#half past five

[rbtlvr]

smth for @remedyturtles new fic firefight! the twins ever <3 i'm sure they're fine

[frunbuns]

There's something so bittersweet about the childhood flashbacks in tua. They were all children together. Reginald was horrible, but they had each other. And then everything went to shit. Five's 13 year old body a bitter reminder of what once was. His siblings in their adult bodies a reminder of how things should've been. God,,,,

[vynnyal]

This is a pretty good point in the wip to share this, methinks :]

Map part for the hole dwelling map, starring... Not my ocs! I wanted to use ocs, but I don't have any-- so I just used the characters from a fic I was reading at the time 😂

Turns out, the symbolism was so much fun to twist into the 11 seconds I had to work with, I ended up going way more complex than I meant to. If you wanna read the fic this was based on, please do!! And tell the author I said hi! :D

[gayfour]

gay sex or something

[krispiecake]

tell me why i can hear another tenants fucking music from my flat. HE DOESNT EVEN LIVE IN MY BUILDING. HE LIVES IN A COMPLETELY SEPARATE BUILDING ON THE SECOND FLOOR AND I CAN HEAR HIS MUSIC FROM MY FLAT. MY FLAT WHICH IS IN A DIFFERENT SEPARATE BUILDING.

[demifiendcruithne]

today on digital devil saga 2 is criminally under-researched (aka crui is a nerd about a 20 year old game)

so i finally got the impulse/opportunity to test out something i've been suspecting for a while but have never seen any documentation on: dds2 has some form of STAB* mechanic with elemental spells for playable characters, based on their associated element (the one they resist + the one their unique gun combos use)

*for non-pokemon folk: STAB == same-type attack bonus. so for example, a chimecho (psychic type pokemon) using extrasensory (psychic type move) will deal more damage than a non-psychic-type pokemon with the same special attack against the same target

i have more tests i intend to make when i have spoons (i'm just grinding mantras for the superboss and noticed it while fighting wild narasimha because that hecker disables my berserker ring), but so far i've tested with my three active characters fulfilling the following:

are fighting the exact same narasimha who has no elemental weakness/resistance/etc (savestates were used and run multiple times; the rng is not fixed until a move is actually used, so i could get multiple data points quickly by making a new savestate every time i loaded it to advance the rng)

have 99 magic

are level 99

have no elemental boost or amp skills equipped

have no rings equipped that may affect damage, outside of boosting magic stat to 99 for consistency

use two different dynes; one of their associated element, and one not. the former consistently did more, and with repeated runs i cannot write it off as damage range.

under cut: many images; by virtue of being in endgame, these will have some spoilers for endgame in plain sight. if you're reading this and haven't gotten to the final dungeon, i highly recommend you go do that and come back later. once you've reached the final dungeon, you're safe to check it out.

(but seriously - i can't stop you, but i highly recommend actually. playing this game first. it's great)

if you're reading this, you've either gotten to the final dungeon or don't care about spoilers; in case of the latter, i'll do a quick explanation of our last party member momentarily. i have been a little misleading because they are. very much a BIG spoiler. but first - gale resists force, and does more damage with zandyne than bufudyne; likewise argilla with earth/teradyne/ziodyne.

(bufudyne was a random pick for gale because i had only five for omoikane reasons, but in hindsight it was a good one...)

now - for those unaware, this last party member's name is seraph. they're a fusion of two other party members both of said party members were associated with/resisted ice, and i'm near-certain that they also got the boost to bufu spells (i can check this at some point, i have a backup save right before endgame) the same way gale and argilla do.

but what's seraph's elemental affinities? no weaknesses, no resistances. so what does this mean here?

extra screenshots because the first agidyne was a high roll - literally the highest i've seen on a non-stab unboosted dyne against a narasimha. yet it's still clearly estranged from gale's zandyne and argilla's teradyne.

the other part? seraph's bufudyne does the same as gale's, and the same as argilla's ziodyne and their own agidyne, the same as expected without stab.

i'm not sure what else to say about this thus far besides putting a list of further tests to do eventually / get proper data for:

