scenario wherein you side with your Hoshidan siblings to take out King Garon for being a butthead. It’s pretty standard Fire Emblem fare, if you want to count the ability to grind outside of the story as Fire Emblem fare. (I do, because my first Fire Emblem game was Sacred Stones which had grinding, so it works for me.) The maps here are decent, for the most part, but Birthright is sorely lacking in unique objectives—almost every chapter is a rout map.

All in all, the story is...well, I’ve got my thoughts about that I’ll expand on later, but it’s all right. Nothing spectacular. The final boss of Birthright feels very Fire Emblem and that’s fine by me.

Conquest is next.

Conquest sees you side with your Nohrian siblings, helping King Garon reach Mikoto’s throne to force his true form to be revealed. It has no grinding as you don’t get out-of-story Challenges as you do in Birthright and Revelation, so your gold and EXP management have to be up to snuff. It features better maps with more diverse objectives, such as Defense and Seize, although the majority are still either Rout or Defeat Commander. Diversify your map objectives, kids.

The story is somewhat more engaging than Birthright’s because the tension of dealing with Garon is omnipresent, and then the final boss is...kinda cool, actually.

Revelation.

First of all, Revelation is the canon route—unlike Three Houses, where each route is equally canon and they tell different parts of the story, Revelation is just the canon and true end of the game, and this is where my contentions most strongly lie. I’ll dive more into the story after the spoiler cut, but for now, it’s enough to say that Revelation should have received a fair bit more focus than it did. As the obvious canon route, I fully, 100% believe it should have been longer than Birthright and Conquest—and indeed, BR and CQ should have been shorter, rather than treating all three routes as equally canon. If I’d had my way, BR and CQ would have been cut in half, with that extra time allotted to Revelation and BR and CQ relegated to shorter what-if scenarios. A lot of the problems with Revelation could have been solved with some more focus and better pacing.

Secondly, the maps in Revelation are...interesting. Kind of. A lot of the earlier maps use the same locations as ones in Birthright and Conquest, with the Wind Tribe map and its wind gimmick being taken wholesale right out of Conquest. Where it gets interesting is when you finally reach Valla after chapter 18. The world here consists of fields of floating rocks, and the maps use teleporters, shifting platforms, and similar to allow you to get from A to B. I can see the vision here, but unfortunately I have to say it wasn’t always executed very well. One map very late in has you using shifting platforms to move between different rooms to hit Dragon Veins to grant you access to the boss, and if you split your party up you’re in for a rough time; I finished that map with only five of my units left. But that all being said, it did do a fairly good job of differentiating itself from BR and CQ.

Third, and arguably most important, Revelation offers the single greatest number of individual maps by sheer virtue of having access to every child unit. This is already tedious in Birthright and Conquest when you only have half of the fathers in either route, but in Revelation you have everyone. And that means a lot of support grinding.

A lot of support grinding.

A LOT of support grinding.

The tedium is thick enough to build a house out of, and then there’s the fact that you have to clear every Paralogue to recruit everyone. That’s twenty-one Paralogues. Twenty-two if you include Mozu’s map early on. That adds up to a whopping total of forty-seven chapters, and forty-eight if you count Chapter 27 and Endgame separately as each route’s final chapter has a second Endgame map.

No Fire Emblem game should be forty-eight chapters long.

Which is a very funny statement when you add all three routes together. Each route consists of 27 main chapters and an Endgame map at the end, plus twenty-two paralogues split between Birthright and Conquest. Unless my math isn’t mathing, that’s 28x3=60+24=84+14 (BR and CQ both feature 14 paralogues with six shared)x2=28+22 (total paralogues in Revelation)=50= One Hundred And Thirty Four Chapters throughout the game. (Of course, if you count only unique maps, then one route has 14 paralogues, the next adds 8, and you wouldn’t count any in Revelation at all so you’d only have 22 paralogues to count rather than 50, but you would STILL have One Hundred And Six maps. Minus, uh, however many maps get reused in Revelation, as stated earlier, but I’m not mathing that one.)

Don’t worry about the actual equations there I promise it’s just how my brain maths I fully understand it’s not even close to how one would write that nonsense out.

And the worst part is, they aren’t even named in the map select menu! They’re all just “Paralogue”! Sure, they have descriptions to let you know whose paralogue it is, but this is wild to look at!

I think maybe now I can move into spoiler territory. As such,

SPOILERS for Fire Emblem Fates under the cut!

OOOOkay.

So, first and foremost, I’m happy that Fates doesn’t shy away from character death. It does a damn good job of showing Corrin’s resilience in the face of adversity.

