#highly recommend everyone to check out the wiki and see what they have there

[fragrantpines]

Thanks for the reminder OP

Also if anyone is interested there are transparent PNGs of every food soul on the wiki

[pahrak-the-sinnoh-slizer]

Game Night: Cassette Beasts

Pokémon fans threatening to find a new monster taming series is like Americans threatening to move to Canada: we’ve all said it at some point, and for completely valid reasons, but the reality is that it just isn’t that easy to pick up and go.  For me at least, it’s hard to pin down exactly what it is about Pokémon that’s central to my interest in it, so I’m not quite sure what to look for in other monster tamers.  At the very least, when something like Palworld rolls around I can easily tell that it’s not that.  The last several Pokémon games have been some of my favorites, but I’ve remained curious about the genre at large; unfortunately these games are innately a rather large commitment, which doesn’t pair well with my indecisive uncertainty.  All this to say, while I was definitely intrigued by Cassette Beasts when I first heard about it years ago, that intrigue never actually went anywhere…until now.

I believe I recently heard someone toss it out as a recommendation on a stream I was watching, which is why it stuck out when I was browsing the Games Done Quick channel on YouTube.  Out of curiosity, I wound up watching the speedrun.  I then poked around the official wiki a bit and came to realize this game could be very appealing to me specifically.  And BOY was I right about that!

Before we get into it, spoiler-free tl;dr: Cassette Beasts both wears its inspiration proudly on its sleeve and iterates upon it in many truly fascinating ways, with an atmosphere that switches effortlessly between delightfully cozy and creepy cool.  I have some gripes, but I have been thoroughly entertained and downright mesmerized playing this game.  If you have any interest in monster tamers, pixel art indie RPGs, and/or cosmic horror, I highly recommend checking Cassette Beasts out.

>PLAY

The game first asks you to customize your character, sans outfit—that comes later so you’re not entirely overwhelmed right away.  There’s also an option for pronouns, including he/him, she/her, and they/them, which is lovely to see.  You are then dropped onto the shore of a mysterious island, and are found by a girl who tells you that you’ve landed in a different dimension.  So, yes, technically an isekai.  But this is a limbo-esque world that only has humans because they keep falling into it from time to time—every single character is either from another world, or was born to parents who are stuck here.  That, combined with making your character’s explicit goal “find a way home”, excellently avoids the most common pitfalls of the genre and lets you assess it without preconceived notions.  What’s really interesting about this is that people are pulled from many different worlds, and from various points in the timeline: you have characters talking about the Mars landing of 1969 and the 20th century peace treaty with the elves, and also famous Greek philosophers and Karl Marx.  I love how eclectic it is, and it’s frequently used in really funny ways. (You all remember Diogenes, right?  Guess what traits are shared by all the monsters he uses.) The people brought here have all banded together in a mutually supportive community, with everyone contributing what they can and materials like wood and metal being traded for goods as opposed to using money.  Why do we want to go home again?  This sounds like a nice place to live!

But anyway, we’re here for the monsters.  And in-game they are just called “monsters”, never “Cassette Beasts”.  Which strikes me as odd.  But the monsters have been in this world way longer than the cassette tapes, which are actually a relatively recent arrival courtesy of an isekai’d shopping mall.  Rather than catching a monster, you record them on a blank tape, meaning that even if you are successful you’ll still need to defeat the monster or flee to end the battle.  You then use your tape and cassette player to take on the form and powers of the recorded monster, and fight your battles first-hand!  Pokémon briefly flirted with this idea in a spin-off manga (Pokémon ReBURST), but here it’s fully embraced; this sort of approach can be seen in other aspects too, as we’ll see later.  After learning the basics, you’re given a few major questlines and then set free into the open world of New Wirral, tackling whatever catches your attention as you romp around.  There is some level-scaling, though I’m not sure of the specifics.  Regardless, both it and enemy AI can be adjusted via Settings, and you can also turn off the glitch effects that show up if those are impacting your experience.  In battle you control both your avatar and one of several recruitable partners, and can carry up to six tapes at a time—essentially Doubles format, with all the complexity and chaos that entails.  One very interesting wrinkle in the formula is that in addition to the tapes/monsters having health bars, the humans also have their own health bar, hidden under that of their tape as if the tape’s HP was a shield meter.  If attacks overkill your tape, the excess damage is dealt to your own HP, and if you lose all of your HP then you’re done regardless of how many tapes you have left.  It’s an important extra resource to keep in mind, and the same is true for (most) NPC cassette-users: if you deal enough damage to their own health bar you can defeat them without having to get through all of their tapes.  Until the late/post-game, that is, where your human foes are invulnerable beneath their tapes while you very much are not, and that feels very unfair.  I also find it strange that there’s no item for restoring your human HP—campfires to rest at are fairly plentiful, but it’s still somewhat odd.

Each monster has one type, and rather than limited uses for each of its moves, both characters generate AP every turn they can then spend on certain attacks.  Moves also each have a type, but while there is a same type attack bonus (STAB), it’s not as significant as it is in Pokémon.  Naturally, each type has advantages and disadvantages over other types, but!  Weakness and resistance is also toned way down, and is not your primary goal when using type advantage. Type interaction is far, far more nuanced in this game, involving the entire spectrum of ailments and buffs and debuffs, and even changing the target’s type.  For example: Water extinguishes Fire, temporarily reducing its attack power.  Using Fire on Water creates steam, which heals Water over the next few turns.  Fire also melts Ice, changing it to a Water type for a few turns.  And this is all just barely scratching the surface!  A chart showing these interactions is given to you in-game, which is nice; more than that, whenever you discover a new interaction for the first time, a tutorial box pops up and elaborates on the effects, as well as providing an explanation of why (extinguish, steam, melt, etc) that goes a long way in keeping track of them all.  While a fantastic feature, it can get repetitive at times: the mystical Astral type has identical interactions with all four classical elements, and despite all 4 being mentioned the first time, you’ll still get that same text box explaining that interaction 4 times.  Types range from the usual suspects (Fire, Water, Air) to some very…surprising choices (Glass, Plastic, Glitter), plus Typeless moves that take on the type of the monster using them.  Moves are treated as stickers applied to your tapes, and can be peeled and moved at your discretion; you obtain them either from leveling up a tape, or from shops and chests and drops.  Leveling up monsters (from 0 to 5 stars) also increases their max AP and how many move slots they have, and I think slightly increases their stats?  Your human characters, though, have their own stats which increase as you level them up from 1 to…well I’m not sure exactly but it exceeds 100 at least.  I couldn’t tell you the exact mathematical way the two sets of stats interact, but it’s a neat idea, strengthening yourself as well as the tapes you collect.  Your partners gain experience even if they’re not with you, and thank God they do, otherwise it’d be a pain to spend proper time with each and every one of them.

There’s one other major battle mechanic unlocked at the end of the tutorial segment: Fusion.  After filling up a meter, your avatar and partner can fuse their monster forms together to unleash hell upon your enemies.  Monster sprites were made modular so that the game could automatically generate fusions on its own, meaning that there are in fact over 16000 different fusions you can make, and your bestiary will keep a list of them all. (Thank God there are absolutely no incentives for filling that list!) Fusing will also cause whatever music track is playing to gain vocals, which is a fun way to up the presentation factor.  Your relationship with your partner is key to Fusion: its measured from 0 to 5 hearts, and you need at least 1 to be able to perform Fusion at all.  At 2 hearts, you gain a super move.  Every level gained increases the stats of your fusion as well.  It’s a fun mechanic to mess around with, even if a lot of the fusions can look a bit derpy—small price for the sheer flexibility of the system.  I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that Pokémon fans have been enamored with fusion since at least B2W2; I doubt it’s coincidence that Cassette Beasts chose to implement it as a Mega Evolution-esque gimmick.  Once you get to the late/post-game, the NPC fights also gain access to Fusion, giving you a chance to figure out ways to play around the feature from the other side.

Like I said before, this game greatly expands upon a number of fan-favorite concepts from Pokémon, and I’m pleased to say that extends all the way to Shinies.  Every monster has a small chance to be a “bootleg”, with not only a different color scheme, but a different type.  There are a total of 14 types in the game.  Do you see where this is going?  Every single monster has 14 variants with different types and color palettes (even their original type, weirdly enough?).  And every single one has a page in their bestiary dedicated solely to tracking how many of these variants you’ve found.  Probably nightmarish for a completionist, but holy shit is that insanely cool!  Multiple palettes to choose from instead of being stuck with just one that might suck!  And they have mechanical differences to incentivize recording them beyond simply collector’s value!  Fantastic!  There are also various ways to increase your odds, all the way up to 20% in specific cases, which I imagine will entice quite a few players into the hobby of bootleg hunting.

Let’s see, what other mechanical topics can I cover before moving onto more story-related stuff?  Field moves are a thing—you obtain them by recording a specific monster, and in the case of some like the glide you’ll partially transform when it’s activated.  I think it strikes a nice balance: it’s dependent on what you yourself have actually recorded, but doesn’t ask you to dedicate move or party slots to it.  Their approach to evolution feels simplified: when you rest after getting a tape to 5 stars, you’ll be prompted to “remaster” it if applicable, rather than having to guess which level you should be aiming for.  There are a few wrinkles when it comes to branching evolutions, but only a few, and mostly come down to either having a certain move on the monster to change its remaster, or, after choosing to remaster, being given two options right there.  Those options can be a bit vague, though; I looked into it ahead of time, and if I had gone with the option my gut opted for when remastering my starter, I would have gotten the less cool-looking monster.  I also want to mention the loading screens; you know how The Sims lists random stuff on its loading screens?  They do something similar here, except they’re all related to one of the monsters: “Directing Traffikrab”, “Tuning Kittelly”, “Sharpening Ripterra’s knifeclaws”.  It’s a little thing but I find it charming, and perhaps a bit devious in making players curious to track down these various monsters being teased.  Oh, and selecting the Flee option will tell you your percent chance to flee, and even if you fail you can still choose to blackout if you really just want to get out of there.  There’s also a Mystery Gift analogue that’s been used to distribute various bootlegs, and things I haven’t even tried like the “Gym Pass” to customize your player character's stats.  Beating the game also unlocks customization options for future playthroughs like randomizers and permadeath.  There’s a LOT.  It’s a very packed game.

Right then, story.  There are two BIG big questlines, one of which being a setup similar to collecting Gym Badges: there are 12 special NPCs all over the map who give you a stamp when you defeat them, but rather than specializing in a certain type, they tend to have a favorite tactic they employ in battle.  One of the easiest to find specializes in moves that create defensive walls; one particularly annoying one prioritizes controlling accuracy and evasion; there’s even one who specializes in just one particular monster with an elaborate signature move.  It’s perhaps not an enormous difference, but again, it’s nuanced.  There is also a “Champion” fight at the end, but I won’t get into that.  More importantly, the questline that the game is largely centered around and leads to the end credits, is the hunt for hidden subway stations that house powerful, eldritch boss monsters known as Archangels.  Apparently, when humans first wound up in New Wirral, they didn’t know what to make of the monsters and tended to refer to them as angels or demons.  That fell out of fashion as the community came to understand monsters better.  The Archangels, however, cannot be understood by human minds.  Each one is drawn/animated in its own style that clashes with the world around them—your partners all say that it hurts just to look at them, and just being in the stations makes them feel uneasy.  A personal favorite is the claymation skeleton with a vertical mouth, to give you some idea of what to expect.  These fights have their own unique mechanics, and the Archangels tend to hit very, very hard; if you do survive, some floating guy in a red coat with a 3D rendered reflective triangle for a head shows up and absorbs the boss (concerning), and you’re given part of a riddle that will eventually lead you to the final dungeon.  The vibes are incredibly at odds with the typical overworld gameplay, and I mean that in THE best possible way.  The Archangels were a real highlight for me.

