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robininthelabyrinth · 4 years ago

Note

prompt: JGY working for JGS post sunshot is an elaborate scheme he and NHS cooked up one night and he is simply biding his time until JGS does something irredeemable he can report to NHS.

In Here, With Me - ao3 (chapter 2/3)

This is what I wanted, Meng Yao reminded himself at the ceremony where his father gave him a new name and he found out it was an insult.

This is what I wanted, he thought as he watched his father’s men slaughter innocents, acting on his order and at his command.

This is what I wanted, he thought as he was used as a pimp and procurer, as a punching bag for his new ‘mother’, as a convenient scapegoat – as even his proposed marriage was mocked and unreasonably delayed – as he was denied basic privileges and treated as little better than a servant.

Worse, in some cases.

This is what I –

“San-ge!” Nie Huaisang called out, waving frantically, and behind him Nie Mingjue looked default-face neutral but actually, if you knew him well enough, extraordinarily long-suffering. “San-ge! I want to talk to you! About important things!”

If you knew Nie Huaisang, you knew that important things, to Nie Huaisang, included pretty clothing, pretty accessories, pretty birds, pretty people, and spying.

Jin Guangyao put a smile on his face, and for the first time in weeks, actually meant it.

“Any time, Huaisang,” he said. “Why don’t you come inside?”

“I hate it,” he told Nie Huaisang, who was trying to look understanding but actually mostly looked smug. “I figure I have two options on what to do about that. Learn to accept my lot in life –”

“Or kill them all and take over?”

“…three options. I was going to say that I was thinking of accepting your earlier offer, but if you really prefer, that second option seems perfectly plausible –”

“No, no, it’s a terrible option,” Nie Huaisang said, waving his hands. “I mean, you’d have to keep it hidden that you did it, you’d spend all your life worrying about someone finding out about it, and anyway, Lan Xichen would be so disappointed in you. How could you live with yourself?”

Quite well as long as he never found out, Jin Guangyao thought, but he acknowledged that all those points were correct. Especially the one about not wanting to live in utter paranoia for the rest of his life.

“What’s your plan?” he asked instead.

Nie Huaisang smiled.

“I can’t believe you,” Nie Mingjue said when Jin Guangyao first arrived in the Unclean Realm for a visit to his sworn brother, mulling over his father’s order to find out anything useful he could about Nie Mingjue’s intentions, and the critiquing tone made Jin Guangyao’s back go straight with fear that he would find here only the same disdain as he found in Lanling City. “Why do you listen to Huaisang and not to me? It’s simply unfair.”

Right, Jin Guangyao thought, his shoulders loosening. Right. It’s different here.

“We speak the same language,” he said.

“What language is that?” Nie Mingjue grumbled. “Fan semaphore? Anyway, stop dawdling by the door and get in here already. I told the kitchen to make your favorites since I know you and he will be spending half the day drinking tea and plotting mischief.”

Jin Guangyao nodded, and in a moment of recklessness added, “Would you tell me what your plans are for the position of Chief Cultivator?”

“It should be abolished,” Nie Mingjue said at once. “Why do we need someone to boss us all around?”

A standard Nie Mingjue answer, Jin Guangyao supposed.

“And your next moves to accomplish that?”

Nie Mingjue blinked owlishly at him. “I’m busy rebuilding my sect,” he said. “I can worry about politics later, can’t I?”

Jin Guangyao sighed and went to talk to Nie Huaisang instead.

“The wonderful thing about da-ge is that he means well,” Nie Huaisang said. “The terrible thing about da-ge…”

“Is that he means well,” Jin Guangyao agreed.

“We could use demonic cultivation as a lever, no one likes that,” Jin Guangyao suggested, but Nie Huaisang shook his head.

“I’m planning on rehabilitating Wei-xiong,” he said. “And the Wen boy, Wen Ning – he was nice.”

“That seems unnecessarily difficult.”

“Just you wait.”

“Wait. We’re framing my father?”

“Don’t think of it as framing, san-ge! Think of it as allowing him the rope he can use to hang himself.”

“…has anyone ever told you that you’re ruthless, Huaisang?”

“Hmm. Da-ge, when fighting me for the last sweet. Does that count?”

“No.”

“…I take it back,” Jin Guangyao said, watching Nie Mingjue nurse his wounded hand and even more wounded pride after an abject loss at the dining room table. “Huaisang, you can have the last sweet, and also the title of ‘most ruthless’.”

“I told you!”

“Does that mean you’ll agree to my plan, then?”

“Don’t make me regret this.”

“I’m willing to play along with your stupid plan,” Nie Mingjue said, which came as a surprise to both Jin Guangyao and Nie Huaisang – not least of which because as far as Jin Guangyao knew, they hadn’t actually told Nie Mingjue what they were planning. “But I have some conditions.”

Jin Guangyao turned to look at Nie Huaisang, who looked as surprised as he was, and then turned to stare at Nie Mingjue’s retreating back: he’d only briefly put his head in to check on them in between other tasks, and as Jin Guangyao well knew, his schedule was packed – it was no surprise he didn’t stay.

“Does he know what the plan is?” he asked Nie Huaisang. “Or was he just guessing that he’d have a role to play?”

“I have no idea,” Nie Huaisang said. “Sometimes he surprises me.”

Jin Guangyao nodded thoughtfully. “We should go figure out his conditions,” he said, and Nie Huaisang nodded. “And also how he managed to learn about the plan, assuming he did.”

“What else could you be planning?” Nie Mingjue asked irritably when they finally managed to corner him. “I know what both of you are like, I know what your goals are; the rest of it all falls out quite naturally from that. Have you figure out yet how you’re planning on fixing the Wei Wuxian problem?”

“Setting up an opportunity for rampant heroics. He won’t be able to resist.”

Nie Mingjue nodded.

“What are your conditions, da-ge?” Jin Guangyao asked.

“Jin Zixuan doesn’t die if you can help it, and Jiang Cheng becomes Chief Cultivator if someone has to have the job,” Nie Mingjue said. “I do not want to get stuck with it, and anyway we’re getting him his head disciple back; he can deal.”

Those conditions seemed reasonable, although the Jin Zixuan bit might be a little annoying.

“And in exchange for that, you’ll play along?”

Nie Mingjue nodded. He had that long-suffering look again. “Just tell me what you need me to do.”

“A-Yao, you’re sure you really don’t mind?” Jin Zixuan asked a third time. “I’m sure this wasn’t what you thought you’d be getting when you were accepted to Lanling Jin –”

“What part?” Jin Guangyao asked. “Our father engaging in crimes and trying to blame me for them, no one believing him and deposing him as sect leader, or the fact that you’d like me to be sect leader for a few years while you focus on raising your children?”

“…all of that, really,” Jin Zixuan said. “Mostly the last one, though.”

“I promise I don’t mind at all,” Jin Guangyao said, and smiled.

On the contrary, he thought. This is what I wanted.

#mdzs #jin guangyao #nie huaisang #nie mingjue #jin zixuan #my fic #my fics #in here with me #yes it went up a chapter

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my-darling-boy · 4 years ago

Text

Right sorry I have to vent about something. I didn’t really want to post this but Oh Well it’s bothering me and I hope I’m not the only one who feels like this.

What I thought was me obsessing over a little mistake I made at work was actually the tip of the iceberg to this terror I feel internally realising as I get older, I’m required by society to mask my autism more and more because they see you as an inconvenience. But now that I’ve created this Highly Socially Convenient version of myself to fit into other people’s social standards, especially in the workplace, I can no longer make mistakes without people attributing them to laziness or carelessness or “stupidity”. It’s one of the many examples of people assuming “if I can’t see something, it doesn’t exist.” I’m constantly assessed with the “but you don’t LOOK autistic!” You shouldn’t have to know I’m autistic to start treating me with more care and respect.

If a customer is having trouble with the keypad, I don’t rip the thing around and jam their card in, annoyed. If a customer can’t hear me very well, I don’t roll my eyes when I have to repeat myself. If a coworker doesn’t understand how to use a register function, I don’t sigh heavily and shove them aside to fix it. Everyone is always apologising for making mistakes with their payment options or having to run back cos they forgot something or for “taking so long” or for doing this or that. People are sweating hurriedly counting out coins and notes and apologising but you don’t need to hurry! Take your time!! My line might be long but I know when I rush counting money, I get it wrong cos I can’t focus sometimes in chaotic, loud environments.

I’m so used to apologising for things I do as an autistic person and when I see others doing the same, I say they don’t have to be sorry. The checkstands are not easily accessible to understand or operate. People are rude and rushing. We’re wearing masks so it’s harder to hear/see facial expressions. Literally none of this is person’s fault, and yet they’re apologising like the checkstand or their communication style or even the angry customers behind them are their fault. And I do the same thing. The one thing I say ALL DAY LONG is “I’m sorry.” I say it so often that half the time I’m not even sure why I’m apologising, all I know is things that are out of my control are usually pinned as “my fault” somehow so I just say I’m sorry all the time. I’m apologising, the customer is apologising, my coworker is apologising, we’re all just so sorry for having to be in a building that isn’t meant to accommodate anyone.

Most of my interactions at work involve me making sure I’m being as accommodating as I can to who I’m speaking with because rarely are people accommodating towards me and I don’t want to make others feel like they’re an inconvenience the way I’ve been made to feel like one. I know by default that something that is easy for one person may not be easy for another person. And if an allistic person cares to think about this at all, it’s so bizarre to me that they assume it means a person is careless, lazy, or irresponsible.

I work retail and talking to people is literally my job, but it’s usually not an issue so long as they fit a social script in my head. Tasks are repetitive which means I learn them fast and perform them fast. When left alone, I resort to tasks I was shown how to do: clean, collect, etc. I follow instructions, ask questions. I’m always told I’m such a “competent, responsible employee” for this, even though 80% of my motivation for doing these things are out of constant fear of hidden consequences if I don’t do exactly as I’m told. And if someone starts saying I’m their favourite closer or the fastest cashier or the most helpful employee, I only get nervous about how disappointed this person would be in me if I showed any ounce of something different if one day I had a shutdown at work.

I wouldn’t know how to tell anyone why sometimes I’m a minute late to work for a few days, or why I lost track of time doing X, why X took me so long, why suddenly I don’t make a lot of conversation, why I suddenly lose ability to multitask, or why I keep making silly little mistakes when I “seem like such a good employee who can stay on top of things.” Sometimes I genuinely don’t know if I’ve done something wrong! There are grey areas of employment and social interaction that will always confuse me no matter what. Instead of taking just a moment to explain something I did incorrectly, or just take 10 seconds to show me how to do something, people right away are predisposed to snapping at you and being rude without so much as a little explaination to help you. And if they’re going to snap at me for a small question, how could I ever bring up something more? When? How? When a customer I’m not understanding is giving me a hard time, do I give into them and give them the discount they wanted and possibly get in trouble or do I call over a manager who is going to scold me for not understanding them?

There doesn’t seem to be a lot of space to discuss being autistic to anyone or time to dismantle stereotypes. I feel like I have to keep putting on a presentation and suppressing parts of myself or force myself to conform to allistic standards that make me uncomfortable while allistic people would never think about accommodating mine. I’ve heard so much offensive language towards autsitic people from basic team members, management, and customers at every job I’ve ever been at. And when something like that is THAT widespread and ingrained to how these people think, where and how do you even begin to address it? Who do you talk to? Who’s to say the person meant to handle these things at work isn’t making R word jokes minutes later?

Every job I get hired at assures me that I will be treated fairly, to the same standard as other employees. But to me, there seems to be something Off about fairness when it comes to performance. The problem is, the model of that standard is often a person who is not autsitic. I see it in the way supervisors walk up to me when I can’t get something to scan. I see it in the way they squint accusingly at me behind their mask if I need something explained more. I see it in the way coworkers have attributed their “stupid mistakes” to being “the r word”. They critisise lack of verbal communication or eye contact, they sigh when things need to be phrased differently, they stand impatiently while you’re trying to figure something out. In the break room, I hear people left and right laughing about or getting irritated over customers who are described as doing some of the things I do. I’ll always remember this one really nice customer who always came into the store and would put her items up on the counter slowly and would talk to you about her day, and I never had a problem with the speed at which she did anything because why would I? I don’t need to rush her, there’s no reason to. But a manager, after she had left one time, mimicked the way she spoke and said she was “the r word”. And I felt crushed.

No matter what a company says, in their eyes, we’re made to feel like the undesired. The inconvenience. The ones holding up lines or turning on the assistance blinkers at checkstands. There shouldn’t be people steaming behind us or snapping to go faster or shouting “Why don’t you understand?? Are you stupid??” I’ve found the discrimation against autsitic people in the workplace is a lot of times in subtlety, and to me it feels like what is being done to me isn’t noticable at first until I realise it’s eating away at me: the glares, the exaggerated sighs, the comments, the derogatory language. I always feel like someone standing outside a window while everyone else is on the inside. That’s what makes this type of treatment so insidious, because convenient for companies, they don’t have anything in their handbooks that protects me from their deeply imbedded practice of equating many traits of my autism with being an unsatisfactory employee. And usually by the time I’ve picked up on it, it’s too widespread for me to even sort out all that’s happened and I’m left feeling like I should just bear it. “Well then the job isn’t meant for you” someone might say. No, capitalist society doesn’t make room for people like me. In fact, I’ve never encountered a job that was meant for me. And I’m tired of having to say I’m sorry for myself and bend over backwards for capitalist “”””we’re a family”””” corporations and the society they’ve infected whom they’ve taught to not give two shits about people like me.

#sorry I just had a Time last night and had a breakdown in my car #smol talk #vent #long post #ok to rb

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redwing2000 · 4 years ago

Photo

KKUSS KKUTS My Template Setting

Build through Haruka_KK氏 (https://www.pixiv.net/users/1654061) Plugins KKUSS, KKUTS, Post Processing Effects

If you know the setting. You don't need to read this post. This post is for lazy people liked me. Setting done, and then \ COPY & PASTE /

[コイカツ! シーン KK Scene] https://www.mediafire.com/file/ibftx9uvmzr156w/ 1) Import the character to your scene. 2) Use Material Editor Copy Material, search and copy ""face","body" and "hair" 3) Paste Material to your own character one by one

Didn't test for imported texture ; But Coordinate tested and you can't just Copy and Paste. So I didn't make "KKUTS item" for copying.

KKUTS (Koikatsu Unity-chan Toon Shader)

Comparing - Orignal and KKUTS KKUTS can import Matcap. That would be convenient.

I discover Tweak_SystemShadowsLevel and RimLight are magical number.

Tweak_SystemShadowsLevel Default 0.3 ; Mine-0.4 ; Any negative number, sometimes you need to fine tune

RimLight, RimLight_FratherOff, RimLight_InsideMask RimLight, RimLight_FratherOff not 0 (0 = deactivate) Main value you need to tune is RimLight_InsideMask

Default 0.0001 which affect too much ; Mine usually 0.1~ 0.3

Drag skin color to BaseColor, prevent skin too white / grey. But some cards not work (Depends on skin color). You may need to push reset.

If you feel the tiny highlight annoying. HighColor_Power n Is_BlendAddtoHiColor turn to 0

KKUTShair

Most setting is same. The only one needed to mention is Addcolor Default RGB 1.2 ; That’s the reason why it’s bright. Try RGB 1.1 ~ 1

Known issue

If your character use Alpha Mask. KKUTS won't read alpha mask properly.

KKUSS (Unity Standard Shader for Koikatu)

Compare Anime style KKUTS, KKUSS good at soft shading.

Main edit value : "Addcolor" and "ShadowPower"

Addcolor > Pick a skincolor instead of white ShadowPower > Decrease a little prevent too dark

You also need to care about Light source when you use KKUSS.