100s of attempts so it can be statistically analysed better. easy to code the data collection into seraph (my helper program, named after this seraph because. yeah), possibly more difficult to analyse but my partner got me into this game he can deal with the consequences (being asked to do data stuff) :v

including cielo and heat as well, probably after i beat satan and grind them up as a victory lap (in the mantras sense not the internment facility sense)

earlier save reloads for data for serph, sera, and roland - i doubt they'd be any different, but regardless

other elemental spells - both the basic and -la levels, the ma-s, the maxed out mantra ones, and the dances. is the boost approximately consistent?

does it affect combos? i believe it doesn't, same as amp skills and the like (and because i feel like i would have noticed by now), but will get data for both participants initiating

does it affect items? i feel like that's unlikely, but worth trying

is there a 'reverse-stab' for someone's weakness? i don't think so, but i'll get the data for free and if there's a trend i just got to test the ailment damagers for cielo

likewise, is the elemental boost innate like the gun combo elements? almost certainly. but it would be funny if equipping x resist made your x do more damage. and also not really that helpful?

does seraph get a boost on almighty? my first instinct would be yes, purely because of seraph's gun combo doing almighty damage; it's near-useless if you got reincarnate but still worth checking. and if so, does ragnarok behave differently from megido+/last word?

on that note, does seraph resist almighty? i... wouldn't be surprised - status only says no weakness, not no resistance, but almighty resistance tends to be invisible anyway (looking at you, devil survivor 2 that shows everything else) (you're fine just using as an example)

that would be a lot harder to test but if i get a party of seraph / someone with dragon ring / someone else with all maxed stats and just find something with megido+

anything else i might have forgotten

if you hack pyriphlegethon onto heat does it do more damage. i don't think i can test this one but i would. honestly be curious

but yeah. this is pretty cool, maybe i'll check for it in dds1 as well. if anyone else checks any of this out and makes a writeup or anything please ping me i have autistic hyperfocused on jrpg mechanics for over two decades :v

[nyaoi-warrior]

Joy is stored in Decked Out 2 special guests event

[catkin-morgs-kookaburralover]

the dog returns to its own vomit etc etc

[disorganised-bagel]

been doing this a lot recently

[iridescentis]

scrolling through my drafts is so funny because it's a mixture of actual posts, stuff i saved just for me instead of using my notes app for whatever reason, random incredibly depressing rants that should never see the light of day, and multiple variations of lesbian struggle

the full spectrum of my personality

[sesamenom]

hi sorry for vanishing, a huge windstorm knocked the whole area's power/internet out since tuesday and my laptop died tuesday night. it looks like everything's back on now though!

[broken-clover]

Living in a red area of a blue state is fucking bizarre because legally there's all kinds of anti-discrimination policies and you can listen to locally-run radio stations from just a few towns away about queer pride and social issues and everyone puts on this nice veneer about being progressive but every local newspaper constantly leads with headlines about how immigrants invented crime and the LGBTQ's are ruining American society, every third house across my town is advocating for politicians that think I should be dead and I've seen about five different people wearing iron crosses in the past couple of weeks

[feketeribizli]

daydrinking already however the mexican gp goes i will not be affected

[shima-draws]

Also it really sucks bc I want to draw but I CAN’T bc I’m in a lot of pain rn. Sitting here like

[yourworldiseternallycomplete]

literally fuck!!!

[the5n00k]

Ollie Chen and the Concept of Identity and Self Worth

Not as long as the other analyses so I won't cut it this time

Quite a few people have boiled down this character's entire arc to prejudice and unlearning taught behaviors but I refuse to believe that is all there is to this character. Especially after one of his biggest episodes came After his redemption arc and explored his insecurities. Which is where I come in and lay them out for you in a long, convoluted, half asleep essay detailing what makes this character so interesting and personally relatable to myself! (Sadly)

Ollie is a good kid. He was raised to believe and build his entire personality and life off of the idea that he is the good guy and ghosts are the bad guys. He's disappointed in himself when he thinks he's failed the "greater good" of Brighton by losing the story sprite in Book Marks the Sprite. It's not hard to see he has a major hero complex and believes that if he's not saving the day himself, he's disappointing everyone. It's not ever spoken but it could be a product of his father.

