#hint: it's because it's not at the level of everyone else's output

[kalgalen]

like not to be an ungrateful bitch and it MIGHT be like. because i'm only one person and as such only have my perspective to go on but it really feels like other people's sketches regularly hit numbers i can never even hope to reach with finished pieces

maybe i should start only drawing fanart for fics and only sharing the result with the writers since there's more chance of them being hyped up by it than like. screaming into the void

[starseedfxofficial]

Unmasking Market Moves: The Hilarious Upside-Down Guide to Global Market Trends Markets are like that one roller coaster in an old theme park—screechy, erratic, and completely unpredictable. And much like that unpredictable roller coaster, markets have given us quite the ride this week. Let's peel back the curtain, pull out some ninja tactics, and dive into what makes these economic jolts both laughably wild and dangerously strategic. Euro Stoxx Bounces Back—Maybe The Euro Ate Its Spinach? Picture this: after a rough Wednesday where the Euro Stoxx 50 dropped like my confidence at a karaoke bar, it pulled itself back together and went up 0.3%. Maybe the Euro found a motivational meme, or perhaps the prospect of a firmer cash open inspired investors to get back in the game. Either way, it’s like the hero moment at the climax of a movie where everyone thought the protagonist had lost—only to see them pop back up like Rocky Balboa. But don't get caught up in the theatrics. Behind this bounce, a savvy trader might wonder about the fundamentals. Here's the hidden formula only experts use: liquidity pockets. When markets drop, liquidity often rebalances, creating strategic entry points. Ninja-level traders exploit these to gain a foothold when everyone else is still sulking over last night's losses. The Dollar Index Takes a Chill Pill, While Antipodeans Find Their Groove Now, let’s talk DXY. Like a teenager after finals, the Dollar Index decided to chill, retreating onto the 104 handle. Meanwhile, the antipodeans (that's Aussie and Kiwi for the uninitiated) took advantage of the lull and staged a comeback against the mighty greenback. Ever wonder why the antipodeans are called that? Well, it’s because Australia and New Zealand are on the opposite side of the world from Europe—so in market language, when the northern hemisphere catches a cold, the southern hemisphere might just start salsa dancing. But here's where the real Forex magic happens: experienced traders often know that antipodean rebounds can hint at shifts in commodity sentiment—and these shifts are prime for catching early wave trades. It’s like noticing that the wave pool at your local water park is about to kick in—time to grab your floatie and ride. Scholz Boots Lindner—Germany Turns Political Game of Thrones In a plot twist straight out of Game of Thrones, German Chancellor Scholz showed Finance Minister Lindner the door. And as if that’s not juicy enough, there’s a potential confidence vote on January 15th, meaning we could be rolling dice on new elections by March. If you think political intrigue doesn’t affect the markets, think again—traders are all but lighting bonfires as they strategize on how to use this turmoil to their advantage. The trick here? Political risk assessment. When major countries like Germany hit political turbulence, opportunities pop up in currency pairs like EUR/USD. Long-term traders have two options: hedge their positions or go on the offensive—taking the under-the-radar path and shorting during uncertainty while the inexperienced traders stick to their “wait and see” comfort zone. Future Highlights That Are Anything but Boring—Economic Data Carnival Edition Who needs a carnival when you have German Industrial Output, EZ Retail Sales, and the US Initial Jobless Claims data all in one week? And let’s not forget Wholesale Inventories, Riksbank, Norges Bank, BoE & Fed Policy Announcements, plus a smattering of ECB speeches. If that doesn’t scream thrill-a-minute, I don’t know what does. The hidden gem here is not just watching the data—it’s what you do in response. With jobless claims, for instance, a spike can signal a move towards safe-haven assets. Think of it like pulling out an umbrella—you know it's going to rain if jobless claims get too high. Underground traders anticipate these moves, positioning themselves well in advance, avoiding the panic of the masses. Corporate Earnings—The Great Investor's Easter Egg Hunt Just like Easter morning, we've got a ton of goodies to hunt for—earnings from heavyweights like Hochtief, Munich Re, Daimler Truck, Airbnb, and Moderna, to name a few. Every earnings report is like shaking an Easter egg to see if it’s hollow—is there real substance inside, or is it just another empty shell ready to crack? Advanced traders know earnings aren’t just about headlines. They analyze profit margin expansion and contraction, observe CapEx guidance, and scan for offbeat insights hidden in CEO remarks. Picture this: Daimler Truck, while giving mundane sales figures, subtly indicates a shift in Chinese demand. That could easily hint at broader shifts in commodity currency pairs—and that’s your queue to pounce. Where Opportunity Lies—And Why Most Traders Miss It If there’s one takeaway from today’s market shenanigans, it’s this: chaos is opportunity. Most people run from uncertainty, but if you’re reading this, you’re not “most people.” You’re the kind who rolls up their sleeves when others are scared stiff. Remember, Germany’s political drama doesn’t mean disaster—it’s simply setting the stage for new setups in EUR pairs. When earnings reports flood in, they're not white noise; they're guideposts for next week’s positioning. So, what’s next? Get your hands on the insider tips, engage in the discussions others are too afraid to have, and start strategizing like you belong behind the scenes. Because when the dust settles, those who were ready with their tactical roadmaps—while everyone else was merely watching—will be the ones enjoying the view from the top. Take Action and Level Up Your Trading - Stay updated on market movements at StarseedFX. - Learn advanced methodologies and ninja-level trading tactics through our comprehensive Forex Education. - Join the StarseedFX Community to access elite strategies, live alerts, and more by visiting Community Membership. - Plan smarter, trade smarter: Download your Free Trading Plan. Don’t just read the news—use it, and let’s get tactical. —————– Image Credits: Cover image at the top is AI-generated   Read the full article

[scertifiedsavanaclawstan]

The First Years Playing DnD

Sooo I’ve been on a dnd kick lately (like I’ve seriously been obsessed over it in every way) and I got some ideas about this sooo here’s a thing I wrote with all the first years including Ortho and Grim. Poor Yuu having to dm a 7 player game... but they’re the one who brought all the source books with them on their phone when coming to Twisted Wonderland so they brought this on themselves.

Grim

Originally suggested (read: pestered) that everyone try out this "role-playing thing”, since most of the other first years had at least heard of it. And it sounded fun to get to blow stuff up! Which he does... a lot. He’s your stereotypical, ever memed, Evocation Wizard. He’s never met a problem he couldn’t fireball, and if he does, he clearly hasn’t used enough fire. Also he flavors all his fire as blue... and he plays a tabaxi... and his character is filled with ambition and arrogance to be the world’s greatest mage... Yeah hes the guy who just plays himself. Everyone else is frequently annoyed by his antics, and keeps asking him to just try ONE utility spell they’re practically begging at this point. At least when they do get into combat he’s very effective, honestly he spends more time maximizing his damage output than he does focusing in class...

Ace

Jumped on board because he was pretty bored. REALLY jumped on board when he realized role playing wasn’t “Just talking to people about stuff that isn’t real” He’s still not actually very good at roleplay, but at least he makes up for it by being very enthusiastic about the human rogue he’s playing. Considering he picked the thief subclass... and begins every new npc meeting or room entry by stealing everything that isn’t nailed down (and some of that too. His starting equipment includes a crowbar and by damn he’s going to use it!) Even if he struggles to roleplay he still winds up more helpful to the party than Grim, at least since he stopped stealing from the party. After Epel nearly beat him up... out of character. That was a pretty heated session.

Deuce

Was also relatively interested because he didn’t have much else going on. Unlike Ace though he’s actually REALLY into roleplay. He’s one of the few who gave you an in depth backstory to work with. He’s a proud Oath of Redemption Paladin, a dwarf who left on an adventure in order to make his family proud! Because even in an RPG he can’t help but try to be the best boy he can be. He’s the one making sure Ace’s character doesn’t steal from anyone too important (when he rolls high enough on perception) and keeps the party on track. Of course that doesn’t mean he dislikes the other aspects of the game. It just means when he uses his divine smite every chance he gets, he’ll give an appropriate one liner with it.

Jack

He got roped into it. But he’s begrudgingly glad he did because he thinks it’s great. Jack’s definitely more into this because he gets to spend time with his friends classmates, but just like everything else that doesn’t mean he’s half assing it. He’s gone full in on the fantasy theme like Deuce and plays an elf, and he’s the only one other than Ortho who read ahead of level one to pick his class: A Circle of the Land Druid, the desert version. You’re not sure why he picked it, but the way his tail wags whenever he describes his plant spells making cacti pop out of the ground to impede his enemies might be a hint. You were half expecting him to use his wild shape on the dire wolf... but he said that wouldn’t make sense for a desert druid, so he usually picks either a lion... or hyena... Unless he really feels like going fast. He’s a decent role player, but doesn’t get nearly as into it as Deuce or Ortho.

Epel

He was in from the moment he realized he could make the character however he liked. AND role playing is sort of like acting right? So Vil couldn’t be upset with whatever Epel decided for his character (the fact that Epel was right about this however very much did upset Vil). It shouldn’t be a surprise then that his character is the most masculine, most smashy, most... tall? He’s a Goliath Berserker Barbarian. His roleplay might not be much more complex than the basics, along with some intimidation and Barbarian screaming, but he’s definitely having some of the most fun at the table. It wasn’t exactly surprising when he showed you his backup character... a rune knight fighter. He’d been playing the game for only a few weeks and he already found out how to max out player size.

Ortho

Ah Ortho, a dream and a nightmare all at once... You should have expected how he’d take to roleplay like a fish to water given his love of acting out movies and games alike... you ALSO should have known that Idia Shroud’s brother would make the most min-maxed character known to man, To both ends, he plays a scourge aasimar death cleric. He gave you more details on his character’s incredibly complex backstory than anyone else, complete with an angel civil war and his characters entire life history. Which he does keep in mind when he’s roleplaying to be fair. Of course, he also destroys all encounter balance since his character is so optimized: damage, healing, support, debuffs. He’s got it all. Why a death cleric though when technically any would do? Oh that’s just because he really likes the Lord of the Underworld, he is in Ignihyde after all!

Sebek

Sebek was not originally invited, he inserted himself when he heard Malleus mention that this “Dungeons and Dragons” you had mentioned sounded interesting. So of course he had to try it himself to test it for his lord. He plays a blue dragonborn, who actually has black scales because he begged really hard for the flavor change, who is also a blue draconic bloodline sorcerer for maximum lightning. His character is the heir to an ancient kingdom, who is mostly adventuring purely for his own amusement, and is named... Dralleus...  Maconia... No one exactly knews what to say, but Sebek is at least having fun, and honestly he isn’t bad at either mechanics or roleplaying... so everyone just kinds of ignores it.

[ghor-dranas]

Campaign 3 PC Class Predictions

This isn’t a novel or exciting type of post, but I just wanted to have this on record, because sometimes I make predictions, and don’t post them, and then they happen. These predictions aren’t exactly what I’d like to see, but more of an analysis of their playstyles and what conclusions I personally have drawn. 

Travis - Cleric, Wizard or Druid. Travis likes having versatility. He enjoys having a high damage output and mobility, but also likes being able to help the rest of the team, be that with debuffs, counterspells or healing. All three of the classes I suggested give him that flexibility. They’re also all prepared casters, which is something he’s gotten a bit of a taste of with Fjord’s paladin levels. Alternatively, he could go Bard for a similar level of flexibility, but with fewer options, prompting more creative uses. 

Laura - Wizard, Warlock or Sorceror. Laura is tired of being nice and just wants to go apeshit. But she likes having more options than a martial class will grant her. She again could also go Bard, but I think she wants to steer away from anything that can heal, because she really does not seem to enjoy that responsibility. 

Marisha - Bard, Warlock, Ranger, Rogue, Fighter. There’s a lot of things I think Marisha could enjoy here, mainly because I think that while she enjoyed Beau and Keyleth, she ended up tired of both of their playstyles. So she’ll want to avoid both full martial AND full support caster. 

Liam - Cleric. Liam, I think, actually enjoyed full caster with Caleb, full martial with Orym and Vax’s mix of both, but I think Cleric for him C3 because one thing he does seem to prioritize is enabling everyone else. He played Caleb as a support caster, he took Paladin levels with Vax, and Orym as a character was designed to take a back seat and enable everyone else. He did also make a comment in the C2 wrap-up about working his way through the original 4 classes, which COULD be a hint for this, OR it could be referring to Lieve’tel, there’s currently no way of knowing for sure. But I do think he’d enjoy playing cleric. 

Sam doesn’t pick his own class, so there’s no way for me to accurately predict this, because I don’t know on what basis Liam makes suggestions. I do think Sam would enjoy Ranger though, because he does seem to enjoy having a mix of magic and martial and having to think of creative uses for things. 

Taliesin and Ashley I have no idea, because they sit at opposite ends of this spectrum. Taliesin we’ve seen really enjoy playing Percy [a full martial class with very little support capabilities], Mollymauk [primarily martial with some support capabilities] and Caduceus [full caster with very little marital capabilities]. I believe he’s said that he’s played every class a lot, so really my only prediction for him is that he’ll likely play a subclass that has come out since C2. Ashley as I said before is at the complete opposite end where she’s played so comparatively little that I can’t quite get a read on her. I think she’ll keep trying out new things, so probably not a third prepared caster. Maybe a Monk. 

I’m not going to make a post speculating on which races they might pick, or subclasses, because races are more story focused and have very little mechanical bearing, and because there are far too many subclasses for me to even begin speculating on that. Just “probably somthing very different to what’s been played before” so not another War or Trickery Cleric. 

TL;DR: Travis - prepared caster; Laura - non-suport caster; Marisha - flexible caster/half caster; Liam - Cleric; Sam, Taliesin and Ashley - ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[tigerkirby215]

5e Sivir, the Battle Mistress build (League of Legends)

(Artwork made for Riot Games.)

Okay I know this is completely off topic but what the hell is Sivir's pose in her base splash art? Like oh my god doesn't that hurt your back? Jesus I know proportions are hard but wow this pose is terrible lmao.

Also it has come to my attention that I unintentionally made all the Legends of Runeterra Shuriman champions. Well I mean, Rammus isn't in LoR yet. Man we do really need more Shuriman champs.

Sorry I really don't have much of a blurb beyond that. Honestly only making Sivir for "randomly Shurima month." Like who actually plays Sivir anymore.

GOALS

Better duck! - We need to be able to throw everything at incoming danger and cut it down to size.

Here's where I get my cut - When faced with a hoard it doesn't hurt to be able to shoot everyone at once!

Nice try - Of course getting hit yourself would suck, so we're going to need ways to avoid incoming damage.

RACE

You have ascendant blood in you, which gives you just a touch of godly power. To connect to the gods look to the Aasimar. As an Aasimar you’d normally increase your Charisma by 2 but we’re instead going to invoke Tasha’s for a +2 to Dexterity. But your other abilities don’t change such as your Darkvision which I only mention because Light Bearer gives you the Light cantrip to help your friends with their dumb human eyes. You also get Celestial Resistance for a Spell Shield and Healing Hands for some potions in a pinch.

Fallen Aasimar require high Charisma and Scourge Aasimar hurt themselves as they fight, so we’ll be going for Protector Aasimar. We’re still going to get a +1 to Intelligence instead of Wisdom with Tasha’s rules, and we’ll cover more of what your subrace does for you at level 3.

ABILITY SCORES

15; INTELLIGENCE - Intelligence is tied to Investigation which makes it the tomb raiding skill. (I’d probably put Dexterity higher to be honest but I dislike uneven Ability Scores.)

14; DEXTERITY - You’re an ADC and even if you’re throwing stuff (which we won’t be in this build) Dexterity is still tied to most ranged combat abilities.

13; CONSTITUTION - While you may be squishy on the Rift we simply don’t need any other abilities for this build.

12; WISDOM - Wisdom is tied to Perception which is also useful when trying to avoid traps.

10; CHARISMA - You’re rather rough around the edges. Maybe if you were more Charismatic your fellow tomb raiders wouldn’t have double-crossed you.

8; STRENGTH - Even though you’re throwing weapons (which again: we won’t be for this build) you are very nimble and Fleet of Foot. Put simply we don’t need Strength at all for this build.

BACKGROUND

There’s no “Tomb Raider” background so we’ll fall back on Sivir’s job as a Mercenary Veteran. You get proficiency in Athletics and Persuasion as well as Land Vehicles and a gaming set of your choice (pick your poison.)

When you live the Mercenary Life you can easily identify other mercenaries by their emblems and logos. (RIP Clubs.) You know bits and pieces about their work, and can go seek them out for hints on the next ancient tomb to break into. And if all else fails you can fall back on mercenary work to maintain a comfortable lifestyle.

(Artwork made for Riot Games.)

THE BUILD

LEVEL 1 - ROGUE 1

Starting off as a Rogue because skills to raid tombs are always helpful. Skills like Acrobatics, Perception, Investigation, and... well we may as well grab Stealth as a Rogue. You also get Expertise in two skills: Investigation is the skill to find hidden loot, and Stealth is still pretty important as a Rogue.