In addition to those, every partner you can recruit has their own questline, which can range from a single fight all the way to finding 6 hidden locations around the map with their own substantial battles to win.  The girl who finds you at the start of the game, Kayleigh, is your first partner, first having a quest that’s essentially “finish the tutorial” before switching to a more personal quest that involves dealing with an actual cult.  You’re also very early on pushed in the direction of Eugene, who has that long, long quest finding hidden locations all over the map.  Slow-going as it is, though, it’s about fighting off a horde of capitalist vampires who are trying to establish a housing market, so.  That’s fucking hilarious.  But it has stiff competition in Felix’s quest, where you follow his middle school OC brought to life as she journeys to four sacred altars to slay their guardians.  That’s right, Felix’s edgy anime OC, an angel demon catgirl ninja named Kuneko, is also up and about in New Wirral and he is mortified by this discovery.  Excellent questline, no notes.  Another partner you’ll run into fairly early is Meredith; her quest involves navigating a dungeon you probably won’t get to for a good while, though it’s a solid dungeon when you do get to it.  There’s also Viola, the character from Twelfth Night by William fucking Shakespeare, whose search for her brother takes her into a haunted shipwreck to face a villain from a different Shakespeare story.  New Wirral is very eclectic.  But perhaps least expected of all is Barkley the dog.  One of your playable partners is a dog.  His quest is the shortest and an utterly fucking brutal punch to the emotional gut.  Anyway I like all these folks, they’ve got personality and endearing character development that touches on some personally relevant topics.  Aside from Barkley, you can romance any partner after maxing out your relationship level, and that was a tough choice to make.  The Gym Leader analogues are sufficiently quirky for their role, and you meet a handful of other perfectly fine recurring characters—including a few who are only encountered in post-game quests.  If I’m really being strict here, I don’t think I’d say any of this game’s characters have jumped the ranks to new blorbo status, but take that as you will.

The post-game has an interesting structure to it.  You don’t unlock any new areas, not really, but after engaging with the newly-unlocked sidequest board for a bit, you gain access to a few longer questlines.  There are two that eventually come together which each feature their own new characters, one following the direct consequences of actions you took earlier in the story, and one that’s about someone new being dropped onto New Wirral, showing that the world keeps turning even if your particular story is over.  There’s also another questline which delves even deeper into the background lore of the game, and that’s something I’ll never get enough of.  The repeating sidequests are brief and rewarding enough to from a satisfying gameplay loop to disguise the grind, and I’m only just now considering an extended break after nearly 70 hours total gameplay (which I would guess is around half post-game).

Oh, I should also talk more about the bestiary and completing it!  Each monster has the standard flavor text and habitat listing, plus that page that tracks bootlegs, and a list of how many you’ve encountered/defeated.  However, when you raise a tape to 5 star level, you also unlock an additional page of flavor text, usually something related to the inspiration for the monster’s design.  While heavily scaled back, having this sort of progression in the bestiary reminds me of doing research in Pokémon Legends Arceus, and I very much appreciate that.  Going that far is optional, of course—really, doing anything involving the bestiary is optional.  But the game does nudge you in that direction and reward you several times along the way.  When you first encounter the “professor” character, he gives you a series of quests that just ask you to record one of the monsters found in the central region of the map.  Easy!  From there, he gives you a handful of resources and tapes every time you hit a new milestone of 10 monsters recorded.  In the post-game you can also randomly get quests asking you to get a certain monster to 5 star, or perform a specific fusion, or use a specific monster to fight the professor’s assistant, all slowly, slowly nudging you in the direction of completion.  But what’s really interesting is that you don’t necessarily have to fully complete the bestiary to get the grand prize (this game’s equivalent to the Master Ball).  Cassette Beasts originally had 120 monsters.  A later update raised that to 128, and some time after that, they released a DLC that added a handful of unnumbered monsters.  You get the Master Tape by recording 128 monster species.  So, if you record a bunch of the DLC monsters, you can “complete” the bestiary without tracking down every last monster in the base game.  If you do go beyond that, the completion percentage will actually go over 100%, which is so weird to see, but in a cool way.  It seems the intention was specifically to not make completion increasingly difficult as new updates are added, which is honestly pretty rad!  And, again, though I appreciate the bestiary remembering all of your fusions, I’m so glad there’s nothing incentivizing you to from every last one of them.  Same goes for bootlegs.  So, does this mean future updates/DLC with even more monsters are on the way?  No clue.  But they are working on a multiplayer update expected to release soon! (I don’t have Switch Online so I won’t be able to do much with that lol.)

I did purchase the DLC right away; I was confident I would enjoy the game enough I would want it eventually, and buying them both together was slightly cheaper than buying them separately. (The bundle also comes with a cosmetics pack but it’s nothing that interests me personally.) After progressing through the main quest enough that you become able to access the final dungeon, a small boat washes ashore, and you’re able to ride it to a dock in the middle of the ocean housing some sort of carnival.  The ringmistress asks you to explore the three major attractions and beat their power sources, the “Infernal Engines”, into submission.  Despite being a small area it’s still just as open-ended as New Wirral, an effort I appreciate.  You can tackle the attractions in any order you want, even leave in the middle of one to go do another if you prefer.  The place is also populated by several new monsters to record, including one of my personal favorites, a ghostly book monster named Hauntome.  It’s a few mini-dungeons, some solid bosses capping them off, and then one last boss, with a loose story in the background that has some connections to the main story but isn’t anything essential.  I don’t know if I’d go as far as to call it a must-buy, but it is fun, and inexpensive, and more Cassette Beasts.  Up to you.

There are two major themes I picked up on during my playthrough: community and art.  The people who’ve ended up in New Wirral, in spite of coming from countless different dimensions, have all banded together to support each other and however many newcomers show up; they don’t even ask for anything in return, they just value life and want to be sure people are cared for.  The theme that plays in Harbourtown is transparent about this: “we’re all in the same ship […] but at least we’re together […] I don’t know you but we’ll make the most of / wherever we are now”.  Fusion is about literally joining with someone to create something stronger than either of you could do on your own.  There are even some genuinely scary twisted manifestations of this idea, like the Mournington cult and the truth behind the Landkeepers—people crave community, and there are some who will use that to their own advantage.  It’s baked into the motivations of all your partners, and, switching gears, most of them are heavily connected to art too!  Felix is an artist learning he doesn’t need to be ashamed of his past, less “polished” work.  Kayleigh, after addressing her regrets with Mournington, reconnects with her old hobby of playing guitar.  Meredith actually takes things in a different direction: she used to spend all of her time consuming vast quantities of art to the point that it cut her off from her community, showing that you still need to exercise moderation when it comes to art.  Viola is a character from another, pre-existing work of art!  The Archangels play into this as well: one of the biggest things setting them apart is the way they clash with the rest of the game’s art style, and their nature as incarnations of humankind’s ideas is a delightfully malevolent spin on the whole thing.

Taking these two themes together, Cassette Beasts presents a thesis on our responsibility to our fellow people and how we can all find our own way to fulfill it, with a particular focus on art and how it broadly conveys our ideas and inspires change.  The final boss fight punctuates this beautifully when, after Aleph destroys your cassette player, Morgante awakens and tells you that you don’t truly need the cassettes.  “THE ABILITY TO MANIFEST YOUR WILL TO ALTER REALITY…TO CHANGE YOUR WORLD, AND YOURSELVES...THAT LIES WITHIN YOU.”  Then she and ALL of your partners fuse with your avatar, and through your combined might, you strike down the malevolent forces in your way, secure a path home, and bring a huge, fundamental change to New Wirral as its inhabitants now have the option to decide if they should stay or go.  It’s an extremely satisfying ending, even if it does see you and your partners going their separate ways.  But, who knows?  Given a few tidbits from the post-game, it sounds like we just might get to meet them again someday.

Again, I had a really, really great time with Cassette Beasts and highly recommend it.  It’s charming, its fun, and it’s only $20!  Maybe don’t get it on Switch, though, not if you can’t stand frequent load times.

And, just to brag about my bootlegs a little:

-The random free bootleg from Harbourtown was a Glass-type Dandylion for me

-The freebie Ritual Candle netted me a Water-type Glaistain!

-The post-game bootleg starter, I got a Poison-type Candevil

-Was able to use the mailbox to get a Fire-type Undyin

-And obviously there’s Barkley’s Ice-type Pombomb

-The first one I encountered purely by chance was an Astral-type Jellyton

-Air-type Jellyton

-Ice-type Carniviper

-Astral-type Carniviper

-Fire-type Traffikrab

-Plant-type Squirey

-Ice-type Boltam

-Lightning-type Snoopin

-Poison-type Kirikuri

-Glass-type Scubalrus

-Glass-type Spooki-onna

-Lightning-type Dominoth

-A Fire-type Piksie

-A Glitter-type Picksie

[deerlacy]

I was blissfully free of HDG love-hate brainrot for three months. Three months where I wasn't constantly trying to tie everything back to a story in my head that would cohesively bind my loose thoughts into something that someone would understand. Today it came back with a vengeance. There's this really good GDC talk that I highly recommend everyone check out called "Cursed Problems in Game Design." It's linked below.

The TL;DR of what a cursed problem is is simple,

An unsolvable design problem, rooted in a conflict between core player promises.

I feel this applies to what I tried and failed to communicate with my own stories in the HDG setting. I wanted readers to understand that I did not hate HDG (at least, not purely,) nor was I complaining about its existence through my work. But at the same time, I wanted to communicate the violent emotional impact it had on me when I first went browsing through the wiki after being directed there from r/196. I wanted people to know and feel my intense morbid fascination. I wanted to capture that horror and pain and use it in my own stories to provide resolution. I wanted to give myself that resolution through my story.

Things didn't work out. I kept trying to solve this problem despite the fact that it really wasn't possible to cater to these two audiences, people who wanted to see the Affini brought to some kind of justice (which is what I want to write) and your average HDG fan who would react poorly to that (reasonably so, HDG was written for them, and if you think that HDG is "problematic" or anything like that I'd like to sit you down and gently nudge you into a more productive direction when it comes to thinking about art.)

At the same time, no matter what I do or did, my brain would not stop trying. This was a puzzle I could solve, if I thought hard enough. I would find the answer and put it all down on paper and I could rest. I could stop if I just tried hard enough.

Still nothing, as of today. I thought I had finally put it behind me and this brainworm would leave me and allow me to do more productive things with my time. Oh well!! Time to rot more!!

In conclusion, no, Lilac Bar is not getting that follow up anytime soon. Nor any of the other HDG projects I've started over the past few months. Maybe, eventually, I'll finally get something down on paper, but if it ever sees the light of day, I'll have finally committed to one audience or the other. (I give it about a 80% chance that it will be committed to what I actually want, which is to make something that's a lot more negative about the setting and I will get tomatoes thrown at me. At least I would be personally satisfied as long as I felt I had done my due diligence to give HDG and it's many talented writers the respect they deserve.)

[cassberry]

EDIT: Want to watch Last Life? Check it out here! Here for Double Life! Here for Limited Life!

With a new Life™ season on the horizon, I thought I’d help those that wanted to get into the series but found the thought of watching 14 different POV’s a little intimidating.

Please keep in mind that this my incredibly biased opinion and I highly recommend watching all the perspectives that I didn’t list. I’ve tried to pick perspectives that give the most insight into a session, however I may have missed a few things. 3rd Life is an amazing series, and it really helps to bounce around to see what others are doing in their episodes because interactions with others are the core of what makes 3rd Life great.

I’ve given more details below the cut for reasons why I picked these POV’s and beware of minor spoilers if you haven’t seen anything yet. Also as the creators still quite hadn’t figured out the format yet, some of the sessions are split into multiple episodes. If you are lost the Last Life wiki has the episode order list to make it easier.

WARNING: The longest read more of your life, do not click if you don’t want to fill your entire dash lmao I have a rambling problem.

SESSION ONE

Grian - As the series creator, Grian is a good place to start as any. Although not as directly involved with the main group this session, he is the catalyst for what really becomes a defining point in the series, so you won’t want to miss that.

Cleo - I feel that Cleo’s first videos give the best overview of a lot of major things that happened in session one. Tree.T.S.D is still the best pun in the series and she has the best angle for “the incident” out of everyone.

Scott – A very fun POV if you are looking for something a little cosier and great viewing for those interested in the Flower Husbands.

Scar - If you know, you know.

SESSION TWO

Scar, Martyn, Cleo and Jimmy

All four of these perspectives give the best view of what is happening on this session. Scar and Martyn more so as they show some developing relationships that will be essential at the end of the season but Cleo and Jimmy are fun as well. 

SESSION THREE

Scar or Grian – Look, it’s pretty essential that you watch either one of these POV’s. I’m not going to spoil why, but it’s very important.

Etho – I’m going to completely honest with you. Etho is my favourite, and this episode is just very, very fun.

Martyn - Martyn’s editing this episode is superb, especially once “the incident” happens.

Impulse – Impulse is a great POV this session as he gives you an outside look into what’s happen outside of the core factions. The grind is real with this man and its fun to see.

SESSION FOUR

Grian – I don’t know whether to recommend watching Grian’s episode first or last because he went full gremlin in this one. It might be more fun for you to watch everyone’s reactions to what he did first, but that’s up to you.