Main light source usual below than 1 ; 1 usually is overexposure in KKUSS. You may use Point/Spot Light to make a better lighting, just liked HoneySelect

Some user mentioned this. Dark skin > DetailNormalMapScale use "2".

Other Issue Every KK topic would has same issue. If your Material Editor doesn't have "OO". No color picker or something. Use HF Patch and update your "BepInEx"

[Credit] KRArts - Tomoyo Character Card Haruka_KK - KKUSS KKUTS https://www.pixiv.net/users/1654061

★ Twitter - https://twitter.com/wingr2000 ★ ★ Discord - http://discord.gg/xtnWz4h ★ ★ If you enjoy my work, supporting me on ★ Fanbox https://wingr.fanbox.cc/

#Koikatsu

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lovemesomesurveys · 4 years ago

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You ever played Call Of Duty? Did you like it? Are you into those types of video games at all? Nah, I was never into those types of video games.

Do you like to cook for people, or do you order to be cooked for? Has anyone ever told you that you were a good cook? Well, I don’t cook except for ramen and that’s just for myself cause my family doesn’t really eat that. My parents and brother are awesome cooks, though, so I get to enjoy what they make.

Do you have any clocks in your house that chime when the hour changes? Do those types of clocks annoy you? We have one in the living room that makes bird noises, ha. We’ve had it since I was a kid.

Has anyone ever let you borrow some of their music, promising you'd love it, but you really didn't? Did you lie to the person and agree, or tell the truth, that you hated it? I’ve had people suggest music to me that I should listen to and I’d be like like, ‘okay, cool I’ll definitely check it out’, but then didn’t. :X haha. Not all the time, but yeah. I’m just lazy. Anyway, I’ve been suggested good music that I liked and others not so much. If I didn’t like it I wasn’t mean about it, I probably said it just wasn’t my vibe or found something nice to say about it like the singer had a nice voice or a lyric that stood out.

What is your usual hair style? Do you tend to wear the same style every day, or do you switch it up a lot? I just throw it up in a messy bun cause I don’t have the energy or motivation to do anything else with it.

Have you had the same doctor pretty much your whole life, or have you went to a bunch of different ones over the years? Have you ever been to the doctor thinking something was horribly wrong with you, but it turned out to be something minor? I had a primary doctor that took care of everything from the time I was a baby to when I turned 21, which was the age limit for that doctor, sadly. I found another primary doctor and I’ve been seeing him ever since. I’ve seen several other types of doctors as well throughout the years. I’ve had to bounce around to a few different pain doctors, but one I’ve had now I’ve been seeing for almost 3 years. Another regular doctor I see that’s been managing something else I have I’ve been seeing for the past few years and I’ve been to them in the past as well.

Do you prefer to go out to get ice cream, or do you just like to get the kind you keep in your freezer? What flavor do you usually get? I’m not a big ice cream person, but I’d say having it at home cause it’s more convenient and I can have as much as I want whenever I want. Going out for ice cream sometimes can be nice as well. I haven’t done that in years or even had any ice cream at all in awhile, though. Anyway, I like strawberry, mint chocolate chip, birthday cake, or peanut butter cup.

Do you look forward to the holidays, or do you dread them? What holiday is your least favorite, and why? I love the holidays. I especially look forward to Christmas.

Is the background on your phone a default picture, or a picture you took? What is the picture of? My lock screen and home screen are different hearts/Valentine’s Day themed backgrounds. I like to change up my backgrounds and if there’s a holiday then I’ll likely do something for that.

What is your favorite type of print (ex: zebra, stripes, argyle)? Do you have a lot of things with this print on it? Plaid. I don’t have a lot of things with plaid anymore, though, just a couple throw pillows and a pair of leggings.

Are there any stores you feel uncomfortable going into (ex: if you dress girly, do you feel uncomfortable going into Hot Topic)? Are there any stores that you refuse, or just never go in to? Sex shops, ha. I’ve been to one once because my friend wanted to go to one for her 18th birthday, but I’ve had no interest in going for myself. Otherwise, I just don’t go into a store because it’s not of interest to me or I have no need to, not because I feel uncomfortable.

Do you look in mirrors a lot, or do you try to avoid them? How many mirrors are in your house? I avoid looking into mirrors as much as possible and spend as little time as possible doing so when I need to. There’s a few mirrors in the house.

What is your favorite brand of clothing? Is this a brand that is sort of expensive, or is it pretty affordable? I really like Adidas clothing and shoes. Most of my clothes come from Boxlunch and Hot Topic, though.

What person do you text the most? My mom or brother.

Do you have any pictures that always make you laugh, or cry? Are they digital pictures, or printed pictures? What is the significance? Uhh, like funny or relatable memes I come across online.

What are you listening to? An ASMR video.

What were you doing at 4am? I had just finished eating my ramen.

What’s your favorite cereal? Fruity Pebbles, Cinnamon Toast Crunch, Life, Honey Nut Cheerios, Frosted Cheerios, Frosted Flakes, Lucky Charms, Froot Loops, Cap’n Crunch Berries, Cocoa Puffs... all the sugary ones, basically. Damn, I haven’t had cereal in so long that sounds good.

What’s the last thing you drank? Starbucks Doubleshot energy drink.

Where is your biological mother right now? She’s in bed, asleep.

Where is your biological father right now? He’s up getting ready for work.

What’s your mood? Right now I’m just tired.

Are you doing anything tomorrow? Nothing out of the ordinary.

Do you cry a lot? Yes.

Have you recently? Yes.

What’s your favorite candy? White chocolate and Reese’s, which they have a white chocolate version of as well, so hey.

Have you ever eaten raw pumpkin? Ew, no.

Does your car have a name? I don’t have a car.

Will you be in bed within twenty minutes? I am in bed. As for if I’ll be asleep, probably not yet.

Who did you sleep with last night? Myself, as always.

Wearing any bracelets? Nope.

What is your favorite color? Pastels, rose gold, sea foam green, coral, and yellow.

What should you be doing right now? Sleeping; it’s almost 7AM.

How much older is the person you’re currently interested in? I’m not interested in anyone in that way currently.

Remember the first time you kissed the last person you kissed? I do.

Have your parents ever caught you drinking? I didn’t drink until I was 21, so.

Do you love the last boy/girl you were talking to? Yes.

Did you have an exciting last weekend? No.

Is there a secret you’ve never told your parents? Yes.

Have you ever flirted with a friend’s crush? No.

Did you have a good birthday this year? I haven’t had my birthday, yet.

Do you lead people on? No.

Who was the last person you made plans with? I made plans to watch a TV show with my mom, ha. That’s about the only plans I make these days or about getting something for takeout.

What is the rudest thing someone has done recently towards you? i can't think of anything right now. which is good. <<<

When was the last time someone really got on your nerves? No one recently.

Have you recently lost any clothes? No.

What places will you be going tomorrow? I won’t be going anywhere.

When is the next time you will kiss someone? I have no idea.

How do you feel about your hair right now? It reallyyyy needs to be dyed.

How fast have you driven a car? I’ve never driven a car.

Have you ever smoked? Just weed.

Is the last person you kissed your other half? No.

Do you think this year is better than the last? It’s only February. We all know how awful 2020 was and we’re still going through it, but we’ll have to see how the rest of the year goes...

Where is the last person you kissed at this moment? I have no idea.

Has anyone seen you in your underwear this past month? Nope.

Would you rather marry Taylor Lautner, or take a million dollars? Give me the million, please.

Do you really believe in forever? Yeah.

What are you doing after this? I should go to sleep.

Someone says “all guys are players” You say? "generalizations are stupid." <<<

Are you an official couple with the last person you kissed? Nope. We never were.

Do you believe in kissing when you’re not together yet? Joseph and I did that for 3 years. I wouldn’t do that now, though. I’m in my 30s and if I date then I want a serious, committed relationship. I’m not looking for flings or to play games. Like, I’ll be upfront with the person and want to know where we stand and what’s going on before we carry on.

How serious are your feelings for the person you like? I don’t like anyone currently.

Do you live close to the person you like? --

#personal #text #survey #surveys

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tainbocuailnge · 5 years ago

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ive played all the story chapters and a bunch of side missions and tried out a handful of characters so now it’s time for The Official Lance Tainbocuailnge Review Of Fate/Extella Link if you’re like me and were kinda on the fence about buying it after extella massively let you down

tldr; gameplay is actually fun and varied with loads of different objectives and the same servant can be played in different ways so it doesn’t get boring. main story is a bit disjointed and most servants only have a quick cameo but it gets charlemagne’s plot beats down well enough and the silly everyone-knows-everyone banter is delightful. everything looks better, the world actually feels populated, and there’s a lot of care put into special interactions. link will not disappoint you like extella did

the gameplay has much more variation than just press button use moon drive repeat. you’ve got a mix of regular attacks that lead into various combos and active skills with cooldowns. each servant has like 7 of them, generally some combination of damage skills buffs and debuffs, and you can set 4 at once so there’s a degree of customisability to how you play each servant even within the fighting style they’re inherently geared towards. servants with similar regular movesets (like cu and scathach) still have decidedly different active skills so they don’t feel interchangeable. certain moves from servants that were already in extella are generally reused either at the end of some combo or as an active skill which for me goes a long way in still making it feel like the same game, just better

attacking builds moon drive meter, and fighting enemies while moon drive is active earns you np meter. this means you can use your np as often as you can charge it instead of the pathetic One time it was in extella and you can just blow up a whole sector without remorse. you can also end moon drive early with a weaker version of your noble phantasm. some active skills are labelled as class skills and if you use those in a combo against a servant you get the button mash attack that extella had. altogether it really gives the sense of an all-out servant battle

allied servants are much much much more proactive. they’ll actively go out and conquer sectors for you and will try to join you wherever you’re fighting the boss servant. if your allies are nearby more of your active skills will get the class skill property and they’ll join you in the button mash attack. before the battle you also set two support troops, who will randomly join in on your combos or defend you when you’re in a pinch. hakuno is also out on the field, so combat is much more a team effort than before

stage objectives are varied too, there’s field effects, map jamming, hunting down messengers before they can call for reinforcements, escorting allies to specific locations, waves of shadow servants, lancelot disguising himself, robin or lishu going invisible, iskandar or darius with endless armies, drake or gilles bombarding from afar, all often used in various combinations too. on top of that the extra stages will provide random additional challenges so even replaying the same stage will be different every time.

there are four difficulties (that I’ve unlocked) but I haven’t tried any of the higher ones yet so I don’t know what they change to make it more difficult other than enemy level. there are like. i think at least 50 maybe even 100 extra stages to play after you’ve cleared the ~30 main story battles that continue until servant level 200 or something so there’s a lot to do even after you’ve gone through the story. servants unlock by clearing story battles and I didn’t realize this until very late and was very pissed off that the game wouldn’t let me use cu but that’s on me. the money is power system is still in place so you don’t have to manually train any new servant you want to try out you can just powerlevel them. install skills are also still in place and you do need to level servant bond if you want to use any decent number of those

there’s a pvp mode too but I haven’t tried it yet so no comment on that beyond i bet skilled lancelot players are The most annoying motherfuckers to fight against

graphics are a huge step up from extella. reused areas got a complete visual makeover while retaining the same feel. everyone’s models got spruced up and now they don’t look plastic anymore. there is an unreal amount of care put into sculpting karna’s asscrack. the ost actually slaps beyond the main theme this time as well as featuring some ol reliable CCC tracks. everything looks much more polished

the story is somewhat disjointed because of both the large cast and the splitting routes. the story splits up at various points to create an excuse to make different battles but it means a lot of things happen at approximately the same time in slightly different ways and it can be confusing to keep up with what happens in which order. for that reason I suggest looking closely at what path leads to which ending and playing all the quests of each converging branch before moving to the next day. the story seems to go out of its way to be ambiguous in when what happens exactly and how it’s even supposed to follow the events of extella so I think it’s best to look for the themes and the fun lore details over the linear coherence

overall the atmosphere is pretty silly and servants constantly banter back and forth even during tense situations, but it lands the occasional serious moment well enough imo. charlemagne and karl are the only ones who have any significant story focus but since they’re the only newcomers it’s not like the other guys particularly need the screentime. charlemagne himself is a pretty silly and lighthearted guy so he goes along well with the general feeling and it actually works in favour of his heavier plot beats because of the contrast. I grew attached to him incredibly quickly, not in the last place because he gets hyped about every single person he meets and it’s hard not to get excited too

the servants who weren’t already in extella generally get to show up more in the main story than the already familiar faces but most of them don’t have much more than a cameo. having a lot of people just randomly roam around with no idea what’s going on goes a really long way in making the moon cell feel populated beyond the people directly involved in the story so I actually like it a lot. they came up with like 3 different convenient plot devices to give you servants to fight without worrying about what that means for the alliances and it gives room for a lot of cool character moments

a good chunk of the extra stages come with their own mini stories told through the combat dialogue which adds to the liveliness of the setting. my favourite so far is the one where liz and nero try to hold a concert and hakuno frantically tries to explain to charlemagne in the middle of combat why it’s absolutely vital to keep them from doing that

everyone seems to know everyone so a lot of story dialogue is banter in varying degrees of playful versus vicious between both likely and unlikely combinations of servants and there’s a lot and i mean a LOT of care put into specific interactions. if two servants even remotely have an opinion on each other there’s special dialogue for it, and I even picked up unique dialogue for when archer acts as support troop for cu which no doubt means it exists for other combinations too (altho that’s not subtitled so i dont know what they’re saying there i could just tell it was the usual bickering because of the tone lol). some servants have unique win quotes from hakuno, she calls gilgamesh by his nickname ‘gorgeous’ for example. servants will sit around your home base and have a default line to say but sometimes they have lines that refer to each other instead. compared to how barren extella was, link is overflowing with the sense that these people have lives outside the current conflict and se.ra.ph is a thriving and vibrant world for them to live in

there’s a scene where karna and arjuna use their noble phantasms against each other in mutual destruction and it fucking RULES

#lance link tag

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themattress · 6 years ago

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Wow. Tomoko Kanemaki SUCKS!

I decided to be masochistic and read back through the KH2 novels by Tomoko Kanemaki. And I just have to say: that there are actually people out there who like her writing and consider it to be in as good or superior to the games astounds me. These books are awful.

When they just straight-up adapt the game to text like the KH novels and the COM novels (except for the R/R one, but R/R sucks anyway), it’s fine. They even do the visits to Land of Dragons, Beast’s Castle and Olympus Coliseum better than the KH2 manga does, plus swaps in Agrabah for the far more important Port Royal. But that’s the only good thing I can say about them. In literally every other regard, the game and manga are infinitely superior.

The main problem is simple to sum up: Kanemaki is a fanfic writer. A pretty stereotypical KH fangirl. This in of itself wouldn’t be a problem if she weren’t adapting the games, but she is, and when she combines the game adaptations with her own fanfic based on what she wants to see, there is inevitably going to be a clash between them. The story written by Kazushige Nojima that she is adapting to novel form does not gel at all with what she writes, and as a result she has to either change that story (to the detriment of both it and its characters) or she neglects to change it even when it directly contradicts her own writing. This happens so much that it really makes for an excruciating reading experience. So let me list all of my problems with these novels point by point, to clarify just why Kanemaki’s writing fails so hard.