When you live the mercenary life you know to speak in Thieves’ Cant so no wanabee treasure hunters try for your mark. Thieves’ Cant is a secret code with regular words that mean something else.

But let’s be real: what we’re really here for is Sneak Attack. When you have advantage on an attack (such as by attacking from stealth) or if your ADC is near the target you can do an additional d6 of damage.

LEVEL 2 - ROGUE 2

Second level Rogues are Fleet of Foot, and can use Cunning Action to Dash, Disengage, or Hide as a Bonus Action. Attack-Moving as an ADC is very important!

LEVEL 3 - ROGUE 3

Third level Rogues get to choose their Roguish Archetype, and you have the blood of a long-dead civilization in your veins. You revived your phantom of a great great great great (x20 more “great”s) grandfather, so Phantom Rogue will work well. Whispers of the Dead will let you choose a skill or tool to gain proficiency in after a Short or Long Rest, so you can adapt your tools to the situation at hand.

But more importantly you get Wails from the Grave. When you hit an enemy you can have your shot Ricochet to an enemy within 30 feet to deal necrotic damage equal to half the number of Sneak Attack dice for your level (round up.) You can use this feature a number of times equal to your proficiency bonus, and regain all expended uses when you finish a long rest.

Speaking of which your Sneak Attack die increases to 2d6. And speaking of more damage as a Protector Aasimar you get Radiant Soul. Once per long rest you can activate your Ascendant blood for 1 minute or until you end it as a bonus action. During this time you have a flying speed and deal extra Radiant damage equal to your level. Look just because we don’t see Sivir fly in-game doesn’t mean she can’t.

LEVEL 4 - ROGUE 4

4th level Rogues get an Ability Score Improvement: Dexterity controls most of what you do currently. Increase it by 2 for more damage, better skill checks, and better AC.

(Artwork made for Riot Games.)

LEVEL 5 - FIGHTER 1

ADCs are meant to fight, and Fighters are good at that! You get a Fighting Style to boost your right clicks and a “Marksman” needs Archery, even if they’re technically throwing weapons. (By the way by this point I’d recommend using a Longbow, for multiple reasons other than “it’s better than a Shortbow / Light Crossbow.”)

You can also pop the Heal Summoner Spell for a Second Wind, healing yourself for a d10 plus your Fighter level as a Bonus Action.

LEVEL 6 - FIGHTER 2

Second level Fighters are On the Hunt (by themselves), and can Action Surge to take an additional action! For now this just means one more attack, but your damage output will really increase at higher levels!

LEVEL 7 - FIGHTER 3

Third level Fighters get to choose their Martial Archetype, and while it’s perhaps not the most accurate or the strongest Arcane Archer is the only way to get some of Sivir’s abilities. But firstly you get Arcane Archer Lore for the Arcana skill (or Nature but Arcana is better), as well as the Prestidigitation cantrip (or Druidcraft but Prestidigitation is better.)

But your main feature is of course the Arcane Shot. Once per turn you can use one of your Arcane Shot options. You decide to use it when the arrow hits a creature, unless the option doesn’t involve an attack roll. Piercing Arrow will serve as your “Boomerang” Blade, firing a projectile in a 30 foot line that deals damage to everyone it passes through. This ability will go through cover so you can shoot past walls too!

There aren’t really many other options that fit Sivir, but Bursting Arrow will make your shot “Ricochet” on enemies within 5 feet of your initial target. And will do more damage, obviously.

You have two Arcane Shots per Short or Long Rest, but I’d really recommend discussing the subclass with your DM. Arcane Archer is known for being weak but it becomes a lot stronger if you make the Arcane Shots scale with either Intelligence modifier or your Proficiency Bonus. I don’t normally recommend homebrew changes but Arcane Archer is honestly a fun subclass hampered by how limited your Arcane Shot options are. I really recommend discussing buffs to the class if you wish to play one. 

LEVEL 8 - FIGHTER 4

4th level Fighters get another Ability Score Improvement and while tricks are useful shooting good is still your main goal. Increase your Dexterity by 2 for the deadliest shots possible.

(Artwork by Horace "Hozure" Hsu and Alex "alexplank" Flores. Made for Riot Games.)

LEVEL 9 - FIGHTER 5

5th level Fighters get their Beserker's Greaves, granting them enough attack speed for an Extra Attack to make two attacks in a turn! "Business is good."

LEVEL 10 - FIGHTER 6

Fighters get Ability Score Improvements instead of Class Features, but that's cool because it means we can get feats! Your Constitution has been sitting at 13 for awhile now, and while I'd normally try to grab a more fun feat Resilient will increase your Constitution by 1 and also make it easier to resist spells, which is like a spell shield!

LEVEL 11- FIGHTER 7

7th level Fighters get their Mythic! Kraken Slayer will give you Magic Arrows that do... exactly what they say on the tin! Magic damage for the sake of overcoming resistance or immunity to nonmagical damage.

Additionally if you miss you can use your Bonus Action to Ricochet your shot to another enemy. Curving Shot will let you redirect a missed hit towards a different enemy within 60 feet.

You also learn another Arcane Shot option: Enfeebling Arrow is like exhaust on an arrow. The target takes an additional 2d6 Necrotic damage and has to make a Constitution saving throw. If they fail the damage of their attacks is reduced by half until the start of your next turn.

LEVEL 12 - FIGHTER 8

More Feats are fun! While I could take Resilient in every stat or perhaps Mage Slayer I think Lucky works better to simulate Sivir's spell shield. If you make a roll on a d20 that you don't like you can roll a Lucky die to change it. You can use this not just on saving throws but also attack rolls, ability checks, and even enemy rolls! (Though of course the most flavorful thing would be to only use it on your own saving throws.) You do only have 3 of these per Long Rest, so be sure to use them wisely to block deadly spells.

(Artwork made for Riot Games.)

LEVEL 13 - ROGUE 5

5th level Rogues can survive a bit of harass thanks to Uncanny Dodge, letting you reduce the damage from a weapon attack you saw coming by half with your reaction. "Nice try." Your Sneak Attack also increases to 3d6, meaning that your Wails from the Grave increase to 2d6.

LEVEL 14 - ROGUE 6

6th level Rogues get Expertise in two more skills: Perception will help you see danger coming, and Acrobatics will help you avoid that danger.

LEVEL 15 - ROGUE 7

7th level Rogues can dodge skillshot with Evasion. If you succeed on a Dexterity saving throw you take no damage. If you fail on the saving throw you only take half damage, instead of the full damage! "Step light, strike hard." Your Sneak Attack also increases to 4d6.

LEVEL 16 - ROGUE 8

Another Ability Score Improvement is in order, and this will actually be your last one! More Intelligence will boost your Arcane Shots, but the Sharpshooter feat will boost your regular shots. It’s up to you what you do really; adapt your build for more Ability Power or more Attack Damage.

LEVEL 17 - ROGUE 9

9th level Phantom Rogues can loot the dead. When a creature you see dies within 30 feet you can use your reaction to grab a Tokens of the Departed. You can have a maximum number of soul trinkets equal to your proficiency bonus, and can’t create one while at your maximum. You can use soul trinkets in the following ways:

While you have at least one soul trinket you have advantage on death saving throws and Constitution saving throws.

When you deal Sneak Attack damage you can destroy one of your soul trinkets to use Wails from the Grave without expending a use of that feature.

As an action, you can destroy one of your soul trinkets to ask the spirit associated with the trinket one question. The spirit appears to you and answers in a language it knew in life. It doesn’t have to be truthful, and it answers as concisely as possible, eager to be free. The spirit knows only what it knew in life, as determined by the DM.

And to top it off your Sneak Attack increases to 5d6, which also means your Wails from the Grave increases to 3d6! “Life’s cheap. Death pays.”

(Artwork by Jean “Curing” Go. Made for Riot Games.)

LEVEL 18 - FIGHTER 9

9th level Rogues get another Spell Shield with Indomitable. Once per Long Rest when you fail a saving throw, you can reroll it! It’s really that simple.

LEVEL 19 - FIGHTER 10

10th level Arcane Archers get another Arcane Shot Option. What? Did you want actual class features? Too bad! Regardless take whatever option you think will be useful honestly, because we got everything we wanted from the earlier levels.

LEVEL 20 - FIGHTER 11

Now that you’re finally six-slotted you can attack three times with your Extra Attack, or 6 times with Action Surge!

FINAL BUILD

PROS

I've got values; they stack up nicely - Three attacks per turn is good in its own right, but you’ve also got Arcane Shots, a Sneak Attack that can affect two targets, and Radiant Soul to add a flat +20 to your damage every turn.

I'll fight for a cause; I won't die for one - Having around 150 HP is nothing to sneeze at, but what’s really impressive is your saving throws. Proficiency in DEX, CON, and INT saves means you won’t be failing those saves anytime soon, especially since your Soul Trinkets give you advantage on CON saves!

You've got a problem, I've got a price - You’ve got plenty of utility with Expertise in the two “searching” skills, the ability to interrogate people after death, and of course good ol’ Lucky if things go south.

CONS

Make me work for it - You need a lot of actions and reactions to operate at maximum effectiveness. Soul Trinkets are tied to spending reactions and you need your Bonus Action for Curving Shot as well as your Cunning Actions.

Don't get between me, and my gold - You’re honestly not that skillful for a Rogue, with a lot of dud skills (let’s be honest you really don’t need Athletics) instead of potentially more useful things like Insight or Survival. Sure +13 to Perception is nice but that and Investigation are probably the only two skills you’re notably good at, as your took Expertise in general Rogue abilities instead of team utility.

They say the desert is a cruel mistress - Half your saving throws are very good. The other half...? +1 Wisdom saves are quite mediocre for a common save, and -1 to Strength saves certainly has the chance to hurt. Even if you can reroll them it’s still going to be hard to make those saves.

But you’re reliable which is all that can be asked for a mercenary. Your jobs are to fight and to nab treasure, both of which you’re damn good at. Go ahead and pull this build out if the party needs a reliable marksman, and if you roleplay them well they may not even realize you’re playing a character from League of Legends. Pull a little Sneaky on them.

(Artwork by Alex “alexplank” Flores. Made for Riot Games.)

[crystalelemental]

I have 20 minutes before I have to feed the cat and get started on these courses that finally allowed me access, so let’s take a moment to talk about my good friend Thracia 776.

I made it through Chapter 5, and got both sidequest chapters along the way.  So that’s fun.  I decided to play on Paragon mode, because I don’t give a shit about challenge, I’m here to try and enjoy the experience for a game whose story I actually really like.

Currently, Leif is doing pretty well, mostly seems to do great with strength and speed, but his skill is bad and I don’t think he’s gained any build so that’s fun.  I think Macha’s been the most unprecedented hero so far.  She’s had two 6 point levels.  That’s really good.  Brighton’s had mostly 1 point levels so he’s not doing so hot.  Asbel seems super magic screwed, he still only has like 4 magic at level 7.  Not looking forward to that long-term.  Tanya actually got some fantastic levels too, including a lot of extra strength, so I’ll be doing my damnedest to get her back.

Chapters 1-3 remain pretty enjoyable.  Moreso now that I understand capturing as a mechanic and how to do that effectively.  A big issue before was not knowing how to set up a good capture, but now that I’m in the swing of it...I kinda like this feature?  Like it’s kinda cool.  Only kinda, though.  And the “only kinda” part kicks in as soon as you hit Chapter 4, where everything starts breaking down, but I’ll get to that.

I’m currently playing with the Lil Munster patch, which also allows me to see the hidden skills for units.  Such as Miracle+ on Eyvel, which just literally prevents her from ever dying.  I did not know that was a thing, and let me tell you, everything going on with Chapter 5′s pitfighters is suddenly a lot less bullshit.  Yes, you can argue all you want that it increases the tension when you don’t know it’s there, but also fuck that.

Chapter 4 is really where I think I’m going to start complaining.  Which is funny because on a second playthrough?  This is actually a pretty fun chapter.  You know, mostly.  Facilitating the escape of the civilians was pretty simple and fun, and it honestly helped out Karin the most, since she wasn’t particularly threatened by a guard holding a captive.  I was also pleasantly surprised at how engaging that map managed to be in terms of just...gathering Vulneraries.  Like, looking at it, I expected a disaster, but judicious use of the thieves and maybe a capture here and there actually nets you enough to equip everyone with a full vulnerary.

Until the trouble.  Let me be frank: I am always one for soft resetting when a character dies, and I’m trying to break myself of that particular habit a bit.  It’s not that I want to not care about characters, so much as recognizing that some characters I don’t give a shit about so why reset everyone else for them?  I play a quick run of Shadow Dragon before this, and just let people die, and honestly it was a lot more engaging when you’re not resetting for stupid things.  But there was one unit who causes two of the three resets, because I couldn’t afford to lose him.  Julian.  I couldn’t just lose the thief and that utility.  Resets occur not because of character love, but because you cannot give up the utility presented.

I feel like that’s part of early Thracia’s problem.  Chapters 1-3, it’s pretty easy to keep everyone alive, especially with Eyvel being actually invincible, and having three super units in Eyvel, Dagdar, and Finn.  If you got the Vouge and the Brave Axe, Osian and Halvan are actually ridiculous too.  But once you hit Chapter 4, things feel like they change to a level that’s a bit absurd?  If you didn’t successfully set up recruitment of Dalsin, I kinda feel like Chapter 4 and 4x are just impossible.  The only way to damage these armor knights are Leif’s Light Brand at range, and Dalsin’s axe.  Pretty much everyone else is dealing about 2 damage, and hoping for a crit, with none of them having the B-rank swords to make use of Armorslayer.  So the chokepoint strategy to the north feels decisively impossible because of how much damage you take, how little you deal in response, and how hard it is to actually break through and take out the mages when their numbers dwindle.  Not to mention one less unit means you have less defense against the soldier reinforcements, and it’s that much harder to protect your thieves.  Which, actually, speaking of: Thieves plural.  Which requires you actually got Lithis.  You probably did, his condition is super easy to achieve.  But.  My recollection is that the original version of this game didn’t give you little icons to tell you when people could talk to one another.  So unless you just figured out that Leif can talk to Eyvel (but not the other way around, that’s too much), you’d miss the hint about “Just catch him and hold onto him.”  At which point I feel it is fair to say people might release him after taking his stuff.  And then you only have one thief.  Which is.  Not great.  And slows down that prison escape significantly.

Then there’s 4x, where you really need 4 strong frontliners to block off attacks, and if you don’t have Dalsin I honestly feel like you’re just hosed, both in terms of taking too much damage, and having too few units to deal with the mages.  I’m not going to say it’s impossible to deal with, but for a putz like me it feels pretty impossible without the big tank man on deck.

Then there’s the issue of capturing.  Capturing only works if your build is higher than the opponent.  If you have a lower build, you can’t capture anyone.  Which is all well and good when you have four chunky axe bros and a cav on your side.  Then you can capture just about anything, especially with Tanya and Ronan giving you some nice chip damage to set up those easy captures.  But Chapter 4-5, you really don’t have many options.  Brighton is consistently able to capture, but Fergus isn’t.  8 build isn’t bad, but it’s not enough to capture one of the soldiers and take their vulneraries.  So if you didn’t get Dalsin, you have one guy who can consistently capture people.  One.  The thieves can steal, but Lara’s build is so low she basically can’t steal anything heavier than a vulnerary or door key, and she’s got 14HP so good luck leaving her in range of anything.  So like.  That’s fun.

Point being, some of these challenges feel distinctly impossible without save states as a result.  I think the biggest offender was admittedly an optional one: the two Loptyr mages in front of the chests in Chapter 5.  Man, those guys are fucked.  Tremendous damage output, poison, and had an absurdly high crit rate that would one-shot anyone if it hit.  I think Leif was able to deny the crits with Light Brand but I’m honestly not sure.  The fact you had to deal with two of them, or risk Leif having to chip them 3 damage at a time at range, was kind of a problem.  That’s the kind of thing where I don’t really know how you’re supposed to manage that, and save states feel incredibly necessary if you’re going to stand a chance.  Granted, this is optional, you can escape and just leave those chests.  But this isn’t the only situation I can think of where the game just plays stupid, and usually the stupid is with mages, because magic is resistance and no one has any.  Except Karin, who is delightfully too weak to actually KO a mage in response.  So that helps.  Situations across Chapters 4-5 have been difficult, because of the presence of magical hits that can 2-shot people if they connect, and a lot of situations feel like you’re desperately hoping for a particular attack to connect so you don’t start losing people left and right.  And then the attack misses anyway because 100% accuracy doesn’t exist, and whoops now you’re gone.

Despite that, I’m still enjoying this more than my first time through.  Maybe it’s familiarity with the game and its mechanics, but I do feel like being able to clear Chapter 4 without screaming is a good indicator that maybe it’s not as bad as I remembered.  We’ll see though, there’s much worse to come.

[captainsupernoodle]

@wolfsrainrules @north-peach IT’S HERE!!

This is very long????????????