Tango – Tango is doing what Tango does best this episode and has created a mini-game. The consequences of the game are very interesting in retrospect.

Ren – I can’t really say much here without spoiling anything, but Ren’s episode is a rollercoaster.

Bdubs – A very good outside view of the shenanigans that went on this session. Also, yes Bdubs your Crastle is very tall.

Joel or Etho – This seems to be the episode of gremlins because I feel like these two shouldn’t work together otherwise the server will fall to chaos.

SESSION FIVE

Ren or Martyn – Shit goes down this session. Session 5 is truly the turning point of the season and where the biggest battles and conflicts start to occur. Ren or Martyn are truly the best pick for this session.

Bdubs – Bdubs chose indirect violence this episode and it pays off.

Grian – A good POV to see what he and Scar are doing when Ren and Martyn go off this episode.

SESSION SIX

Session 6 is tricky to expand on because I can’t really explain anything without getting into major spoiler territory. Just know that I’ve picked those POV’s for a reason and by now you’ve probably picked a side and will want that side to triumph. Also, Joel is a menace.

SESSION SEVEN

Skizzleman - Skizz pops the fuck off during this session. He fully represents what a red life should be.

Martyn and Scar – Just good POV’s to see either side of the conflict.

Impulse – I can’t say anything here without spoiler but just know, that karma is very circular in this series.

Jimmy - Jimmy you poor, sweet canary.

Cleo - I love you Cleo, and you never have done anything wrong in your life.

SESSION EIGHT

Ren, Martyn, Grian, and Scar – At this point I don’t really need to explain anything, but I highly recommend Grian’s episode over Scar’s for the finale (but don’t discount Scar’s POV either).

Scott - Scott Smajor decided to collectively destroy everyone’s heart with his finale.  Honestly, I remember tearing up a little when I watched it for the first time. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Big B - Our lord and saviour Big B also included something in his episode that many of the others cut out, footage from the ghosts perspective. Everyone say thank you to Big B.

In summary...

As someone who watched 3rd Life as it was airing it felt very weird to go back and only watch one perspective at a time. The fun of a Life™ season is to try and watch as many perspectives as you can the week they release so you can see all the nuisances and conversations that happened to get a full picture of what happened that session.

Anyway, I hope this guide helps you in your 3rd Life endeavours. It is an incredible series and my excitement for the new season is at levels previously unknown. If you have an suggestions for episodes that others should watch, let me know! Have fun!

[acepalindrome]

I’ve spent much of 2021 thus far playing Stardew Valley in the hopes of distracting myself from the horrors of reality, and I keep meaning to make a list of mods I recommend! Because I am running a truly embarrassing number of mods and there are some really great ones that really improve the gameplay or add fun content or just make everything look really pretty! So without further ado, here are some of my favorite mods:

- Lookup Anything: This is probably my favorite mod. It basically eliminates the need to have to keep consulting the Stardew Valley wiki while you play. The title says it all: this mod lets you look up anything. Need to know what’s a good present for Shane? You can pull up a list of all his loved and liked gifts, with items you have on hand highlighted for ease, plus his birthday, how many hearts he has with you and how many points you need to get to the next heart. Need to know if you should hoard that pine sap or sell it? You can pull up all the uses for it, items that can be crafted with it, anyone who might like it, community center bundles it’s used for, and how much you make by selling. How many days until your melons are ready to harvest? What items can drop from that stone in the mines? What are all the items you can make with the furnace? It’s such a fantastically handy mod and I refuse to play without it!

- NPC Map Locations: One of the most frustrating things in the game is trying to remember everyone’s schedule and then not being able to find someone to give them a birthday present or turn in a quest item. This mod shows exactly where everyone is on your map and solves that problem for good!

- Automate: This mod automatically pulls items from nearby chests into machines, so you don’t have to keep running back and forth to your furnace to pick up the finished metal bars and toss more ore in there...it just spits the finished item back into the nearby chest, pulls in whatever available items you’ve got in the chest and starts running again without you having to do a thing! Just be careful of where you place your chests and machines or you might end up processing items you didn’t want to. Luckily, you can set individual chests to not have items pulled from them.

- Fishing Made Easy Suite: I suck at fishing. I almost never bother with fishing if I don’t have a mod to make it bearable. I like this one because it has different levels of easy-ness, so you can make fishing just 25% easier, or 50%, or 75%, or 99%! And there are some other fun perks too. You want to catch all fish regardless of weather or season? Want to catch legendary fish multiple times? Want to catch prismatic shards? Go nuts.

- Stardew Valley Expanded: This mod is absurdly huge and adds SO MUCH CONTENT. New areas! New characters! New events! I was a little hesitant to start it just because I knew there was so much to the mod and was a little concerned of how well it would mesh with the rest of the game, but the characters and story and style fit in perfectly with the vanilla content. I could almost forget Andy and Sophia weren’t there all along! The purpose of the mod was to make the game feel fresh and new for people who had already played the game and that’s exactly what it does. I love it.

- Artisan Valley/Project Populate JsonAssets/Starbrew Valley: I’m lumping these together but this is a collection of mods that add a TON of new items, crops, trees, flowers, machines and recipes to the game. You don’t have to download them all! You can pick and choose the ones you want, or download the PPJA content pack to get the bulk of these mods all in one go! I personally really love Artisan Valley because it lets me make floral candles and soaps. And an espresso machine so I can make fancy coffee. And Starbrew Valley so there’s actually a fun variety of alcohol in the game.

I’m putting the rest under a cut because this is getting too long.

- Chests Anywhere: Lets you access all of your chests from the menu! You can add some limitations, like only being able to access chests in the same location you’re in, but I’m dumb and constantly forget that I was supposed to bring a present for a villager with me today, or that I wanted to upgrade one of my tools but left all my metal bars at home. So instead of having to run all the way back to my farm, I can just open my menu and switch through the chests until I find the item I need! Labeling the chests also makes this a lot easier for organization.

- Seasonal Villager Outfits: Finally, the villagers have more than one set of clothes! This mod gives them different outfits in different seasons, different weather and special outfits for holidays! It’s cute and really improves the immersion to see the villagers wearing tshirts in the summer and bundling up in the winter, and dressing up for special events! Some characters will change their hairstyle too, which I love.

- Canon-Friendly Dialogue Expansion: Gives all characters more stuff to say so they won’t just repeat the same lines over and over! Also gives them varied dialogue for festivals starting in year 2, so they don’t say the same thing every year at the Egg Festival or Spirit’s Eve.

- Immersive Elliott: Add more dialogue! Lots more dialogue! I downloaded the Elliott version of this mod because that’s who I plan to marry but I recommend looking up dialogue mods for whoever your favorite characters are (I think there’s one for almost all the marriageable candidates.) You’ll probably be chatting a lot with whoever you’re trying to woo and it’s nice to get lots of new lines!

- Stardew Foliage Redone: There are tons of mods that change the colors and style of trees and buildings and stuff but this one is my favorite. It’s very soft and earthy and pretty without being overkill.

- The Love of Cooking: Actually makes cooking fun in Stardew Valley! It adds a cooking skill, an upgradable cooking tool that lets you cook with more ingredients (at the start you can only make one ingredient dishes), a cooking community center bundle, star levels to cooked items, an animation when you cook...cooking was very bland in the base game, and this mod really spruces the whole system up.

- Medieval Buildings/Medieval craftables: Again, there are so many mods that change up the look of your farm buildings and stuff but these are really pretty and cool and absolutely my style. There’s a mod to make all the town buildings have this style too, but I kind of like keeping the town normal and just living on my mysterious and beautiful farm apart from the rest of the world. My sprinklers are magic moss covered rocks now!

- Elle’s Dog/Cat/Horse/Barn/Coop/etc animals: Super cute animal skins. They look so huggable and soft. Also one of the dog options looks like my real life dog and that’s very important to me.

- Adopt ‘n’ Skin: Pairs well with the mods above, this mod lets you have multiple dogs/cats/horses and lets you use as many different skins as you like. I’ve got four cows and they’ve all got different patterns and colors. I love it. Also Marnie starts taking in stray animals and you can adopt them from her, which is a really cute way of letting you have more pets.

- Seasonal Garden Farmhouse: Its a pinch overkill especially in the early game, but I really like this farmhouse layout. It gives you a small kitchen from the start, a bathroom you can use to restore stamina, big open windows that change with the seasons and time of day...it’s a luxury house and it’s very nice to live in!

- Industrial Kitchen and Interior/Industrial Furniture/Rustic Country Town Interiors: These mods give the interiors and furniture a more rustic style, and the last one changes the town interiors to match. There are many furniture/interior mods, so if this style doesn’t do it for you, check out some of the others! There are lots of very pretty mods!

And I’m going to stop there but that’s only the tip of the iceberg and I highly recommend looking around NexusMods or ModDrop and seeing what kind of stuff is available!

[what-aboutno]

Great places to start if you decide to watch Hermitcraft.

I've had a few people on various posts asking how to start watching hermitcraft so I decided to make a post!

First off you don't really need to watch previous season to watch hermitcraft, they might mention things from the past occasionally, maybe when they’re talking about buildings but that's not that important. 

If you want to see eveyone whos in hermitecarft and their channels check out the wiki!

(ignore previous season information on people's pages if you're not interested)

If you want a quick summary of what everyone is like I would recommend this post by @/ceramic-galanter it's got some great information

Edit: They also have a website where YouTube videos of each of the hermits will pop up as they are released

Please dont try and watch everyone at once! You’re better off starting with a 1-3 hermits first and then watching the others later. But if you're still interested what others are up to I would highly recommend Hermitcraft recap !!

They make videos every week about what everyone is up to so you dont have to watch everyone if you want to know what they’re doing. Each video is around 10-20 minutes long.

Uh that's all I have now, maybe I'll add to this if I think of anything else! Enjoy watching hermitcraft!!

[infizero]

This is the anon from cartoonrival’s blog! What are your Sonic lore recommendations?

If you mean media through which to learn sonic lore, then I'd honestly recommend the wiki (Sonic News Network) first and foremost. There's a looootttt of different canons, different interpretations, etc etc and the wiki catalogues all of it! It's a much easier option than trying to play all the games and read all the comics and watch all the cartoons yatta yatta

If that is something you'd wanna do (or at least, some of it) then here are a few of my personal recommendations for some of the sonic lore (gameverse, again theres a lot of different media with its own canon so i'll just focus on gameverse for this ask)

Sonic Adventure: SA1 has a lot of focus on the ancient echidnas, Knuckles' tribe, and their history. If you were intrigued by what the movies did with them and wanted to see where a lot of that came from and how they are in the games, then I'd recommend playing through or watching a playthrough of Sonic Adventure!

Sonic Adventure 2: Personally my favorite sonic game. I cannot recommend this one enough, it has one of the best stories (imo) out of the whole franchise. Unfortunately the English localization is notoriously bad/muddles lots of plot details, and the channel that housed the Japanese cutscenes with faithful English subtitles recently got (completely unfairly) deleted. I think you'll be fine with the English cutscenes if you're just casually looking into this game's story, but if you want a better picture that's more clear/accurate (and have 2 hours to spare) then I highly recommend this video that goes over the entire story with an emphasis on the original Japanese version. SA2 is Shadow's debut appearance (and was originally supposed to be his only appearance), so if you're a Shadow fan and want to learn about his backstory + get a feel for his character (or just want to experience a super well-written story that gets pretty dark) then this is definitely one of the games you'll want to check out!!

^ (also its story in general outside of shadow is really good everyone is characterized really well and its very enjoyable - it's rouge's first appearance too if you want to see how she was originally as well!)

Sonic Unleashed: Personally I've never played Unleashed, but a lot of people really love it! It's got beautiful graphics, great soundtrack, and (relevant to this ask) it has some major worldbuilding which still appears to be canon today, concerning the planet Sonic and friends live on - and some ancient gods, you know how it is. (Oh and Werehog Sonic AKA God's greatest gift to humanity. he fluffy)s

Lastly, I'll recommend the IDW comics again cause why not. They take place in the same canon as the gameverse (although they're not canon to the games... assumedly) and build off of them. They're really good at bringing back things from older and more obscure games in a way that doesn't feel forced or confusing, so if you want something that has a little taste of everything then I'd once again say to check them out!