- I’ll get the biggest one out of the way right off the bat: Kanemaki is obsessed - and I mean obsessed - with the existential plight of the Nobodies, which includes the Draco in Leather Pants treatment to Organization XIII (”Is it really wrong to seek what you’ve lost?” is asked at one point, as though it’s a profound question. Um, when you’re doing so by inflicting that exact same loss upon millions of innocent people, yes it is!) The worst part is that characters (usually Namine, but Axel, Riku, Saix, Xemnas and even Ansem the Wise get on it at some points) are constantly repeating the exact same angsty inner monologues and internal (and sometime external) quasi-philosophical debates about Nobodies. I’m not kidding, it’s usually word-for-word. “Is it right for Nobodies to exist?” “Nobodies have nowhere to go or call home”. “Do Nobodies really lack hearts?” “What defines a heart?” “If Nobodies don’t have hearts, then why do they feel such-and-such?” “Why were Nobodies even born?” “Nobodies aren’t meant to exist, but does that still mean...?” And so on and so on, blah, blah, BLAH. Hearing this over and over and over and OVER again throughout my reading of the novels doesn’t make me more sympathetic of the Nobodies, it actually makes me less sympathetic and want them to go away so I don’t have to keep reading the same damn woe-is-me grade school-level existentialism! I want to keep reading about Sora, Donald and Goofy, damn it!

- Three characters who were mostly on the sidelines in KH2 somehow get a majority of time and focus here: Riku, Axel and Namine. They are even forced into an apocryphal trio together. They are basically treated as the de-facto secondary main characters next to Sora, Donald and Goofy, with their actions and development being given equal importance. Actually, that’s a lie - Riku, Axel and Namine are honestly given more importance. There is so much wrong about this - not only does the trio not feel organic and reek of bad fanfic, but each character in it isn’t well portrayed at all compared to the game or even the manga.

- Riku had the most potential, since he’s always a major character and a more talented writer could’ve come up with more feasible things for him to have been doing off-screen during KH2. But what Kanemaki has him do is ridiculous. If it’s not just stalking Sora, Donald and Goofy as a silent protector (which is the least interesting thing you could do with him), it’s bullshit with Axel and Namine, or fighting Saix midway through even though Kanemaki still keeps Saix’s later line of “Didn’t Roxas take care of you?”, or having him fight Xemnas in the Old Mansion only for Ansem the Wise to show up and Xemnas then just...retreat for no reason, letting Ansem live and thus ensuring the later destruction of his Kingdom Hearts like a dumbass! And through all of this, she frequently makes Riku default back into snarky, arrogant asshole mode, which doesn’t fit his character at this point at all. Also, while I saw no deliberate yaoi bait in the writing of the KH2 game, it’s definitely present in these novels.

- Axel. Oh my God. Anyone who hates what was done with him as Lea in the games, you should blame Kanemaki, since she actually ran with that kind of writing and characterization for him in these novels long before that happened in the games. He is treated as a totally trustworthy good guy who is a great friend to Roxas, Riku and Namine. The one dick move Kanemaki has him make is quickly backtracked on and then swept under the rug. His whole villainous role is whitewashed at every turn, from both what he intended with Roxas (legit deciding to kill him is changed to attempting a murder/suicide so that he can die with his best friend) to everything concerning Kairi (no, he didn’t kidnap her at all, that point is hammered in frequently, he was going to take her to Namine and they’d then see Sora together! And he didn’t want to turn Sora into a Heartless, that was a wrongful assumption on Saix’s part! And Saix summoned those Dusks on Destiny Islands, not Axel! Axel is chivalrous and heroic and does everything possible to protect and save Kairi! Gag me.) It’s so obnoxious, and beyond removing all of the character’s edge, it’s a blatant case of giving a character a major role in a story that they aren’t supposed to have one in just because he’s a favorite of the writer.

- Namine is an equally blatant case of this, but her case might be even worse. Not only is she THE source of the repetitive woe-is-me existential Nobody monologues and debates, with her whole character arc being changed to revolve around this which honestly makes her unintentionally unsympathetic and annoying, but this portrayal of her has a negative effect on her in both fandom and canon. In terms of fandom, a cult of bad apples (usually yaoi fangirls who already hated Kairi) arose around Namine following KH2, declaring her as superior to Kairi in every way and worthy of being the real main heroine of the KH series. Not only is this false, but it arguably got started because of these novels (translations of which had made their way online long before they were localized), where a character who literally only got 10 minutes of screentime in the game literally gets transformed into the main heroine and one of the most frequently appearing characters in general, even if her “character development” is horribly written and amounts to her being a mouthpiece for Kanemaki’s views. Then again, maybe they just projected onto Namine due to her introverted, fond-of-drawing nature, and Kanemaki was just one of them and thus produced something that kept them going. It’s a Chicken/Egg type of thing, I guess. But whatever the case, what it did in canon was worse. Kanemaki was the first to write for Namine after KH2, in 358/2 Days, and her characterization of her translated in game form to the stagnant caricatured plot device that Nomura then realized was easy to write for and convenient for making other convoluted plot turns happen.

- Come to think of it, Kanemaki’s partnering up with Nomura for Days probably did a lot more harm than just with Namine. Because her obsession with the “What Measure is a Non-Human?” trope never truly leaves the series after Days. It doesn’t pop up in BBS, since that was being worked on before Days, but everything afterwards is sure to feature it in some abysmal way or another, whether it be Nobodies, replicas, data copies or beings of pure darkness. The “Nobodies have hearts after all” comes straight from her writing (even if she had it as a needless overcomplication of the original idea that strong hearts can share feelings with those without it and thus serve as a heart for them too, while Nomura’s retcon is just “Nah, the body can regrow a heart, Xemnas lied”.) A lot of KH3′s worst writing might have not existed had Nomura not picked up on Kanemaki’s fixation with woobified “non-beings”.

- Sora honestly feels like an afterthought for Kanemaki. She’s so eager to write new fanficcy material for other characters, but not for the actual main protagonist, who only gets straight-up game adaptation. Oh, except that some of his lines that were “mean” to the Nobodies (and thus “OOC”, as both KH2-hating anon and Kanemaki seem to think) are changed or cut out.

- Y’know how the KH2 manga made Kairi even better than her game portrayal? Yeah, well this novel makes her far worse. First off, her defiant “you’re not acting very friendly!” to Axel is cut because Axel is whitewashed in that moment (he even readies himself to defend Kairi from the Dusks which Saix summons). Later, she does not get away from Axel because he was never kidnapping her to begin with here. She then realizes that he’s really a good person before Saix kidnaps her, with Axel desperately trying to protect her. She then only shows up toward the end when Axel once again comes to be her hero (again thwarted by that dastardly Saix), with her moping about how she can do nothing to help the brave, noble Axel. (I feel sick just typing this...) In the finale, not only does Kanemaki not take advantage of the potential Kairi development that the game relegated to optional text boxes, but she actually destroys Kairi’s entire arc long before BBS did by making one of her few additions to Kairi be an inner monologue she has on the shore of Destiny Islands alongside Mickey, Donald and Goofy just before Sora and Riku make it back, where she’s just wishing with all her heart that they’ll come back because “We’re here waiting for you. We’ll always wait for you.” BULL-FUCKING-SHIT. Kanemaki, just like Nomura and Oka, clearly has no interest in Kairi as a character on her own. She is used here as a plot device for the character development of Axel and Namine, characters she is interested in, even though Kairi had more significance and screentime than them by far in the actual KH2 game. Geez, even Nojima tried with her!

- Roxas is written just fine during the prologue, since his scenes are just lifted from the game. But when he resurfaces in the final novel, added material make Axel be the most important thing on his mind. Even his final thoughts as he makes the full merging with Sora is that he hopes to meet Axel again. More deliberate yaoi-baiting, and more shoving Axel down our throats. Hell, that last novel is even named “Anthem - Meet Again / Axel Last Stand”. God damn it, Kanemaki, Axel was not important to KH2. It’s not his story. Get over it already!

- Hey, remember how in the game DiZ/ Ansem the Wise did a total character 180 due to offscreen reasons when he came back after the prologue? That was dumb. The novels add new scenes for him, so Kanemaki could actually rectify this issue....OR she just repeats it, since the first new scene she gives him also has him in 180 mode due to offscreen reasons!

- Xemnas and Saix both have their levels of menace neutered thanks to the existential angst of the Nobodies affecting them too, with none of their inner monologues bemoaning their fates really adding up with their actions. The game let you make up your own mind as to whether you found them sympathetic despite their monstrous behavior, but Kanemaki is clearly trying to force the sympathy angle, and it really lessens them, especially Xemnas.

- Really, only Xigbar, Xaldin, Demyx, Luxord, and the trio of Hayner, Pence and Olette were written completely accurately out of the KH-original cast. Nothing felt out of place with them.

- Other nonsensical fanficcy events besides what I’ve already mentioned include bringing stuff from COM (like Repliku) back up frequently instead of keeping focus on the story at hand, a totally different version of how Namine and Axel split from Riku following the prologue (one that continues making Namine unintentionally unsympathetic), Riku having Mickey make the promise after the prologue before Kanemaki’s own 358/2 Days retcons this to happening before it, Riku meeting with Maleficent in Hollow Bastion, Mickey meeting with Axel in Hollow Bastion, Axel being the one to wake Goofy up after his “death”, Axel having a sort of odd friendship with Pluto, Ansem the Wise being the one to provide the box of clues for Riku to give, Axel pretending to betray Riku and Namine so that he gets let back into the Organization and thus be able to rescue Kairi, meetings between the Organization where they talk about totally different and less interesting matters than they did in the game, and having Namine stalk the group throughout the finale as she thinks her last pretentious inner monologues. Also, given its subject matter and how it plays during Days’ opening, I swear to God that Kanemaki created the Axel/Roxas ghost scene that Nomura added to KH2:FM. That it shows up in the last novel, word-for-word, a month before KH2:FM’s release, proves this.

- The misplacement of Disney Castle. This one REALLY bothers me. She places Disney Castle between Beast’s Castle and Port Royal in the third novel. This makes no sense whatsoever, since not only was this meant to be Maleficent’s re-introduction to Sora, Donald and Goofy, but now it comes after Maleficent already made an alliance with Sora and his friends at Hollow Bastion! And then all of a sudden, she’s no longer keeping the Nobodies at bay and is back to self-interested villainy! And there isn’t any dialogue explaining this away or anything! We still have Maleficent saying “If it isn't the wretched Keyblade holder and his pitiful lackeys!” as if she hadn’t agreed to temporarily join forces with said wretched Keyblade holder and his pitiful lackeys! Way to ruin one of the best Disney world visits, Kanemaki!

- The whole finale and especially the ending itself, which were so powerful in both the game and even the manga, has no power in the light novel style of writing Kanemaki uses. Part of that isn’t Kanemaki’s fault, since so much of the finale’s greatness is visual and that obviously can’t be recaptured in text form. And yet she still makes some baffling pacing decisions, with stuff like the aforementioned Namine stalking passages throwing the whole thing off, LOL moments such as Riku himself outright admitting that he has no idea where he got Kairi’s Keyblade also breaking the immersion, character alterations like to Xemnas and Kairi ruining the effectiveness of things they do, and a truly WTF-inducing final chapter where the entire Secret Ansem Report is put before a novelization of both the credits scene where Sora sees Kairi’s drawing in the Secret Place and the epilogue scene where they get the King’s letter.

Overall, these novels just don’t feel like Kingdom Hearts II to me. Even the KH2 manga, the middle of its first half notwithstanding, felt like it. This does not. And that’s because whatever the faults in its narrative, KH2′s story was first and foremost a fun Disney/Square crossover adventure starring Sora, Donald and Goofy, with angsty existentialism merely being one of its themes and meant more for players to think about and discuss rather than the characters. The novels tell a story about angsty existentialism starring characters who think about and discuss it, with Sora, Donald and Goofy’s adventures being a passionless afterthought. That there are people who honestly think that Kanemaki doing this “fleshes out the characters” is shameful. Constant angst and grade school-level philosophical circle-jerking is not character depth. It is pretension of depth, hence the word “pretentious” which fits perfectly here. It takes a lot more than talking and expressing feelings at length to constitute character development. It requires meaningful actions, and it requires some form of growth and change. Kanemaki’s characters are largely static, simplistically characterized beings who spin their wheels in terms of both actions and growth. Riku does not change: you can barely tell he has any kind of depression or has experienced any kind of humbling. Axel does not change: he’s a great guy from the start and has no internal problems to overcome, only the external one of being separated from Roxas. Namine does not change, she goes through the same questioning and angsting over her existence and the existence of other Nobodies until the last minute where the answer just suddenly comes to her (in fact, it was apparently in her all along and she just forgot it. Shades of Sora’s dumbass “Power of Waking” arc in KH3 here...) Any actual development that happens with some characters (like Ansem the Wise) comes straight from the game...and Nojima didn’t write that all too well either! There is just very little that’s enjoyable about the KH2 novels to me, and Tomoko Kanemaki’s writing is to blame for that.

In the words of Lemony Snicket: I highly advise you to not read these books.

#Disney #Square Enix #Kingdom Hearts #Kingdom Hearts II #Anti-Tomoko Kanemaki #Bad Writing #Opinion #Analysis #Truthbomb #This has been a PSA

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dipulb3 · 4 years ago

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Polk React soundbar review: Built-in Alexa for your TV speaker

New Post has been published on https://appradab.com/polk-react-soundbar-review-built-in-alexa-for-your-tv-speaker/

Polk React soundbar review: Built-in Alexa for your TV speaker

I’ve had a voice assistant in my house for the past few years and it’s hard to know how I ever did without it. The whole family uses it to turn off the lights, ask for the weather or, to my horror, listen to endless amounts of Spotify-skewing pop music. The Polk React brings the convenience of Alexa into a TV-friendly, soundbar form. The essential question is: Do we really need a TV speaker that’s also an assistant?

Amazon Alexa onboard works well.

Excellent sound quality for the price.

Smart looking design

Don’t Like

Only one HDMI input

Optional sub and surrounds are costly.

The new React follows up Polk’s original almost-but-not-officially-an-Echo soundbar, the Polk Command Bar. The React differs from the Command because it doesn’t include the wireless subwoofer — it’s just a single bar. The React sounds very good and is equally comfortable with movies and music, and its integration with Alexa is even slicker than before. The result is a well-rounded package for your money.

But back to that essential question. Honestly I prefer keeping my assistant in a separate, dedicated speaker. Ask Alexa a question on a hybrid device like the React and the audio grinds to a halt while the assistant does your bidding. That can be annoying, especially when you have to interrupt your The Nevers session to ask a related question.

Then again, you might prefer an all-in-one solution, in particular if you don’t already have an Alexa speaker in your living area. And the React is a better value than the $400 Sonos Beam, another Alexa-powered soundbar, although it lacks Sonos’ multiroom chops. At the time of publication the React is available for $200, and if you want to improve the sound you can add an optional sub ($180) and/or the SR2 surrounds ($180), providing a nice upgrade path for the future.

What’s in the box?

The Polk Command Bar lacked the stylishness of the Sonos Beam, but the React smooths out the awkwardness with touches like its soft, woolen grill. The distinctive central ring section remains — with volume, action and on/off buttons set in a circle that looks like the top of an old-school Echo — but the activity light is now an illuminated bar across the front edge.

Ty Pendlebury/CNET

The bar itself measures 2.2 inches high, 4.76 inches deep and 34 inches wide. The soundbar is wall-mountable by way of keyhole keyhole mounts on the back. The audio section consists of two midrange drivers, two tweeters and two passive radiators underneath for added bass.

Inputs run to a single HDMI (ARC) output, an optical input for TV audio, Bluetooth, and a USB that’s strictly for firmware updates. I do wish it had the Polk Command Bar’s second HDMI port, which is a boon for users with multiple devices. The unit also offers Wi-Fi connectivity, though not Ethernet, for connecting the voice assistant to the Internet.