(also writing this really drove home another one of those moments where i'm just like “what the FLIP I have FAMILY as young as this hero WHAT ARE THE GROWNUPS DOING”)

Ichigo is immediately like “a person who Knows Things! Who's willing to Tell Me Those Things!” and sits down and lays out everything he's been mentally and not-so-mentally screaming about since he got STABBED with a SWORD and got up with MAGIC POWERS. Byakuya eventually meanders them to his estate and orders tea and half of soul society feels Judged even though they're not sure where it's coming from. Byakuya is massively unimpressed with Everything.

Whether this is right after the first invasion or later would change some things, but in any era what the fallout mostly boils down to is the Gotei freaking out because suddenly! The super-powerful kid they've had running around is asking questions! And doing things!! Legally!!!

Ichigo puts Byakuya on speed dial on his soul phone and calls him up every time he thinks of a problem or someone tries harassing him or Isshin says something that just. Doesn't add up.

And eventually he just starts calling Byakuya to yell about shinigami nonsense around town (his bedroom is no longer marked as a safe house, has the esteemed Gotei 13 fallen so low–), about theories and experiments he's doing to adapt kido to his reiatsu levels, about history and science and reishi architecture and whatever else catches his interests, and Byakuya pretty much always picks up, even if it's just to tell him that he's in a meeting and setting a time for them to talk, and when he visits soul society he has friends who are eager to see him but he always spends some time at Byakuya's.

(more under the cut!)

Byakuya is quick to invite him into the Kuchiki library, and they spend many afternoons and evenings just sitting quietly, Ichigo tearing through scrolls and records, Byakuya doing paperwork or reading, and sometimes Ichigo will ask a question or Byakuya will point out that this author over here expounds on that point in the book you're reading, and they'll have intellectual debates over hasty bites out of their dinner and the staff is Scandalized by the young lord taking books to the table but after the first three times they got up in the middle of eating bc byakuya was trying to enforce Decorum ichigo just brought his books with him and then byakuya had to get up to reference something and it was just too much trouble. The head servant whatever is just like fine! fine, at least they're not eating in the library, who knows what might happen with a Shiba in the works, at least the young lord still has a grip on his temper.

And it is funny to anyone who sees them together -- it took a little while because Ichigo isn't actually in SS all that often, he usually trains in the bunker and Kisuke is about all the mad scientist he can handle, but he comes to hang with Renji & other friends on some weekends -- but they actually do get along like a house on fire after byakuya flipped the "mentor" switch and let his guard down enough to keep getting sucked into heated debates. Ichigo's not a rebel, necessarily, in that he's not out there constantly looking for reasons to pick fights with anyone, he just doesn't let anyone pick fights with him or his friends and also goes "well that's stupid" with... pretty much any kind of unjust authority and law. It drives Byakuya a bit bonkers but he channels it into "educate the unfortunately misinformed future clan head" instead of immediate senbonzakura-ing. Trouble is that Ichigo is entirely ready for friendly debate throw-downs and yeah, maybe he doesn't have a law degree, but execution without a trial for trying to protect people, byakuya, really?

And this is where a little of the cultural confusion comes through, because Byakuya is intellectually aware that Ichigo is human but it doesn't really affect much beyond Ichigo being from somewhere else and being unfamiliar with soul society. And he's like, mostly adult-shaped, right? He's bigger than Toshiro, and most souls that look like Ichigo are already out doing things, even if they're still pretty closely connected with home, and he acts young sometimes but most of the time he's at Byakuya's level, just less experienced, which is to be expected given shinigami aging. So Byakuya answers any questions he has and applies pressure in ichigo's favor when needs be in the background, and otherwise lets Ichigo come to him and generally be independent.

And this works for Ichigo! He's been independent for years, wrongfully so, but he still has more life experience than most kids his age and is fiercely independent on top of that, so having someone to lean on is both novel and avoids being suffocating or condescending. A lot of the time he wants help – he already has more independence than he really wanted, and he's mostly adjusted to it, but it doesn't stop him from wanting some of that support that he's been lacking for so long, and that Byakuya is freely offering.

And eventually he figures out that he's started telling Byakuya things he hasn't told anyone else – questions about hollows eventually led to offhand mention of his hollowfication, and oh right, he'd actually kind of attacked Byakuya with his hollow mask, he'd probably want an explanation for that and even as chill as he's been so far the soul society anti-hollow rhetoric has gotta come into play somewhere with a noble –

Except Byakuya doesn't push. He never pushes. Even with that first offer, he was just laying out an option that Ichigo could take if he needed it, and he followed through when Ichigo took him up on it.

So he has a bit of a crisis and is a little more scowly than usual, but his sisters and friends know what it looks like when he's thinking really hard about something and leave him be, and he takes some long walks with Chad, just turning over what's been happening in his head and considering.

(Byakuya's been one of his people since he got his head screwed on straight, but Ichigo knows he has a tendency to latch on in ways that most people don't reciprocate, and it's okay. His friends have gone to war with him for someone they barely knew, they trust him, and he can lean on Chad most times, and it's good, it's good to have friends and precious people to protect.

But Byakuya isn't looking for his protection, or for someone to follow, or to spar with or experiment on or manipulate.

He's just – there.)

His thinking doesn't change much. He's already confided more in Byakuya than he has with anyone, because before hollows and Soul Society his friend group was all human teenagers doing teenager things, and Chad was sorely needed relief from a chaotic home life but he was still Ichigo's age, didn't have answers to a lot of the questions Ichigo's been shoving deep ever since his mom died. Byakuya doesn't press, doesn't judge, thinks deeply before speaking, but Ichigo always knows he's listening.

It's. It's good. It's really good.

And I guess I have a timeframe after all because Ichigo's really been there and back by the time of the Winter War. Byakuya sent his sister and his lieutenant to support Ichigo before he'd even been denied help to rescue Orihime, and came to Hueco Mundo himself, and listened again when Ichigo came to him, glaring and stiff, and slowly, quietly told him about dying and coming back less than human, fear in the faces of his friends and enemies, about seeing a soul – a person – crumble at his own hands.

Byakuya gets a hint, then, that Ichigo isn't quite the same as a soul. Souls might go entire lives only in soul society, from birth to death, but even souls who grow naturally rather than coming from the Living World are in some ways static, slightly less flexible in some fundamental way than those in the Living World. He does a little asking around, and Ichigo is so young even by human standards – Soul Society has been leaning on him like he's as old as his power levels suggest, in a place where passive reiatsu output is often more accurate than physical appearance, and all this time he's not even fully developed as a person, is still soft and learning how to exist in the world.

Byakuya has his own crisis right about then, and I'm playing fast and loose with timelines because I don't even remember most of the show, so in this au we're in a waiting period after clashing with the Espada just enough to get Orihime back – all the shinigami are alive, Grimmjow is licking his wounds-presumed-dead, tragic batman is dead, harribel and the tres bestias are not wearing battle bikinis cool, uuuuuuuum I think???? the vizard already happened before the grand desert slaycation??? Byakuya has a few belated heart attacks when he hears about training and the dangers thereof even though he's been privy to & helping with Ichigo's solo experiments with the hollow mask, and after Orihime is back and the shinigami do whatever sneaky sneak they've been planning or however it was they figured out about the time limit or whyever they wait for the Karakura pillars fiasco instead of, idunno, trying to prevent the megalomaniac from keeping hold of the magic rock….

ANYWAY there's a quiet period and Byakuya has his oh crap i'm a dad crisis and eventually is just like this is a literal child but he's proved himself time and time again that he's capable and wouldn't appreciate anyone butting in on his business uninvited, so instead he's sneaky about it. Most of his sneaking reveals that things are about like Ichigo's described, he has school and friends and training (urahara probably notices his snooping but he's certainly not the one filling in for Isshin's catastrophic failures in parenting, and maybe he sees the need or maybe he just isn't bothered enough to do something about being spied on, and he never interferes or tells kurosaki). Okay, this is fine, if everyone else is a complete and utter failure of a parent then he'll have to fill in whatever Ichigo hasn't covered himself. He gets an actually competent shinigami to cover Karakura, gets a copy of his school schedule and keeps people from harassing him near tests, is even more stringent with fronting central 46's stupidity and Very Firmly, At Risk of Murder cuts off all possible contact between Kurotsushi and Ichigo's people (and may start quietly grooming nemu to take over the 12th but nobody can prove it).

Things are bopping along, and then we have whatever permutation of the winter war that happens in this AU. Byakuya's been busy with the Grand Karakura Relocation or whatever the plan is and reinforcing his division, whipping them into shape after centuries of nothing but low-level hollows, and he knows that Ichigo's doing the same and he isn't concerned when they have less time to communicate.

Then Aizen.

I never actually watched the interim between the hundreds of episodes of vs arrancar fights and the butterfly beatdown but i'm assuming that everybody's tied up elsewhere or else they wouldn't have let a SINGLE 15YO fight aizen on his own, right? RIGHT???

Anyway in THIS fic that's the way it works, and while urahara and some of the other captains/ whoever's fighting fit, free, and not gonna die just from standing near the powerhouses lends a hand, so Byakuya is busy but not really worried bc Ichigo is a proven warrior and he has backup and for all his unexpected fondness, byakuya is still a military man and he Compartmentalizes.

Except then Ichigo's power rises and rises and rises again, and then all at once disappears.

Byakuya promptly flips his lid and Aizen goes into the box a bit more shredded than he did in the og timeline.

Everybody else gets the idea pretty quickly and flings Ichigo at Byakuya, who figures out what happened very fast and immediately decides Isshin has lost all rights to anything, ever. Ichigo is kept abreast of all developments in the efforts to get his powers back and NOBODY leaves him to his own devices for two years because Byakuya is persistently present and Isshin is on his shit list big time so he takes great joy in thwarting him at every turn.

I haven't watched or read the Ginjo arc at all but from what I gather they sneak in while Ichigo's isolated so there's a solid chance all that mess gets cut off at the knees.

Byakuya may or may not have an apartment and double life as a reclusive rich businessman in the Living World so that Ichigo has a place to stay when Isshin is Too Much, maybe the welcome eventually gets expanded to Chad and Orihime and the twins, but whatever goes on after Aizen, Byakuya is there and backing Ichigo up.

[firesign23]

Trope mash up: detective au + poorly timed confession

Okay, so, a few notes first. I got this mash-up (detective AU + poorly timed confession) and it so perfectly fit my plans for Cocks and Robbers (not its real title, I promise) that I was like “Damn.” So then I decided to write a version of a scene that will eventually be part of a longer fic. In theory. The basic premise of which is FBI-agent-equivalent Jaime has struck up an unlikely friendship with Detective Tarth of the King’s Landing PD after they worked the kidnapping of the Stark girls together three years previously. Simmering attraction, blahblah, Jaime gets caught in a bank robbery/hostage situation, manages to notify Brienne’s captain/his close friend as it started, blahblah, y’all know this trope.

Trope mash up: detective au + poorly timed confession

(Below the cut for length)

Jaime looks around the office, assessing each of his fellow hostages. The group has formed a near-circle, though none have been brave or foolish enough to put their backs to the door where one of the robbers stands sentinel. The man is watching the corridor, not the hostages, his fingers tapping the barrel of his rifle in a strange staccato. Amateur, then. Or possibly just cocky.

Of the hostages, six of them are some degree of hysterical, ranging from slightly upset (one of the tellers) to about-to-lose-their-shit-and-get-someone-shot-in-the-process (the bank president); the only one who isn’t is the bank security guard, a crude man who is eyeing Jaime with the same sort of assessing gaze. Blackwater, says his nametag. Jaime hopes like fuck he’s uninterested in getting shot--he’s the closest thing Jaime has to an ally at the moment.

Shuffling back slightly so his back is against the heavy oak desk, he manages to slip his phone from his sock, where he’d stuffed it as the robbery began. He doesn’t want this noticed, hopes like hell none of the others see it and ask questions. The quickest glance tells him his text chain with Addam is still on-screen--he mutes the output and hits the call button, then shoves the phone beneath the edge of the desk. It should be good enough to pick up the conversation in the room, give the police outside some idea of what’s going on, at least in this room.

He runs a hand over his face, eyes roving around the room once more. He's trained for this possibility, it’s part of the job, but he never expected to have to use it. Not for what was supposed to be a routine trip to the bank. He hadn’t even stopped for coffee this morning. He just hopes it’s enough, hopes he can keep order before someone fucks up and gets hurt, or--experience warns him--gets someone else hurt.

*

Brienne isn’t entirely sure how long they have been sitting in the surveillance van, waiting for Ops to get a video feed inside the bank. Too fucking long, by any reckoning.

She’s contemplating whether she can just walk into the damn building and fuck the consequences when Addam’s phone rings.

“It’s Jaime,” he says, and for a moment Brienne thinks that maybe he’s inside but not--

Addam answers, muting the mic and putting it on speaker in one swift movement, hooking it up to the computers in the van, and Jaime’s voice comes through. She’s never been so glad for his expensive taste in technology--he’s distant, as if he’s hidden the phone nearby, but the sound is clear.

“Hey,” Jaime says, interrupting low murmurs—the other hostages. “If we’re going to be stuck in Edd’s office, why don’t we go around, tell everyone our names? We might as well know who we’re stuck here with. The guy at the door isn’t going to mind.”

Edd. Bank president. Brienne writes it down, shoves it at one of the officers in the van with them. It should help, knowing where the hostages are being held. There’s a frisson of… not excitement, this is too dangerous to be excited about, but it’s something. Jaime leads the conversation, the voices in varying degrees of clarity, but he is always clear, his words layered in subtext that Brienne and Addam are able to parse. There are seven hostages in addition to Jaime, a single man guarding the door to the office where they are being held. Jaime manages to convey that there were at least three more, all armed, and he has no idea where any of them are. Nobody is injured. Yet. It’s something.

The conversation dies away, but even through the phone Brienne can tell that people are getting restless, panicked. Panicked people are dangerous. They make stupid decisions and people get hurt. Jaime must notice too, because he speaks again, in that same level, soothing tone. Panicked people are dangerous, but they can be controlled.

“Listen,” he says. “Every single one of us has a reason to walk out that door safely. Let’s focus on that, okay? Jeyne, what about you? What is waiting for you?”

Brienne listens as the group takes turns talking about the thing that means the most to them, the thing worth living for. Friends. Family. One of the women mentions that she has a cross-stitch she’s never found the time to finish. Another talks of the holiday she has booked, her first one since her husband passed away the year before. Jaime keeps them talking, engaged, distracted. Brienne tries to pick up hints of the situation inside the bank, keep her mind on the task at hand, but there is an aching humanness in the conversation that sets a strange lump in her breast.

“What about you, Jaime?”

It’s one of the women that asks. He’s avoided talking about himself up til now.

“I have a cat,” he says, a familiar gentle fondness in his voice. It’s a good line. True, but not revealing. “Giant grey tom called Honor. I rescued him in the Vale last winter. Well, I didn’t. I was with a friend--”

“You fucking her? This friend of yours.” It’s one of the men. Bronn, she thinks, the security guard. She doesn’t even want to imagine why his mind went there, but it keeps the conversation moving. Someone titters, a nervous laugh but a laugh all the same.

“I never said it was a woman,” Jaime replies dryly.

“It’s always a woman,” says the man. “That’s a no, then. You wanna fuck her?”

This time, Jaime ignores the comment entirely. “We had to head back early, before a snowstorm hit, and it was dark and late and fucking freezing, and she insi--”

“Told you it was a woman.”

“--insisted on checking the car before we moved. Said animals would sleep anywhere when it was that cold. Of course, she was right. She found this scrawny little kitten tucked around the engine and…”

Brienne knows the way he smiles at this part of the story, the unaffected little shrug he gives as if to say what else could we do? One of the women laughs genuinely, despite the circumstances. Jaime has that effect on people.

“The friend can’t have pets at her place, so he came home with me. He’s mouthy and stubborn, so I tried to name him after… well, she didn’t like that. And Meticulous Pain In My Ass was too unwieldy, so Honor it was.”

There’s a softness in his voice by the end, an affection that she knows is about more than the most spoiled feline in King’s Landing.

“Sounds like you have more than the cat waiting for you,” says one of the women, startling Brienne. “She must be very lucky.”

She expects him to object, or play it off, but Jaime is simply silent for a long moment. “She’s extraordinary,” he finally says. There is a raw honesty that she rarely associates with him in his tone. “She doesn’t know that I... She should be told.”

And she knows, objectively, that he is talking about her. She’d held that little kitten halfway to King’s Landing before they’d found a place to stop and buy supplies, it’s not like she can forget that. She can even, in that distant part of her that is not entirely focused on the job, acknowledge the implications of what he is saying. She can’t deal with them, but she can acknowledge them. It isn’t until Addam looks at her though, far too much sympathy in his eyes to be coming from her captain, that she realises.

Jaime doesn’t know she is here. His words are meant for Addam, not for her. A message to pass on, if the worst happens. He doesn’t… however calm his voice, however clever his communication, he doesn’t think he’ll be walking out of that bank alive.

And his last-- no.

“Take five, Tarth,” orders Addam, brisk but not unkind. “It’s your turn to grab the coffees.”

She doesn’t want to go, doesn’t want to risk missing… She doesn’t want to go, but she can’t stay either, can’t sit in this cramped little van listening to his voice knowing it might be the last time she hears it.