I know this isn't a lot, but "lore" is kind of hard to quantify. Every canon sonic game would technically count as "lore" I guess, since it's a new story installment, but I'm not gonna ask you to play/watch every single sonic game LOL. I tried to just pick stuff that focuses on things that happened in the past pre-sonic & friends since that's what comes to mind when I hear the word "lore"

Sorry if that wasn't quite what you were asking for, your wording was a little confusing for me ^^; if you want other recommendations or want to clarify, just let me know!

[kbsd]

not sure if you’ve answered this before, but what’s your process look like when you make an amv? i’m just curious and in constant awe of ppl who can make videos like you do :)

hello all!!! i have answered this before and i have a vid help tag with other asks i’ve gotten about stuff like this! but i’ve gotten several more messages along these lines so i’m just going to answer a bunch of them together (under a cut since i love to ramble about editing lol). i do just wanna say i’m definitely not the authority on video editing and obv everyone has their own techniques!

edit: i just finished typing all this up and it’s SO long so sorry in advance LMAO god bless anyone who reads this entire thing

so i work in news tv and we have a very specific workflow for writing scripts, sourcing video, producing, and editing. i’ve just applied that to making amvs! for every video i make, i copy the song lyrics into a google doc and adjust them to match the song i’ve cut (i often will trim songs for time and/or content purposes). then i start planning! i’ll mark down what clip i want to use for each lyric next to that line, and any sound bites i want to use (with episode numbers!). i’ll color code between video and sound bites and lyrics, so my scripts end up looking something like this (for my honeybee amv):

doing the planning ahead of time makes everything much easier when it’s a video that spans the whole show or involves a lot of sourcing, like honeybee or sports analogies. that way when i get to the actual editing process, i already know what i’m going to do and have a game plan. for videos like happy ending or believe it or not, where i’m mainly just pulling from a few episodes, i can just plan it in my head as opposed to writing it all down, and produce as i edit. obviously i do make in-the-moment decisions while editing—sometimes a shot doesn’t work the way i thought it would, or i go where the video takes me—but planning ahead definitely helps. i know some people use spreadsheets as well, with columns for lyrics, video clips, and sound bites if applicable. once you find a system that works, it actually goes pretty quickly.

as for sourcing clips themselves/finding clips within episodes, i talked about that here and kind of here. the short version is that transcripts are a must, and the supernatural wiki is hugely helpful by cataloguing all the hugs, prayers, phone calls, etc. in the show. gifmakers that tag episode numbers on their posts are your friends. it gets easier the more video you make—that’s another huge reason i make the google docs for each video (even the ones i plan in my head, i end up going back and making a loose script with episode notes just for reference). if i can’t remember where something is but i know i used it in another video, i can easily reference past scripts!

i also cut all my videos in the same project in premiere pro, so i can flip between them easily. instead of checking a past script, i can just go to the video sequence itself and copy the clip i’m looking for! this was especially helpful when i match cut together the 5x18 and 4x22 wall slam shots for my bestie video, and then stole it from myself for honeybee hahaha. at any given time i have at least 8 sequences open:

because of the sheer volume of videos i make, it’s worth it for me to download the entire show—i have all 327 episodes in HD, plus deleted scenes. if you think you’re only going to make a few videos, i’d start with scene packs. you can usually just google “destiel [or whatever ship/character you’re looking for] scene packs” and there will be any number of ones you can download. if you need other specific scenes, you can always download/torrent individual episodes or screen record netflix (that’s what i did before i got HD download links). i’m happy to share my links if you DM, but be warned it’s a lot of disk space (about 500GB on my hard drive). someone also compiled every destiel scene, downloadable here.

having every episode already loaded in premiere for all my projects also makes it a lot easier to source clips. once i use a clip in a video, i’ll put a marker on the episode file, so that after a while i have most of the important scenes/lines marked to easily find them. to give you an idea, this is my episode file in premiere for 12x10 lily sunder has some regrets (markers at destiel scenes, the car fight, hot girl cas, etc.). markers are the green tabs along the bottom:

premiere also lets you color code and name markers, so ONE DAY i will go back and color code them all. the ones above are all the same color, but in a perfect world, i’d have a myraid—for destiel shots like hugs, touches, looks; for important pieces of dialogue; for action shots; etc. but for now this works ok for me, so that’s a project for another time!

between detailed scripts, one giant premiere project, markers, the wiki, and my own memory, i have so many points of reference that i can usually find any clip i need in about 2 minutes max. sound bites are often harder to start out, or tiny specific shots i haven’t used before, and that’s when i turn to tumblr gifsets or beloved mutuals to crowdsource. but if you’re as obsessive about marking/keeping neat scripts as i am, it gets easier and easier with every video you make. that’s part of why i’m able to cut videos together so quickly. (also i want to stress i do this for a living and have to produce/edit a new piece for my show every day so i’m used to it. and compared to constantly updating content/sources and news that changes every day, 327 highly documented episodes that never change are much easier to handle hahaha)

this is all great for me since i make so many videos and plan to continue doing so, but if you’re only making a few, this level of work isn’t worth it imo. really it’s all about developing a system that works for you. whatever you do with episodes/sourcing, though, i cannot recommend planning things out in a script ahead of time enough. 

everything i just mentioned is producing, though. for the editing process, i usually do it in this order:

music first. any parts i want to cut, i make sure it all sounds smooth

then soundbites. i usually try to weave them into the lyrics—i have characters talk in breaks between lines or instrumental sections as much as possible. i’ll sometimes go so far as looped/extending an intsrumental part to make room for the soundbite i want there lol. if i do have dialogue over a line, i do the sound mixing/levels at this point as well to make sure everything is audible/one doesn’t overpower the other. (also i always include the video that goes with these bites when i drop them in, and decide later if i want to show the character speaking or have other clips cover the dialogue)

once i have all the audio locked in, then i bring in all my other video clips. sometimes i edit completely chronologically, sometimes jumping from section to section—it depends on the song or how i’m feeling

double check sound mixing. i usually listen to my videos through a few times, with headphones and without to make sure it’ll sound good no matter how people watch it

once i have picture and audio lock, i go through and color correct my clips. i’m basic and just use lumetri color in premiere, and usually just play with brightness, saturation, temperature, and tint until i like it

render and export! :)

i always have several audio tracks, but i try to keep my video tracks condensed. i’ll drop clips on a V2 level, and edit a section there, and drop the whole chunk down to V1 so i know it’s finished. that way when i leave and come back i can know where i left off/what’s done/etc. to give you an idea, this is the timeline for my what the hell video:

i always render as H.264 with high bitrate, and make sure to check “render at maximum depth” and “use maximum render quality” for the best quality. i’m sorry, but i don’t know what the equivalent options are in final cut, imovie, kdenlive, etc. i post on youtube mostly so i don’t have to sacrifice quality, but usually just using a lower bitrate will get you under the tumblr file size limit and it’ll still look good.

as for the anon who asked about “polishing”: first of all, thank you!! second of all, it’s in the details. all of this is a matter of taste and my own insanity, but here are some little things i always try to do:

after i color correct, i blur out any credits from the starts of episodes. i use gaussian blur for this, but really any blur tool works

as much as possible, i avoid clips where we see a character’s mouth move but don’t hear the words. in tv/film we call it “lip flap” and i just think it looks messy. also i’m trained to avoid it at all costs at work hahaha. it’s more for serious videos that this matters a lot to me (e.g. i think i did a really good job eliminating lip flap in my happy ending amv)—for comedy videos i don’t sweat it as much

i put audio fades on the start and end of every single audio clip i use, even if i don’t think i need it, to make sure everything sounds smooth

i use markers for timing, especially in action-y videos like what the hell. i’ll put a marker on the clip i’m using at the exact moment a punch lands, and in the song on the beat. if i have the magnet/snap in timeline tool on i can just easily snap them together instead of having to spend time finagling it

this is such a small thing but i dip/cut to black for a tiny bit at the start and end of every video. this way if i post with tumblr video player, there’s black between the loops, and it gives you a beat before the video restarts. i do this even on videos i post on youtube, just because i think it looks nicer/more professional

this is 1,500 words so i’m going to stop myself before i pull something. if you have follow-up questions feel free to ask and i’ll continue to add them to the vid help tag, but any more questions about sourcing clips or my process in general i’ll just link this post going forward. anyone who made it this far, i am sending to a telepathic kiss. thank you for reading and happy editing!

[thesecretdollgarden]

Introducing Harlow

Meet Harlow! First, I’ll get into what kind of doll she is, all of that nitty gritty, and then Harlow will take it from there to explain more about herself. I’m also still figuring out how to best photograph her, so bear with me.

Harlow: “Hey, everyone.”

Harlow is from the first wave of the BMR1959 collection, a line of Signature Barbies released in 2019 (yup, straight from the Wiki). I first saw one of these dolls on the Instagram of a collector I really admire and I was immediately taken with the unique clothing design. I had no idea Barbies could look like that, honestly.

Here’s a promo pic from Wiki for the aforementioned first wave:

(My other personal favorites are the green-haired Ken—with!! makeup!!—and the dark skin, curvy Barbie. And there’s Harlow in her original outfit. I won’t necessarily get into the specifics of the second wave in this post. Harlow’s actually wearing an outfit from the second wave here, as they’re pretty easy to obtain on eBay for a reasonable price.)

Ok, brief digression about Barbies.

Harlow: “Oh boy.”

I’ll try and make it quick. For some reason I said to myself early on, when I realized I was very serious about getting back into doll collecting, that I wasn’t going to mess with Barbie.

Harlow: “What? Barbie’s iconic, c’mon.”

I know! Exactly (and there are lots of amazing Barbie collectors out there, I’m sure). So, maybe I’ve got some internalized issues to unpack surrounding Barbie. Another niche doll-related thing to bring up with my therapist I guess (I kid. She’d be down though, she’s very cool).

My mom also informed me that I was so infatuated with a certain Oreo Barbie at age 5 that she had to procure her from the depths of eBay for me.

So really, I’ve come full circle. Barbie has been doing her thing since 1959 and I’m here for it.

Harlow: “Let’s remind them of my face again in case they forgot.”

Hey now, can’t a person reminisce in peace?

Harlow: “Humor me.”

You’ve got a point. Alright.

BMR1959, which stands for Barbara “Barbie” Millicent Roberts and the year that the first doll released, was initially conceived as a celebration of Barbie’s 60th anniversary. I’m sure Mattel held other shenanigans to commemorate Barbara, I’m just a Certified Newb and don’t know what went down exactly. Still learning as I go and everything.

So BMR1959 is a collection unto itself, but it also seems to be a sub-collection of the Barbie Signature line. The latter looks to cater more to adult collectors, with the byline being “Shop All Rare & Barbie Collector Dolls”. Carlyle Nuera is the Lead Designer of Barbie Signature, so therefore plays a key role in BMR1959.

Source: The Costume Society

I highly recommend checking out the two-part interview he did linked above, it’s really lovely. But basically, one of Nuera’s priorities is making sure his dolls are representative of a diverse population (now if Mattel could institute that same principle in another certain company...). Here’s what he had to say specifically regarding BMR1959:

“My concept for the BMR1959 line was as if ‘BMR1959’ was a real fashion line and the dolls were all wearing pieces from the line. The design of the clothing and the ‘BMR1959’ branding worked in synchronicity with the design of the dolls wearing the clothing. In my head, I was a casting director asking myself ‘Who am I going to put in my clothes? Who do I want to invite into the line? Who do I want to be able to see themselves as part of this line?’. I wanted to make sure that all different types of people could see themselves in BMR1959.”

The clothes are also designed to be shared between the five different body types the line contains, which is super cool. They’re all on Made to Move bodies, with 22 points of articulation. Harlow is a typical Barbie size at 12’’ tall.

I think that about covers it. Take it away, Harlow.

Harlow: “Thanks. Ok, some Cliff’s Notes on me. I’m very passionate about music, graphic novels, and I love exploring cities, old and new. Hopefully I’ll be able to do that again this year.”

What are you listening to right now?

Harlow: “Lauryn Hill, Mac Miller, Childish Gambino, and Joji are constantly in my rotation, and I’ve recently discovered Giveon and Tkay Maidza so they’ve been getting a lot of play too. It changes all the time, though.”

I’ll have to check them out. Ok, and tell us about some of the graphic novels you like.

Harlow: “Sure. Well, I think it all started for me with Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim, and it kind of took off from there. Make sure to check out O’Malley’s other work, especially Seconds. Then I got into fantasy graphic novels with Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. That was definitely a game-changer for me. And of course, any graphic novel aficionado worth their salt has read and enjoyed Saga. I could go on for a while! Maybe I’ll make my own post about it at some point.”

