#i didn't mean for this to become a review on the game

[isagrimorie]

I’ve been watching video reviews praising Agatha All Along, and while I more or less agree with their points, one thing that bothers me is the claim that Agatha remained 100% evil, and she didn't change, and that doesn’t sit right with me.

Agatha didn’t have a redemption arc (or as Schaeffer put it, “This lady did not arc out.”), and I understand why. In fact, I love that about her character. The show doesn’t try to sand down Agatha’s sharp edges. I love that Agatha can feel so deeply while still being unapologetically a dick.

But the reason it bothers me when people claim that Agatha didn’t change is because she did.

To put it into context, for a character who hasn’t changed and remains firmly on a villainous path, the reviewers should look at another comic book show that aired at the same time: The Penguin. While it’s not an exact comparison, there are notable similarities: both main characters love purple (sorry, Oz, I mean plum), have a fascinating, wide-eyed, unhinged brunette antagonist, a teen sidekick, and a ruthless quest for power. But there are key differences between Agatha Harkness and Oswald Cobblepot.

The Penguin is the story of Oswald’s rise to power as Gotham’s crime boss. Agatha, on the other hand, was already at the height of her power and villainy. Over 300 years, she killed fellow witches, schemed, and connived. This all came to an abrupt halt when Wanda trapped her in a hex. With the help of Rio and Billy, Agatha eventually clawed her way free from Wanda’s distorted spell.

Initially, it seemed like nothing had changed for Agatha.

But Agatha did change. The Agatha Harkness of three years ago—the witch killer—wouldn’t have sat around a campfire trading stories and feeling emotional about it. She wouldn’t have felt any remorse for accidentally killing Alice.

(It’s funny how, between Rio and Agatha, Agatha reminded me more of Dream than Rio. Both are capricious and prone to holding grudges. Both were held captive by mystical forces and when freed, they denied they had changed—even though their captivity altered them in both small and profound ways. In the end, both characters die because of their capacity to change and are reborn, metaphorically or literally, wearing white.)

I appreciated that the show didn’t dull Agatha’s sharp edges. She was, and remains, a killer. Even when we get glimpses of Agatha’s tragic backstory with Nicky, the show doesn’t excuse her actions. She was a killer before Nicky, during her time with Nicky, and after Nicky. In fact, she became an even more prolific serial killer after Nicky. Her contempt for fellow witches deepened every time they fell for her road scam.

So, it’s tiring hearing that “Agatha didn’t change.” The ending of Agatha All Along made it clear that while she didn’t change—because such a drastic shift can’t happen in just nine episodes for someone with a 300-year history—there was, as Jac Schaeffer put it, progress.

Agatha never considered the consequences of her actions. For example, when she tried to avoid harming Jennifer Kale back when she was a rootworker and midwife, she inadvertently hurt Jennifer for a century.

Agatha spent her life trying to fill the gnawing black hole inside her, running from pain and avoiding anything resembling personal growth. She finds the Darkhold, and she becomes invisible to Rio, her remaining connection to her life with Nicky.

And, even when the world around her burned, nothing truly touched Agatha Harkness—until she found herself in the Hex, facing off against the Scarlet Witch.

Agatha was overconfident. Armed with her vast knowledge and the Darkhold, she thought she was invincible. But she miscalculated, becoming powerless and losing three years trapped in Agnes the Nosy Neighbor's life.

This disruption in Agatha's pattern is enough that when Agatha was about to restart her Killing Game, it gave Agatha pause. When Alice shows up at her house hoping to visit the Road, only to end up dead in Agatha’s basement.

There was even a moment when Agatha went to recruit Sharon Davis as a replacement backup Green Witch, she had to take a moment to confirm to herself that she could live with killing Mrs. Hart.

Agatha’s story (for this season, at least-- because there will be another season or sequel, dammit) wasn’t a redemption—nine episodes isn’t enough to atone for 300 years of killing. It's a story of moving Agatha into a position to transform. Or, as Jac Schaeffer called it, progress. Redemption may come later, but progress isn’t linear. For someone who is an unrepentant killer and con artist, even the smallest shift is big.