Not when he’s just admitted he loves her.

Fanfiction Trope MASH-UP

[robert-c]

The “Right” to Bear Arms

Typical of how these “debates” get off on the wrong foot from the very beginning is the gun “rights” lobby’s complete ignoring of the first 13 words of that famous second amendment to the Constitution. Those words? “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State,”. EVERYTHING that follows in that amendment, especially and including the “magic phrase” – “shall not be infringed” are prefaced, modified and in the context of those first thirteen words. So, from the very beginning of the republic the idea was that there should be some regulation of this right to bear arms and that it was connected with a defense of the state and the peace, NOT necessarily with personal protection, ideology or even personal sportsmanship.

Therefore, restrictions on types of weapons and background checks and any other regulation of gun ownership is in no way an infringement or violation of this amendment. Frankly, given the language of the amendment, making clear that it was for the purposes of having a readily available pool of citizens ready to take up arms for the defense of the country, I am surprised that more training isn’t required (or at least a proficiency test) before a gun can be owned. Let’s face it, a militia where someone doesn’t even know how to hold their weapon is of little value, and is of considerable danger to others.

Let’s get honest about the support for this amendment. A significant portion comes from a group of people who believe that somehow, the second amendment was meant to ensure that the populace (or at least some segment of it) could rise up and resist the government. While there is no support for this idea in the actual language of the Constitution, it is easy to see why some people came to that idea. It was personally armed patriots that led the Revolution leading to American independence. Yet, in the absence of more comprehensive regulation of this right, this has done little more than make possible the placement of weapons in the hands of mentally unstable individuals all for the sake of making it possible for an armed minority to promote a revolution against the government.

As further proof that this interpretation of the second amendment is inconsistent with its history is the fact that one of the earliest statutes the Congress enacted made it a crime to take up arms against the government of the United States of America or to promote its violent overthrow. Why? Because as a republic with the checks and balances of the separation of powers and the opportunity to elect representatives, there should be no need to violently overthrow the government as the Constitution prohibited tyranny. Whether or not you believe the Constitution has failed or has been circumvented, there is absolutely no legal or historical support for an argument that the second amendment is there to allow armed overthrow of the government.

I am amazed at the level of confusion and hypocrisy that some “gun rights” people will go to in order to oppose reasonable restrictions on the purchase of weapons. For example, I’ve often heard about how loosely organized and controlled those 18th century militias were. Fine, if you want the amendment to apply only to weapons available in the 1700’s then I’m on board with that. Everything else in the Constitution anticipated that there would be changes in the future and sought only to provide the foundation, the guiding principles. The Founding Fathers could not have possibly imagined the sort of weapons there are today and I would hope that even the most ardent gun rights supporters would agree that my neighbor shouldn’t be allowed to own a fully armed and operational tank, or a nuclear, chemical or biological weapon.

I am disturbed by the “we are the victim” attitudes of so many of these people who are ardent supporters of no restrictions whatsoever on the acquisition of military level weapons. People who feel like they are the victims of oppression easily justify the use of any level of force to resist their real (or imagined) oppressors. That some of these people are only feeling oppressed because their dominance is being eliminated doesn’t change their perception of their justification in the use of force. It should change our view of what is right and ethical about their arguments around control of who gets to purchase and possess a weapon.

The gun manufacturers are well aware that the total output of their production lines exceeds the registered weapons legitimately sold. But, hey, it’s a “free economy isn’t it?” And isn’t the pursuit of profit one of the Ten Commandments? (Hint: no it’s not!) Once again we have an “unholy” alliance between the people happy to make a profit from anything and those who would love the opportunity to enforce their view of the world on others.

Once we quit imagining that the second amendment guarantees anyone a gun who wants one, perhaps then we can discuss reasonable restrictions. In the meantime, let’s at least call “bull shit” on the argument that any waiting period, background check, or restriction on type of weapon is somehow in violation of the second amendment.

There are, no doubt, some people who (naively) would like to ban all weapons from everyone; however, characterizing anyone who would like to restrict some gun ownership with these people is both unfair and inaccurate. Likewise, it is equally unfair to equate all “gun rights” supporters with extremist militias. Yet it is these extremes, or more correctly, their clichés, that seem to define the discussion. Instead of reacting as if we are on a slippery slope, we could address the need for some sensible regulation and  agree that anyone who wants more (in either unnecessary restriction or unlimited loopholes) will get voted down by a sensible middle of voters.

But that is the heart of all of our issues, isn’t it? That the sensible middle ground is drowned out by the posturing extremes. And that middle is increasingly encouraged to worry that one extreme or the other is going to win.

If you are still a person of reason and get involved in passing this around and spreading the ideas that neither of the extremes are correct. And most of all don’t let the extremes make you feel as if all guns will be removed from all people if there are restrictions or that no restrictions whatsoever is the only way to remain free.

[commentaryvorg]

Danganronpa V3 Commentary: Part 6.1

Be aware that this is not a blind playthrough! This will contain spoilers for the entire game, regardless of the part of the game I’m commenting on. A major focus of this commentary is to talk about all of the hints and foreshadowing of events that are going to happen and facts that are going to be revealed in the future of the story. It is emphatically not intended for someone experiencing the game for their first time.

Last time…

…Kaito went to space. That’s all. He was in space, and he was happy.

Now to start chapter 6, which I am not quite as excited to get into – can’t possibly imagine why. There’s still definitely a lot I want to talk about, though.

We open the chapter with… Makoto. Not the Makoto we knew (he doesn’t exist), but a kid who’s called Makoto nonetheless. That’s almost certainly the most popular thing to name your kid in this universe, even probably for cultures that aren’t Japanese.

We also have some bizarrely cheerful music. Originally my feelings about this was just that it gave a very weird mood whiplash from everything else that had been going on. But now all it makes me think of is this game’s bonus board game/RPG mode that this music is actually taken from, which I may have got rather addicted to played an inordinate amount of one point. Hearing this now just makes me want to roll some dice and optimise my characters’ stat spreads, dammit! (And by “my characters”, obviously I mean Kaede, Shuichi, Kaito and Maki, who else.)

Makoto:  “I don’t have any talents or anything. I’m just a regular teenager…”

…

Makoto:  “Getting into an elite school like this was just the start of my bad luck.”

The writers (entirely out-universe here, of course) really just wanted to drop all these similarities to Makoto Naegi here just to mess with us and make us wonder if this kid really is him despite looking different, didn’t they.

Makoto:  “I want to run away from my daily life… I want to run away and just forget all this…”

This is considerably less like Makoto Naegi, though. He may have been ordinary, and a little daunted at getting into an elite school, but he was ultimately pretty chill with it and didn’t really want anything to change.

Makoto:  “But I’m okay! I have a reason to live!”

Remember the Monokuma Theater last chapter where Monokuma said he’d be thrilled if Danganronpa was people’s reason to live? Apparently it really is, for probably way more people than just Makoto here.

Makoto:  “I’ve got something to look forward to! That’s why I’m gonna be okay! Thanks for the courage! Thanks for giving me something to get totally obsessed with! Thanks for the strength to keep going!”

This is extremely relatable to me! This is what genuinely loving and caring about a work of fiction looks like! I can’t tell you how many times in my own life I’ve felt like things are going great for me almost entirely because there’s a work of fiction that I absolutely love that makes me happy just to think about.

Makoto:  “I’ll keep on rooting for you, so please keep trying your best!”

And look, he cares about the characters! Obviously, somewhere inside him he is hoping to see bad things happen to them, but that’s because he wants to see them overcome those trials! On the level on which he is actually engaging with the characters as if they’re people, by cheering them on like this, he just wants them to succeed.

It’s kind of like the way I’ve been doing this commentary. On the one hand I’ve been very unabashedly appreciating all the horrible suffering everyone’s gone through and the ways in which it’s been emphasised because that’s what makes this fiction so enjoyable. But when I talk about that, I take the more detached, third-person-pronouns approach, like they’re elements in a well-crafted work of art. Whenever I use second-person pronouns as if I’m engaging with the characters myself, imaging that they’re real people I could talk to, I almost never say anything about how I appreciate their suffering. I’m not engaging with them because I want them to suffer. I want them to suffer so that I’ll end up caring about them even more and therefore will want to engage with them more. Which would all still be thoroughly fucked-up if they really were real, but this is how engaging with fiction works.

(I am making a big point to stress all of this about Makoto here because, oh boy, the next time we see the in-universe audience, things are not going to be remotely this way and that is my biggest issue with this chapter.)

Makoto:  “And—! One day, I’ll also—!”

…audition for Danganronpa and hopefully probably get myself killed in one, is what he’s about to say.

No, Makoto. You were doing great at being a healthy, wholesome appreciater of fiction (aside from the part where it’s not really fiction and you’re watching real people die) until now. Genuinely wanting to be a part of your favourite works of fiction is usually quite an understandable sentiment… but not when it’s Danganronpa, what the actual hell.

We have suddenly jumped from Makoto being a reasonable example of someone enjoying a work of “fiction”, into him being an example of how utterly fucked-up this outside world actually is. People – specifically, teenagers – will apparently willingly throw their lives away to be on Danganronpa if they don’t think their life has much else going for them. That’s why this Makoto hates his life, to make him someone who’d want to do this. If Danganronpa really is his only reason to live, then it does make some kind of twisted sense that it’d also give him a reason to die.

Something important to note about this scene is simply the fact that we’re seeing it. This is in a context entirely removed from anything happening right now in the Academy and is for our eyes, the out-universe audience, only. So there is no reason to doubt that what we’re seeing here is the truth. This Makoto kid really is watching “Danganronpa V3” unfold like it’s basically a work of fiction and having a great time.

I’ve seen some people propose the idea that sure, the killing game was put on as a “fiction” for people’s entertainment, but only for a shady illegal underground audience of people who should know they’re being shitty, probably hidden away somewhere in the deepest darkest corners of the internet. On some level, I might like to believe that, because it’s nicer and easier to buy than thinking the entire world is this obliviously twisted. But Makoto here is a completely ordinary teenager who would be very unlikely to have any idea how to access something like that, and he doesn’t seem to have any conception of the fact that what he’s watching and enjoying so much is illegal and frowned upon and he needs to keep it secret. So I don’t think that can reasonably be the truth here.

Anyway, back at the Academy, Keebo is busy destroying everything. He’d better leave the training spot alone, though – that place contains precious memories of Kaito and deserves to remain undamaged.

Also bear in mind that this is still the same evening after Kaito’s trial. They are not getting any time to rest here.

Keebo:  “Did you call for me? Please keep it brief. I have other matters I must attend to.”

Geez, Keebo. “Keep it brief, because I’m busy getting all of us killed”? Yeah, maybe that’s why they won’t want to keep this brief.

Maki:  “What’s with that weapon and the jet pack?”

Keebo:  “I obtained this equipment from my lab.”

Maki:  “You had equipment like that… in your lab?”

Implicit in Maki’s words here is the sentiment of: then why the fuck didn’t you use it *sooner*? Which, yes. Very much.

Keebo:  “I made some modifications to drastically improve their power output and functionality.”

Tsumugi:  “Since when have you been able to do that? You didn’t level up or anything, right? Did… something happen?”

The fact that it’s Tsumugi asking him this suggests that he really wasn’t supposed to be able to do that at all. It would be pretty stupid of Team Danganronpa to have someone that potentially dangerous here. Obviously they figured he’d never do anything drastic because his inner voice had him on a leash, but the suggestion from Tsumugi’s words here is that he shouldn’t even have been able to make those modifications, inner voice or not, and he just figured it out himself somehow by being a smarter person than she’d written him to be. Maybe he learned a thing or two from his time with Miu?

Keebo:  “I wanted to be treated like a real human. A creature of flesh and blood like you all. But I no longer have the luxury of clinging to that wish anymore!”

You never had that luxury, not while abandoning that wish (and only temporarily, mind you) would have saved your friends’ lives!

The writing is trying to present this like it’s some kind of character development, but there’s been absolutely no build-up to Keebo realising something like this. And there’s no reason that the seven people who’d died before his lab opened up wouldn’t have been enough, such that he somehow needed to see four more deaths before finally making this decision. The only actual change now is the lack of his inner voice – but that never had anything to do with the part of his character that felt awkward about not being human and shouldn’t be making a difference to this supposed character development.

Tsumugi:  “If you do something like that… we’ll all die too, y’know!? There’s no oxygen in the outside world… There are no living things…”

Tsumugi would like to remind us all that there is definitely 100% not anyone alive out there, even though Kaito's efforts just proved that there almost certainly somehow is.

Shuichi:  “Our hope is… everyone here. Our friends who are still alive.”

Shuichi is good. He’s not going to forget the last thing Kaito said to him!

Keebo:  “We simply do not have the power to change the outside world on our own.”

Well that’s very foreshadowy of you, Keebo. He’s only talking about making it less uninhabitable, but.

Keebo:  “All we can do now is refuse to submit to despair!”

Shuichi:  “And you would be willing to let all of us die to accomplish that?”

Yeah, doesn’t sound very not-despairing, does it, Shuichi? Keebo’s just gunning for a different type of despair right now.

Keebo:  “Kaito and Kokichi gave their lives to end this killing game… We should follow their example! We should be willing to give our lives to end this killing game!”

Okay, so to be fair, this might sort of count as following Kokichi’s example, since he wanted to ruin the audience’s experience (even though he went about it in literally the worst way possible by giving them two incredibly entertaining trials). Killing ourselves to give them a boring ending is actually along the lines of what Kokichi at least should have been trying to do, and is in fact what everyone will attempt in the end once they realise what’s going on.

But fuck off with your implication that Kaito would have wanted this, Keebo. Kaito gave his life so that everyone else could survive and escape, not so that they’d all do the same as him! Kaito’s sacrifice was only ever about “ending” the killing game so long as doing so would save everyone!

Maki:  “…Is that what your inner voice is telling you to do?”

It’s interesting that Maki considers this possibility. I wonder what she thinks his inner voice is, since she’s pragmatic enough to not believe in hearing voices, especially not for a robot.

Keebo:  “We can never submit to despair! Because we are students of Hope’s Peak Academy!”

Keebo may have lost his inner voice, but he’s clearly still very much a thrall to the other kind of brainwashing that’s been going on here.

Shuichi:  “Because there might still be hope. There might still be a place to call home.”

Keebo:  “And what are you basing that claim on?”

Shuichi:  “…Nothing. I just have a feeling.”

Shuichi just has a hunch! He’s doing a Kaito and he knows it and it’s so lovely that he’s able to say that with a smile!

Maki:  “Just a feeling…? You sound like that idiot right now.”

Maki knows it just as well, of course. She’s smiling, too! I love how her calling him an idiot has become a thing of affection now. They really are his sidekicks.

(I am going to bring up and be delighted by every single moment in this chapter of them fondly remembering Kaito like this and you can’t stop me.)

Shuichi:  “…Kaito said so. […] There can be no killing game without an audience.”

…So actually, Shuichi was basing his claim on something after all and just wanted to act very Kaito about it anyway, and that is adorable. Well, maybe he felt like it was appropriate because this still isn’t very concrete evidence, but.

Look at him being really sure of this argument, though! Kaito gave everything to prove that and he succeeded, and Shuichi is not going to let his efforts go to waste.

Shuichi:  “There’s still a possibility!”

Keebo:  “True, we cannot say there is absolutely no possibility. But even a mere possibility—”

Shuichi:  “That possibility is our hope!”

Finally, someone gets it! The actual meaning of the damn word! They don’t know for sure that it’s true, but so long as they can keep believing that it’s possible there’s a home for them out there, that is hope.

Monokuma finally shows up with his Exisals in tow. (I wonder what Monotaro makes of the small mountain of screwed-up bloodstained toilet paper in the recesses of his cockpit.)

Monokuma:  “Huh? Is the robot malfunctioning? He must be – why else would he try to defy me?”

Haha, yeah, Keebo is very much meant to be part of the workings of this killing game and not someone who should try and fight against that, isn’t he?

Goodbye Danganronpa

Wow, geez, that was late for a title card. I forgot we hadn’t even had that yet. Of course, this title is pretty straightforward, yet a lot more literal than anyone would be expecting it to be on their first time through.

Maki:  “But why did Monokuma leave a weapon like that in the research lab? He’s… pretty careless, isn’t he?”

Good question! The way Maki’s actively asking this suggests it’s something that actually has an answer, but I’m still not convinced it’s anything but lazy writing.

Maki:  “If the outside world is destroyed, then the mastermind must be in this school, right?”

Makiii, Kaito proved to you guys that the outside world probably isn’t as destroyed as it seems! Don’t you believe that too? (I mean, yes, the mastermind is in fact in this school, but there’s no reason to necessarily think that right now.)

…Actually, Maki still buying the lie about the outside world despite Kaito’s efforts to discredit it might be down to her in particular being very subsceptible to the Flashback Light’s manipulation. There’ll be some more indications of that in this chapter.

Tsumugi:  “Someone… You mean a Remnant of Despair, right?”

Tsumugi is very quick to keep things on-script and remind everyone that this is definitely about Remnants of Despair.

Maki:  “If we can find them and kill them, then this killing game should end.”