Sounds like a good idea.

Harlow: “Nice meeting everyone! Talk to you soon. Try and keep warm out there, if you’re undergoing massive snowfall like we are.”

[sun-choices]

It Lives Series: A Guide For Those Who Are Bad At Horror

*ORIGINALLY POSTED ON REDDIT, I AM REPOSTING HERE*

I’m famously bad at horror. I’ve played every single Choices book and been into the app since early when it came out in 2017, but the one series I’d never dared to play was the It Lives series. I’ve been dying to play the series but the scariest thing I’ve watched is Caroline and I get nightmares from that. I’ve also got real bad anxiety, so it was a no-go for me. However, I finally sucked it up and went through both, and god damn, they do live up to their rep. There’s been posts before asking how bad it is, but I would’ve liked something with more guidance to keep the anxiety more at bay. If anyone out there has been holding off on playing, or wants to replay as safely as you can, I hope this helps you all out.This guide will contain some spoilers for those who haven't played it yet, but I’ll try to keep them at the minimum, just some of the scariest stuff. I will also talk about keeping your friends alive diamond free in ILB, a highly debated topic, so keep reading for that too.

GENERAL GUIDELINES

Use the wiki guide for both books. This is the safest way to make the safest choices, have slight but not full on spoilers, and keep your friends alive without spending diamonds willy-nilly.

Do NOT play at night, and play with your sound off. Listen to cheery music even, if you want. I found the best time to play was taking on 2 chapters in the morning, and preferably when I had something to do for the day to take my mind off it later (school, work, etc)

Do not fret when you lose nerve. You might even fail nerve checks, but that doesn’t mean its the end for you all. Follow the wiki and think about how you want to play ILB, and everything should go fine in the end.

You don’t need diamonds to keep everyone alive in both books. However, a few calculated diamond choices can help make things less scary. I’ll go more in depth for each game, but as a general guide, weapons pop up over and over a lot in both games. If you want to spend, that’s a good choice.

Play differently than you usually do if you can. I usually play as a girl in non genderlocked books, so I played as a guy here with names very different from what I’d usually choose. Its a small thing, but can help separate things in your mind.

If you ever get really scared or you want to purposely do a darker play through and something disturbs you, remember we’ve basically all played the book, and these writers at PB were really just going all out on these books.

If you want to have a chance at winning diamond free in ILB or make it easier on yourself, everyone must survive in ILITW, and you must sacrifice Noah.

IT LIVES IN THE WOODS

IMO, I found this book scarier, while the other felt more like a mystery book. This is in part due to the scary artwork. There’s a pretty bad jumpscare early in the first chapter, of a purple zombified Dan, so beware of that and perhaps keep your hand splayed over the top. Monsters will also pop up throughout the book but they’re not so bad once you’ve seem them once or twice. The mud monsters can be scary as well for some. Redfield might look a bit creepy too at times but its manageable, look away from the sprite and cover it up if its too much for you. There’s a noticeable in Chapter 9 where the walls are filled with spiders so be ready to look away if that type of thing creeps you out. The next scariest thing I’d say is at the second to last chapter when the friends play Are You Scared in the cave and reading about your friend’s deaths and seeing their bodies splayed over the screen.

Scary story spoilers if you want them: Dan will be missing and then in a coma at first, but he will be found and turn out to be okay later on. Cody will show up impaled and dead on the tree outside your house at one point. Jane is Redfield. To complete the sealing ritual, someone else must become the monster (Noah or MC).

It is easier to keep everyone alive in this book, so don’t worry too much. Try to enjoy their friendships and any LIs you romance, because one of the best parts of these books is how well written everyone is and how intricate the story is.

You can make it through the story pretty easily w/o diamonds. However, as I said before, weapons are very useful to have and they reoccur the most often, helping tone down rougher scenes. Pets are nice refreshers, so if you want to buy one, thats cool too. The lore is what I feel least necessary, and you can google them up on the wiki anyways, but whatever you choose is fine!

IT LIVES BENEATH

This book is less scary, but harder to keep everyone alive. You cannot make one wrong choice without diamonds, and even then, everyone will be alive but Parker will abandon the group and go live elsewhere. This is okay if you don’t mind, but a few calculated diamond choices can help avoid this. Save up diamonds from ILITW to do so. Play with the wiki to get every choice right. You need a group nerve score of somewhere around 289 for nobody to die, so even if you fail minor nerve checks, even those sewer checks, get it up to there by then and you should be okay.

To win without diamonds: Choose EVERY right choice, so use the wiki or replay chapters. You MUST either dance or sit with Tom (you cannot lose your finger at the nerve check or you will need diamonds to make up and keep anyone from dying). Do note, I believe Parker will abandon the group regardless if you don’t buy at least one diamond choice, but he can still stay alive and nobody will die. Alternatively, you can keep him in the group for free but someone would have to die for him.

With Minimal Diamonds: Buy Parker’s stun baton. This boosts his nerve significantly throughout the book and I believe it’ll help get him to 55/100, the amount you need for him to stay in the group. I also bought the scene where you hide with him in a closet, and his end nerve was in the 80’s, so I think you’ll be okay with just the stun baton.

Disturbing scenes and spoilers: this book doesn’t have as many jump scares like the other. The first chapter has a gruesome bloody murder scene where you find MC’s parents dead and a bloody symbol on the floor, and MC remembers this in a flashback throughout the first half of the book. Maybe some of the animals are unsettling at first but they pop up so often its not too bad. The ghost monster from the lake is unsettling too but I’d put her at the same level as Benji’s statue in the closet you find in QB. Finally, I’d say towards the end when you go from the sewer into the water and find Josephine’s skeleton with the marlinspikes in her, that’s also unsettling. If you don’t like seeing ghost sprites, you will see Josephine’s and her angry expression is creepy as well, but again, try to avoid looking or cover up the sprite and you should be alright. Finally, in the last chapter, Richard will try to murder MC by putting them in a coffin. If your nerve is high enough and you use the wiki guide for the right answers, you will survive just fine.

Optional Diamond Purchases: if you have the extra diamonds, I highly recommend buying the bracelet as it serves like a little warning before something bad/scary will happen, and gives MC a major nerve boost later on. Again, weapons are great (I wish I had bought Imogen’s Bolas to keep her nerve higher but oh well), and weapons appear REALLY often in this book so its a worthy purchase. Next I’d say some of the rune items are helpful, such as the skeleton key and Danni’s seeing stone, and ofc the bracelet, but if you had to choose, I’d say weapons before most of the runes. Pets really only pop up once after the initial purchase, but they’re sweet if you want them. As for scenes with the group/one LI, those are nice too, they give MAJOR nerve boosts and since you kinda have to be selective of how you play diamondless, if you really wanna romance someone specific its a good way to get more interaction without risking someone else through the free options, and brings the group score way up regardless.

I hope this guide is useful to some of you, and if I’ve forgotten anything or you have questions, feel free to add on. This is a horror based series and I totally respect and understand anyone who wishes to play it as such and doesn’t mind characters dying, however the plot is so damn good, the friend groups are A+, and I figured I would’ve liked a guide like this when I played. Good luck everyone!

[dontneedadictionary]

Scrap->Reclaimed->Refined Metal, all you need to know about Crafting!

This is a guide for crafting in TF2. Crafting in TF2 is an important component for attaining cosmetics, weapons, and all other kinds of fun stuff. It is most importantly one of the easiest ways to make money from your playtime in TF2 (although, I recommend this to no one for a source of income). I recommend anyone who plays a lot of TF2 get to understand the way to craft for metals, etc as it can save them money and help them get cool stuff!

This guide covers the very basics of crafting for metals, Reclaimed Metal as currency, and How to Craft Hats/Weapons! (It’s long I’m sorry, but if comes with tons of pretty pictures!).

First thing’s first, why is it important to know how to craft in TF2? To put it simply, crafting can get you free cosmetics, weapons, and a couple other things within the game. The only thing you are spending is your time! 

Playtime in TF2 will grant you free Normal Quality weapons. These weapons will add up over time and you will eventually begin to get duplicates! These duplicate items can be crafted into Scrap Metal or Class Tokens. Metal and tokens are able to be directly used for either the creation of cosmetics, weapons, or used as currency within the TF2 trading market. 

So how do you craft?

Step 1: go to your Items tab on the main menu! 

Step 2: Click on the Crafting tab! (Pretty self explanatory).

From here you will have multiple tabs for where you can craft. Most of your crafting will be done on the first tab that I have shown here. It is hard to miss because it is the first one that shows up on the crafting menu. I have the tab for it outlined in orange as well!

From here, you have many options (as you can see). These can get confusing if you have no idea what they mean or what they’re for. Understandably, I would avoid crafting if I had no idea what was going on in this menu too!

So, the beginning to almost all crafting is smelting class weapons (unless you specifically want a token, which I will get to). 

Smelting class weapons will create scrap metal. The requirements for creating scrap metal is two weapons from the same class, IE: You would need two weapons from Scout. This is shown below:

By putting in two weapons from the Scout class, I am able to craft for one pile of scrap metal. Cool! From here you will craft reclaimed metal. Reclaimed metal requires the use of 3 piles of scrap. This means you need 6 weapons to create one piece of reclaimed metal. 

From reclaimed metal you can craft refined metal. Refined metal is there things get to be fun with crafting/trading! To craft refined metal, you will need 3 piles of reclaimed metal. This means you will need 18 weapons just to create one pile of refined metal.

To create a crude diagram of how much it takes to get refined metal, here’s a crude diagram I made in 5 minutes!

It’s hideous but I find that this is a good way to show exactly how much goes into refined metal. Refined metal can be used for many things in the TF2 community. First and foremost, it is a legitimate form of currency within the TF2 economy. Traders will use refined metal, reclaimed metal, and scrap metal to price items on sites like backpack.tf. The current price of refined is $0.04 USD. This is a small amount but you would be surprised what you can trade for using refined! You can even see that you can get keys using refined metal! TF2 has its own economy!

Remember what I said about TF2 crafting not being a legitimate form of income? This is what I meant! The good news though is that you can put in less money and get more through the usage of crafting. I highly recommend everyone learn to use it for things like trading. If you would like to learn more about how to trade on Backpack.tf, I have a guide posted Here.

So what about the other parts of Crafting?

What if you want to ignore trading altogether and create things for yourself from your own bare hands? You can do that too! TF2 allows you to craft weapons and cosmetics for yourself. They will only be normal quality (someone correct me if I’m wrong), but you don’t have to pay anything for them.

To craft weapons, you will need a combination of things depending on what you are looking to craft. If you just want to craft a weapon for a specific slot for a specific class, you will need a Class Token, Slot Token, and one pile of scrap. This option can be found on the 2nd crafting tab: Common Items.

Slot Tokens and Class Tokens are very simple. Much like scrap, they are made from weapons. To create a Slot Token, you will need 3 weapons equipped in the same loadout slot. For example, if you wanted to craft a Primary Weapon for Soldier, you would need 3 Primary weapons from any class to create the token. There are no class requirements for Slot Tokens.

To craft a Class Token you will need 3 weapons used by the same class. They do not need to be from the same slot in a load out.

From here, you can use those tokens to craft class weapons and class cosmetics. Certain class weapons can also be crafted directly on the Common Items menu. These items will tell you what they require to be crafted. The list of directly craft-able weapons is a bit weird so I suggest you check it out for yourself! The items needed to craft a specific weapon depends on the weapon itself and will require things like metal and other weapons. 

Cosmetics can be created in the Rare items tab.

As you can see here, there are many different things in the Rare Items tab. But to craft cosmetics, or Headgear, you will need 3 pieces of Refined Metal. So for the TF2 economy equivalent of 0.12 USD, you can get a random cosmetic for a random class! This does not include ALL cosmetics available so if you want something specifically you will probably want to get into trading.

If you want to craft one for a specific class, you will need a class token and 4 pieces of Refined metal. The craftable class headgear can be found in this wikipedia link: https://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/Random_crafting_recipes. To my knowledge this also includes all craftable cosmetics.

Otherwise, that’s pretty much the basics for crafting! There are many other things you can craft or do with your crafted materials within TF2, but I will let you guys find those out for yourself! If you have any questions please shoot one to the askbox and I will get back to you!

Signed: @r2mich2​

[rwby-redux]

Deconstruction

Worldbuilding: Aura

Our first official foray into the worldbuilding category: Aura. The chakra-like soul-energy that functions as the primary fuel source for Semblances, along with a handful of auxiliary features. Despite arguably being one of the cornerstones of RWBY’s lore, the page for it on the RWBY Wiki is worringly short. Like, no joke, it’s not even 2,000 words long. Suffice to say, that’s not a good sign.