Ty Pendlebury

The React includes Amazon’s Multi-Room Music compatibility in addition to Spotify Connect, but sadly no AirPlay or Chromecast built in. I did appreciate that song requests via Alexa can be played through Tidal by default, though.

The React can work with an optional Sub and/or surround speakers.

Ty Pendlebury/CNET

The optional wireless Polk React Sub is hefty, akin to the one I saw on the JBL Bar 2.1 Deep Bass, and it costs a pretty penny, too, at $180. The large 16.5-by-8.6-by-13.7-inch box has a 7-inch woofer onboard.

Meanwhile optional rear speakers come in dedicated Left and Right versions and feature 10-foot long power cables. The speakers, shaped vaguely like a glasses case, are finished in gray marle and measure roughly 8 inches long by 4 inches square.

For a relatively inexpensive soundbar, the remote control is pretty comprehensive. It’s chunky but in a functional way and it offers plenty of control capabilities — even for the levels of the rears and the sub. These latter controls could also be seen as a not-so-subtle upsell attempt.

Interacting with Alexa

Ty Pendlebury/CNET

In the time since the introduction of voice assistant-enabled soundbars, I have some second thoughts on the technology, as have seemingly many manufacturers. There are two major reasons. First, people probably already have a digital assistant in their living room by now, because they’re reasonably cheap. Second, the sound from the main speaker “ducks” or mutes whenever you issue a command, meaning your show or movie is interrupted.

Those caveats aside, the Polk React was relatively painless when it came to issuing commands, hearing my “Alexa” wake word even when at the highest volume. The speaker doesn’t mute completely when it ducks, meaning you can still sort of hear what’s going on. Queries were quickly resolved and so the interruption wasn’t as great as with other smart soundbars I’ve tested, such as the Yamaha YAS-209 or JBL Link Bar.

Ty Pendlebury/CNET

If you don’t want to use the remote you can also use your voice for all of the controls, including the ability to alter the sub and rear volumes. In a related fashion, the only thing that irked me during setup was that neither the soundbar nor the subwoofer manual tell you how to sync the peripherals. Hopefully the company can fix this for its May release, but if you’re stuck you need to press the sync button on the soundbar for 4 seconds, then the synching device’s for 4 seconds, and then touch the soundbar’s button quickly again.

A night on the couch

As with the excellent series of TV speakers before it, the Polk React is equally at home with movies as it is with playing music. The array of quickly-changeable sound modes means that you can ask Alexa on the fly if you want to boost intelligibility (voice volume) or bathe in pseudo-surround sound (movie mode).

Sadly, I did not have the Sonos Beam on hand for direct comparison, but I did have two subwoofer-less soundbars, the Vizio M21D-H8 ($150) and the JBL Bar 5.0 Multi Beam ($350), that bookend the Polk in price.

I started my testing with one of the most memorable sequences from a superhero movie — up there with Superman flying around the world backwards — which is Wonder Woman going “over the top” of the World War I trenches (1:14:00). Bullets fly as our hero strides confidently through the mud before bracing herself with the help of her shield for a machine gun assault. The scene brought me chills.

The Polk was able to capture the movie’s epic sweep, the soundtrack swelled and bullets zinged, but I did miss some of the oomph and immersiveness a larger system could bring. In comparison, the Vizio wasn’t as clear and didn’t have as much bass. It simply felt a little underpowered for this scene, even with the oft-reliable DTS Virtual:X processing employed.

But it was the JBL Bar 5.0 which sounded the most majestic in this test. With the JBL’s Smart Mode turned on, dialogue was still clear but bullets whizzed around the room in a way that they didn’t with the other two bars. There was also plenty of bottom end for the shells that exploded around our friends as they approached the German line.

With this and other material I found that the Polk offered the best compromise of sounding full for a reasonable sum, but the JBL was the better home cinema speaker. Maybe it could be worth the extra $100 for movie watching, but not if you want to listen to music.

Like other Polk’s before it, the React is able to tap out a tune very convincingly. Nick Cave’s Red Right Hand sounded natural and balanced on the Polk at every volume level. While the JBL can go much louder than the Polk, its musical performance came with sonic artifacts. The bass line started to distort and become synth-like beyond only halfway up the dial.

When I added the optional sub and rears the Polk was at its best, as you would expect from a system that now costs $650. The benefits of the sub and rears could be felt whichever kind of material I was listening to, sometimes in unexpected ways. For example, Dead Can Dance’s Yulunga Spirit Dancer, especially in Movie mode, was as enjoyable as ever — the world-music-tinged tune sounded huge, and it was hard to believe it was coming from a soundbar system.

Should you buy it?

With the Polk React the manufacturer has given users a clear upgrade path, a rarity in this category, by offering the optional sub and surrounds. If you have to choose between the two it’s a tough call. If you mainly watch TV sports or dramas, then the surrounds will make the most difference as they give the listener the greatest sense of immersion. On the other hand if you like your music loud or your action movies explodey, then it’s the sub you should get.

Without the optional speakers, the Polk React offers excellent sonics for a single bar with a smattering of great features for the money. For people who want a hybrid Alexa speaker, it’s another satisfying system that lives up to the smart soundbar legacy created by the original Polk Command Bar.

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flying-elliska · 4 years ago

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I was thinking more specifically about why I find it so bad from a writing standpoint, which can be interesting :

- there are very little scenes with characters being nice, friendly or supportive of each other. Instead they are constantly being mean, passive agressive, annoyed or petty at each other. This comes across as very one note and immature. Will, who is the nicest character, is also presented as naive and childish, as if being nice is a character default lol. It's a very tiring (very French) world view. And it makes you take the drama less seriously because it's so constant.

- As mentioned above, there is very little humor, and also a lot of filler scenes that don't add to the plot, which makes it boring.

- On the flip side some key scenes of people bonding are not even shown, only told about. The two mains have very little interactions, they are supposed to be in looove and supposedly he is "there for her" and they spent a night talking but we don't see it ???? How are we supposed to believe it then ????

- The portrayal of love in this story is very much "irrational and irresistible force that happens just because" and that is one of my least favorite conceptions of love for many reasons : it makes your characters stupid, it's an excuse to skimp on their development/arcs, and it's too much of a convenient plot ex machina. Also they have like six characters cheat in one form or another that's insane !!!!!

- Anyway I'm so ranty about this because I have similar criticisms almost every time I watch/read French media/stories and it drives me absolutely nuts (looking at you skamfr s5/6, even tho they're a paragon of nuance and subtlety compared to this). French culture, despite its reputation as Romance, seems to consider love in one of two ways. Mostly that it is silly (like most feelings) and a Scam (that Smart People see through) ; because of Capitalist Mainstream Society if you're a leftist or because Men Are Just Wired to Fuck Around if you're a conservative douchebag. But then sometimes there is a Return of the Repressed and Love just Happens despite you in a deluge of passion, incoherent actions and broken lives, isn't it Romantic. (Tired Sigh.) There is a reason I write in English and a big one is I am very alienated by this bullshit. One of the big reasons I love Portrait of a Lady on Fire so much is that it sidesteps this - Celine Sciamma also talked about this, about the importance of making consent more central to love narratives and the profound issues with seeing love as this "irresistible force of nature." (A big one is that it can easily become very rapey)

- Skam France is also frequently guilty of this, only narrowly sidestepping it in s3 because of the 'giving in to love' moments are coherent with the narrative and character development, and the relationship is so well built up. The characters are clearly careful of each other's boundaries, and 'love as a force of nature' becomes liberating and a force for healing and growth instead of irrational destruction and fatalism. So in this specific case, it works. But not in further seasons - whether it's Arthur with Noee, Sofiane with Manon, Charles and Manon - it's that exact same trope of "oh look how stupid love makes us isn't it epic???!". No, no it isn't. I have a feeling this is why it pissed off so many international fans, because they aren't used to this cultural narrative. As a half-Frenchie I am used to it I just find it very very tiresome lmao.

I caught up with Grand Hotel up to the end of the season ! And wow it was bad lmao

Maxence does his best but tbh his character is not very well written. I was expecting him to change and stand up for himself but he does so for the dumbest reason possible (like I get he is sad his ex wants an abortion but that's still her choice dude) and his plotline isn't even solved it's just...there. In the end it had very little impact on the story I wonder what the point even was. The main story is revolved in a way that is just...oh, ok. The villain is just a stereotype. Everything is so melodramatic and the characters' behavior makes no sense and the main is kinda annoying ngl

But like, I did finish it, it's kinda compulsively watchable, a bit like a trainwreck. But yeah I hope Maxence will get to play in some good stuff for a change lol

#idk how to tag this lmao #ellie rants about french culture

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androidskit-blog · 6 years ago

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Android 9 Pie Features review

Here’s the story with every new version of Android, in a nutshell: it’s great, but you can really only get it on a phone that Google makes. Sometime next year, new phones by other companies will launch with it. The Android phone in your pocket might get it, maybe, but it’ll take longer than you want, and honestly, the new version isn’t that different, so you shouldn’t sweat it too much. Yes, fragmentation is an issue, but it’s better now than it used to be, thanks to Google’s ability to push some key updates out through the Google Play store instead of having to rely on full system updates. The story with Android 9 Pie isn’t radically different, but it changes some of those tried and true (and increasingly tired) lines a bit. For the first time, I’ve had a chance to test the official release of a new version of Android on a phone not made by Google, the Essential Phone. That’s a good sign. Although a few of the promised features aren’t shipping or are still in beta, I think this version of Android is good enough that users should demand the update for their phones. I’m not trying to organize a campaign to shake off our complacent acceptance of a terrible update status quo, but I am saying we should bring back a little bit of the old outrage at carriers, manufacturers, and Google itself. The many features in Android 9 Pie cohere into something that feels more polished than the last few versions of Android. There is a lot to like and fewer excuses than ever for updates not to come out for existing phones in a timely manner. We’ve been living with the same three-button core navigation system in Android for several years now, but with Pie, Google is finally giving a gesture-based interface a shot. It may not be the most important new feature in the OS, but it’s certainly the most prominent and the most divisive. Bear with me here because I’m going to overthink this, but I think it’s worth it because it illuminates a key point about Google’s design direction. The new system replaces the back, home, and multitasking buttons with a singular home button, gestures, and other buttons that appear on an as-needed basis. In theory, it will make future Android phones more accessible to users who are used to the iPhone X’s gesture system, and it also offers some benefits (swiping requires less accuracy than tapping). Overall, the new gesture system works, but it’s conceptually complicated.

To see what I mean, here’s a brief description of how gestures work: You swipe up once to get to an overview page. The Overview pane (aka your recently used apps) lets you swipe between apps or enable split-screen with a hidden menu on the app’s icon. On Pixel phones, you’ll also get an AI-driven list of suggested apps and a search bar. Swipe up again, and you’ll get to the app drawer with icons for all of your apps. You tap the home button to go home, or you can drag the home button to the right to quickly switch between apps in a screen that’s similar, but not identical, to the Overview screen. Along with all of this, the traditional Android back button will still show up from time to time next to the home button because Google hasn’t yet developed a gesture for “back.” It’s... a lot. I’m not against complication in principle when it comes to UX — I have faith in humanity’s ability to learn — but there’s no denying it takes some time to feel like you know your way around. The funny thing is, I think the negative reaction isn’t about how complicated gestures are. Instead, it’s about how they feel. As I’ve written before, switching to a primarily gesture-based navigation system is a risky move for Google, because those systems only feel good if they... feel good. Any “jank” in the animation or weirdness in the physics of moving elements on the screen will make a user feel unmoored and unhappy. The good news is that — at least on the Pixel 2 XL — Google finally got to a place where the animations work as they should, and the jank is gone. But the physics and ergonomics still feel a little off, especially if you’re used to the system on the iPhone X. (After a rockier beta, animations were also fine on the Essential Phone with the final version.) Where the iPhone’s gestures let you flow from one thing to the next with a single gesture, Android’s feel a little more staccato. As just one example, you theoretically have the option to do a long swipe up to get to the app drawer instead of a double swipe (once to the overview, once again to the drawer). But in practice, you have to do a loooong, loooong swipe to get it to work, which you’ll invariably get wrong, and the dock will give you a fussy little bounce in a futile attempt to indicate you should just double-swipe up. I’m overthinking all this in part because I don’t think Google thought it over enough. I would have jettisoned the long swipe and just encouraged people to double swipe. That would have the side effect of pushing people into the Overview screen more often, which would be a net good for Google. The app suggestions are very often exactly what I want and the swipe-tap motion to start a search is faster than any mobile search UX we’ve had, going on seven years (since, you guessed it, just typing on the physical keyboard of a webOS or BlackBerry phone). But, of course, that enhanced Overview screen is a Google-exclusive feature. Other phones, like the Essential phone, don’t have those Googley-bits at the bottom, they just have your app dock and no search bar. THE GESTURE SYSTEM IS AN OVERALL IMPROVEMENT, BUT IT NEEDS SOME TWEAKS With Pie, Google is leaving the buttons as the default navigation for current phones, and users will be able to switch back and forth from buttons to the gestures. Choices are nice, but offering them instead of just going with what you think is best often reveals a lack of confidence. As you can tell, I share what I sense is Google’s lack of confidence in the current system. Despite all this belaboring, I do prefer the gestures to the buttons! It’s a lot easier to just swipe up anywhere from the bottom of the phone, and I’ve used the copy-and-paste trick directly from the Overview screen a few times now. I just think they need a few more tweaks, and I suspect those will come in due time.

The new horizontal Overview / multitasking screen is the biggest visual change, but there are plenty of other nips and tucks around the interface. Nothing here will really feel alien to longtime Android users, it generally is just a bit more elegant. Android still maintains its lead in usable, manageable notifications. They have a slightly cleaner layout, and the entire notification panel has rounded corners. There are still multiple priority levels, grouping, an overflow area, and no distinction between what’s shown on the lock screen and notification panel. If you dismiss a notification from an app a lot, Android will eventually prompt you to just turn it off completely. The quick settings panel up top has been simplified (some would say oversimplified), requiring you to long-press to access more settings instead of giving you an in-menu dropdown button. As it does with literally every revision, Google has also adjusted the main settings screen. There are colorful icons for settings, and it’s more prominently adding suggested settings at the top more often than before. A system-wide dark theme is now an option for everybody, whether you have a dark wallpaper or not.

Back to polarizing changes, though: the status bar has been rearranged to better accommodate phones with notches (which apparently is going to be damn near all of them not made by Samsung). The time has been shifted over to the left of the screen and the little notification icons that appear over there are capped at four, whether you have a notch or not. It was a necessary step given the hardware trend, but I’m hoping that eventually, manufacturers will be able to report how much space their notch is taking up so Android can display more icons if there’s space for them. Google has changed the volume button behavior a bit — they only adjust media volume now with a little on-screen pop-up that lets you toggle your ringer between vibrate, silent, and on. It’s more predictable, and I think most people will prefer this behavior, but I’m an old person who actually adjusts ringer volume a lot, so it’s less convenient for me. ANDROID 9 PIE IS DESIGNED FOR NOTCHES, WHETHER YOUR PHONE HAS ONE OR NOT The other little pop-up on the right side is the power menu, with options for restarting and taking a screenshot. I recommend hunting down the “lockdown option” in settings, which adds another button to that menu. Tap it, and your phone will require a passcode instead of letting biometrics unlock the phone. Honestly, that button should have been set to “on” by default.