Shuichi:  “Ah, I don’t know about *killing* them…”

Yes, Maki, listen to Shuichi! Remember that the last time you tried to kill the “mastermind”, you nearly got Kaito killed instead! Kaito risked his life because he didn’t want you to kill anyone else, even if it was the mastermind!

Maki:  “…Hope?”

Shuichi:  “Our home. Where we’re going to live after this killing game ends. I know there is hope out there. We have to find it before we leave.”

This is what Kaito was talking about when he said Shuichi could find “something beyond the truth” – something beyond that destroyed world they saw at the end of the tunnel. Kaito sacrificed everything for the plan to give them this hope!

(And again since I must nitpick: they wouldn’t be finding the “hope”. The fact that they’re even looking means they already have hope, thanks to Kaito.)

Himiko:  “This isn’t some fictional story, so I don’t think things’ll work out that well…”

Hoo boy. We’re in chapter 6 now, all gloves are off, hints are being dropped left and right and they do not care about being subtle.

Shuichi:  “But if we look for it, we just might find it. If we don’t try… we’ll never find anything.”

This is also quite Kaito of him! Kaito never specifically said anything with this wording, but he was always advocating the idea that you’ve got to put in the effort to be able to get anywhere.

Maki:  “No matter how impossible it seems, we’ll accomplish it.”

Speaking of Kaito! This… is awkward localisation. Maki’s phrasing here is a close match to the Japanese phrasing of Kaito’s “The impossible is possible, all you gotta do is make it so” catchphrase. Evidently, Maki’s localiser is a different one to Kaito’s, and they never got the memo about what Kaito’s catchphrase was changed to in English and just translated this directly.

This is still clearly reminiscent enough of Kaito to get across the point that she’s thinking of him anyway, but Maki is meant to have straight-up said that the impossible is possible, and, awwww! That’s adorable.

Shuichi:  (Maki…) “…Yes… that’s right!”

Shuichi agrees! He’s happy for the reminder! They are such good sidekicks.

Hope Searching time, again! This is still an appropriate title, because, like Shuichi just said, they are searching for proof that they have somewhere to return to, and that is hope.

A sudden tremor causes part of the entrance hall’s floor to collapse and reveal a staircase downwards that leads to Kokichi’s lab. Shuichi guesses that this was meant to open with a mysterious item, presumably if things had been proceeding as normal and Monokuma had happily given them their “presents” like at the beginning of any other chapter. But, awkwardly, there was never any mysterious object around here that looked like something that could have opened this. Yet again, anything which is not directly meant for the player to interact with simply doesn’t exist in the game world, even if it’s something that should exist as part of the story.

“Now it is time to test your bonds with your friends!”

DID YOU KNOW THIS DANGANRONPA GAME IS ABOUT FRIENDSHIP.

…Okay, this whole Friendship Power mechanic for this investigation is actually a very thinly-veiled way to force you to investigate places in a completely linear order by restricting where you have access to until you’ve reached a certain point in the story. But since they were going to have to do that one way or another, I love that they flavoured it to be about this.

“So work hard to end this killing game before dawn breaks!”

Oh, boy, this, though. This whole time limit mechanic is really badly-implemented.

The first thing is that it’s not a real-time time limit at all. I’m leaving my game running as I type this and it’s not going to make a difference. The timer just ticks forwards a small amount every time you examine something or talk to someone, as is appropriate for what is after all a visual novel and not an action game. I’ve seen several blind LPers assume it was a real-time time limit (because the game is very vague about it) and get instilled with a sense of urgency because of that, so I guess that was meant to be the point.

What the real, ahem, “challenge” of this time limit is is that you’re supposed to try not to examine anything nonessential. Which is really not an okay way for a mystery visual novel to be! Half the fun of these sorts of games is seeing what kind of silly bonus dialogue you get for checking things that don’t matter, to the point that many people’s approach when investigating a room is to figure out what object will progress the plot when they examine it and then examine that one last. But here, the developers are telling us we’re “failing” at playing the game properly… when we’re trying to play the game as much as possible. That’s quite frankly rude. They went to the trouble of writing a bunch of bonus dialogue for this investigation, and yet they apparently don’t want anyone to see it.

There’s also the fact that, from my experiments, there is extremely little leeway. You can examine at most two or three nonessential things while still remaining within the time limit, and anything more than that causes you to run out of time before the end. Even if someone is actually trying to examine only the essential objects, on a first run through they’re not going to know exactly what’s important, because sometimes the relevant thing is not that intuitive, and they’re almost certainly going to make more than just a few “mistakes”!

And the punishment for “failing”? I’m sure literally everybody has already seen this themselves, but all you get is Shuichi briefly going “Oh no, I took too long!”, a brief cutscene of the Academy exploding… and then it puts you back at the beginning of whatever room you were in with the timer wound back far enough that you can hypothetically finish from here. It’s the most petty of slaps on the wrist, but of course it shouldn’t be any more than that, because having to replay the entire chapter for the crime of not knowing exactly what was important, or, gasp, wanting to see more dialogue, would be incredibly obnoxious. So what’s the point in even having it be possible to fail in the first place?

What they should really do is have the timer tick forward only when you examine something plot-relevant. That way you’d get the illusion of being in a hurry to anyone who’s on a first time and hasn’t realised how it works, but none of the annoyance of meaninglessly “failing” or of it being incredibly inconvenient to actively go looking for bonus dialogue.

…Also. Uh. Turns out I was partially wrong about it not being a real time limit. I assumed that because the timer doesn’t seem to visibly move when you’re standing around, yet you can notice it tick forwards a small chunk whenever you finish examining something. Buuuut, as I left it running while typing this, with Shuichi just standing in the hallway, the timer has progressed a bunch. Some quick science, namely staring at the screen for a while, confirms that it does actually move in incredibly small pixel-by-pixel increments that are hard to notice unless you’re looking for it. So I guess also don’t go leaving your game running during this part either! Geez. …And, turns out it also ticks forward outside of dialogue if you’ve had the Monopad open for a while. It doesn’t even let you pause the game to pause the timer! Rude.

The timer does however completely vanish during actual dialogue, meaning that it is presumably actually paused then. …Yes; I did some more science to confirm this, this time sitting on a dialogue box for probably something like half an hour and seeing the timer still only tick forwards a little bit once I finally clicked through the dialogue. Talking (or thinking) is a free action, apparently, even though standing around without talking or thinking isn’t.

Anyway, here’s the method I used last time I played this chapter to be able to see all optional dialogue anyway while still technically not “failing” because fuck you too, game: Save as soon as you enter a new place. Go nuts examining everything you want to, while noting which ones seem to be necessary to progress and which ones aren’t. Before leaving for the next place, reset back to your save and this time go through the room while only examining the correct things (fastforwarding the dialogue if you want, not that it matters), so that the game thinks you did so in the minimum amount of “time”. Then head to the next place (as quickly as you can, apparently), save as soon as you enter it, and repeat. Doing this last time I played was how I learned that there was so ridiculously little leeway for “mistakes”, because even then I only just barely made it.

And of course I’m going to be doing that again on this playthrough to get all the optional dialogue, because that’s what this commentary is here for, dammit.

---

[Next post]

[solivar]

WIP Ghost Stories On Route 66

In which there is an unexpected and troubling revelation.

“Team Tokki, report.”

“On station, sorry for the delay.” Hana replied a nerve-wracking ten minutes later. “Took us a minute to get all our cables in order but Kozy Kot Motor Inn Basecamp is now online.”

The topographic holomap hanging over the dining room table rippled gently as she proved it, pulsing their location in the scrubby desert flatlands between Mesa Prieta and the ruins of Albuquerque, turning their basecamp icon electric pink-and-green.

“In an amusing sidenote,” Hana continued on breezily, “You know those MiBs -- the TALON guys? Their base may be in Albuquerque Sunport but they’ve got mobile units all over the place in the immediate vicinity and some kind of stationary observation post up on the mesa itself. So yes this is me formally blaming my tardiness on avoiding the notice of scary goons who may or may not be employees of the federal government.”

“Mesa Prieta is an archaeological preserve -- it has been for decades, the petroglyphs there are thousands of years old.” Ana, seated at the opposite end of the table with stacks of airtight herb containers, a mortar and pestle, and a digital scale, observed carefully, pausing in her work. “Ownership yielded back to the Federated Southwest Tribal Government after the Crisis.”

“Meaning?” Hanzo asked, inclining a questioning brow.

“Meaning,” Ana gave the contents of her pestle another thoughtful turn, “that either the FST is acting in direct cooperation with TALON or else their actual employers kissed considerable quantities of ass to access that site for reasons other than advancing the cause of cultural preservation.”

Hanzo blinked at her. “That feels extraordinarily bad.”

“It is what it is, my young friend. Until we have better intel, we can only take matters as they come.” She spooned the contents of her pestle into a little tin container.

“I’m not so sure I like Team Tokki’s proximity to a potentially hostile unknown quantity,” Hot Vampire Jack’s tone was significantly less philosophical. “Maybe you should relocate?”

“Their base doesn’t directly overlook ours -- it’s on the far northern point of the mesa, closer to the Chamisa Wilderness Area than to us.” Jesse replied, calm and even. “We can set a drone on stealth observation if you want, but hauling off and moving again might get us seen by one of their mobile units. They’re putting up those pylon things they’ve got on the UNM campus all over out here.”

“I tried getting a look at one of those the other day but campus security waved me off.” Hana added, aggrieved.

“Whatever else they are, they’ve got a pretty hefty sensor and communications package on them -- I can see their output on our own passive monitors.” Lucio added, and the map rippled as he pushed data, added clusters of red-white-black pinpricks representing the pylons’ locations, easily a few dozen spread across the desert basin between Albuquerque and the mesa, many of them concentrated just above the Red Line along old Route 40. “I can try hacking one of their transceiver modules and skimming the data to see what they’re monitoring but that might attract some attention if they’ve got any kind of intrusion detection capabilities onboard.”

“No unnecessary risks. The pylons likely aren’t going anywhere and they’re extraneous to our own mission.” Terrifying Smoke Gabe rasped, his voice on the comms a weirdly metallic echo. “We can always try that if we can’t get intelligence from other sources.”

“Speaking of which,” Zenyatta interjected smoothly, “Team Tattoo reporting perimeter secure at Four Daughters Basecamp -- we are about to begin deploying our sensor and visual observation drones and begin transmitting.”

“El Malpais Basecamp likewise secure and ready to begin deployment.” Jamie added. “Team Helicopter Parents on perimeter patrol.”

“God, I hate that name,” Jack muttered.

“Who gave the lecture about appropriate comm discipline last night?” Gabe asked sweetly.

“Oh, shut up.”

Actual comm discipline immediately dissolved in jokes and back-and-forth smacktalk, a release of tension that even Jack recognized as necessary before any real work could get done, especially since they were waiting for Team Tokki to get up to speed. Hanzo, recognizing at as well, went and fetched tea and cakes and fussy little finger sandwiches for himself and Ana and, eventually, Reinhardt when he came in off his own perimeter patrol with the members of the pack left on guard duty. She accepted the cup he poured and the plate he delivered with a gracious smile, setting aside her work for the moment, while in the background nearly everyone they loved pretended not to be afraid.

Four days they’d been in the field -- four days of hunting the monster haunting him, four nights of sleeping rough, fanning out from Cerrillos in a gradually expanding search pattern enabled by Jesse’s practical maintenance of multiple gasoline-powered vehicles and Jamie’s purpose-built technology. Hana had dropped her presentation and then bagged the rest of her classes to assist in the physical construction of the drones, displaying a level of mechanical skill that Hanzo at least had never suspected. (“When I was a kid, my cousins and my friend Dae-hyun and I built hovertech for competition before I got into gaming -- seriously, aniki, it’s like falling off a bike, you never really forget once you know how to do it.”) Genji and Lucio had done likewise with the programming, following Jamie and Roadie’s careful instructions, working late into the night on stress-testing up until the day before their departure. Hanzo, relegated to a support role, had helped prepare the supplies and the vehicles for departure, packing MATILDA and the largest of Jesse’s off-road capable Jeeps with military surplus rations and bottled water, three fully stocked first aid kits, the heavily warded four-season tents and camping gear going with Team Helicopter Parents and Team Tokki, and extra warm clothing for everyone. He forced cardigans and sweatshirts on all of them at breakfast the morning they departed, a meal he crawled out of Jesse’s warm embrace to make for them and to which he returned before he allowed them to leave.

Jesse had taken his face between his hands, his kiss sweet and soft, and Hanzo had exercised enormous restraint by making only a few rude gestures at his brother and friends as they whistled and shouted suggestions and encouragements ranging from the mildly obscene to the outright pornographic. Jesse’s husky laughter had warmed him almost more than the kiss as he drew them together and murmured against his ear, “I’ll bring Hana and Lu back safe and sound, I promise, and Roadie won’t let anything happen to Genji and Zen.”

“I know.” Hanzo replied, soft and low against his shoulder. “I just wish...I wish I could do more.”

“You’ll have plenty to do when we find this thing. For now, you’re our lifeline. Don’t forget that.” Jesse pressed a last kiss to his forehead. “We’ll be back before you know it, darlin’. Never fear.”

But fear he did, despite Jesse’s assurances, despite his knowledge of all their skill and ability and competence, because he also knew the cruelty and viciousness and above all else cunning of the thing that they hunted, a cunning that had concealed what he had become from their entire clan, from the sister raised at his side, from the Dragon of the South Wind himself. That concealed him now, still, even as they found the telltale traces of his passage through the world, marked on the holomap in a particularly vile shade of bilious yellow, twisting tracks that appeared and disappeared without apparent pattern, growing gradually denser as the search teams moved west. Fear moved him to carry an inflatable camping mattress down to the dining room, where the communications nerve center was set up by virtue of adequate work-and-table space, and built a nest where he slept, light and restless, alert to the slightest twitch of sound on the comms, the tiniest hint of distress, which mostly came in the form of bodies shifting in their sleep and a terrifyingly vast assortment of snores.

“Drones airborne and headed to optimal scan radius,” Hana reported. “You want me to send one of our spares up to keep an eye on the MiBs?”

“Couldn’t hurt to gather a little intel at this stage of the proceedings.” Jesse opined.

“It could if your drone is detected.” Terrifying Smoke Gabe pointed out. “If you send one up, I recommend passive visual observation only.”

“Doable. Lu, you wanna handle that while I get these puppies where they need to go?” A clattering of equipment on the line as Hana and Lucio moved about in their working shelter.

“Gotcha. Temporarily disabling the drone’s sensor package just to be on the safe side.” Lucio came on the line for the first time that day. “You want me to stream footage back to HQ?”

Hanzo glanced at Ana who nodded slightly and murmured, “If they can detect our drone sensor data streams, a video stream will hardly make matters worse, and if they cannot, we will have fresh information of our own.”

“True.” Hanzo replied as his stomach tried gamely to twist itself into a Lemarchand cube of pure dread. “Go ahead, Lucio.” He clicked his own comm off and looked back to Ana, meditatively sipping her tea. “If they -- if TALON -- detects our data streams, could they trace them here, to Cerrillos?”

“Theoretically? Yes. In practice, Jack and Gabriel and Jesse have all exerted considerable effort to make this place as difficult to find as possible for outsiders.” Ana smiled dryly. “And, in any case, they may be the least of our concerns at this juncture.”

“Point.” Hanzo muttered and clicked the comm back on, applying himself to his own tea in an effort to wring some calm out of his digestive tract.

“Team Tokki’s drones on station, optimal positioning.” Hana sang.

“Team Helicopter Parents, ready to begin scanning.” Jamie replied.

“Team Tattoo, likewise prepared.” Zen added tranquilly.

All three Basecamp icons flashed and Hanzo set the countdown timer. “Ten second timer.”

At ten, the holomap blossomed as the drones’ sensor packages and associated data streams came online, populating it with a picture of local reality that overlaid and intertwined with the topography in ways that would make a cartographer’s eyes bleed. In the corner, a secondary pane opened with Lucio’s camera drone feed as it climbed out of basecamp, view panning out across the remains of the Kozy Kot Motor Inn and its eight identical “log cabin” cottages plus the motel office, set around an inner courtyard that had once contained picnic tables and grills and now held two four-season tents linked by a vestibule, a camp sanitary structure, and a warmed, weatherproof work tent, where they also ate their meals. As Hanzo watched, Jesse made is way between two of the cottages and looked up, waved for the camera as Lucio panned and zoomed away, over the cracked and crumbling remnants of a paved road, through the remains of the little tourist town that had sprung up around the motel, as fully abandoned as it was, and into the desert beyond.

There the ground was rucked up and rugged, split by arroyos and tumbled spits of dark, jagged stone, blanketed in tough, autumn-browned grasses and scrubby, wind-tortured trees and shrubs, elevation rising steadily until the drone was climbing vertically along the wall of the mesa. The top of the mesa itself was so flat the TALON installation was clearly visible miles off, a crescent of four dun-colored prefab structures clustered together, their communications uplink arrays pointed skyward, the rest of their camp’s perimeter delineated in those pylons, spaced neatly exact distances apart. Lucio dropped the drone to a few inches above the mesa hardpack and brought it in behind the largest of the structures, up the back avoiding the windows, and settled it into place on the edge of structure’s roof, cameras trained down into the camp itself.