Before we get started, let’s make sure everyone’s on the same page by quickly brushing up on our definitions. Aura is the physical manifestation of one’s soul, depicted as a colored emanation around the user. This effect is first visible when a person engages their Aura, and can be seen again when a person’s Aura is close to depletion. As Aura is drained through taking damage, staving off inclement weather, or using one’s Semblance, it begins to rapidly flicker. Upon depletion, it’s represented as either a full-body shimmering effect or a particle effect with “fragments” of Aura falling away from a person’s body, signifying that they’re susceptible to physical damage. Aura is vital not just for its inherent failsafe against injury, but for the other functions it offers, including: an innate healing factor, thermoregulation, conduction of Aura through inanimate objects, extrasensory perception, and unlocking dormant Auras within others. The only prerequisite for possessing Aura is having a soul, something which all life on Remnant (except for the Grimm) has.

You know, it’s amazing just how convenient Aura is. It almost makes you wonder why

EVERYBODY ON REMNANT HASN’T FUCKING UNLOCKED IT.

Seriously, why didn’t Pyrrha use her fame as a platform to raise public awareness on Aura? We know that trained Huntsmen can unlock them for people who have no prior training (looking at you, Jaune). Couldn’t her manager have found the time in-between signing deals with Pumpkin Pete’s to get a campaign going, so she could be sponsored to travel around the country doing exactly that? Why is 90% of Remnant’s population leaving themselves deliberately vulnerable to Grimm and bandits? Seriously, RWBY, what the fuck?

Sorry. Getting ahead of myself. Deep breaths.

Let’s set aside the histrionics for a moment. Aura as a combat mechanic is pretty ingenious when you think about it. It capitalizes on a pretty well-established trope already found in the genre. If you’ve familiarized yourself with the manga and anime scene in the last decade, chances are you know what Naruto is, even if you’ve never read or watched it. Having a magical soul-powered fuel source already gives you the license to justify all of the crazy acrobatics your cast is going to be doing, and given its parallels to chakra, it isn’t going to require too much explaining to a genre-savvy audience. In theory, anyway.

I think part of the problem is that RWBY’s writing relies a little too heavily on fans having at least a vague pre-established understanding of the concept behind Aura. It lets the show dodge having to answer problems that arise from under-developing its world. Aura’s utility as a combat accessory, coupled with all of the extra functions I mentioned earlier, creates the problem of: If this tool is so useful, why doesn’t everyone have it?

If you’ve never seen Hello Future Me’s video on magic systems, I highly recommend you check it out. Without even mentioning RWBY, he manages to pinpoint the flaw with Aura (and by extension, the common flaw with most fantasy magic systems): differentiating between limitations, weaknesses, and costs.

I’ll let him take over from here:

“The most common form of limitation is a vaguely-defined limit of strength, or training, or mental acumen of the practitioner. Avatar: The Last Airbender is kind of like this. There’s no explicit limit to how much fire a person can conjure, or how strong a wind they can muster, but we know it’s kind of limited by their training, willpower, strength, and talent. Think of it as the rule of: THERE’S ONLY SO MUCH AWESOME ONE HUMAN CAN HANDLE. If you’re really trying to differentiate your hard-magic system from this common trope, then think about not relying on this particular limitation, but maybe something else. Perhaps certain powers can be negated or are affected by certain things in the environment around them, like the moon, certain plants, or minerals. That way, your magician has to be aware of their surroundings at all times, or it can be used against them by their enemies.

Secondly: weaknesses. Weaknesses in magic systems can create interesting dynamics in a story where magic would usually make a character a lot more powerful than those around them. Maybe they can transform into a werewolf at will, but that makes them vulnerable to silver bullets, though, once again, making these limitations to your magic too simple can make them…uninteresting. […] If you have multiple different powers in your story, it could be interesting to have the use of one power making them more vulnerable to another, so your character has to be cautious about using their powers around someone who could take advantage of that. …I personally feel the best magic systems affect the way your characters think or act or change the way your fictional world operates.

Finally and thirdly, perhaps the most common way that people create rules for their magic system is through magic costing something. […] Perhaps the most common magical cost is that of bodily energy. In The Wheel of Time and The Inheritance Cycle, doing something with magic exhausts you, which is fine until you try and be too magically heroic, and you overdose on magical heroin and die.” [1]

Seriously, go watch this guy’s video. He’s great.

With all of that in mind, let’s take his thesis and apply it to Aura:

Does Aura have any limitations? Not really. We’re vaguely told by Kerry Shawcross that it’s possible to increase the amount of Aura a person has, but that it’s “impractical.” Most people try to get more efficient at using Aura instead of trying to get a “bigger gauge.” [2] Unfortunately, the show hasn’t provided any evidence of what “getting more efficient” looks like—whether that’s simply increasing your training, or undertaking a specific kind of training. Is Aura like a muscle that becomes stronger the more you exercise it? We don’t know. The show hasn’t given us a definitive metric for measuring training progress, so it’s up for debate.

Does Aura have any weaknesses? Sort of. You could argue that there’s a trade-off between using your Semblance versus simply relying on Aura to tank hits. A combatant’s innate defense system draws from the same energy source as a Semblance, which could create an interesting choice between offense and defense. Do I rely on my Semblance to win, or should I conserve Aura for other things, like activating Dust or staving off hypothermia? My issue with this being a credible weakness is that we don’t really see characters grapple with this dilemma on-screen. Taiyang tells Yang to decrease her dependency on her Semblance, but that has more to do with Yang’s Semblance enabling an aggressive attack style that gives her opponents more openings, than it does anything to do with conserving Aura for other things. [3]

Does Aura have any costs? That’s a resounding no. A Semblance costs Aura to use, but Aura itself doesn’t demand anything in exchange for activating it.

From every conceivable angle, Aura sounds like a pretty sweet deal. And that’s the problem: there’s no believable in-lore explanation for why the entire world doesn’t simply have a Huntsman unlock it for them.

So how do we rectify this?

What if having an unlocked Aura made a person more likely to attract Grimm? We already know that Grimm track people primarily through detecting negatively-valenced emotions and the presence of nearby souls. If we wanted to give Aura’s aesthetic appearance some more significance beyond simply being cool to look at, what if Grimm can sense that emanation? If a person with a locked Aura is akin to a matchstick, then what if a person with an unlocked Aura looked like a bonfire by comparison? The very tool used to fight Grimm has the drawback of also attracting Grimm, or worse, causing Grimm to prioritize you as a target.

Not only would this give us an answer for why the entire world doesn’t unlock their Auras, but it opens the floodgates for lore and worldbuilding ideas: If unlocked Auras can attract Grimm (even when not in use), do governments have an incentive to regulate how many of its citizens have unlocked Auras? Are only certain members of the population allowed to unlock their Auras, like Huntsmen or soldiers? What happens if you accidentally unlock your Aura? Would the government force you to pay a tax, or make you choose between conscription into either the military or a Huntsman Academy? There’s an entire afternoon’s worth of ethical debates right there.

But let’s say that unlocking your Aura doesn’t attract Grimm, in which case, maybe there’s some sort of societal stigma against it. What if you’re afraid of unlocking your Aura because that means, by extension, opening up the possibility of discovering your Semblance? What if you’re afraid of getting a passive Semblance that causes misfortune? What if you gain a pyrokinetic Semblance that’s hard to control, and without training you run the risk of hurting yourself or others?

We can even take this a step further if we consider how Aura and Semblances can be abused by others. What if at some point in history there was a monarch that would forcibly unlock their citizens’ Auras and force them to serve in their army? Skip forward several generations and picture a well-meaning Huntsman passing through a village. They stop to chat with the locals, and an inquisitive child comes up to them and asks about what it’s like being a Huntsman and having an unlocked Aura. The Huntsman, unaware of the history of the region, offers to unlock the child’s Aura for them. Cue the parents and nearby townsfolk panicking as their thoughts immediately go toward the tyrannical monarch from long ago, and the number of child soldiers forced to bleed for that king.

If we wanted to make Aura inconvenient, we could even introduce Aura- and Semblance-specific diseases transmitted via Grimm. Take a moment to imagine what it would be like if you lived in a world where you never had to worry about getting the flu, as long as you refrained from doing one specific thing. How’s that for an incentive? Now apply that to RWBY, and suddenly there’s a whole list of Grimm-based illnesses that you’re automatically immune to as long as you don’t unlock your Aura.

The possibilities are endless.

With a little creativity it wouldn’t be hard to give realistic, in-world answers for why unlocked Auras aren’t more prevalent: everything from mechanical drawbacks, limitations, weaknesses, risk factors, cultural taboos, stigmas, you name it.

I wanted to complain more about the vagueness of Aura’s healing factor and how it relates to Aura depletion—like how the hell Hazel stabbed himself with Dust crystals while his Aura was still active; wouldn’t the healing factor have caused them to just shoot out of his arms like magical splinters?—but this post is getting long, and I want to wrap things up. I think I’ve made my point.

Join me next time when I put another one of RWBY’s core concepts on the chopping block.

-

[1] Hello Future Me. “On Writing: hard magic systems in fantasy [ Avatar l Fullmetal Alchemist l Mistborn ]” YouTube video.  February 07, 2018. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMJQb5bGu_g&list=WL&index=351&t=0s]

[2] Shawcross, Kerry. “CRWBY AMA.” Reddit interview. February 12, 2018. [https://www.reddit.com/r/RWBY/comments/7x3w4s/crwby_ama_w_miles_luna_kerry_shawcross_and_paula/du5bpdm/?context=3]

[3] Volume 4, Episode 9: “Two Steps Forward, Two Steps Back.”

[ultra-swap]

Could I ask what role Zoffy plays? There’s not much of him on screen, but he’s shown to be pretty tight with the Ken and Marie family (apparently his dad was bffs with Ken and they share a mentor/surrogate relationship). So by proxy, he’s also close with Ace and Taro. Not sure how this transfers to Ultra Swap AU, but he could be some sort of consigliere/intelligence officer for M78? Like he probably floats around, spying on everything and executing the will/plans of M78 — even if it’s at the expense of the Ultra Bros. But idk haha I literally can’t see him as anything else aside from some sort of leadership position

There’s something going on between Zoffy and Seven: Zoffy pretended to be Andro Melos to save Seven from a bunch of aliens once (in the Andro Melos show). In the “The Ultraman” manga, Zoffy apparently made Seven second-in-command of the Ultra Bros, and cried over Seven like twice lol (same goes vice versa). Would highly recommend the manga for some Showa Ultra lore and relationships between the ultra bros.

I like to think this Seven is just as morally ambiguous as canon Seven (not sure how much of Leo you’ve watched but Seven really really loves Earth lmao), the only difference being that this Seven fights for more personal reasons than his selfless canon counterpart, who fights for literally everything but himself. Good stuff, really loving this AU!

Holy heck I didn't know asks could be this long

I'm still fairly new to Ultraman and so far I've only watched the original series, Ultraseven and Return, so I've seen Zoffy on screen exactly one (1) time. I read up on a few new gen characters that seemed important like Zero, Belial and Geed and read through a few more characters' wiki pages but I'm trying to avoid spoiling myself too much about Showa, so I've probably skipped some parts. I'm about to start Ace so hopefully I'll get a better understanding of the ultras' personnalities and relationships!

As ultras are all mostly bounty hunters/mercenaries, the base idea I had for Zoffy in Swap was that he could be both a general/captain and debt collector, collecting fees from ultras and bringing them back to Ken and Mary as well as organizing military operations when needed. Everyone around Ken and Mary seems to somehow make it into high ranking positions, whether they're qualified for it or not- tho Zoffy is one of the few who is qualified. I haven't worked on Ace and Taro too much (except for one ask suggesting to make Ace into a Jack the Ripper kind of serial killer), so I don’t have much to say about them yet.

Reading the rest of your ask, I could definitely see Zoffy and Seven being close friends! They lost contact for a few years as Seven was traveling around different galaxies looking for jobs and Zoffy was chasing after indebted ultras ; but since Seven settled down with Anne they've been keeping in touch more regularly. They keep each other updated about what's going on with their rulers ; Zoffy tells Seven about Ken and Mary's latest shenanigans, and Seven warned Zoffy when Geed dropped by to buy a Pegassan child from Anne and kinda, sorta hinted at a planned murder... Seven may be an alien hunter and a multiple time murderer, he still cares deeply about his family and his few close friends. They're the motivation behind all his actions.