Ruben Chen is ALSO very goal oriented and on a one track mission to rid the world of ghosts with more passion than his other family members. He's the one that single handedly convinced the entire family that ghosts are bad because of a traumatic experience. By failing to capture a ghost, Ollie is failing his dad. Everyone at some point in their lives has wanted to make their parents (or somebody they look up to) proud. And it's devastating to him to believe that he doesn't. He reminds me of Varian from Tangled the Series in that aspect, trying to make his father proud and putting on a persona when he's just a scared little kid. (Another character I was skeptical about joining the main cast of characters I was familiar with only to fall madly in love with his character arc)

Another thing he's built his life around is the title "research specialist". He's the so-called "expert" on ghosts according to the GCC metube introductory video. So during A Frightmare on Main Street, when Molly, the first person he bonded with in this new town, the first person he told about their ghost hunting, his CRUSH, tells him he knows NOTHING about real ghosts?

He is DEVASTATED.

His whole life, his title, crumbled in an evening. Faced with the reality that he had been misinformed since birth and that him and his family are the REAL bad guys. He denies it, (multiple times before this too, so much so that Molly was so fed up, she finally said what she had been feeling about his family's ideology for MONTHS) obviously that is one difficult truth to just suddenly accept. But he eventually comes to terms with it. Happy ending, right? He's not a bad guy anymore! Well...

Here's where the self worth comes in. If he's not a ghost hunter and isn't part of a team doing good anymore, who is he? He was the research specialist, he had a mildly successful metube channel with his family (who still hunt ghosts btw!), if he's not useful to them, what's his purpose?

They don't really explore this aspect very much aside from visually showing it to the audience in the episode The Unhaunting of Brighton Video. He's seen not quite keeping up with the rest of his new group, The Ghost Friends. He's awkward, out of sync, doesn't understand their inside jokes, he's almost completely excluded for the first part of the episode. Scratch even voted against him joining the group to begin with. (Apparently Libby voted for him with Molly, I wish we could have seen that exchange and dramatic gasp of betrayal from Scratch) It doesn't help that the ghost is yelling at him for most of the episode for being a screw up despite being a screw up himself.

Honestly Ollie and Scratch have more in common than you'd think in terms of reinventing yourself and being afraid of your past but that's a post for another day.

The next episode I get this read from is Let's Play Turnipball. In it, Ollie plays a very convoluted and confusing local game along with Molly's coaching. And right away you can tell he is Not confident and that she is totally overselling him. He knows he's going to let everyone down because he can't remember any of the stupid rules. He tries his best and for the most part is successful until he loses them the game by accident. (While Perfektborg is actively trying to lose, hope Molly didn't tell him that) He kicks, curses the game, and walks away to go mope about his loss. He just wanted to prove himself in this new town he's still unfamiliar with. He wanted to be useful otherwise he would have just told Molly he didn't want to play anymore. But he didn't want to let anyone down.

But then, the entire town embraces him in a celebration!

He's... confused. But excited! And accepts the town's appreciation. It was so nice to finally see him get a dub for once.

My conclusion for this? Ollie was raised misinformed and misled for his entire life, yes. But that affected him beyond his anti-ghost agenda. He became reliant on being the hero (A Frightmare on Main Street) and stubborn in his beliefs, believing everyone else wrong. He's TERRIFIED for most of the season because of this, by far the jumpiest member of the ghost friends. He's traumatized by horror stories and insurmountable expectations of saving the world from a supernatural threat that isn't even there. Unless you count the frightmares in which case, yeah, sure, I'll give you that. So when all of that was ripped away from him and turned on its head, his entire self image SHATTERED.

I almost wish we had an episode to explore that but it doesn't seem like we'll get that. But this scared, confused boy is finally coming to terms with the fact that he doesn't have to be The Ghost Hunter or Molly's Hero to be useful. Heck, he doesn't even need to have Molly to be in the show. (UNLIKE SOME LOVE INTERESTS COUGH COUGH WENDY COUGH COUGH WASTED POTENTIAL)

He's becoming his own person outside of The Ghost Chaser Chens. And I'm excited to see how they'll react when they find out.