Ana moved to join Hanzo, teacup in hand, and settled to watch. Within the relatively compact confines of the camp, technicians in khaki jumpsuits were working with obvious care among the basalt-black rocks, scanning the petroglyphs with handheld devices, taking photographs and video, neither moving nor touching anything if they could avoid it.

“I’ll be damned,” Lucio muttered. “Maybe they are doing archaeological preservation work?”

“You have to admit, we’ve seen stranger things.” Genji remarked dryly.

“But if that’s the case, why are they crawling all over the school? And why’d they interrogate Hanzo about Professor Flakes-a-Lot? And what’s the deal with those pylons? And --” Hana’s stream of questions was cut off by the sound of smashing crockery and Hanzo’s involuntary yelp of pain as Ana gripped his arm with unexpectedly fierce strength.

“Pan back,” Ana snapped over his comm.

Lucio did so and Ana’s grip tightened another degree. “Jack, Gabriel...are you seeing this?”

The pair standing together before one of the largest single petroglyph displays in the camp were not dressed like technicians. One, scrawny and unshaven and bespectacled, dark hair going gray at the temples, wore an honest-to-gods white lab coat over his cable knit sweater and gray cargo pants, hands doing as much talking as his mouth as he conversed with his companion. That companion was a solid two, maybe as much as three, heads shorter, clad in rust red coveralls and heavy hiking boots and more toolbelts and their associated attachments than seemed possible, his hugely muscled  and heavily tattooed shoulders uncovered and most of his face obscured by a genuinely impressive mass of thick blonde beard and mustaches.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Jack breathed over the comm, his quiet carrying the relative force of an explosion.

“Torbjörn?” Terrifying Smoke Gabe sounded frankly stunned. “But...he and Ingrid retired years ago.”

“Apparently not,” Jack replied, grimly.

“This...changes the complexion of many things.” Reinhardt said, heavily, from the door and came to lay an enormous hand on his wife’s shoulder.

“It does?” Hanzo asked. “How? Why? What does this mean?”

“Too soon to tell on some of those, kid.” Jack said into the silence that followed. “But as to what it means? That little Viking wrench-slinger there is Torbjörn Lindholm and, once upon a time, he was a member of the same UN-sponsored special ops unit as Gabe and I -- Rein and Ana, Yanaba and Nate, too. Helped us save the world a time or six. And, if he’s involved with this bunch, TALON? That likely means nothing good and we should probably figure out what it is sooner rather than later.”

[fadinginfluencerblaze]

Fallen Dreams

 Disclaimer~ Art is devised by me and all editorial work is a solo operation. “Fallen,” will be my last publication before my vacation: https://adventvoice.newgrounds.com/news/post/1057611 If you would like commissions or requests for art work done please visit my patreon  account   https://www.patreon.com/AdventVoice  https://adventvoice.newgrounds.com/news/post/1057550      https://adventvoice.newgrounds.com/news/post/1057522

From several authorities of art and creativity, I’ve heard something after completing “Loving My Dragon,” something I’ve not heard since I was sixteen. My ability in the arts is worth more than a few hearts, likes and the endorsements of a few passerbys. It is better than what people have been forced to digest in the past twenty four years. Could be longer really. Depends on your tolerance for main stream media.

Forced to settle, due to never being exposed to minds similar to my own. Which there are a lot of us. I’ve realized as I dig deeper into the internet, blogs, and journals of other dreamers.

There was a study, a social experiment really, given by Facebook and other online platforms, seeking to gauge how to rate worker performance by emoji. Wanting to reward creative minds who earn the most accolades and applause of the people. It can become rather addictive and I find I may be falling into that same trend. Advertising more or less for the approbation of people and not so much for pay.

I explained this to a few supporters and they were shocked. Believing me to be worth far more than the few seconds of increased impressions on twitter and the level of dinner table conversation I can influence with a few well directed bards and illustrations of the latest trending topic.

Now if only I could find a paying sponsor that believes the same thing. Then me and the Dream Weaver would really go places. Here’s the thing about me, that is different from your average ambitious and dedicated creator. I don’t want to go anywhere my friends won’t be invited to reap the benefits.    

I’ve seen too much in this life to believe I can do anything on my own and be a success at it. You know I remember a time when people could have 500+ Facebook friends and no one spend a dollar with or on each other. On anything that could turn a profit. Nearly a thousand people talking, interacting, mingling and no money is made on the effort. Oh there is a lot of sexy talk, a lot of people locked up cause the girl is underage and the guy is enthralled with her pictures. Oh there was a lot of room fo shows like “Cheaters,” to corner a market in tracking people via location recognition devices on the broadband signatures, but for nearly ten years, no one was making any real money that would put them on the Forbes list as the best entrepreneur, besides those buying out all of the larger retail stores and Disney. Could be why I spend so much money on everyone else and not on myself. Makes me feel like I am saving the small business owners world, one click at a time.

The loss of Tina-Raze  on the                                         internet and access to her work has really made me appreciate the gift of visibility attributed to my own work. Sure I desire a physical gallery, but that cost money and you need dedicated staff. An online gallery is a one man show that will last as long as I have material, drive and an interactive audience. But when outside forces wage against one’s output and you are forced to erase everything and the years put into a showcase are no longer accessible; there is something daunting in the realization that everyday I have a chance to present anything, it should not be wasted on the trivial.

That is a sharp word because I highly doubt any of us have the authoritative right to define what is relevant or trivial to a creator. We can choose to interact with a product of not but we can’t say what someone was seeking to share has no value and thus erase them from existence. Not if we have any respect for the sanctity of the culture of art and the freedom in which we universally share this gift.      

~ I can never say enough of how much I appreciate the time we shared and I hope you return to the creative scene soon Tina-Raze.~

 I was reviewing “The Action Bible,” published by David Cook and illustrated by Sergio Cariello. It is an extensive publication that sought to illustrate the entire Bible, without the mistakes seen in previous renditions. It really took that whole group a while to find the best method to bring the Bible to life for young and old readers. I enjoyed their expressive illustrative skills and dedication to keeping to as much as can be had with a book as fantastic as the Bible.

What surprised me was the decision to eliminate the wings of angels and go with the ‘golden locks,’ signature.  For years the wings of angels and demons played a big part in aiding people in separating the two worlds. Without the wings, we are no more than disembodied spirits, ghosts of our formers selves and have a long journey yet to that pinnacle of glory that awaits the faithful. So it was taught to me at least.

There were a lot of ideas shared with me as boy that I spend little time contemplating now, because I am a man and more than assured of where I will be regardless of the mistakes in this life.

Others may doubt. Others may seek to clip my wings as I ascend. Others may project their insecurities and through bitter imaginations suggest that because of the curse of Ham, and Nimrod, the black race will never have a place in heaven. Some may build a whole world of fantastical proportions and place compartments, as zookeepers, locks and doors upon the gates, with signs that say, “If you never drank yourself into oblivion while on earth, you go here, you never loved anyone but God you go here, if you never where tempted to fuck a woman in the ass, though she begged for it, you go here.”

Another sign reads, “Collect your white wings for perfect attendance on the earth, to every Sunday meeting.” In this corner of heaven, you should have received a notice in your casket upon death, we were sure to send Gabriel, who after years of working for God, never got his golden winged promotion.

All who have been the black sheep of the family and have been to prison more than once in their life time be sure to collect your “black wings,” down isle five. Five is the number for grace and that is the only reason you’re hear, so don’t be cute and try to steal the ‘white wings,’ from your betters, who happen to shine a little sharper in hue and have more gold flakes in their hair.  

Those who were on earth and always fought for a righteous cause but failed to achieve any victory and remain angry behind the loss, you will receive your ‘red wings,’ in the dust falcons chamber. Some of you were clumsy on earth. Always bumping into things. Could never walk in heels or win a fashion show. Never turned the heads of men or appealed to women. Had a haunch in you back from never learning poise and posturing. Be sure to pick up your set of ‘spotted owl,’ wings, found in the east gate.

God is a god of order and angles never complain about their lot in heaven. There in whatever state they are in, there, they are to be content. There is a hint of a karmic code in association with the hue and colors of heaven and I was never one to believe in eastern influences when it comes to what my place in heaven would be like. I bend so far on earth, doing what I am told, I will go to heaven with white skin, white wings and all curse will be lifted from my body upon death and the curse of the previous life that marred me and made me black, while I was alive.  

I don’t think so. No, I’ve believed for a long time now that even black angles deserve to fly.   https://avproductionsblog.wordpress.com/2017/11/03/even-black-angels-deserve-to-fly/   https://avproductionsblog.wordpress.com/2017/03/18/you-read-it-here-first-black-amethyst/

I know I am not one to be denied.

Those of you that know how to twirl and twerk and shake your tail feathers, to win the Twerk Team Auditions https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rba9Z0CcWwQ&list=PLxwfHzPeMrG0N0E5Q3hBI_vRjXl-BqJAR or hang out with DJ UNK https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TeLdCPINh6M and earn 15 minutes of fame for being a video vixen with a phat ass, you can gather your eagle wings in the North tower. You should notice the Notorious BIG Smalls in the butlers uniform, set to serve and assist you wonderful ladies in fitting for your wings. He was always so good at zipping up Faith Evans dresses, we thought he’d like doing that for eternity.

Just stand there and zip wings.

He was way too dark and ugly so he never earned his own, but Puff Daddy sand and danced enough to ensure he’d make it in.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LHyvFryW2M

What a joke, eh that might have been a cheap shot to bring Puff Daddy and Biggie into this conversation, it’s just, I am so sick of color being a barrier for people I guess. But as long as there are people, it will play a part in the minds of men and women that hold their minds hostage and will build politics and kingdoms centered around it. We will split God into figures of hued stone that resembles us in some fashion and suggest if he looks like me, then he is the one that created me. Odd considering how I can create characters of different races, backgrounds and love each with as much joy as the next. Why would I doubt God would love me less because my hair is not wavy or red and ruddy and my skin is not peached or pinked, but bronzed and red? Why is my tolerance for people and the curves, shapes and hues greater than that of a god and I am a mere man?

King Solomon, black but comely: I am glad I’ve never heard it taught, due to Solomon’s hue of skin the temple came down. Why are we so caught up with color that we would actually base our safety on it, risk our lives for it? When in the middle of turmoil, pain, upheaval, or simply in a moment of benign joy during an annual parade in the city, color should be the last thing discussed.

Ever since I was a boy, I’ve held a rigid position on color talk. I had to be set because all of my friends where white. My first love was a gothic princess, that used to put a cat collar and a leash around my neck. I lived in New Jersey and traveled to upstate New York and Ohio all the time and had so much fun playing video games, poker or reading comics with white people. Lived in Kansas where they tried to make me where a confederate uniform for the JROTC program. I did not know if it was a joke of if they really felt I would be honoring someone’s death by wearing that uniform.

I sought to be above the barriers poised by classification and color because I am an artist.  Because I am a storyteller and find relevance in people and can’t deny anyone based on my insecurities. I would not want someone to look at me and deny me access to anything. A communicable discussion, a forum, anything political, or my own comfort and what I believe to be good for me because of my color, because  their preconceived beliefs  denotes I should be marginalized.

I laughed myself into stitches, when during my junior year of highschool I realized all of the black children expected me to eat my lunch on the wall and away from the ‘preppy-white,’ children because they decided to self-segregate. Because they felt they did not have a life style or come from a family that could afford to play golf at the local country club. That they would not and were not admitted to be  apart of a society setting our grandparents and great grandparents were conditionally denied. I was infuriated by the idea of having to defend my home and right to existence, from people of my own color, if I ever married an Asian, white, Indian, Arab, anything besides a black woman. Especially to look at me, you’d never out right believe I was of African decent until I grew out my hair, which I would wear proudly, long and wild.

Fredrick Douglas had nothing on me in my desire to topple the walls the youth of my generation would build around themselves for the sake of traditions that should have been long dead. I would have loved to ignore this conversation, but it is all over the conservative radio, it is misdirected or used callously on liberal stations and it’s become too easy to degrade someone you might disagree with on a benign social discussion, as a racist.

It is too easy to believe I don’t attribute credibility in the claim when you call me an Uncle Tom because I speak well and try very hard not to curse when it would be so much more convenient to do so.          

https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/730095

Honestly in the world of art this should never be a discussion and if life truly imitated art in this dynamic the world would be a better place. At least confrontation and schisms would not be as prevalent as it is today. To me it is like we begin the topic of hues and what is beautiful or seen in heaven, because we don’t have anything else to talk about.

I illustrated “Fallen,” as a response to how ridiculous of an idea of not being accepted by God or anyone would feel that way, because they are black. That someone would use the Bible to teach that and we would stop illustrating wings when talking about angels, in order to unify the spectrum of colors that make up our world into the kingdom of Zion.

Hard to imagine; in some aspects we still can’t agree on a marketable environment that unites black, white, Asian, and Indian dreamers.      

[youdecode]

How To Not Be Sensitive? | Why am I so sensitive & How to stop being?

Sensitivity!

It is a blessing because it reinforces that you have a heart!

Sensitivity is vital for emotional intelligence.

But it can become a huge pain and completely distort your being if it exceeds a line.

It is good to be sensitive about others but when it comes to yourself then not so much.

You are reading this blogpost which means you are already threatened by this problem & wondering how to not be sensitive.   

Do you know that what most people will do to get rid of sensitivity? (And this will backfire by the way)

People will avoid social situations, shut others out of life, develop a cold exterior, and pretend to be someone else.

Yes, implementing these strategies might help you in the short run.

Of course, how will you feel sensitive when you will practically shut the others out!

But as far as the lifetime personal development is concerned then these strategies will cause more harm than good. This is not a way to treat how to not be sensitive.

One will sink into deep depression. So never attempt to get away sensitivity with the aforementioned steps.

What to do then for how to not be sensitive?

Don’t worry the points below have got you covered with how to stop being sensitive.

 Also Here Are Some Related Massively-Transformative Resources You Will Ever Need.

10 secret tricks you need to master for self confidence

15 Insanely Powerful Low Self Confidence Tips 

9 ways to increase self pride & fix Distorted Self Image

When any incident makes you feel an overly sensitive then you need to untangle the knots swirling within you.

Yes, you have to get why you feel the way you did and what made you so affected.

  PS : Don’t forget to grab the freebie at the end of post, specially crafted for you  !

 #1. Figure out what makes you sensitive

You should identify the cause as without that you will not reach to a concrete solution.

Sensitivity can get triggered upon the mention of certain incidents, or upon being called out at something etc.

You might take the comments passed by others more seriously than you should.

 #2. How to not be sensitive: Limit overthinking

 One of the reason of being sensitive is overthinking.

Do you obsess over at the slightest actions/words of the people You need to learn how to control your thoughts.

Yes, you cannot just let them wander where ever they feel like.

Overthinking will devoid you of any possible productivity thus the best bet is to become mindful of the thoughts.

You might question that how to do just that. *****This blog post has got you covered. *****Remember your thoughts can become your biggest enemy.

And most importantly they have a pivotal role in law of attraction.

So you need to limit your thoughts.

 #3. How to not be sensitive: Think before you react

 Over-sensitivity also means that you are reacting before thinking wisely.

Whenever any such triggering situation arises, do not jump on the defensive mode rather take a step back.

Do not over blow the situation rather learn all possible dimensions.

You will act in a sensitive way mainly because you will turn judgmental.

Next time when any such situation strikes just write 80 possible reasons for thinking in a negative way . . .

Yes, till the time you will jot down 80 reasons you are most likely to become less sensitive about the whole situation.

For instance if your friend was not able to return the call then this does not mean that has forgotten your importance.

SHOW SOME LOVE & PIN THIS FOR LATER ! 

  #4.  Stop being sensitive by knowing It’s not all about you

 When you are being oversensitive you are most likely to believe that every one behaves intentionally to hurt you.

Life is busy my friend.

Everyone is just busy in thinking about their own struggles.

Yes, everyone.

So most of the time people are not thinking about you at all.

You are the main character in your life and they are the main character in their life so remember the distinction.

 #5. How to not be sensitive : Be patient

 Getting rid of sensitivity will take time because it is process.

I wish there could have been any medicine that could instantly help.

But let’s not get demotivated because if you will work on your mindset then you can overcome sensitivity insanely quickly.

 #6. Become Mindful

 Do you think that mindfulness is a big term?

Well, it is actually not.

Mindfulness is nothing but a lifestyle where you are intentionally living with a clearer and calmer mind.

Mindfulness is about making most of the moment.

Interestingly there is not a single way of achieving it and that is why many stay confused.

See what works best for you from:

Mindful meditation

Mindfulness app

Mindfulness journaling

#7. Train Your Brain

 To overcome sensitivity you need to understand brain pattern.

Do not worry i am not digging into scientific jargons!

I am just trying to tell that our brain is like a computer.

It has pre-stored programs.

It works on the basis of connections.