"The Ultraman" sounds excatly like what I need to catch up on the ultras! I'll definitely check it out, thank you for the suggestion! And I'm so happy you enjoy my AU! Your Sevanne art was absolutely wonderful and really made my day!

[clothingbrand2]

Strategies for Everyone Who wants to Get started a Outfits Model

how to start a clothing brand

In this article are some recommendations to any person ready to or contemplating about launching their own clothing line.

Tip # 1. Will not Hurry

What I suggest by this really is just take your time and effort when it comes to the start of the line. There may be a lot of competitors around today, creating some social websites webpages having a t-shirt coming soon is not about to slice it. Have you at any time obtained excited about a Fb site with 12 likes and "a contemporary new clothes model coming soon"in the about me area? Me neither.

Idea # 2. If you cannot design and style, then shell out someone who can.

A lot of road wear start-ups launch their brand with just their identify in the script font, display screen printed on the black t-shirt. Now I am all for supporting a brand name, but you have to have to not less than put some imagined and creative imagination into your outfits, normally men and women will see you are the same as the rest of the garments models that have began and unsuccessful. If you cannot draw or design and style, pay a person who can. You're likely to want sound types if you need to stand out and it doesn't have to be high-priced. An excellent web-site for structure operate is named Designcrowd. This page makes it possible for you to submit your design and style temporary, established your finances, then wait for designers from all around the planet to submit their entry so you can pick the ideal just one.

Tip # 3 Never rip-off other people!

Just about every model really wants to be as prosperous as Obey, Stussy and Hype, but blatantly copying their suggestions, design and ripping off their types will not be planning to get you there. Actually, It can be much more likely to have a terrible impact due to the fact these models are well known, highly regarded and their thousands of fans will know that your clothing models usually are not authentic.

Idea # 4 Assume exterior the box.

You've got in all probability read this indicating ahead of and although it is much less difficult mentioned then finished, a fantastic way to start out would be to do a good little bit of investigation to gather your personal ideas. Inquire your self what sort of apparel do I would like to generate? What are my favorite makes? What do I appreciate in everyday life? After you know the solutions to these issues you then can begin to study models, jot down strategies, take images and doodle to actually construct a picture of the sort of avenue wear merchandise you wish your manufacturer being making. But make sure you do not disregard suggestion variety a few though carrying out your exploration!

Tip # 5 Study your solution.

Since you might have a couple of layouts or suggestions that you would like to see printed on a t-shirt, it truly is the perfect time to take a look at what company you are going to use to provide your blanks. There are numerous organizations which make blank garments all set for printing so this part might be a bit too much to handle, but selecting your spending plan and who your goal current market is will really assistance to slender down the selection.

Gildan and Fruit from the loom are on the cheapest conclude of your scale however they are likely to have a boxier in shape and you are not most likely to seek out quite a few respected apparel brand names printing on them.

Tultex and Anvil print a great good quality tee for the fair rate if you need a high-quality feel but your finances will not likely extend to highly-priced blanks.

And in the larger stop are American Apparel and Choice Apparel. Even though these is going to be high-priced, the standard is outstanding and so they also carry a variety of colors and products that can make your brand name stick out from the rest.

Suggestion # 6 Will not lower corners.

If you would like being taken very seriously being a brand name, creation is the a single location you are doing not desire to rush or lower corners. To begin with, select a great printing corporation. It's going to cost you a lot much more time, income and energy within the prolonged run should you elect to print using a person in his bed room who prints your styles wonky and receives chocolate stains on your own t-shirts although he's printing them.

You could find many trustworthy firms by typing in "Screen printers" in Google, and do not ignore to buy all over. Octomuffin and Woven Inc are rated highly during the Uk.

Next, take into consideration your manufacturer picture. Are you interested in to generally be thought of as a qualified brand? When you do, then your intending to want tailor made neck labels, swing tags and some neat packaging. This doesn't ought to be pricey, but small touches like that may possess a long lasting impression over a buyer.

And lastly, will not print a lot of. Once you very first launch a style and design, you'll have no clue how it will market, so it truly is ideal to purchase a lesser quantity to start with to check the h2o. Never get worried about selling out swiftly, it's going to make your model look well-liked in case you do and you simply can generally just re-order a lot more.

Suggestion # seven Web site, and pics.

You don't need a large finances to help make an excellent wanting and practical internet site, there are numerous e-commerce platforms readily available now which provide great searching web-sites for the low month to month price. Major cartel, keep envy, volusion and shopify are just the tip of your iceberg with regards to these.

As soon as you have selected your web system, invest in a site. Domains are so affordable nowadays apparel makes have no justification never to obtain one, and it makes you glimpse a great deal of extra experienced any time you come to launch.

Now you're ready to upload your goods and images. It is important to create guaranteed you obtain some experienced seeking photographs taken of your merchandise and never types which appear like they may have been taken on a three mega pixel mobile phone digital camera. Your shots would be the only way your buyers can interact with your merchandise about the internet, in the event the photos are modest, blurry or usually do not show enough of your merchandise element, you're probable to not have a sale.

Suggestion # eight And now we wait around.

Once you first start, the thrill may be just a little much too considerably and you happen to be very likely to get expecting big factors in inside of a quick duration of time. Try out to remain grounded, matters choose time, lots of time, so don't get disheartened for those who have not bought out within your first thirty day period and just keep likely. It is really also a great idea to try and get suggestions from friends and family to determine should the products and solutions are actually nearly as good when you consider they are.

And that is it, I actually hope your uncovered this short article interesting and hopefully just a little beneficial, as I mentioned before I am not an expert while in the street put on market, but all those are only a few of the things I have learnt alongside just how.

References Clothing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clothing

[satoshi-mochida]

Some thoughts and hints on my last Gamefly rental, Chulip.

The game is very weird and charming at the same time. It’s also very Japanese, especially in humor and style. There’s also some surprisingly heavy moments here and there, like with Love Interest’s(her name and yours can be manually entered) parents.

The game has a day/night cycle, everyone has their own lives and  schedules to keep track of(a few of which change depending on events in the game, like Batayan getting hired at the factory), and trains from each area run on a set schedule. 

There seems to be a bit of randomness to the game: trash cans can have items you can sell(or use for kissing certain characters) or cartoonish turds(like you see in stuff like Digimon) which do damage to you. The Funny Bone Factory is also like this: every in-game day the areas change, so the number you enter on the tram won’t take you to the same place everyday(aside from when you’re going for the Boss Card), and the area you can hide in to stay after work hours also changes, which makes kissing all the characters in there kind of tedious. 

Another random factor is finding the rare frogs/cicadas you need to use to make a potion to kiss Dr. Dandy. You can only get them from garbage cans(the ones next to the bar for frogs, the one near Batayan’s house and in the park for cicadas). I think the garbage cans have a few items and reset after sleeping at home, so you probably won’t need to save scum as much. The correct frog/cicada you need are the ‘Blue Dots’ and ‘Sleepicada’, respectively, and you need to show them to Leo/Batayan to check if they’re the correct ones.

I’ll give a hint for one of the more annoying kissable characters at the Funny Bone Factory, Jigsaw. You need to pick up and give a certain puzzle piece to him. This is the correct one:

Though kissing Underground Residents gives you a decent amount of money, the best way is to sell stuff you find in the trash, with the best items being from the trash can in Scarecrow Fields. Just make sure you have enough health in the event you pull out an item that hurts you. Also make sure to save at least one Frying Pan and Refrigerator for kissing the Alien, though. 

Speaking of saving items, anything you toss you can pick up again later from Policeman while he’s standing in town. This is good for saving items you need for later, since you can only hold so many at once.

I highly recommend a guide while playing, as well as the wiki sometimes, since while some hints are pretty easy to understand, others are fairly cryptic on what you need to do. While you don’t need to kiss everyone possible to finish the game, the extra Hearts(your health) you get from kissing a lot are nice to have, especially since it’s pretty easy to accidentally take damage(like having the Monk accidentally mow you down at sunset heading back home on his moped). Here’s the one I used.

The game is available digitally for the PS3 as a PS2 Classic for anyone who wants to try it themselves. Even with some annoying parts, I’d say it’d worth playing.

Next game being sent is: VA-11 HALL-A

[aoibaratraveler]

A Look Back At My Time in Japan Chapter 3!

Double Collage! One for Busan and one for Nagasaki in May!

Heyo! We’re back for chapter three and it’s only been a little over two weeks! Looks like I’m getting the hang of this...maybe?

Second Month on Exchange: May

I last left off with the beginning of my South Korea exploits in the city of Busan. We had met some other travellers, visited some street markets, had lunch with our host and started our trip off rather nicely apart from sleeping on the hardwood floor of our host’s apartment every night….

It looks like we started off May with visiting the beautiful park and cliffs of Dongsam with our host. It was a glorious day with spectacular weather where we walked along the rocky cliffs and coastline for a couple of hours. Our host was a really friendly dude who really wanted to show us a good time when he wasn’t busy with his university classes. Afterward, we headed back to Gwangbok street and met up with the other couch surfers to enjoy more street food and some skincare shopping as well as check out a nearby beach. It was about here though when things started to go a bit south with TC and me. I mean it pretty much started from the beginning of the trip, especially when we met these other travelers but it really started to get to me that night when we went shopping. You see, TC loves herself a bit of attention which I didn’t care so much about. It was the belittling and nasty remarks that I couldn’t stand. She is someone who hates taking responsibility for anything and has no empathy or consideration for others. Throughout the course of that night, she kept making snide remarks about how I’m too cheap and I should be spending as much money as her because in her opinion I was holding back too much. I mean truth be told I was holding back, I was nearing the end of my first two months in Asia and running out of the scholarship money I had received for my trip (it wasn’t that much money but more than enough for at least 2 months), which wasn’t anything too major as I still had my credit card and savings back in Canada but I didn’t want to use them unless I really needed to - especially since I knew that when I returned to Japan I would get my month’s earning from my part-time job at the English school. Besides, I’m not that much of a shopper, even though I do love my Korean skincare. Who doesn’t? It wasn’t just money. She started body-shaming me since I had put on a bit of weight from all the food I was trying and claiming that I should stop and lose the weight in order to fit into Asian clothing better so I could properly shop with her (I refused to go clothing shopping). I mean, I do agree that by that point I wasn’t looking my best but I was trying to enjoy myself and all the digs she was throwing at me was really making me resent taking this trip with her. The atmosphere between the two of use was starting to drop and we were making it a bit awkward for the guys with us. I was trying to be normal but anyone who knows me, when I’m upset or frustrated, knows that I tend to go quiet which is very different to my usual energetic, happy self so it was apparent that something was wrong. I tried to be diplomatic, I really did, but I also felt that she just kept spinning things to make me look bad. I was really embarrassed especially since I was starting to like Z, whom I mentioned earlier, and we were getting along but meh it wasn’t meant to be. The night ended a bit sour and we both decided that we would do our own thing on what we thought was going to be our last day. My trip to Busan was, unfortunately, a bit of a blur after this as things tend to be for me if it is spent with bad company. I can tell you that the next day I decided to go off to the area of Haeundae and spent the day walking around the beach, getting some dinner and bingsoo and just having some self-reflection. I do remember getting a message from Z asking if I wanted to join them (them being him, the other guy, and TC) for a night at a day and night spa but since I was feeling a bit insecure about my appearance and just too embarrassed from the day before, I declined. I finished at Haeundae and decided to head back but didn’t realise that TC hadn’t given me the code for the apartment and she wasn’t planning to come back that night and was spending it with the guys at the spa so I was locked out and nowhere near wifi and had to wait for the host to come back… Yea the Busan trip wasn’t going so well. The first day or two were nice though and I would love to go back but this is just an example of how traveling with some people really brings out their true colours. I had only known TC for a month at this point but still. Unfortunately, a huge storm came that night and lasted until the next morning and our ferry back to Fukuoka was canceled and we were forced to stay in Busan for an extra day. Couldn’t really do anything that day either but when TC got back and the weather got a bit better we just went for a walk in the neighborhood and checked out the nearby convenience store to try some more Korean goodies. Our host ordered dinner for us on our real last night there and I told him that I couldn’t eat any pork so he asked the restaurant to just make it meatless but then, of course, TC was then spiteful for the rest of the night because of this claiming that she “needs her protein…” I’m sorry. I wish I could tell a great story of my Busan trip but unfortunately, TC and I just had very different personalities and thus were probably never meant to travel together. I do honestly highly recommend Busan as a lovely side trip from Fukuoka. Anyway, the day of our departure finally arrived and I couldn’t be more thrilled. When we arrived back in Hakata, it was late at night and our bus back to Nagasaki wasn’t going to arrive until the next morning. I mean we could have paid more for a train or opted to stay in a hotel or something for the night, well TC could have, I was going to be my frugal self and go back to the family restaurant that I had stayed in the first time I arrived in Fukuoka and chill there for the night and get some dinner and even though we weren’t so friendly anymore, TC decided to join me. The next day we boarded our bus back to Nagasaki and parted ways, then, and for the rest of my time in Nagasaki (we remained civil at school though, of course). I spent the rest of that day walking around Suwa shrine to decompress.