That being said, some of the deaths did seem somewhat forced; Lilith, for example, is never shown to even be accompanying Corrin outside of My Castle, but she jumps in front of an attack and dies in Birthright and Conquest anyway. That would have had much more impact if Lilith had a greater part in the main story rather than just being a fish you feed in My Castle so she can help in castle defense maps.

Flora’s death in Birthright is honestly kind of hilarious. She has no REASON to set herself on fire, and no, I don’t buy her “I must atone” nonsense because she opposes Corrin in Conquest as well and DOES NOT in fact set herself on fire, actually joining Corrin instead.

Kaze’s death, also in Birthright, is also kind of hilarious, because he only dies if Corrin has not achieved an A-rank support with him by chapter 15. He gives his life unless he’s sworn fealty to Corrin as their retainer, at which point he apparently has the capacity to actually see that weird purple crystal and explode them back to safety.

This also has an effect on his kid; most units, when reaching an S-rank, immediately unlock their child’s Paralogue, but Midori’s paralogue doesn’t unlock in Birthright until chapter 16 and only if Kaze survives. It makes me laugh because it implies every character immediately gets down and dirty when he puts that ring on it, EXCEPT Kaze and ONLY in Birthright where, even though he absolutely can S-rank beforehand, he waits until a near-death experience to bone his wife. Silly Kaze.

The other character deaths are much less silly. Birthright and Conquest both see at least one royal death, and those are proper painful. Revelation also sees some deaths, so there’s no path where you can genuinely save everybody. In Conquest in particular, Takumi himself is the final boss, possessed by Anankos and not saved by Azura as he is in Birthright and Revelation, and it's honestly a pretty cool fight.

Now… The main story. We all know it’s contentious, that a lot of it doesn’t make sense, that it has a ton of holes.

To my knowledge, the scenario writer actually pumped out FIVE HUNDRED PAGES of material for this game, and 90% of it got gutted for the final product. As a writer I’m deeply saddened by that, and genuinely wish I could know what the rest of the story could have been like.

That being said, I don’t actually hate what we got. It’s fractured, incomplete, but it’s still a fun experience and I can still care about the characters, one-note as they can be at times. I mentioned before in my Engage writeup that this has been an issue for a few games now, and Fates is no exception. Also this happens in Revelation and I love these idiots.

Anankos—or Hydra, in the JP—is a genuinely tragic figure. As one of the First Dragons, his age and draconic instincts led to degeneration of his mental state, and he became controlled by his baser instincts. Before he could fully fall to his own instincts, he sealed his body away. Over time, his love for humanity turned to hatred when he saw that they were more free, could flourish, while he lay suffering, abandoned and forgotten. It’s hard not to feel for him, even as ruthless and cruel as he is in the story. He’s among my favorite villains in the series for that reason.

In a nutshell, I genuinely do love Fire Emblem Fates. It’s flawed, and it’s weak in places, and my god there’s more maps than sense, but I still love it. Even so, I probably won’t be playing it again—it is, after all, quite a time commitment.

I hope to have another game cleared much sooner than this one took. Two months without a new writeup was a bit silly.

じゃ！

ま！た！ね！

[eskawrites]

dont sell yourself short on elden ring au! i just dont know what elden ring is lol

tbf does anyone really know what elden ring is? i'm about to hit 200 hours in the game and i don't think i could tell you

[feralprancinghomosexual]

Literally we had to call the emergency services twice in two days! Jo fell down the stairs (they thankfully didn't have to go to hospital and they're recovering at home) but then this evening I went to open my bedroom door and... it just wouldn't open. The door handle mechanism was basically fucked and we had to call the fire service who, after trying to force the door for like 10 minutes, had to saw around my door handle!!

Like I just have a hole in my door where the handle used to be!! Apparently whoever installed the door handle did it wrong and my door was a ticking time bomb??? Yes I rent thanks for asking.

[wizardofvamp]

Well, Ponder...

[pink-lightsabre]

cerrit "my friends call me pinch" argupnin. who gets called pinch once in the entire series. by his coworker. and not at ALL by any of his best friends.

makes me crazy.

[kdranime]

.

[hey-scully-itsme]

still thinking about the count of monte cristo movie. some of it felt half-baked on a technical level (score choices, some weird edits, etc) BUT also it hasn't left my head since i watched it and i WILL be seeing it again on wednesday. enraptured by the count's sad brown eyes and long eyelashes. and his dumbass leather coat.

it's a situation where i wish the movie had more of the book but i also wish the book had a little more of the movie in it.