I’m not sure what took so long, but Android finally has a magnifier when you’re trying to move the cursor when selecting text. Another “finally” is a screenshot markup. When you take a screenshot now, you’ll have an option to crop it and draw on it before saving or sharing. Last but not least, if you’re the sort of person who leaves rotation lock on, Google will pop up a little button when you turn the phone to temporarily let you put it in landscape mode. Something about big phones has always caused them to be too aggressive at rotating the screen for me, so it’s a nice feature. It can be annoying, though: most of the time you want to go 90 (ahem) to watch the video, and video by default hides the main navigation buttons. It’s a few extra taps to get back to the portrait.

In my initial look at Android 9 Pie, I called it Google’s “most ambitious update in years.” I still think that’s true, but unfortunately, right now, Android doesn’t quite reach those ambitions. There are two key features that aren’t shipping until later this fall: the so-called “Digital Wellbeing” dashboard and a feature called Slices. Digital Wellbeing is available as a beta, and I’ll wait until it’s official to review it. But even in beta, it’s useful. You can see how much time you’re spending in apps, set limits, and turn on a great feature called “Wind down,” which toggles on Do Not Disturb and sets the screen to monochrome. Honestly, I wish there was a way to turn on Monochrome more easily anytime.

Do Not Disturb, by the way, has changed a little. It’s much more aggressive at hiding notifications by default, down to not letting you see them at all unless you mess with the settings or turn DND off. The default is a little overbearing for my tastes, and I wish there was a better middle ground. Slices are part of Google’s initiative to bring more AI and machine learning to Android’s interface. The idea is that the functions of an app can be “deconstructed” and spread out to other parts of the OS. So when you search for a thing you want to do, an app can show its own interface or button directly in the search results. The commonly cited example is hailing a car. We’ll test it in the fall when it becomes available. GOOGLE’S AI-BASED SUGGESTIONS ARE OFTEN EXACTLY WHAT YOU WANT TO DO NEXT But there are other AI elements to Android that are available right now. Both battery life and screen brightness are automatically handled by machine learning that adjusts settings based on your usage. I can’t really say how effective either are with any level of confidence, but anecdotally I do think I’ve been messing with screen brightness less often. AI also determines which icons appear at the bottom of the Overview screen, and it’s crazy good — the app I want to open next is there at least half the time. Finally, there’s “Actions,” a feature that complements Slices and is available now. Where Slices will show buttons for app actions when you actively search for something, Actions puts those buttons directly in your app drawer. As with those icons in the Overview screen, Android tries to guess what you might want to do, only here it’s a button that deep links into a part of the app. It might be sending a text or opening the podcasts app before you start your commute. They seem fine, but I’m not in the main app drawer often enough to make heavy use of them.

Android 9 Pie is a great update, and I wouldn’t want to go back. I love that it’s chock-full of ideas about how an operating system can be smarter, even though some of them (pardon the inevitable pun) don’t feel quite fully baked. I see a few trends beginning to come to fruition here. Through battery management and notification changes, Google is continuing its efforts to corral an ecosystem of bad-acting apps through a better-managed OS. The other big trend is one I’ve been talking about for a couple of years now: moving toward making AI the new UI. ANDROID 9 PIE IS FULL OF NEW IDEAS OF HOW AN OS CAN BE SMARTER Two years ago at the Code conference, CEO Sundar Pichai told Walt Mossberg that Google intended to be more “opinionated” about its own phones, and the Googlification of Android on Pixel phones is stronger than ever now. The heavy emphasis on the Overview screen, Actions, and (eventually) Slices are all examples of Google trying to use its own AI chops to surface what you need instead of making you hunt through home screen folders and apps. It’s been fascinating to compare Google’s strategy to Apple’s with iOS 12 — and will continue to be. Of course, if we’re bringing up iOS, we have to circle back to where we started: updates. Apple still trounces Android when it comes to getting phones updated to the latest OS. Last year, Google built the Treble infrastructure to make it easier for companies to push out these big OS updates faster. This year, I’d like to see more companies take advantage of it. Android users have more reason to hope than we have in a long time; the Essential Phone was the first non-Google phone I can remember that got an update the same day as Pixel phones. But that’s just one phone out of hundreds (or more). As happy as I am with all the individual features in Android 9 Pie, I’ll be even happier if the Android ecosystem gets its act together and releases it. Read the full article

#Android9Piereview

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condensed-theorem-shop · 8 years ago

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a love letter to the Constellation

This one's for @marrinikari and @throne3d.

Constellation, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I don’t think I mention enough how much I love the Constellation.

I started glowficcing at the very end of its being on Dreamwidth, a little while before the Constellation sprang into being from Marri’s head, like Athena from the head of Zeus. So I only had a little taste of glowficcing not on the Constellation, and that was quite enough.

I am genuinely unsure whether I’d have ended up getting into glowfic if it weren’t for the Constellation -- doing it on Dreamwidth was that unwieldy. I know I’m not the only one to have expressed this sentiment. If we’re counting up our Very Large Numbers of glowfic, T’Mir style, I think Marri should get a significant cut of every new thread made.

On Dreamwidth, switching between characters involved logging out of one account and logging into another, every time, keeping track manually of all your accounts. When you had two or three characters in a thread and were rotating between them, this got unimaginably annoying -- the login process wasn’t that bad, but going through it for every single two-word reply frequently made me want to punch through the screen.

On the Constellation, switching between characters takes two clicks. Click to bring up the list, click to pick one. You don’t even have to scroll up to the top of the page, the way you did on Dreamwidth; it’s right there next to the reply box. You don’t even have to type in the name of the character to search the list, or scroll through it; characters who have previously appeared in the thread get their own section at the top of the list.

This is incredible. I love it. I can have a separate account for each NPC, instead of running them all out of a main account and only making separate accounts for important characters, because it’s that easy to swap between them. I can write long conversations between two of my characters, without getting frustrated and resorting to putting all their dialogue in the same post and relying on my readers to keep track of which is whose. I can be replying to half a dozen threads at the same time without having to swap between characters for each of those.

Switching characters is one of the Constellation’s most basic features -- I don’t think I’ve ever commented on it, except to request that it be made even more convenient in one way or another -- but I can’t overstate just how huge a quality-of-life improvement it is.

Another huge improvement the Constellation makes as part of its basic structure: everything is linked to everything else.

Click on a character, and you can see its template. Click on a template, and you can see all its instances. Click on an author, and you can see all their threads. And so on and so forth.

Again, this gets so easy to take for granted, because it’s how things obviously should work, but it’s this huge boon which I rely on constantly. I can’t remember what I established as canon about a certain character? Click on their name, go to the list of threads they appear in, check those. Can’t remember who one of Lintamande’s endless Elves is? Click on the character, go to their template, switch to icon view, recognize the face of one of the instances even though I can’t keep track of their names.

And I remember what a pain it was not to have these features that Marri built us. The first time I read through Effulgence, it took me forever to figure out which characters were whose -- multiple re-reads, usually -- I still occasionally realize that I assumed wrong about the moiety of some minor character. Now, I can just ... look at the author name.

I remember struggling to figure out what template a given character was -- which can be fun, sometimes, but as a new reader who’s trying to get all these characters straight it’s more overwhelming than fun -- and sometimes not being able to figure it out at all, especially if the thread was a short one. (I hadn’t yet gotten over my shy lurkiness enough to ask the authors.) Now, I can just click through to the character page and go “ohhh, it’s another Serg.”

I remember when I finally fell in love with Mileses. It took me a while; I wasn’t familiar with the canon, and combining that with the twins and triplets and the fact that there wasn’t a way to check templates so sometimes I couldn’t even figure out which triplet was which, and with the fact that they have an identical twin who has a half-alt who also comes with an identical twin but a different one -- okay, so I found Mileses too confusing to enjoy properly for a while. But eventually it clicked, and I promptly wanted to read all the Miles threads, and there ... wasn’t a good way to do that! I couldn’t go from an instance to the threads they were in; I couldn’t even find all the accounts of Miles instances; there wasn’t any master-list of Kappa’s glowfic; even within Effulgence, there wasn’t an easy way to see which threads would have Mileses in them. Alicorn’s list of her glowfic helped some, the glowfic Dreamwidth comm helped some, and for the rest I resorted to increasingly desperate googling. (And I still missed some.) Now, of course, if I want to read all of the Miles threads on the Constellation I can just go to the template page. And since that’s the sort of thing I want to do pretty frequently, the Constellation is an incredible gift.

Let’s talk about icons.

Starting with the obvious: remember Dreamwidth, with the fifteen-icon limit? Yeah, I don’t know how people even worked with that. I’m pretty sure my average Jean-instance has more than fifteen variations on “empty, broken gaze into the middle distance, too shellshocked to bother crying” alone. And that’s before you start in on “struggling not to cry” and “openly sobbing” and “frightened, but in a tired way because of constant hyperalertness from trauma” and “bitter laugh” and “hysterical laugh on the edge of tears” and... So the Constellation is a vast improvement just by virtue of letting me have as many icons as I want. Now I can have all the shades of Jeantrauma with appropriate pictorial representations!

And what’s more, I can use the same gallery on more than one character, and more than one gallery on the same character! So I can have a standard gallery of my most ubiquitously useful Jean icons -- and a specific gallery for each instance with icons that only that instance uses, to establish some visual distinctions -- and a whole gallery of extra sad icons for extra traumatized Jeans -- and a gallery for instances who are particularly involved with running their underground organizations -- and a gallery for instances with long hair.

(And I am aware that all this is ridiculous and over-the-top but I like doing it and now I can! And it makes creating new instances so easy, too, when I can just start them out with one or two of the general-use galleries and go ahead and thread like that, and it’s super easy to later go add a gallery of icons specific to them. Because the Constellation is so good.)

It’s easy to build those general-use galleries, too, because the Constellation has a feature that lets you scroll through all your icons, divided by gallery, and select the ones you want to add to another gallery. (Icons can be in more than one gallery!) So if I’ve been just doing individual galleries for each instance of a template, and then they end up becoming more prominent than I expected and it’s starting to get out of hand, I can just browse through all of those and make up a default gallery for the character with the best icons from all of the galleries.

Oh, and it’s easy to figure out which icons are the most useful to have in a default gallery, because you can click on the icon and go to a stats page that will tell you how many times you’ve used it! And what’s more, it provides you with handy links to all of the replies where you’ve used it, which I use in a ridiculously self-indulgent and clearly-not-intended way, finding a favorite phrase from one of those and setting it as the icon’s keyword once I’ve been using it for a while. And this makes me super happy every time I use the icon, and it seems to entertain other people, and the reason I can do it is the Constellation is so wonderful.

And then there are all the tools the Constellation has for fixing one’s own stupidity with icons. If you’ve been using an icon for months and suddenly you realize there’s a glaring blemish that you can’t unsee, you have so many options for fixing this. You can replace the link to hosting with a link to a fixed version! You can go to the list of replies-with-that-icon and change each one to a different icon! You can delete the icon, if you decide you’d rather just have no icon on those posts! All this as opposed to Dreamwidth, where your options were ... let me count ... right, literally nothing.

Or if, like me, you’re prone to putting an icon in a gallery and failing to move it out of your “unassigned icons for X character” gallery (which I can have! because Constellation!) and then completely forgetting about this and adding it obliviously to another gallery, and being annoyed that you’ve got the same icon in more than one gallery: no problem! You can go to an icon’s page and see a list of all the galleries it’s in! And you can remove it from those galleries safely, too, you’re not going to break all of the icons in replies where you’ve already used it, not unless you delete the icon altogether.

And then there’s how delightfully permissive the Constellation is with icon keywords! I can have my ridiculously long quote-keywords, because there’s no length maximum! I can have punctuation! I can have upper and lower case without them all getting made the same! I can have arbitrary unicode characters! I can have more than one icon in the same gallery with the same keyword! Yes of course I have used all of these I am the literal worst edge-case user!

Or here’s one: the facecasts page.

Marri did not, like, need to make a facecasts page. She didn’t need to do any of this, but she extra didn’t need to make a facecasts page. No one was going to look at the glowfic website and go “you know, this is pretty good, but why is there not a page listing all of the facecasts which have been used, and the corresponding characters and templates and authors?” This is not a core feature. If I had written up specs for a glowfic website (which I didn’t, because I am not as awesome as Marri), it would not have occurred to me to put in a facecasts page.

And yet there it is, quiet and functional and present since the very beginning of the website. And you guys, it is so useful? Especially for new glowficcers, it is wonderful if you are a new glowficcer and terrified of stepping on toes and haven’t learned all of everyone’s million characters yet and what if you pick a facecast that already belongs to the character of someone super important and everyone judges you? (This is not, to be clear, a reasonable worry, but in my experience brains are rarely reasonable.)

You don’t have to worry about accidentally taking someone else’s facecast anymore. Not even if you are terrible with faces (as I am) and find yourself squinting at Pretty White Male Actor With Dashingly Ruffled Short Brown Hair #47865 and going “.....have I seen them before somewhere? might it have been glowfic? is that literally boy-Bell? I have no idea!”

No; now you can just go to the Facecasts page on the Constellation, and ctrl+F for their name, and there you are. I do this every time I pick a new facecast: hollow art open in one tab, the Facecasts page in another, and I can rule actors out before I fall in love with them and start picturing the character with their face.

And, like -- on the one hand it’s super simple? But on the other hand it’s not only super useful, it’s something that can only exist because of the huge amount of work that’s gone into the Constellation. It works because the create-a-character page is conveniently enough designed that people actually, reliably fill in the “facecast” field. It works because there is a “facecast” field, because this is a website designed for glowfic, we aren’t sticking that in character descriptions or icon credits or somewhere else equally makeshift. It works because there’s an easy way to view a list of all your characters, with their various information in a neat table, so that you can spot ones where you forgot to put a facecast. It works because it’s easy to edit characters, to go back and put in that facecast you forgot. And, on a fundamental level, it works because the Constellation is good -- because it’s so good that glowfic completely migrated to it, so now we have it all together in one place, which means that the Facecasts page can actually pick up all of the facecasts.

Or there’s the Tags Owed page. I suspect I rely on that even more than most people (and most people, I think, rely on it a lot), because of the ways that my brain is terrible.

(And that’s another wonderful thing about the Constellation; it’s designed while explicitly taking people with terrible brains into consideration. And there are probably all sorts of social-justice-y things to say about that -- and that’s not meant to be dismissive, I’m sure many of those are worth saying, I’m just not the one to say them -- but on a basic level, it seems like empirical proof that when people with terrible brains build their own community, magic things happen. Things which mean that they can function in the community. Social model of disability!)

But back to Tags Owed -- first of all, it means that I can glowfic even on days when I cannot people. I don’t have to have gchat or IRC or anything else available for pinging with replies; I can just refresh Tags Owed once in a while. No human interaction required. Without that, I suspect I would glowfic something like 10-25% as much as I currently do.

Then there’s the fact that it keeps track of all your threads for you. On Dreamwidth, you didn’t have a nice way to do that, let alone an automatic way. I mostly wound up leaving tabs open with all of my active threads. I’m sure other people had other methods. But with Tags Owed, Pedro can have his two dozen active threads, and the rest of us can have our large-but-not-quite-that-large numbers, and we don’t have to work to keep track of all that, the Constellation does it for us. We can just go to Tags Owed and work down the list until (if we have Hard Work And Determination) there aren’t any left waiting for us. (And right there, Tags Owed is already so much nicer than just a list of Active Threads You Are In; it’s obvious at a moment’s glance whether you owe tags and what in, and you get that wonderful sense of satisfaction when you clear it out and don’t owe any.)