If you are sensitive then your behavior is fed in it due to repetition and it will keep repeating the behaviors or that “over-sensitivity program” unless you told it to do otherwise.

When some one will pass any comment, your brain will process it and output something like “you are supposed to feel threatened and hurt right now”

So what is the drill?

You need to teach your brain new ways of responding.

And here comes the play of thoughts.

You will have to train your thought.

Is it that easy?

Yes. Try for yourself.

 #8. Jump your Perspective

 This technique is really powerful. It is an effective answer for how to not be sensitive.

It is called perspective jumping. We have established above that we tend to think “me against the world”.

You get sensitive because you think that everyone just hates you and there is some sort of scheme going playing on.

How to practically get rid of this perspective? Yes, thought jumping.

Don’t worry you do not have to hop around . . . rather just make your perspective hop.

Sorry that was lame.

Any way you need to think from the lens of an completely different individual.

Now recall the incident that triggered your sensitivity.

This time, narrow the lens and view it as “what would alien think of the whole situation.”

Detach yourself from the situation and see everything as an onlooker.

What would a random onlooker suggest?

 #9. Become easy on yourself

 If you get hurt very easily then now is the time to show self acceptance.

We humans tend to value others more than ourselves.

So now think of others. When you find yourself judging then do not get hard on yourself.

Instead imagine you were talking with a good friend . . . how would you speak to one and treat one?

Offer yourself the same help in such sensitive triggered situations.

 #10. Overcome sensitivity by Daily Journaling

 There are several types of journaling and I am clearly not hinting towards writing your daily routine in here.

Maintain a self discovery journal. ***** Get these prompts here and let your feelings flow.****

These prompts will help you unload what is in there.

Release your thoughts. Wherever you feel that you will explode with sensitivity then go for the journaling.

Those 5 minutes which you will invest in journaling have the potential to completely flip how you feel.

 #11. Proper Self Care for stop being sensitive

 Do you know one interesting fact?

If you are emotionally sensitive then there are 90 percent chances that you are physically sensitive as well.

You simply do not take care of yourself.

Poor sleep.

Poor diet all are your enemies. You need to start taking care of your self religiously.

What will it do?

It will make you fall in love with yourself again.

Yes, i am using the word again because you have forgotten.

Check this insane value self care bundle.

It is extremely powerful for boosting your self esteem, self love and self worth.

Trust me work on your self image for getting rid of this sensitivity.

Become the self confident women who will conquer any battle with strength. . . this time without getting hurt, angry or sad. 

  Before you go Know This Secret:

If you ask me what is the key for not being sensitive then i will say:

It is the way you look at yourself. . . 

It is the way you look at other things. 

Value yourself. Boost yourself confidence so that no one else could ever shake that. 

Take care of your sensitivity by flipping your mindset around.

Love yourself . . . if you have forgotten then fall in love with yourself again. 

Tell me what do you think in the comments below. 

  My favorite FREEBIES for you 

 3 Epic PDFS For Instant Energy - Boost Your Productivity To An Insane Level

 3 Badass PDFS For Incredible Motivation - Fulfill Any Goal & Turn Any Desire Into Reality

 3 Essential PDFS For Remarkable Focus & Concentration -

 Grab 1100+ Journal Prompts To Tap Hidden Answers Of Your Life

 Grab 8+ Special Printables For Unstoppable Vision - Your Future May Depend On This

CLICK TO DOWNLOAD YOUR PRINTABLES & MEET ME IN YOUR INBOX. I HAVE A SURPRISE GIFT FOR YOU !

.et_bloom .et_bloom_optin_4 .et_bloom_form_content { background-color: #000000 !important; } .et_bloom .et_bloom_optin_4 .et_bloom_form_container .et_bloom_form_header { background-color: #000000 !important; } .et_bloom .et_bloom_optin_4 .et_bloom_form_content button { background-color: #dd9933 !important; } .et_bloom .et_bloom_optin_4 .et_bloom_form_content .et_bloom_fields i { color: #dd9933 !important; } .et_bloom .et_bloom_optin_4 .et_bloom_form_content .et_bloom_custom_field_radio i:before { background: #dd9933 !important; } .et_bloom .et_bloom_optin_4 .et_bloom_form_content button { background-color: #dd9933 !important; } .et_bloom .et_bloom_optin_4 .et_bloom_form_container h2, .et_bloom .et_bloom_optin_4 .et_bloom_form_container h2 span, .et_bloom .et_bloom_optin_4 .et_bloom_form_container h2 strong { font-family: "Open Sans", Helvetica, Arial, Lucida, sans-serif; }.et_bloom .et_bloom_optin_4 .et_bloom_form_container p, .et_bloom .et_bloom_optin_4 .et_bloom_form_container p span, .et_bloom .et_bloom_optin_4 .et_bloom_form_container p strong, .et_bloom .et_bloom_optin_4 .et_bloom_form_container form input, .et_bloom .et_bloom_optin_4 .et_bloom_form_container form button span { font-family: "Open Sans", Helvetica, Arial, Lucida, sans-serif; }

DOWNLOAD

Welcome To The Community Decoder!

  The post How To Not Be Sensitive? | Why am I so sensitive & How to stop being? appeared first on You Decode.

[prince-of-egypt-memes-blog]

The best way Bitcoin Off shoot Blocks Will be Backward Working - a lot more They’re Never

Through a splash of water in the multimedia, Purse and the in-house-built unique Bitcoin enactment Bcoin a short while ago presented their whole scaling pitch, dubbed “To the Phase of the moon. ” Wheresoever Bitcoin XT, Bitcoin Vintage and Bitcoin Unlimited all of attempt to maximize Bitcoin’s mass size restriction with a challenging fork, along with Bitcoin Central developers like a Segregated Experience soft pay (SegWit), Backpack CEO Phil Lee has announced a third tactic: extension chunks.

Extension obstructs were essentially first recommended by Bitcoin Core coder Johnson Lau in 2013 (as “auxiliary blocks”), in addition to again sooner this year. The best generally conveys many of the benefits of tricky forks: proxy blocks provide almost any standard protocol change. However share just one significant reward with tender forks: off shoot blocks are usually backward works.

Well, like …

Delicate Forks

Very soft forks are generally protocol variations that create new principles or firm up existing models. “Old nodes” - like we’ll get in touch with them for the present time - could consider a soft-forked chain applicable because it will not break almost any “old regulations. ” This causes soft forks backward working: they allow for old clients to coexist on the same multilevel with “new nodes” in which enforce typically the soft derive.

While delicate forks can just only add or simply tighten policies, they can be wisely used to increase Bitcoin’s capacities. To do this, very soft forks ordinarily utilize exceptional Bitcoin contact information known as “anyonecanspend. ” (They’re actually “outputs, ” definitely not addresses, in particular simplicity’s welfare ignore this for now. )

If most of these anyonecanspend the address hold any sort of bitcoins, it signifies that any one can shell out them; virtually no cryptographic bank or everthing else is required! or possibly even longer it seems for you to old clients.

But that certainly is not just what exactly new clients, enforcing the revolutionary rules, find. The new protocols prescribe which the bitcoins during these anyonecanspend looks into can only often be spent less than specific disorders, defined because of the soft hand. These fresh rules can certainly, for example , propose that a element of time probably passed (CLTV) or that your particular signature have to be included in a different part of a new Bitcoin prohibit (SegWit).

File format Blocks

Extendable blocks be like soft forks, but fairly literally take their concept to an alternative level.

An extension with conservatory block per se looks smilar to a normal Bitcoin block, which in turn we’ll name a “base block. ” Like a bottom block, an extension with conservatory block largely includes a crowd of transactions.

Although there is a variance. A base obstruct is cryptographically linked to the former base wedge and to next base mass, chaining most of base hindrances chronologically to make Bitcoin’s blockchain. An extension prohibit, on the other hand, one way links only to a person corresponding bottom part block. Proxy blocks “peg along” basic blocks.

Similar to soft forks, extension pads utilize anyonecanspend addresses. Now, these anyonecanspend addresses work like enter plus exit tips, to and also from the file format blocks.

Any time a transaction is definitely sent at a base obstruct to an extendable block, an ancient node can be tricked. With the perspective of your old computer, the money are deliver to a typical anyonecanspend address for the base wedge. The gold coins never give the base mass as far as outdated node can be involved, and in point the old computer doesn’t possibly see the proxy block.

Nonetheless from the view of a brand-new node, often the bitcoins are very sent to a total new deal with on the off shoot block aid an “extension address. ” This file format address plays its part more or less as being a normal Bitcoin address.

Perhaps surprisingly, these bitcoins can then perhaps start to flow into from extendable address to help extension street address, from one proxy block to another location. As such, completely new nodes to view coins moving and switching ownership. Also, old clients do not discover anything along with think the exact bitcoins are nevertheless stuck during the original anyonecanspend address.

A different node may send the particular bitcoins using their company extension handle back to a regular address in the base prohibit. This is produced by tricking outdated nodes for a second time: from the mindset of the previous node, typically the coins usually are finally migrated from the anyonecanspend address. Only one new computer knows the spot that the coins seriously came from.

If the bitcoins will be back in the starting block including a normal target, old in addition to new clients see the ditto.

As maybe there main great extension chunks, they don’t really need to adhere to an original Bitcoin method in any way. The following opens up a full category of innovative possibilities. Recognized blocks might perhaps deliver more programmability like Ethereum or Ethereum Classic, and up privacy including Monero, Zcash or Mimblewimble.

Bcoin’s proposition is minimal, however: “To the Moon” extension obstructs are mostly simply just bigger than ordinary blocks (by a so-far unknown amount), so they can tackle more ventures. They also involve Segregated Observe, and some beneficial properties specifically made to support often the lightning market on top of recognized blocks.

Sophistication

While off shoot blocks usually, and To the exact Moon specially, can work each year, they do offer some negative aspects.

At the heart of them drawbacks, On the Moon is much more technically difficult than other your current solutions planned so far, as well as all very difficult forks along with a Segregated Find soft division. This also generates more complicated that will implement.

In addition to from a individual perspective, Into the Moon could leave good old nodes unaware more than a lot of soft forks do. Though old clients don’t discover coins for soft-forked anyonecanspend addresses is often spent, by using extension hindrances, old clients don’t even find out where loose change are. Consequently old clients can���t hint the history on the coin as well as in some cases quickly can’t quite possibly spend them. (This would be the case in cases where a blockchain reorganization takes place; this will likely cosmetically switch what a exchange from an file format block a good old computer looks like. )

As such, never everyone loves Towards Moon. Perry Lau, the very first proposer connected with extension pads, argues of which To the Moon phase “failed in order to reach the very necessary requirement of your softfork: toward the back compatibility. ” He on the other hand still looks at extension chunks “more for an academic subject matter than a little something really looking forward to production apply. ” In a similar fashion, Bitcoin Main developer plus Bitcoin Take away the maintainer Lenny Dashjr alerts that extendable blocks “are a chance of creating not one but two classes with ‘full clients, ’" wheresoever non-upgraded clients are "left insecure for instance pseudo-SPV (not even serious SPV) clients. ” Plus Bitcoin Center developer Sofia Corallo dismisses the idea that proxy blocks might be of interest opt-in in anyway - as a substitute “the full network will trust recognized block, ” a “pretty terrible antecedent. ”

[yekulan-dothkah]

Stormblood Live Letter: May 22 discussion

I reblogged a post earlier regarding the live letter summary in quick notes form. I just wanted to express some thoughts and state some clarifications verbally expressed during the stream; because I sat and watched the whole thing and some people are freaking out or assuming the wrong information. There will be some of my own opinion thrown in so keep that in mind.

Job Changes:

Base Abilities: Do not assume all your abilities will transfer over, the original versions of many abilities will show as grey with a red line through them. Many abilities have been reworded, combined with other abilities, or slightly modified. This has been done to help level the playing field while maintaining play style. They appear to have taken a lot of care with new and modified abilities to make the classes represent themselves more clearly, and offer logical abilities that benefit both self and allies. Please be patient and willing to work with the new abilities, and capabilities that come with them, rather than complain you no longer have X ability.

Role Skills: Some cross class "mandatory" abilities may not all be able to be selected because of the role skills replacing cross skills. Role skills are arranged by  tank/healer/melee/ranged/caster, and all the role skills have been carefully selected, modified, and tweaked. For example, Goad is now a melee role skill, along with Rampart as a tank role skill; while Quelling Strikes and Raging Strikes have been taken off the list of shared abilities for ranged role skills. The interesting factor this will bring is to playstyle, you can only select 5, and there are about 10 to choose from; many of these abilities are useful and it will be hard to pick the last 3, this will hopefully give playing the variety and choice we've been lacking, while still offering our very job specific playstyle.

Healer DPS/Cleric Stance: Cleric stance is a huge change, to clarify if you've missed the memo, it is no longer a stance and is now a cooldown that gives us a temporary boost to damage, our Mind stat is now also being used for our attacks instead of Intelligence. This is a huge quality of life improvement to all healers, if you've been nervous about dps'ing and healing as a healer, please reconsider after this update because now there's little to no risk of dps'ing and not being able to heal in time; you may even find you enjoy it. 90% of healer attacks have cast times, simply twitch your character in a direction to interrupt casting and begin healing instead. People I don't expect to dps and most of the community doesn't either: People with horrible ping, people who are unfamiliar with the job, people who are "rusty" and are playing after a long break from class/game, people who are new or still relatively unfamiliar with the dungeon and it's mechanics. Simply state something like the aforementioned  when you enter the dungeon and everyone will understand; you may also be offered hints, tips, even tricks. Please openly take the advice offered and use it if you didn't know the information before, if you already knew the information, say thank you either way. People who stand there for 99% of the dungeon and don't really heal that much, you're probably going to get some flak from people; if you want not only do the content more slowly, but are not affected by the words your party spews at you, ultimately willing to be kicked and queue again, then by all means don't do anything. Understand however that people will react negatively if you make absolutely no effort to speed/make a mechanic passable in the dungeon/raid/trial up by participating when you literally have nothing better to do; so don't cry me or anyone a river when you get kicked for the 20th time today because you weren't dps'ing when your search information and gear clearly states you are a skilled and competent healer.

Resources & Their Graphics: Resources have been added to classes that lacked a resource, like dark knight and paladin. Some resources have been added to classes that already had them, like scholar and dragoon. All these new and existing resources have User Interfaces (UI) to accompany them, an extra bit you put on your screen to clearly state where you are in your usage or build up of said resource. These are an expansion on the first point that is giving each of our classes a more distinct feel by pushing us to use our combat techniques and a skillful manner to open up opportunities for high utility and damaging moves. To people complaining they've turned PVE into easy mode with the reduced actions and simplicity, this is where the skill level of you end game raiders will separate you from the casual players. People able to fill and maintain these bars efficiently will be the kings and queens of their classes, while still allowing the casual individual to use and play effectively.

Attribute Changes:

Blocking: Blocking is still a shield stat and not increasing from the sounds of things, blocking will now be possible from the sides and backs, deteriorating at a rate based on how far the angle is from your front. Block is also being applied to magic attacks to give Paladins and shield & scepter casters & healers a bit more utility.

Parry: Yes parry has been removed as a stat, but it has not been removed as a mechanic. You will still parry, they stated there will be calculations similar to blocking that allow you to parry based of a set percentage instead of a stat affected number. Parry materia will, as a result, no longer be present; all Parry materia affixed and obtained, will turn into "Tenacity" which I will address next.

Tenacity: Tenacity replaces parry, and the best way to describe it is your ability to wield the weapon both offensively and defensively. This stat will both passively increase your attack, and decrease the damage you take. This is a stat I am very excited to test on all the tanks as the passive damage reduction and increased output will be a boon if the calculations are significant enough.

Accuracy: Much like parry, this stat has been removed, but not the mechanic. Increases to evasion and blinding the respective combatants will still decrease the chance to hit. Attacking something of a higher level will have a reduced chance to hit. However, attacking a creature from the side, and back, will have increased chances to hit. For example hitting someone head on from the front and they are the same level as you with no debuffs or buffs will mean you have a 100% chance to hit, but being a fighter at the flank or rear will increase your chances significantly so even when blinded you can land blows. Likewise your position when casting will be crucial if you are under leveled or debuffed. As a result, Accuracy materia have been replaced with "Direct Hit" just like Parry was replaced with Tenacity.

Direct Hit: This stat will give you more consistent, smaller, critical hits. Say a critical for you right now is 4k, two times your normal damage of 2k, a Direct Hit critical will likely be in the ballpark of 2.5k-3k. What is interesting is this damage WILL stack with the damage of criticals, so if you get a direct hit critical of 3k, if your critical hit triggers at the same time you'll do 6k damage instead of 4k as it will go off the new base damage. Now this is speculation; the is also the possibility your crit could also just be 4k + the extra 1k your direct hit did so it could only reach 5k. Still this is a huge boon to fast attackers like Monks, Ninjas, Bards, and Machinists, I look forward to the science side of our community experimenting, testing, and posting their new numbers thanks to this stat. I am also curious and excited to see how this affects criticals for Scholars, and Astrologian nocturnal sect healing.