The next day was Friday and since it was still Golden Week, I decided to spend the day exploring Peace Park. I should mention that Golden Week in Japan is called as such because a few national holidays happen to occur during that week. The university wasn’t closed the whole week but luckily one of my teachers, an American who was in charge of all the exchange students, allowed me and several others who had plans to travel to just take the whole week off because we “should just enjoy our time and make the most of it”. He was a very relaxed individual. Peace park was a remarkable place, a symbol of hope that is also filled with melancholy. It was established in the early 1950s and is close to the hypocenter of the bomb and remnants of the concrete wall of a cathedral.  At the park's north end is the 10-meter-tall Peace Statue created by sculptor Seibo Kitamura of Nagasaki Prefecture.

“A plaque at the nearby hypocenter gives the following account and statistics of the damage caused that day.

At 11:02 A.M., August 9, 1945 an atomic bomb exploded 500 meters above this spot. The black stone monolith marks the hypocenter.

The fierce blast wind, heat rays reaching several thousand degrees and deadly radiation generated by the explosion crushed, burned, and killed everything in sight and reduced this entire area to a barren field of rubble.

About one-third of Nagasaki City was destroyed and 150,000 people killed or injured and it was said at the time that this area would be devoid of vegetation for 75 years. Now, the hypocenter remains as an international peace park and a symbol of the aspiration for world harmony.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagasaki_Peace_Park

This adds a bit of a sad tone to this blog but I do think it is necessary for people to be educated about what happened. I also think that everyone should at least watch Grave of the Fireflies once to be further educated on the history of this event. I think a lot of foreign tourists go to Nagasaki and Hiroshima while remaining ignorant of the past and just take a lot of pictures to add to their collection or add this site and the nearby museum as something on their tourist checklist but even my local friends are too horrified to go to the museum and be reminded of what happened but do visit peace park often. Junior high school students also make annual trips there to lay a dozen cranes against the statue, another symbol of peace. 

Over the next couple of weeks, I began to focus more on university and taking my language studies seriously. I decided to ditch taking the bus every day to and from university and either use an old bike that my homestay family had or walk. The bike ride would take about 45 minutes but the walk would take 2 hours. It was a big difference and I would mostly just walk when the brakes on the bike weren’t working so well, which was a lot of the time (as I said, it was old). I did this partially to save money and partially to get in shape and I honestly loved it. The university may have been far from my homestay but this allowed me to really get well acquainted with the area as well as shed a few pounds. Around mid-May, I checked out Glover Garden and the Dutch area of Nagasaki with one of my Japanese friends whom I had met in Vancouver when she was doing her exchange there. It was a very interesting place and different from the rest of the city. We explored the garden and Glover residence of a Scottish merchant who lived there hundreds of years ago and is the oldest Western-style house in Japan. Later on, we walked around the Hollander Slope which was a preferred settlement area for mainly Dutch foreigners in the mid 19th century. Upon returning home that night, my homestay mother cooked for me a non-pork version of Nagasaki Champon which was delicious. 

The next day, I joined my homestay family in supporting my homestay brother at his undokai, or sports day while having a picnic. It was a fun-filled day with lots of excitement and was much like something that I had seen in anime numerous times.

At the end of the month, I went with the rest of the exchange students on a day trip to Huis Ten Bosch which is a slightly overpriced, but still fun, Dutch theme park in Sasebo, Nagasaki. May was pretty much a chill month where I became more acquainted with my surroundings, became closer friends with my classmates; two French girls, CA and LY and an American girl, R as well as my coworker at the English school, B, who was my rock during my time there and whom I considered like an older sister (well apart from the bf who I was messaging every day during my time in Japan and becoming closer friends with. I think having him as a connection that was separate from everything happening in Japan was what really made me feel like I was never alone, I also felt like I could tell him anything so that helped.). Honestly, apart from what I am going to tell you next, it was a not too eventful time in regards to my regular life. Oh and I woke up one day at like 4 am to walk up the hill behind my apartment by myself to watch the sunrise peek behind the mountains and go for a run, it was amazing.

Boy Drama Part One:

So what good study abroad trip in a foreign land where everything is new and exciting is complete without a bit of boy drama here and there? I’m separating this into two parts because it took place around mid/end of April until mid-June and setting this aside from the rest of the story because it really needs its own part and I can’t remember when exactly everything coincided with the rest of my time there. Hold onto your horses folks.

Ok, I know I said that I had a bit of a crush on Z whom I met in Busan but I only met him for a couple of days and it wasn’t anything too serious. Before I went on my trip to Busan and began a few my classes at the university, however, I met E, a 27-year-old Japanese man who also happened to be one of my Japanese language teachers. Don’t worry guys, I was 22, it was fine. Well, that’s what I told myself anyway. To me, at the time, he was super cute and a bit shy and I found that attractive and even though everyone told me that I shouldn’t, I decided to pursue this crush. Very innocently, of course. What do you take me for? I wasn’t expecting anything serious to happen but I wanted to get to know him and see where it would go from there. I tend to be a bit forward when I crush on a guy, I mean, I am after all the one who asked out the bf but the bf turned out to be an amazing guy which I can’t really say the same for E… oops I’m getting ahead of myself! Ok, where was I? Right, I decided to pursue E so I added him on Facebook and began to message him every now and then to get to know him. In the first week or so, I think he could tell that I liked him a bit and so he reminded me that he was my teacher and nothing could happen. I completely agreed. Honest. This story may make me look a little bad but I wasn’t hoping to become his girlfriend at all, I just wanted to get to know him and maybe go for a date since I didn’t know anything about him. So I told him that, I told him that all I wanted was to be friends since there wasn’t that much of an age difference and it didn’t take him long to get over the fact that he was my teacher and start to become very responsive in our chats. We began to become a little flirty with each other in school when no one was looking and I even went as far as to cook him lunch after he had told me what his favourite food was. I was very silly, giddy and just fully embracing my girly side. It was certainly an experience to be doing something that felt like it was straight out of a shoujo manga. Over the course of the first half of May, I could tell that he was really starting to like me back which was interesting….because I was starting to lose interest in him. Ok, chill I’m getting ahead of myself again but I’m looking back on this whole experience with hindsight and really I was just pursuing him so much because everyone told me not to and the more they did that the more I wanted to. I know, very childish. Anyway, I’m pretty sure it was around mid-May when we finally went on a date.

I told him to meet me next to my homestay’s apartment at Suwa shrine and after that, we walked up to Tateyama to sit at a really nice viewing spot (same place I woke up to see the sunrise). I thought this would be a great location where we wouldn’t really be seen by anyone and where we could have some privacy since only the elderly or really young kids ever go near there but it’s mostly empty when it’s not cherry blossom viewing season. We didn’t really need to hide anything because again it was just two people innocently meeting up (I do realize now that it was inappropriate) and there was only a 5 year age gap plus he looked super young. My interest in him sparked back up a bit that day because forbidden fruit and what not and I thought it was fun and exciting to have a secret date with a teacher. Anyway, I can’t remember for how long we sat at the top of Tateyama for but it was at least a few hours and all we did was talk….well I was talking. I filled in a lot of silence because he didn’t really have anything to say, I don’t even know what I talked about but it became apparent that outside of Facebook messenger this guy wasn’t so good with talking to women. He did tell me that it had been ages since he had a girlfriend and he hadn't met with a girl alone in a really long time (a bit of a red flag there...maybe?). Finally, around dinner time, we grabbed some cheap food from a bento place and some yakitori and sat outside to eat it as it became dark. It was kinda nice, I could tell though that he was starting to like me more than I liked him. A little while later we said good night to each other and parted ways and I went back to my apartment. I was satisfied. Honestly, in my head I felt like I was good, I did not need to pursue him any longer and I had experienced my “forbidden fruit”. Nothing happened of course, literally just talking and dinner. I had satisfied my curiosity and I honestly think that after that date is when I completely lost interest in him because I did get to know him a bit. I got to know...and this might sound a bit mean but I got to know that he really wasn’t interesting at all and was actually just a bit starved of attention, which I had given him. Over the next couple of weeks, he would message me and I would reply but I was no longer instigating the messages. He would tell me how much he couldn’t wait for our next date and after a while, his messages started to become really creepy and I stopped replying as much which made him not send as many messages. Anyway, I now need to backtrack a bit for you. So E and I went on our little date around mid-May and then afterward I pretty much put him at the back of my mind, right? Actually, just a little while before is when I met another guy, maybe like a week before? Which is also what was making me lose a bit of interest in E… Welllll a lot of interest. I still went on that date with him just because I wanted to see how things would go and if there was anything actually there and I proved to myself that there wasn’t. (Of course, E did not realize that the date didn’t go that well...but more on that later). Yea, so this new guy, who we’ll call Y. Another Japanese boy and damn was he like Japanese pop star attractive. I’ll start from the beginning. I was hanging out a lot with my coworkers by this point and one day we decided to meet up at Starbucks (one of three in Nagasaki city, it’s a small city and Starbucks was THE place to meet up) which is where I thought I would study and they would complete some marking and whatnot. After a while, my friend and coworker, B had to go and I was left with the receptionist...who was a little crazy but we’ll get to her some other time. Anyway, what happened next was very simple. This barista was spending a lot of time near our table cleaning up and at first, I didn’t notice until the receptionist (oh right, we’ll call her M) pointed him out to me and damn was I instantly attracted. I chatted him up a bit and I could tell that he was everything that E wasn’t. Very charismatic, boyish good looks, tall and talkative. 

So I hung around for a little while longer and then I packed up my stuff, walked up to him at the barista counter and asked if he was to be working the next day and told him I’ll see him then. (honestly looking back on it for some reason when I was living in Japan I just gained all this confidence that I never really had before, I have always been forward with my feelings but never this assertive and flirty and honestly, I kind of had the feeling almost that if I wanted a guy that I could have him, it was probably all the freedom and excitement of living abroad and being away from my parents) Right, so the next day I decided to take my time in going back to Starbucks, I hung out with LY, one of my French friends for most of the day, and studied with her and didn’t did really get to Starbucks until around 6. I rocked up with my books, saw that he was still there and set myself up to look like I was still gonna study. But then suddenly he disappeared from behind the counter, I figured that maybe he had gone on a break but then he reappeared in front of me in his civies. I was a bit taken aback that he was done work but pleased that he came to talk to me. He told me that he had just finished which was really just good timing and then we talked some more. I found out that he was 19 and in his first year of university studying to become an architect. He had to leave after a little while but I told him that we should be friends and that we should exchange LINE IDs (a popular Japanese messaging app, although I think it originated in Korea?). From that day onwards we messaged each other every day and damn was I smitten. He was a great talker and really made me feel special in our chats which I can’t really say the same for E. I never needed to instigate a conversation, he was always the one messaging me and was able to naturally keep the conversation going. The way he spoke to me and made me feel special was kinda like how Neal from White Collar talks to women, especially when he’s trying to con them. He would wish me a good morning and good night everyday, asked how I slept and how I was doing and really just showed that he cared. I began going to his Starbucks a lot more and would stay until he finished his shift and then he would walk me home, he was super gentlemanly. I told him that I like riding my bicycle everywhere so he said he loved riding his bike too and would always cycle to my apartment on his days off and we would walk our bikes side by side, we didn’t actually ride them so we could have a proper conversation. Towards the end of May, we met up one night and walked our bikes and chatted as we usually did but this time we went to a nearby river and sat down. It was all very romantic and what do you know, like out of a friggin romance novel or, again, shoujo manga, a lone firefly flew past and it really set the tone and made the night magical and intimate because it was both of our first times seeing one. We held hands, spoke for a while longer and I felt like I was in high school again and all my romantic fantasies from back then were coming true. I had properly fallen for this guy.