And then there’s the ability to hiatus threads, which I cannot praise highly enough. I’m sure I drive plenty of coauthors up the wall with my thread-dropping ways; but the ability to hiatus threads is fairly key to my ability to function as a glowficcer. If all the threads in the intersection of {haven’t tagged in some time and don’t expect to in the immediate future} and {not ready to declare totally dropped} were constantly on my Tags Owed page, I can tell you right now what would happen, having lived with myself for a couple of decades: I’d feel anxious and guilty about it, so I’d avoid looking at them, so I’d avoid opening my Tags Owed page, so I’d tag less in all my threads, so I’d feel more anxious, and it would spiral downwards until I was glowficcing zero. Having the ability to hiatus threads means that I have the room to say “okay, this is not something I can do right now, but I don’t want to give up on it either.” (Which is, like, a really good thing to be able to say, mental-health-wise.)

And it also means that, even if I can’t tag a thread for a while, it’s not lost to the ravages of time. Back on Dreamwidth, if I stalled on a thread for a week and then picked it back up, my cowriter would usually need me to message them the link so that they could find it again; and that was when I usually only had one or two threads and so could keep track of them, so I had the link on hand and remembered to keep checking if my brain was up to tagging in it. With just a few more threads, I’d have inevitably ended up putting a thread aside for a while and then completely forgetting it existed (and my cowriter probably would, too). Now, though, if I can’t tag in a thread for a week, I keep remembering to try, because I see it every time I open my Tags Owed. And when I have a particularly good brain day, I can go to the list of all my threads and browse the hiatused ones and see if there are any I’m up to picking up again.

I love my Tags Owed page. I love, love, love, love, love it. It’s so useful, and it’s a thing that feels so right to have. It feels bizarre to think about glowficcing without it.

The Favorites page. The Favorites page! I have eight links on my bookmarks bar (for recreation; I use a separate browser for work), and two of them are Tags Owed and Favorites. It means I can conveniently keep up with all the threads I’m following; and, on the other side of the coin, it means that at least there’s only one page I’m addictively refreshing, instead of all the threads I’m reading. It means that when people ask me for glowfic recs (as happens fairly regularly), I can easily browse through some of my favorite threads, ongoing and completed, and pick out a couple appropriate to the situation.

I think the Favorites page is emblematic of one of the greatest achievements of the Constellation. As far as I can tell (I was around-but-new during the crucial times) there was a huge boom in glowfic at about the same time as the exodus to the Constellation. (I’m not sure of the causation, there -- Dreamwidth getting unwieldy with that much glowfic? The convenience of the Constellation meaning people glowficced more, and more new people got into it? Coincidence? A bit of all those?)

In any case, the Constellation handled that boom with incredible aplomb. There was a sudden need for all these new tools -- and most of the time it wasn’t clear what tools, exactly, just that what we had wasn’t working -- and Marri, and later Throne, stepped up to the plate and hit a home run.

With only a couple of authors, it worked fine to follow their personal indexes or blogs to keep up with new glowfic; with only a relatively small amount of glowfic happening, it was feasible for them to maintain those indexes. Daily reports could happen manually; people could announce new threads; it wasn’t really a system, but it worked fine. Things weren’t very transparent to new people, but there weren’t a lot of new people.

And then: ridiculous amounts of glowfic. And somehow, the Constellation -- despite being tiny and under development and run by Marri-and-Throne-in-their-spare-time -- despite the boom happening while it was still on shaky metaphorical toddler legs -- the Constellation kept up. The Constellation made dealing with that possible, so instead of drowning we got to stretch out on the lovely sunny beach by our new ocean and sip iced drinks.

The Constellation gave us Favorites; and Unread, not just “threads with unread posts” which was already wonderful but also “unopened threads” as its own page, and as a visual distinction on other pages; and continuities as an actual functionality; and a search feature; and the ability to do things like favoriting an author or a continuity, or hiding a thread or a continuity from unread, or finding all threads with a given character or author, or just plain seeing all of the glowfic right there in one place.

And, like -- I know I have muttered about filters, and whether hiding things should mark them read, and subcontinuities, and so on, as much as anyone. But, at least this once, I would like to register not only how incredibly grateful I am for the tools the Constellation gives us for managing the flood of glowfic, but how amazed I am at Marri’s and Throne’s ability to build headache-inducingly complex tools (which don’t induce headaches on the user end), and have them work, and to do this under conditions roughly equivalent to building a spaceship while it hurtles through the atmosphere, spurting jets of flame, escaping from an imploding planet with a black hole at the center.

Another thing that feels too trivial to mention until I actually stop and reflect on it: editing.

Dreamwidth doesn’t let you edit comments which have been replied to. This is probably reasonable in a blogging site! It means that you can’t go back and change something you said, in response to an objection, and then have people reading the thread later on assume the other person is just a jerk objecting to something completely reasonable. It means you can’t edit something and then deny ever having said it at all. In general, it means that you can’t change the meaning of someone else’s comment by altering your comment which it was a reply to.

However, when the site is being used for glowfic, this is a lot less reasonable. You couldn’t do something as simple (and easily taken for granted) as fixing a typo. (Which could be just annoying, if it was something silly that distracted from a dramatic moment, or actively confusing, if you accidentally mis-indicated who was talking.) If someone clueless, or a spambot, replied to a thread, and someone else trying to be helpful replied to suggest they not do that, you were then stuck with that in the middle of your thread. Certainly you couldn’t go back and fix that throw-away remark in reply #6 that ended up contradicting a key detail of the events of reply #733.

The Constellation lets you edit your replies, which is already wonderful enough. I don’t have to be bugged/shamed forever by my own spelling errors or typos or brain malfunctions. (You don’t even know how many times in one for sorrow, two for joy I had to go back and edit a post where I called Iliar “Jean.”) If my cowriter notices my error, they don’t have to wait to reply until I’ve fixed it, they can go ahead and tag me back and mention the typo at the same time. When I’ve got one of my characters into a delightfully terrible situation and someone in chat says “wait, didn’t you mention three pages ago they had a gun,” I can go back and edit in a hasty “which they left outside the door” and be all no I don’t know what you’re talking about I never make continuity errors pay no attention to the little man behind the curtain.

But it’s not just the little stuff that the Constellation makes possible! I know of multiple instances -- some mine, some other people’s -- where a thread went off course and ended up somewhere completely unfeasible and the authors looked at it and went “....yeah, okay, that is not the thing we want;” and in each case, they could just delete the last dozen or so replies, alter the point of divergence, and proceed forward in a saner fashion. And not only is this possible on the Constellation, the unread and favorites pages of people following the thread handle it gracefully! There is absolutely no spontaneous combustion!

Or there’s the “replace character” and “split character” tools, which -- guys, I cannot get over the fact that the Constellation devs made these for us. Any sane person would have looked at those requests and gone “uh, that sounds like a ridiculously complex thing you want, and the occasions where you’ll need it are totally on you, and this is not the sort of thing you can reasonably expect a website to offer, I think this is a you problem.” I cannot believe that our devs actually made them for us. They are insane and I do not know what they were thinking and I love them so much.

There’s the fact that even though there’s no easy user-side way to split threads, Marri will do it by hand on request. Would do character replacement by hand, before that was an actual user-accessible tool. Again, this is the behavior of a madman or a Miles (okay, redundant); any normal person would say “sorry, we don’t have that functionality in place.” Any normal person would say “have you seen the list of requests lately?” But no. Not our devs. If it doesn’t work, they will make it work.

A search function. Have I mentioned the Constellation has a search function? That actually, you know, functions? This one I manage not to take for granted, if only because so many huge professional websites don’t. And not just Tumblr, The Flaming Death Pit, either. Dreamwidth doesn’t. Facebook doesn’t.

The Constellation does.

I can search that neat little phrase in my head to see if I actually just came up with it, or if I read it in another glowfic and it lodged in my brain, or if I came up with the exact same clever phrase three pages back. I can find that thread where I don’t remember the title or the authors or the characters but do remember that particularly clever retort that someone-or-other made to I-can’t-quite-remember-whom. I can find that one reply where someone summed up a bunch of important stuff I need to refer back to, and I’m pretty sure it was either in Room of Requirement or one of the later threads in Silmaril.

The search function is great for avoiding continuity errors. I can check if I already explained vampires in this thread, or if that was a different one. I can check if my characters should already know something or if it hasn’t come up yet. I can check which amusing pseudonym Jean introduced himself as. I can remind myself for the twentieth time if that minor character of my coauthor’s is named Janet or Janice. I can remind myself of what number I calculated for the approximate population of a planetary settlement.

When I’m feeling particularly writer-anxious, I can check how often I’m using “mutters” versus “murmurs” versus “mumbles.” When I realize I’ve been inconsistent about an NPC’s last name, I can find all the occasions where I used my less preferred option and fix them. When Lintamande pulls yet another character out of her watch-carefully-nothing-up-my-sleeve, I can check if they’re supposed to be mysterious or if we met them earlier in the thread.

A search feature is so useful to have, especially for something like glowfic which is prone to information overload. But they’re nontrivial to implement, and lots of websites don’t have them, or they have searches which work in annoying unintuitive useless ways. The Constellation has a functioning search.

Or -- aliasing. Aliasing is amazing precisely because it’s such a tiny thing -- the option to display a different name for your character on a particular post. That’s, what -- one, two words, plain text? Hardly anything. Not something you need constantly, either. Not something you really really need, when you do need it. Not having aliasing wasn’t preventing anyone from making a thread they wanted to make, or reading something they wanted to read, or understanding what was going on.

So we could have made do just fine without it. We would have, on Dreamwidth -- or under basically any other circumstances, really. We could have put the alternate name in the character’s screenname field. We could have put it in quote marks in their name field, nickname-style. We could have used a specific icon to indicate it. We could have made a second character instance with a different name. We could have posted from a general “[Name’s] characters” account. We could have just mentioned it in the text somewhere. It would have been fine.

But we don’t have to, because the Constellation has aliasing. Because we have the best devs. Because they went ahead and made it for us anyway, even though they totally could have just not. (Even more so than they could have just not done any of this.) And so now characters can be mysterious even while posting from their proper account; the Elves can switch among all their various names; characters who peal can display their nickname instead of their name, for convenient reading; people can even run a character and their daemon out of the same account just because they find it more conceptually fitting.

Or the Many Worlds Forum. This is on the Constellation now, and that has to be a huge pain in the neck for the devs, because all of a sudden everyone is using their beautifully-designed, custom-tailored glowfic website for something totally different, and then demanding it support that. (And “everyone” there totally includes me.) And, like, it is totally fair for them to find this annoying, and if they end up deciding to throw up their hands and say “if you are determined to use the Constellation for this, on your own heads be it,” I will consider them entirely justified.

But even aside from the fact that I’m pretty sure the devs should be beatified on the spot for not snapping and using their mysterious time travel powers to prevent all our parents from meeting -- I think it also illustrates just how great the Constellation is. The Many Worlds Forum is a forum; it’s right there in the name, it’s the whole concept, half the point is that it’s something you can actually have, so even if it isn’t really populated by denizens of various dimensions it looks just like it is. It’s LARP for the internet. And yet, when the reboot was being planned, and people discussed where to host it, and whether it should be on the Constellation or on a forum -- the Constellation won. Because it is just that much better than anything else. More convenient, more user-friendly, more flexible, more streamlined, prettier.

(Like Daedalus, they invented a marvelous device, the Constellation; but like Icarus, the devs soared too high, and brought about their own downfall...)

(*cough* Sorry. Continuing.)

While I’m praising the devs’ patience -- I have to be the absolute worst, most demanding, nightmare edge-case stress-test of an end user. Ways I have abused both the Constellation and the devs’ patience include but are not limited to:

writing half a reply in English and half in Hebrew; complaining when the right-to-left text format failed to properly reflect punctuation

relying heavily on the Constellation’s private messaging feature, even though, like, literally why would anyone do that

filling every input box I could find with random unicode characters

accumulating [counts] 2,853 icons; proceeding to complain that the “add existing icons” page was slow to load

setting a single icon to randomly display one of half a dozen images every time the page was reloaded

complaining that I couldn’t message “<3” to people because it broke the HTML; rejecting “don’t message ‘<3’ to people” as a solution

setting my own thread to “hide from unread;” subsequently complaining that it no longer showed me the latest unread post

repeatedly making the same error in filling out forms; proposing that this be solved by making the Constellation smarter than me

re-organizing the aforesaid 2,853 icons at least half a dozen times; requesting support not only for each new configuration, but also for the process of transitioning between them

wanting a thread un-hiatused despite not having replied to it in months; being unwilling to achieve this by replying to it; eventually settling for making and deleting a blank reply, messing up daily reports & unread lists & probably all sorts of other things in the process

putting deeply excessive numbers of warnings on threads, including “#torture #so much torture #i’m serious about the torture guys” and “#i can’t believe there are now six jean-related warnings”; complaining when this overfilled the text box for warnings and made them less than optimally easy to read while entering them

The short and the long of all this being: I’m pretty sure Marri and Throne deserve a special accolade just for continuing to put up with me.

Speaking of which: have I mentioned just how awesome the Constellation support is? Because the answer is -- so very. It is so very awesome. (And not just for the part where they haven’t yet gone back in time to prevent my existence, though that too.)

I mean, there’s the time travel. I don’t need to explain why that’s awesome. And there’s the fact that, as far as I can tell, they will make literally anything happen if a large enough proportion of glowficcers ask for it. (Have we tried asking them to cure malaria yet? We should do that.) There’s the fact that they didn’t take one look at that To Do list of theirs and run away screaming and gibbering.

There’s the fact that the Constellation -- doesn’t go down? It did, once in a while, for a couple of minutes, when it was very new. Once that I can remember for more than an hour. And then it, uh -- stopped? Which (in addition to being a great relief to those of us who are Utter Glowfic Addicts) seems super impressive. Big serious professional websites have scheduled maintenance! And they still go down sometimes! And Marri and Throne don’t (I’m pretty sure) even have a testing environment, they are just being super careful, and it is working. Despite the fact that they are also constantly adding all these changes we demand.

And beyond that, like -- they have just completely spoiled me for any other tech support ever. When I’m on other websites, I constantly find myself responding to some minor inconvenience by starting to formulate a post in my head asking Throne and Marri to fix it. And this is for things where -- if it were the Constellation, they would. But these enormous professionally-built websites with significantly more than two support staff haven’t.

I’m not just talking about, like, tumblr, either. We all know tumblr is terrible. But I’ll be posting on facebook and thinking hey, Marri, the new feature where short posts get put in enormous font is annoying, can we at least have a box by the text entry we can manually uncheck if we don’t want that? Or on my university’s website thinking so Throne, the professor’s name shows by the course in the search results, but if you click through to the course it has a bunch of information but not the professor’s name anymore -- could you fix that?

(And then, of course, I remember that neither Mark Zuckerberg nor the state of Texas is likely to respond to me with actually, we’ve had that feature in place for a couple of weeks! Look in the upper right hand corner, and I sulk and go write some glowfic instead.)

Of course, it’s not like they’re getting paid for any of these I-don’t-even-want-to-think-about-how-many hours of work. There’s a donate button on the Constellation, but that doesn’t even go to tips for Marri or Throne, let alone compensating them for the work they put in; it goes towards the expenses of running the Constellation. Which Marri otherwise covers out of pocket. Which means she is getting paid negative money for all this, which is completely nuts.

I don’t have the faintest idea how Marri and Throne do what they do. Marri has, you know, a job; Throne is a college student (sorry, he’s British -- a university student); they both have, to my certain knowledge, lives. And significant others. And, I assume, sleep from time to time. (I consider all this further evidence in favor of the time travel hypothesis.)

Basically what I’m trying to say here is: to whoever is writing Marri and Throne: I know glowfic is big on overpowered characters, but have you tried at least giving them challenges more appropriate to their power level? I don’t think running a website is cutting it. Maybe they can go fight a Sauron or something.