Strength: A change to tanks and no one else, you will have this stat added into your damage calculations once more. It is unclear at this time if you will do more damage for having VIT over more STR, or if STR will be a drastic enough increase that tanks will be willing to skip out on some VIT. Whatever the result is, people, please take a deep breath and calm down. The decision to go VIT instead of STR is the tank's choice, not yours; if they're willing to compensate for the loss of HP by using game mechanics like having more defensive role cooldowns instead of offensive ones and they do just fine, then you have no place to call them stupid for that choice. People will play how they want, and as long as you get to the end of the content I don't see a problem with people spec'ing their stats the way they want, or choosing uncommon skills for role abilities. Please note, you will not be able to equip STR DPS accessories like you could pre-Stormblood, this applies to any classes trying to equip different accessories from their defined sets, so stacking a high Strength stat will be much harder for tanks, hopefully this will prevent extremely low HP tanks while still offering an alternative to materia melding from VIT.

PVP:

Gear: Gear has become 100% aesthetic, this is nor more PVP gear item levels or stats, this leads me to assume that current PVP gear will be reduced to lvl 1 glamours, or lvl 50/60, but not actual equipment for combat. Alternatively they could leave the stats on, and people who use the seals to buy the gear for use in PVE could keep doing so (even if that isn’t optimal it’s probably a lot less coding work.). So go in strutting your best glam and love it.

Stats & Attributes: Everyone will have “comparable” stats and attributes now. What this means is tanks that are going to have more hp that most, then next highest is likely melee dps, followed ranged dps, and casters/healers at roughly the same amount. It appears everyone has the same MP amounts as well, but that is likely subject to change. For examples on this, tank will probably have 15k HP, we know dragoons have 12.5k HP, red mages have 10k HP, and both dragoon and red mage have 10k MP.

Skills & Abilities: Everyone will have “comparable” abilities as well, how this factors in is that everyone has combo’s, and the abilities, even if they go by the same name have much different potency and effects from outside of PVP, this also means we get PVP separate hot bars. Everyone gets between 9-10 abilities and these are your heals, attacks, ect. Next everyone gets 2 PVP abilities that are like the “remove all detriments” or “Greatly enhance evasion” for current examples. Lastly you get 3 passive abilities that are available to all roles, there’s roughly 10 of them and they have things like increased damage types, increased stats, and passive effects judging from what we could see in the live letter. 

What this all means for players is a level playing field where actual skill and teamwork are rewarded, instead of playtime and gear. All three of these changes are a huge improvement to a previously very unfair and relatively broken system we have put up with for so long.

Also: PVP can be entered at lvl 30, instead of lvl 50 or 60, minor yet important note.

Shortcuts:

Story: I completely understand this, the story is long and tiring, it's pretty painful all said and done. While it is a good story in my opinion, not everyone has the time to play through it all, and catching up  to your friends is fine and dandy. My beef with this is removing the newbie bonus from dungeons affected by story. Should the story dungeon and side dungeons be accessible? Yes. Should the MSQ dungeons be marked as cleared? No. These people join into a dungeon, have no clue what's going on in say, Aurum Vale, and then die because they stood in a puddle. If I see the newbie bonus, I typically ask "Does anyone want an explanation as we go?". Most new people say "Yes please" or "Sure" or "Yeah, it's my first time.". This establishes that not everyone knows the drill, that not everyone is on the ball with what is going on. I could care less about the actual bonus but just knowing "This is someone's first time" makes me and a lot of people I know very understanding of any mistakes. To queue up and get The Vault and have someone who has no clue what the hell is going on with the final, second, or even first boss is NOT doing anyone favors. People who are not forced to run every dungeon along the way have no idea what all the different mechanics look like, they have no clue what's going on or why they're dead. It's not fair to us as players paired up with them, and its definitely not fair to the people who are put in the uncomfortable situation of having no clue. Ideally they do research on the dungeon, but that’s IDEAL, many things that are IDEALLY a good idea fail in practical application as history has taught us. So what is the list of dungeons and trials that are required to be completed for MSQ that will be auto completed? Every MSQ dungeon obviously, but also every primal trial besides: Odin in normal mode and most hard modes, especially extreme modes are excluded. The Hard Mode (HM) of the first 3 primals, and a number of things like the steps of faith, and the final steps of faith; all are trials that are very hard if you have no clue what's going on and can be mechanic heavy that people will have ABSOLUTELY NO FREAKING CLUE ABOUT, but are MSQ required. "What cannons?" / "What does this do? *queue activating mechanic too early*" / "So I stand in the blue AOE's right? They're friendly?" / "Why did we all just die?" / "Healers screwed up?" / "I'm supposed to do what with the adds?". All legitimate questions I've seen or been asked already, and marking these dungeons as "completed" is going to cause a ton of wipes, frustrated players, kicks, and "House rules" that are unfair to new players. Please, mark these as "First time" SE, it will avoid a lot of pain with that simple tiny little message pop up.

On a side note that is related, there is a cheaper shortcut to just do 2.0-2.55 msq of A Realm Reborn (ARR); the other package does ARR plus Heavens Ward (HW) msq content of 3.0-3.56, but is more expensive as a result. This also does NOT grant any levels, you will still be level 1.

Levels: This I am on the fence about, right now you are only allowed 1 per service account, that's fine, and most people who shortcut the story will also buy this to make the catch up process complete. Now we will have people with no clue about mechanics attempting to complete content without even going through the process of learning how to play the class they currently are. Thankfully, on Balmung, these people are likely "smurfs" or "alts" and this will be less common as most people have a main trained in everything but they want their OC to be trained as X class. Other servers that are still open to new characters and population are going to be the ones suffering most from this inexperience. Yes we have cross world duty finder but you are more likely to get someone from your own world I find rather than other worlds. Yes they prompt you to "Go to the tutorial level and learn how to not be completely horrible at your job" but it's a poor and painful alternative to the learning you go through doing the dungeons. I would rather SE increase the novice hall's lessons to include more complex tactics as "Bonus courses" but knowing them they will sit there and leave it as it because it's still better than nothing. My biggest issue is the novice hall is OPTIONAL. You don't have to do it at all, and you could choose say, dark knight to 60, and proceed to not use grit when you're the only tank, and not use any aggro grabs because you don't even know what those are; now the dps and the healer are dying, it's a party wipe, and you have no idea why everyone is mad and you, or why you got kicked if it was bad enough. This is bad for the new characters because new people will feel they wasted 50$ buying the packs only to get kicked out of every dungeon and told to learn how to play the game and even insulted. Please blacklist and report people who get foul at others or you like this, but by all means this new player can still be kicked for "griefing" well before the ones who kicked are called on being rude and disrespectful.

Final Note:

Please, as a community it is our job to be patient and willing to teach these new players the basics, or those inexperienced in X job, even those relearning their jobs, especially those performing the experiments that help us understand the game better. If the person is rude to you or others for trying to help them, or rude to you and others for stating you are learning, yes kick and report them as applicable, but at least try to be the mature teachers and mentors we should be to each other?P.S: Don’t be that WHM that uses the leash ability the wrong way, jokes are fine and dandy especially with friends, but with great power comes greater responsibilities.

[acetokens]

The Curse of the Vampire: My thoughts on MUA3′s first DLC

Today I wanna talk about the first DLC expansion pack for MUA3: The Curse of The Vampire! Because I can’t contain my hype for this any longer, I have to ramble about it and you can’t stop me.

This post will probably be stupid long, so its all under the cut!

The Curse of the Vampire is MUA3’s biggest update so far, and its first paid DLC update. It released just in time for spooky month, so naturally the entire thing is Halloween themed. Every player will be able to sink their teeth into a new story mode difficulty, ‘Nightmare’, where enemies affected by a vampiric curse will appear, as well as accessing the SHIELD Depot, where you can purchase various costumes and items for SHIELD Tokens. The update raised the level cap from 100 to 150 and added extra sections to the Alliance Enhancement Grid, both of which can be used to further strengthen your heroes. For Season Pass holders, you can also unlock four new characters: Blade, Punisher, Moon Knight and Morbius, through the new ‘Gauntlet Mode’, where you take on challenges in a loop of ever increasing difficulty to get rewards.

There was radio silence from the devs leading up to the release of the DLC, so my hopes weren’t high. But I was really happy to wake up on the 30th September to see the massive amount of content we received! Because there’s so much to unpack here, I want to talk about each new feature one at a time, starting with the most hyped up part of the update!

The Characters

I’ve never been a big fan of The Marvel Knights, but I was really pleased to see most of them had something unique to distinguish them from other heroes and I had fun trying them all out!

Punisher is, of course, based around using his huge arsenal of guns. His stats are horrible, like all ranged characters, but he makes up for it with his surprisingly good evasive abilities, as he can shoot his guns or throw grenades whilst strafing left, right or backwards to avoid attacks. Punisher’s sniper rifle is also incredibly deadly, and feels so satisfying to land, especially on those AIM snipers in Wakanda. Punisher feels like the kind of character where you have to play very tactically to win with, which makes him the one I enjoyed playing as the most out of the four.

Morbius gets KO’d fast because of his poor defensive stats, but he absolutely rips apart enemy health bars. Not only does he have high strength and can increase his damage output with Fangs and Claws but he can also lower his foes’ defence with Hypnotic Gaze. The combination is absolutely terrifying. He can also heal himself by biting his enemies, as a vampire should. Playing as him is very fun because you deal so much damage its’ just obnoxious. He’s like Hulk on steroids.

Moon Knight is the most unoriginal character of the four in terms of playstyle, which is a shame. All of his abilities are identical in use to those from other characters, with the only unique feature of Moon Knight is his ability to glide, which is a more situational version of flight. His crescent kick and EX are also visually impressive. I think Moon Knight is the definition of ‘basic but practical’. He has the least impressive moveset of the four new characters but he’s also the only one who didn’t get KO’d when I ran through Nightmare Mode with them all, so he’s a solid unit.

Blade has the unique ability to charge all of his abilities to make them stronger. While charging he can move around (albeit slowly) and you can even switch to a different attack mid-charge. At first I found Blade the least enjoyable to play because of how slow he felt and how often he’d get interrupted by the enemy before he had a chance to do anything. But with the right items equipped, I found Blade significantly more fun, and seeing him stalk around the stage, charging up and waiting for a chance to strike was undeniably awesome.

Something I also noticed is that currently the characters’ traits are incorrect. It doesn’t say Blade can use elements, but he can. It doesn’t say Punisher has the super strength trait, but he does. And it says Morbius has a passive healing factor, but he doesn’t. I hope this gets addressed next patch.

The Story & The Enemies

I don’t think I was the only one who felt disappointed when the ‘new story content’ we were promised turned out to just be another difficulty option. After clearing the campaign four times already I wasn’t too motivated to do it a fifth time, but I did it anyway, and I have mixed feelings on it overall.

Disappointingly, Nightmare Mode has no treasure chests or infinity trials to discover and you get no reward for completing it. Its purpose is ultimately just to be a place for players who haven’t purchased the season pass to fight the new vampire enemies and collect SHIELD tokens. Despite that, I did have fun playing through Nightmare. The enemy’s stats rapidly increase in this difficulty more than the rest, starting at level 40 and rising all the way to level 90 by the last stage! Not only that, the new vampiric enemies (Reborn, Infected and Cursed) add an extra layer of strategy to combat, forcing you to adapt your tactics and your team pretty often.

The Reborn come in many different types, each with unique buffs that make them harder to defeat than standard enemies. They might slow you down or poison you if you get too close, heal nearby enemies, magnetically pull you towards them, inflict the damage they take back onto you, explode after being defeated etc. There are also Infected, which may return as Reborn after being defeated (and can Infect you, which will make you rapidly lose HP until cured), and Cursed, which will cure all Infected of their disease when taken down. Its hard to remember all of this at first, but once you’ve memorized what each of the enemy types do it makes Nightmare Mode much more enjoyable in a uniquely challenging way, especially in boss battles.

I do wish we’d gotten a brand new story mode chapter instead though.

The Gauntlets

I expected Gauntlet Mode to be a never-ending wave of enemies, but I was pleasantly surprised to find it was a lot more innovative and enjoyable. Gauntlet Mode is split into three phases, each with 4-6 Gauntlets. In each Gauntlet, a series of trials must be completed one after another, with the added caveat being that you cannot change your characters or items mid-Gauntlet, and (aside from after completing certain trials) your HP will not recover. After completing a Gauntlet once, you can challenge it again, and this time it will become an Endless Gauntlet where the trials will loop continuously and get harder each time, only ending when you give up or your team is defeated.

Like Nightmare Mode, Gauntlet Mode starts easy and gets progressively more difficult. The first Gauntlet is only level 5 and includes 3 trials, whereas the last Gauntlet is level 120 and includes 10 trials! I must be sounding like a broken record by now but this is the hardest challenge in the game. Gauntlet Mode really puts your endurance to the test, pitting you against continuous waves and bosses, many of which are Reborn, Infected or Cursed, all while under difficult conditions. Many of the optional challenges are also deliberately designed so that they are only achievable on an Endless run, meaning if you want those sweet rewards you have to clear the Gauntlet two, three or even four times in a row without quitting or losing.

I haven’t fully completed Gauntlet Mode just yet. I managed to get 4-stars on all Gauntlets in phase 1 and 2 without much effort due to my over-levelled characters, but on phase 3 the difficulty rose quite considerably. I had to start thinking very carefully about what characters and items I took into the Gauntlet, and I can’t exaggerate enough how incredibly hard Endless can get on these high level Gauntlets after a few loops. There’s a reason they give you 99 revives on Condition: Terminal. They expect you to die. A lot.

Overall, Gauntlet is pretty great! It offers a lot more variety than Infinity Trials, which is perfect if you’re using it to grind or farm items, and phase 3’s Gauntlets are the ideal test of skill and patience for players who enjoy a challenge. That being said, the load times between the trials can be tedious, and the difficulty isn’t for everyone. But I really enjoy Gauntlet Mode, and it’s my favorite part of the expansion!

The Store

The most unexpected part of the update for me was the new SHIELD Depot. Here, you can spend the SHIELD Tokens you collect in Nightmare and Gauntlet Modes for goodies, including new costumes for Black Panther, Captain America, Iron Man and Thor for 400 tokens each. You can also buy voice lines (which I believe may accidentally hint to future DLC characters) and items, some of which are very expensive at 10,000 tokens but look powerful. My favorite part of the Depot is that you can use Credits to buy XP cubes. Up until this point, Credits have been a useless currency. You can spend them to upgrade your items or enhance your alliance, but the sheer rate that you acquire credits means you end up sitting on a pile of 80,000,000 with nothing to spend it on, and that’s not a exaggeration. With this update, my mountain of Credits can finally be put to good use! I bought over 2,000 XP cubes and used them to level up my lesser used characters, so that felt pretty good.

I think the SHIELD Depot is a nice addition to the game, but I am slightly concerned how it will be affected by future updates. Will all future costumes be available for purchase there? If so, does that mean we have to play Gauntlet and Nightmare over and over to get the SHIELD Tokens needed to buy them, since that currency can’t be found anywhere else? I really hope not...

Other Changes

The expansion also made big changes to the level cap and the Alliance Enhancement Grid. Heroes can now reach the lofty heights of level 150, which is absolutely insane. Previously difficult trials like the New Brotherhood and Ultimate Alliance of Evil become a total cakewalk when you’re that overpowered, so anyone willing to put the grinding hours in will be well rewarded. My teams are currently around level 115-125, so I still have a way to go before I hit the new level cap, but I want to reach that stage before I try to 4-star the last phase of Gauntlet Mode because I think I’m gonna need it.

The Alliance Enhancement Grid has also been extended with new upgrades now available. They cost a lot of AEP, but the ones that allow you to heal by attacking stunned enemies are very helpful for Gauntlet Mode. I was close to finishing the original AEG (literally just 7 nodes away from obtaining every upgrade in the game) so my first reaction was: ‘’Damn, I should’ve saved my AEP for this’’. But luckily, the update also added the option to spend void spheres to reset the AEG and refund all AEP spent on it, so you can edit your upgrades. No more buyers remorse! This is one of the features I’ve had on my wishlist for a while so I’m happy they implemented this feature!

Finishing Thoughts

The Curse of the Vampire is a great first expansion for MUA3 overall. It has its let-downs, but it really surpassed my expectations with the amount of new content it contained, and sets the standard for the future expansions pretty high. One thing I am confused by, however, is that they mentioned in a tweet that ‘’players will be able to discover a new Infinity Rift’’. Despite all the new stuff included in the update, an Infinity Rift wasn’t one of them, which gets me thinking: Is this particular expansion really finished? I think we may receive another update on the 31st October, which includes that Rift as well as some spooky costumes. Maybe some free characters as well? Although that might be too optimistic.

Taking my tinfoil hat off for a moment, we know for a fact the next expansion will drop in late 2019 and include characters and features from the X-Men. This is the one I’ve been looking forward to. This is X-23’s (extremely slim) chance to make it in. More than anything else, that’s what I’m wishing for out of the next expansion. Although even if she doesn’t get included, I think if the next update includes as much content as this one, I’ll be more than happy with it.