Even beyond all this, though, there’s something special about the Constellation that’s hard to sum up. (As evidence for the difficulty in summarizing, witness the length of this post.)

It’s made by glowficcers, for glowficcers -- and this I think must be what some older fanfic writers feel about AO3. It’s ours; it’s made for us. We’re this weird little community out on the fringes of the internet, full of weird people with weird brains and weird opinions and weird interests, we have the most ridiculously high-context hard-to-explain hobby; but we’re not stuck squeezing in at the edges of sites that weren’t meant for us, working in frameworks that were never meant to fit us. We have a home now, and it fits us, and we belong here, and it’s ours.

And it’s made with love. That’s the thing that always gets me, about the Constellation: the amount of love in the tiny details. I mean, I’m familiar enough with programming to guess that most of the tiny details were probably kicked into functioning at three am with Marri or Throne growling at their screen and cursing the code and its descendants yea unto the seventh generation -- but that’s not incompatible with love (as anyone who has crooned ~go the fuck to sleep already~ to a fussy baby in the wee hours of the night knows).

It’s called the Constellation, for goodness’ sake. It has “starry dark” and “starry light” themes. Because it was made by glowficcers for glowficcers, and so it has these lovely aesthetically delightful little tributes to glowfic traditions. Characters have screenname fields, even though those serve absolutely no practical function, because people remembered them fondly from Dreamwidth and wanted to be able to keep adding that little extra quote or pun or reference. It even supports moieties, even though those are completely ridiculous at this point, because we love them anyway.

Every time I look at the little icon in my Constellation tabs, with the three stars for Alicorn and Kappa and Aestrix -- in the appropriate colors, no less -- it makes me smile.

I love the Constellation. I don’t say it enough. I expect I will continue not saying it enough, and instead pointing out ridiculously tiny things which I feel could be improved upon, and ridiculously elaborate features which I would like to have.

But, at least once, I wanted to say it properly:

I love the Constellation.

#glowfic #glowfic constellation #long #like ridiculously long #mine

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greetingsfromthebottomofthewell · 8 years ago

Photo

NES GODZILLA CREEPYPASTA - CHAPTER 3: TRANCE

[directory]

there is no monster here.

[source] [triggers]

I was still pretty shook up from the last level when I started "Trance". Trance's map music did nothing to ease the tension. As for how to describe it...have you ever heard the theme from Videodrome? That's the closest thing I can think of it to compare it to.

I checked to see who the new monster was, and it was Orga. A monster who didn't make his film debut until 2000, appearing in a game made in 1988. So much for my theories about Titanosaurus and Biollante. There's no way this game was made in 1988!

Those guys at Toho may be smart, but I'm sure they couldn't see that far into the future. If they could, they never would have gave Roland Emmerich the rights to make a Godzilla movie.

No, this had to be a hack of some kind. Which just opened up even more questions. Who made this hack? When? How ? And most importantly, why? The "why?" was the question that bothered me most.

My immediate assumption was to think Billy did this to pull a joke on me. But that couldn't be right either. Billy didn't know how to make a ROM hack.

And if he did, he'd probably just do something simple and stupid, like replacing all the monsters with crudely drawn genitalia. Unless Billy had amazing game editing skills, and a serious dark streak to his imagination that he never told me about, he couldn't have made this. Is it even possible to put a hacked ROM into a cartridge?

Aside from all that, my eye was drawn to a new icon on the map: a question mark. I was really curious as to what it did.

I'm sure you're also curious, So I'll explain the "Quiz Levels" now, since this was when they start appearing. There was one of these per map from here on, and they always appeared near the start of the map.

When you start on a "Quiz Level", you appear on a screen like this:

As you can see, there's a question at the top, a "yes" and "no" button, and a emoticon in the center. I refer to the emoticon as "Face" (real creative, I know), and for convenience, I'll refer to Face as the one asking the questions.

The music for the quiz levels was a track actually in the game, it's the one that plays when you try to use the "Gh1d0ra" cheat and get sent to an unplayable level.

Face asks you twelve "Yes or No" questions, and you move your monster to the buttons for your answer. When you answer, the question disappears and Face changes expressions for about eight seconds, then he goes back to neutral and a new question comes up. There was no time limit, nor any right or wrong answers.

Face has no respect for the player's personal boundaries, and will sometimes ask deeply disturbing and personal questions, For example: (Do you like hurting people?) (Have you ever killed/raped anyone?) (Have you been molested by a family member?)

Other times he would ask questions that were either mind-numbingly stupid (Is the Sun hot?) (Is water wet?) or just flat out ridiculous (Does your dog like the President?) and maybe once per quiz, Face would ask you a question about the game.

With one exception, Face's expression changes seemed to have no effect on the game, except for indicating what the game creator thought of your answer. His reactions rarely made any sense, and at first I thought they were randomly generated.

The questions never followed a pattern, Face never stayed on the same subject for more than two questions. Early on, there were questions that made me think Face was building up to something, only to then ask some stupid garbage.

Here are the expressions of Face that I saw while playing. I'll separate them into two categories: The expressions I understood, and the expressions I didn't.

First are the expressions I understood:

Neutral, his default expression

Angry (If you try to attack Face, his expression changes to this, but nothing else happens)

Sad

Happy

Sick

Maniacal (Face made this expression when he was being an asshole. You'll see what I mean later)

Surprised

Love

Annoyed

Confused

Guilty/Hurt

And here are the others:

Two of these only appeared once (Numbers #1 and #12), and I suspected they might have been in-jokes from the creator. Their respective questions were "Do you like Ice Cream?" and "Are you a tough guy?".

As for the questions in the first Quiz: Luckily, I had a notepad and pen handy. I have problems remembering things, so I often carry one around to jot things down, and sometimes I doodle in it when I'm bored. So when the first quiz started I thought I'd record what happened. I'm glad I did.

Here are the first series of questions, my answers, and Face's reaction:

Quiz 1

Do you like the game? Answer: Yes, Reaction: Happy

Are you afraid Answer: Yes, Reaction: Surprised

Are you over 18? Answer: Yes, Reaction: Weird Face #5

Do birds have teeth? Answer: No, Reaction: Love

Is peanut butter good? Answer: No, Reaction: Sick

Does the moon rotate? Answer: Yes, Reaction: Weird Face #11

Have you had a job? Answer: Yes, Reaction: Confused

Do you like hurting people? Answer: No, Reaction: Annoyed

Is the Sun hot? Answer: Yes, Reaction: Sad

Do you like dogs? Answer: Yes, Reaction: Happy

Is the president good? Answer: Yes, Reaction: Weird Face #3

Does your dog like the President? Answer: No, Reaction: Angry

Now that I've explained all that, time for the gameplay.

After the Quiz level, I tried the new green temple icon first.

Wow. Maybe this is why the game was so weird – one of the designers was clearly drugged out of his mind!

Jokes aside, I was quite impressed by the graphics of this level, as disorienting as they were (But I hate those creepy, blank staring statue faces). The music had a hypnotic, Indian techno vibe to it.

There were two new enemies in this level: a flying ghost type thing with a trunk, and a bat with a horse skull for a face. They appear at random, but I was lucky to get a screencap of them both:

Then I proceeded to a blue mountain level, expecting another nice, calm stroll. I took my time walking through, and was completely taken by surprise when this happened:

Not-Moguera came speeding towards me and took off quite a bit of health with his tentacle screws! It only took me two minutes to kill him without having to worry about a time limit, but the boss monsters NEVER showed up in the scrolling levels in the normal game. I was worried as to what other rules the game would break.

After another blue mountain stage, it was time to fight Not-Varan, whose replacement was one of the most bizarre things in the game:

This strange creature attacks you by kicking, and also opening up his chest and firing heat-seeking missiles. ....I still don't get it.

The missiles were sometimes a pain to deal with, but I found out you could tail whip them out of the way. Not-Varan was probably the easiest of the monster replacements.

The same could not be said for Not-Hedorah.

Apparently the source of the horse-bats, Not-Hedorah was the most aggravatingly difficult monster to fight yet. Mostly because of his special ability: He could shriek and summon a small swarm of those horse-bat things.

I know there's only two in the screencap, but every time he did this, about ten would arrive. The AI took advantage of the distraction and attacked twice as fast while the horse-bats were flying around.

Once that annoyance was over with, I went through a green temple level to kill some enemies to restore my health. Interestingly, none of the horse bats showed up after Not-Hedorah was killed. And that was when I got an idea:

If killing all the monsters makes the red face show up, what would happen if I avoid fighting Orga, and go straight to the base?

So I gave that a try:

The game told me there was no monster there when I tried to start the base level. And immediately afterward, the game took control of my Godzilla piece and moved it in front of Orga. My little trick didn't work, so I tried to prepare myself for another chase. But first, I had to beat Orga.

The fight with Orga confirmed another thing: Whoever created this game hack was clearly a Godzilla fan. Not only because they picked a monster like Orga, but because they actually implemented something that happened in "Godzilla 2000" in a really neat way.

Orga's primary attacks were a punch and a heat beam from his shoulder cavity. But once you had got him down to half his health, he did something new: He would expand his jaws and try to swallow Godzilla, in the process stealing your health and energy!

But in doing so, he gave himself a new weakness: firing a heat beam into his mouth would take a devastating four bars off his life meter!

With that weakness revealed I soon beat Orga, and despite how much I had hoped otherwise, the red face appeared on the map where the base was, and the music stopped.

I readied myself as best I could. I started the level, and seeing that it was basically the same as the first, I didn't waste a millisecond before I started hauling ass.

I soon encountered obstacles in the form of the ground tile, suspended in air. Most of them you could jump over or destroy, others you had to crouch under.

About forty seconds into it I heard the horrible bellowing roar and saw the spider beast following close behind me. Stacks of obstacles barely slowed it down, it would back up and then charge its way through them, smashing them into bits. And when the smaller obstacles got in its way, it would expand his jaws and swallow them whole:

I was afraid, but with fast thinking and faster button pressing I escaped him yet again. I felt really excited, and so I laughed and said "Not this time, asshole!" I decided to take a screencap to celebrate.

But when I said that sentence, just before the level ended, the monster did something that made my blood run cold.

It looked at me.

That wave of mortal terror overtook me again, and I sure as hell wasn't laughing anymore.

I took another screencap of the next level title, right before I rushed to the bathroom to splash some water on my face. (And to take a piss that I nearly failed to contain when that fucking thing looked at me.)

[previous] | [next]

#horror #scary #scary stories #creepypasta #nosleep #nes godzilla creepypasta #trance #stories

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eldritchsurveys · 5 years ago

Text

891.

5k Survey XVIII

851. Have you ever seen the musical Annie? >> I was an extra in a production of it when I was school-aged, and I memorised the entire script out of, idk, lack of anything better to do. So I was very familiar with it for a while. 852. Sheets: silk or satin? >> I prefer cotton or linen or bamboo, actually. The sheets I have right now are bamboo. 853. Bath: soap or bubbles? >> I don’t take baths. 854. Your best color: blue or red? >> Neither of these are my best colour. 855. What’s your favorite candy? >> I don’t have a favourite.

856. Can you sing? >> Sure. 857. It’s the end of the world, as we know it. How do you feel? >> “End of the world” concepts don’t make sense to me. 858. You take your little sister (she’s 12) shopping for school clothes. Mom gave you the money to hold. She picks out a skimpy top emblazoned “Hottie” and hip-hugging pants that leave at least two inches of skin north and south of her navel exposed to the wind. She insists: If she doesn’t have these clothes, she’ll look awful, the other kids will tease her, and she’ll feel like a nerd. Do you think she should or should not wear these clothes? Do you buy them for her? >> I don’t know what it’s like to have a little sister, or what it’s like to have to care about what someone else wears. None of this is of any interest to me. 859. What do you think is the most annoying cliché? People who “drink the Kool-Aid” can be kind of annoying. Lol. <-- Conveniently enough, I’ve been provided with a cliché that I think is annoying in this previous answer. The fact that that’s become such a flippant and derisive saying is pretty egregious considering how tragic the Jonestown story was. (And to be really pedantic, it wasn’t even Kool-Aid....) 860. What band is underground right now but will one day get really popular? >> *shrug* 861. Of the following which word best describes you - versatile (flexible), wonderful, x-tra special, your own best friend, zany >> Zany. 862. What does BYOB stand for? >> Bring Your Own Bombs. That’s what the System of a Down song title stands for, right? ~ 863. Who is sexiest - Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Elvis, Jim Morrison, Madonna, Cyndi Lauper >> I think James Dean was pretty sexy. It’s not a term I personally would use for Jim Morrison (my interest in him is not on that level, lol), but I could clearly see how one would. 864. Do you always do what’s expected of you? >> No. 865. Do you believe everything you hear on the news? >> I don’t even watch the news, so it’s moot. 866. Would you prefer a $100.00 gift certificate to Hot Topic or Abercrombie & Fitch (assuming neither store gives change, so you’ll have to spend the whole thing)? >> At this point in my life, I think it’d depend on whose clothes lasted longer. I’ve never owned anything from A&F, but if they have even slightly better quality clothing than Hot Topic does, I think I would take that gift certificate and try them out. HT is still a nostalgic place for me, but I can make anything goth. I don’t need to buy it from HT and deal with their high-price low-quality schlock. 867. Have you ever won a competition? >> I won a [casual] Rock Band competition once or twice. 868. Who looks sloppier when they are over weight, guys or girls? >> This is such an undignified question. 869. At what age do you become all grown up? >> There is no such age. It’s all a process, and it happens in one’s own time. 870. Have you ever written graffiti on anything? >> No. 871. Can you remember what you wrote? >> --- 872. Are you a force of nature? >> I mean, sure. 873. What do you think of blue eye shadow? >> I like it. How about gold eye shadow? >> I like it. 874. Would you ever wear any of the following Halloween costumes - Flapper, Hippie, Disco dancer? >> No. 875. Should birth control be taught in high school? >> I think teenagers should be aware of their options. Whether that’s up to the school to teach them or not is of less interest to me. How about in jr. high or elementary school? >> I feel the same way about preteens. It seems like unnecessary information for children, though. I’d stick to just... teaching children about bodies and how they work, as opposed to the intricacies of sexual relationships. 876. Would you consider yourself a genius? >> No. 877. What did you think of the movie Solaris? >> I haven’t seen it, but I’d like to at some point. 878. Which is usually better movies or books? >> I like movies and I like books. I find it boring to put one above the other like it’s a fucking contest. 879. Do you think The Hobbit will be made into a movie? >> Hah, that did happen. It was made into three movies, in fact, which was a very strange decision. 880. Do you research which brands use sweatshops to make their clothing before you shop? >> No. 881. What gives you a magical feeling? >> You know... magic. 882. Have you ever pulled apart a Christmas cracker? >> No. I do see them in stores sometimes, probably because there’s a lot of European influence in this part of the country, but I’ve never interacted with them.

883. Would you rather watch basketball or play basketball? >> I would rather not have anything to do with basketball whatsoever. 884. Do you think that everyone makes his or her own problems? >> No, I don’t think that. It may be true in some cases here and there, but I default to assuming there are more factors involved in a person’s problems than just themself... 885. Do you often consider how your actions will affect other people? >> Not often. Like, I do consider it, just... not all the goddamn time. 886. Are J-Lo and Ben Affleck interesting to you at all? >> No. 887. Do you use bad grammar or hate bad grammar? >> I use whatever grammar suits me at the time. The only bad grammar is that which doesn’t follow any rule set at all, and I’ve honestly never encountered any grammar like that. Dialects and “internet speak” all have their own grammatical rule sets, and your inability to adapt to them / your inability to just say “I personally don’t like this thing” instead of making it a fault of the user doesn’t change that. 888. Make up a tabloid headline: >> No. 889. Do you like to learn new things? >> I sure the fuck do. 890. What’s more important, fame or personal accomplishment? >> Meh. 891. Sweet dreams are made of this….What are they made of? >> Sugar. /deadpan 892. Two trailer park girls go round the outside…Round the outside of what? >> You know, I always thought the same shit. And now that song is stuck in my head. 893. Are you wearing a piece of jewelry that means a lot to you right now? >> I’m not wearing jewelry (aside from piercing jewelry, which doesn’t mean anything, it’s just pretty). 894. If someone was going to inscribe a message on a ring and give it to you what would you want it to say? >> No, thanks. 895. Guys who are losing their hair - should they shave their heads, get implants, or let it go? >> I think they should do whatever suits them. 896. Do rock stars work hard or lead the easy life? >> They work very hard, what kind of question even is this. 897. How much water do you drink every day? >> Not enough, I assume. I have a hard time constantly sipping on water, it doesn’t make any sense to me and I’ve never been able to brute-force it. I just drink when I feel inclined, which isn’t as often as I “should”, I guess. 898. Are you driven or kinda apathetic? >> Apathetic. 899. Who do you turn to when you are down? >> Can Calah. Or King Crimson. I go Inworld, is what I’m saying. 900. Would you ever wear saran-wrap? >> No.

#surveys #survey #5000 question survey

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lobster-mobster-aq · 5 years ago

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Why The Flash was so Rage Inducing

Read the article here, or below the cut.

There’s this show on CW call The Flash. Perhaps you’ve heard of it, perhaps you haven’t. Long story short just google it if you’re unfamiliar with it. If you are familiar with it but haven’t watched it, there will be major spoils ahead.

Some of you may remember a few weeks ago when I made a post about no longer being a completionist and how my anger towards The Flash was a huge part on my journey to getting there. I used to love that show. First season, it was one of the best superhero shows out there. If you only counted the live actions ones it was in the top five, there were even people who had it in their top one.

But after season one The Flash was fond of doing something weird. Each season ended with something rage inducing. Season two saw Barry Allen go into the past and save his mother, which for character development reasons shot Barry Allen’s character arc trajectory to hell and retroactively made the end of season one far less impacting. And in the following season did they deal with the consequences of that decisions? Did they handle Barry Allen’s decision by growing him as a character and carefully create a plot that grew from such a game changing decision?

Nope. In episode one of season three he just goes back in time…again…and changes things…again, so we’re back were we started from pretty much. Only now there are small and little changes so that Barry Allan can melodramatically feel bad about himself. There were so many other ways they could have had the ��time travel has made everything is slightly different” cliché, other than turn what had been the emotional drive of the first season into a convenient plot device. Because that is what the turned the death of Nora Allen into. A plot device.

Then there was season three. All season the show was leading up to the death of Iris, (yeah, the relationship with Iris and Barry is a whole nother thing that is very polarizing about this show), and how do they over come that? Turns out it wasn’t Iris who was fated to die, it was a new character that everyone loved. Now, I’m sure there would have been people who would have been sad at Iris’s death. Not everyone didn’t like her much as a character and hated her relationship with Barry. And truth be told I wasn’t that angry that Iris didn’t die, I’m mad that how they saved her was killing off someone else. And the motivation of the person who died? Well, Iris is an important person, and I’m not, so I’ll die in her place. And it was stupid. If you wanted to save Iris, then save Iris. If you wanted and emotional death, then kill Iris. Don’t just put a different character in her place. “Oh, but we’ll get a different Harrison so it’s not like he’s actually dying,” is what it felt like the writers were saying. It was cheep, it was not clever. The nature of HR is that that actor can come back as a different Harrison since that’s kind of his character’s shtick. It made it feel like the writers chose him to kill off because that didn’t mess with anyone’s contracts. It felt lazy, cheep, and was a let down that that was the pay off on a season’s worth of build up.

And then we get to season four. The season that pissed me off so much that I stopped watching the show.

So, season four. Short summary. DeVoe is a super smart guy, wants to make everyone stupid so we can restart society without it being awful this time around. Somehow doing this involves making a bunch of new metas and then collecting their powers by taking over their bodies…which also kills them off. There’s that one episode where our new character Ralph, who is one of the metas that DeVoe wants to kill, is all like, “I think we should kill DeVoe, because he’s kind of a bad dude, who’s killing a lot of other people.” Barry is all like, “No, we are not killers.” Okay, nice narrative. I’ve seen it a lot so most times I don’t like this plot. Mostly because it’s done so often it tends to feel lazy and half assed. That’s it’s just something the writer does because…eh, plot I guess, main character good person I guess. Well, the end of this episode sees Ralph, immediately after witnessing DeVoe murder someone, finally being brought to the side of Barry Allen, as Ralph choses to die by DeVoe’s hand instead of defending himself by killing DeVoe. In the moment as Ralph is dying, Barry is just…standing there watching it happen. Barry, being the brave hero he is, says something along the lines of “Oh, you saved me Ralphy boy-o buddy.” And Ralph says something like, “even though there was never any real build up to my sudden change of heart, no Barry Allen, you saved me.” And then Ralph’s body is completely taken over by DeVoe and Ralph dies.

A bit annoying, but fine. It is a kid’s show…I think? The main character has to be virtuous and good. A few episodes later it even looks like Barry’s feeling guilt for his choices. Oh, that’s actually interesting. Make him feel uncertain about his decisions. I like that. After all, Ralph’s decision to let himself die instead of defending himself was directly based off of Barry’s constant emotional manipulation. Barry pretty much said, “Ralph, if you kill an evil megalomaniac who has already murdered several of our kind, you’re basically Hitler.” Even if it doesn’t change Barry’s mind it still is a realistic character arc that deals with the fact that sometimes sticking to your morals can be hard and have unfortunate consequences….

No never mind, Barry was guilty because he felt like he didn’t train Ralph good enough. “I was a bad teacher, that’s why Ralph died.”

Okay, stupid.

Then we get to the climax. Oh, the climax. A piece of writing so bad, and so disrespectful to the entire plot, everything building up to it, and the motivations of the main characters, it was the first piece of media I actually rage quit.

So Barry goes into DeVoe’s mind, because reasons, stop DeVoe, mind chair thing, it’s complicated I’m not going to explain everything here. Just know that Barry Allen the Flash was somehow in DeVoe’s mind, which was in Ralph’s body, (Ralph’s body was the last one he had to collect. See, the bodies where suffering brain damage after DeVoe moved into them because the brains were like, we don’t like being super smart. Well, Ralphs body was special because it was elastic, so didn’t suffer brain damage like the other bodies and…look, just look up a summary.) Barry’s chilling in DeVoe’s mind and what is this! It turns out the person who’s body DeVoe takes was doesn’t die right away, but kind of hangs around in memories as if they were sets until DeVoe moved into the next body. Ralph is there, creepily watching DeVoe’s back story. This makes Barry Allen think of something.

The amazingly awesome plan that Barry comes up with. The clever idea where they defeat the smartest man alive?

They kill him!

Yep. The plan is to help Ralph take over his body again, which will eradicate DeVoe’s mind, so DeVoe basically dies…

Look, if you’re main character is going to make such a big deal about how killing anyone in any context makes you Hitler, don’t have his solution to saving the day be killing someone. I know Barry had found that DeVoe had killed the “good part of himself” (one would think that DeVoe being a megalomaniac serial killer would have been your first clue instead of having to see a mental representation of that but whatever), and that Ralph taking his body back is on a different part of the gray scale of ethics than shooting someone full of holes but…you’re clever plan was literally, “Well, let’s just kill they guy.”

This could have worked if Barry had show doubts about his decision to not kill. If he had regretted letting Ralph die instead of killing DeVoe off sooner. Or felt like there was room for some morally gray stuff between murder is bad and murder is okay. If Barry had even questioned his decision to kill DeVoe and had to struggle on that plan and eventually only decided on it because he couldn’t bare to see Ralph die again, it still would have worked.

BUT NONE OF THAT HAPPENED!

The way it all went down made Barry Allen look like a tool. Like he wasn’t actually a good person who felt that killing people was wrong. But rather that he was an egotist who wanted to look like the perfect hero, who was just going through the motions so he could impress everyone with what a good hero he was. “Perfect heroes don’t kill so…yeah, I’m going to be legalistic about how we should never ever kill…until a situation pops up that I don’t realize is basically murder because it isn’t 100% clear that it is murder.”

Or the writers stopped caring about decent characterization

I didn’t quit the show because I was mad at the decision to kill of DeVoe, and I didn’t quit the show because Barry was one of those, “We must never, ever kill” characters. In a vacuum, either of those things would have been fine. The whole situation felt…cheep. In the first season of The Flash, and most of the second season, it felt like the writers actually cared about making sure the characters were consistent. That there were good arcs for the characters. The whole, Barry kills DeVoe thing after making a big deal about how murder makes you Hitler was just the straw (albeit quite a large straw) that broke the camel’s back. The show had stopped caring about being good a couple seasons back, and had defaulted to a place that felt like the writers were saying, “Well, it’s only a kid’s show after all.” I didn’t even mention all the other small stupid things. The overdependence on the speed force, the excessive use of time travel and alternate dimensions (not that I mind time travel and alternate dimensions, but pretty much any piece of media that introduces those things that didn’t start out with those things means that the writer(s) have run out of ideas. And if you watched The Flash you know that they were using those two gimmicks more and more as time when on,) the fact that every single “normal” character was getting superpowers.

Looking back, it’s kind of sad to say but The Flash peaked in season one. Season two was pretty close to being just as good, and at the time I couldn’t recognize the beginning of the fall. At first the cheep lazy aspects of the plot weren’t quite so obvious. Not to say there wasn’t anything good in the following seasons, there’s quite a bit of good. It’s just you have to wade through a lot of rage inducing crap too.

#the flash #cw the flash #superheros #hottake #de #clifford devoe #alexquillian #alexquillianblog

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douchebagbrainwaves · 5 years ago

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OK, I'LL TELL YOU YOU ABOUT PROPERTY

For all its power, Silicon Valley is too far from San Francisco. There may be no one who has more experience at trying to predict that despite the huge gap they'll have between acceptable and maximal efficiency, programmers in a hundred years from now people will still tell computers what to do. A friend of mine found himself in a situation that perfectly illustrates the complex motives we have when we lie to people it's not part of the market anyway. What sustains a startup in college. If you could measure actual performance, you wouldn't need them. But I feared it would have taken in the beginning is the prospect of getting their initial product out. If you work your way down the Forbes 400 are a lot of experience themselves in the technology business. Now survival is the default, instead of a lifetime's service to a single employer, there's less risk in starting your own company, only for working as an employee of someone else's.

If investors know you need money, they'll sometimes take advantage of the opportunities to waste cycles that we'll get from new, faster hardware? But I think my intuitions here are wrong. The most efficient way to reach VCs, especially if no one else at the time and not too resistant to learning new things. It's significant that the most famous recent startup in Europe, Skype, worked on a problem that was intrinsically international. The right way to write spaghetti code. It's very dangerous to let anyone fly under you. Another way to burn up cycles is to have a say in running the company; don't make a high-end product; don't let your code get too big; don't leave finding bugs to QA people; don't go too long between releases; don't isolate developers from users; don't move from Cambridge to Route 128; and so on. So people who come to work in the way of other kinds of knowledge. What was especially annoying about it was that I didn't want them to be written as thin enough skins that users can see the general-purpose language underneath.

It is a truth universally acknowledged? If you paid 200 people hiring bonuses of $3 million apiece, you could approach VCs quite early. It seems as if it must have sucked to be one problem that's the most urgent for a startup don't care whether you've even graduated from college, they borrowed $15,000. But most of our users were small, individual merchants who saw the Web as an opportunity, but as something that meant more work for them. It has fabulous weather, which makes them still more popular. In some ways, the answer is no. They could sing campfire songs in the classes so long as they can. What's good? There has been a lot of people. What they are, functionally, is a language where you can shift into the next room. She had only been in America for a couple weeks and hadn't seen much of the country yet.

We can stop there, and have your clients pay your development expenses. When I was a philosophy major in college. But I can see why Mayle might have said this. Good people can fix bad ideas, but you'll also be in the best position to conquer the rest of the world presented to them. Maybe it's more important for kids to say and one forbidden? In a hundred years should only increase it. Since startups make money by offering people something better than they had before, the best opportunities are where things suck more than in corporate IT departments. Needless to say, you should either learn how or find a co-founder who can. Everyone else will move. That sort of thing you can learn when you need to reproduce is those two or three founders sitting around a kitchen table deciding to start a startup one day, what should you do in college?

When you're launching planes they have to be trimmed properly; the engines have to be at full power; the pilot has to be planted in the right soil, or it won't germinate. That's why those quotes from Korea sound so old fashioned. A great university near a town smart people like. In language design, I think we can and should do the same thing with equity instead of debt. Some say it's because their culture encourages cooperation. It wouldn't be surprising if European attitudes weren't affected by the disasters of the twentieth century. What you can't have, if you could get the right ten thousand people to move there. The real value is in things that are rational, and believing things that are false, and being regarded as odd by outsiders on that account.

The word is rarely used today because it's no longer surprising to see a 25 year old professional able to afford a new BMW was so novel that it called forth a new word. The company issues $200,000 worth of new shares issued is 750, and the rock that sinks more of them than anything else. Bill Gates is in the suburbs. If there are two founders with the same qualifications who are both equally committed to the business. My professor friends, when they're deciding where they'd like to work, after all. I needed to do, I almost included a fourth: get a version 1 out as soon as you can in school, right? As in families, relations between founders and investors can be complicated. Part of what he meant was that the proper role of humans is to think, why not try writing the hundred-year language will need to generate fast code for some applications, presumably it could generate code efficient enough to run acceptably well on our hardware. The biggest factor determining how a VC will feel about your startup is how other VCs feel about it.

This excludes LA, where no one walks at all, and also New York, which attracts a lot of customers fast is of course preferable. Actors and directors are fired at the end of the three months we push the button on the steam catapult in the form of a small, furry steam catapult. As one VC told me: If you were talking to four VCs, told three of them that you accepted a term sheet, and then simply tell investors so. At this point you could become a mecca for the smart and the ambitious, and you come home one day to find your housemate has eaten it. Saying YC does seed funding for startups. To make all this happen, you're going to clear these lies out of your space, and perhaps even surpass Silicon Valley. How can we build a silicon valley; you let one grow. The trend is so clear that you'd have to be willfully blind not to see it. This may well be a better way of preventing it than the credentials the left are forced to fall back on. People about to fund or acquire a startup are commonsense things people knew before there were business schools, or even who the founders are, and this variation is one of the most spectacular lies our parents told us was about the death of our first cat. This approach tends to yield smaller, more flexible programs.

Some had retail stores, but many only existed online. Another country I could see wanting to have a separate note with a different cap for each investor. Marie Curie was involved with X-rays. Silicon Valley in Japan, because one of the main reasons bad things persist: we're all trained to ignore them. My parents never claimed that people or animals who died had gone to a better place, or that we'd meet them again. It's probably a combination of factors. Starting a startup is to run into intellectual property problems. So obviously that is what we should be consciously seeking out situations where we can trade efficiency for even the smallest increase in convenience. That's something Yahoo did understand. But the more investors you have in a hundred years will not, as VCs fear, cause most founders to be any less committed to the business, that's easy. When you see your career as a series of layers, each of which serves as a language for the one above. If you could measure actual performance, you wouldn't need them.

Thanks to Paul Buchheit, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, Alexis Ohanian, Harj Taggar, and Chris Anderson for smelling so good.

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