Agatha All Along doesn’t try to make Agatha into a hero, nor does it attempt to soften her sharp edges. Instead, the show offers a nuanced portrait—a reminder that even an unrepentant bad guy can evolve, even if they don’t fully understand or accept it themselves.

Agatha Harkness might not be “redeemed” but she isn’t the same either.

[leafsbabe]

Travis Kelce - private show (SMUT)

2k, there is a butt plug in this in case you don't like that

He loved his team, he truly did, but Travis was also very glad when their post-training meeting was over and he could dip. None of his teammates tried to stop him as he all but ran out of the room, something he was grateful for. In the past it had been a given that he would walk out with some of the other men, talking, joking, but nowadays that had become a rare sight. He was always in a rush to get back to his room, back to the closest thing he had ever come to an addiction.

Away games hadn't been the same ever since he had stumbled across that fateful link.

By some lucky coincidence the facilities for the visiting team in the field they’d be playing tomorrow were absolute ass so the chiefs had rented out one of the hotel meeting rooms for their review. Meaning all Travis had to do to get back to his room was hop onto an elevator. After that he was free to lock himself in his room until it was time for dinner.

The elevator crawled up to his floor at a snail's pace but he stopped himself from impatiently rocking back and forth on the soles of his feet. When it finally came to a stop he started to squeeze out of the elevator before the doors had fully opened but he didn’t even care how it looked, he was already late and he didn’t want to miss any more.

The door to his room slammed shut behind him as he stormed in, jumping onto the bed with enough energy that realistically it should have broken but by some miracle stayed intact as he opened his carefully changed laptop while attempting to toe off his shoes.

The website didn’t automatically open once he clicked on his browser but he had been visiting it religiously to the point that it autofilled after a single letter. His pants started to feel too tight before the site had even finished loading and Travis couldn’t help but groan at the realisation that he fucking pavloved himself into getting a semi at the mere thought of you.

The stream had already started but hopefully he didn’t miss much. A familiar background greeted him before his eyes focused in on you. Splayed across the bed you’re a sight for sore eyes, hair messed up just enough to let him know you’d played with it before he logged on, body clad in next to nothing. A new, expensive next to nothing. Good to know all of the money he sent you got put to good use. 

He waited for you to greet him like you usually did, surely you must have noticed him joining your stream, he was your biggest fan after all, but when you didn’t he sent you a message over private chat. Expensive, yes, but he didn’t need people knowing his dirty little secrets.

Finally you acknowledged him. 

“Hi bigyeti, nice of you to join again.” It seemed like a standard greeting but he knew by your tone that you were annoyed at him for being late again. Brat. Travis watched you slide a hand over your bare skin until it reached the lace covering your chest. But instead of teasing one of your hard nipples through the material or even taking it off to show the irresistible swell of your chest you just ran your fingers over the seam at the edge of your bra. “As much as I think this set is cute, this will probably be the last time you’ll see me in it. It’s not really comfortable and I can barely get it closed by myself.”

You were probably hoping for messages offering to help you with that but Travis had been watching long enough to read between the lines. You were going to offer up the set but beat you to it. His simple message didn't get a written reply but he noticed you look off screen before smiling. “You know the price bigyeti.”

You didn’t take it off though, just changed positions until you were kneeling on the bed. It was only then that Travis noticed the selection of toys laid out in front of you.

“What do you think,” you picked up one of them, dark purple and intriguing, but not his favorite of the spread. “Should we run a poll or let the highest bidder decide?”

He sent you a rack before you even had time to decide, after which he finally rid himself of his sweats and underwear.

“You know which one.” Your sweet voice read his message in the chat, laughing as you held up the one you knew he wanted. Pale pink with ridges that could get you off every time, filling you up perfectly before the vibrations took you out. The first time he had watched you use it you had squirted and he had been hooked ever since.

“Should I be concerned big? You seem to like this little guy more than me.” You pouted at the camera, bringing the vibe up and tapping it against your bottom lip. 

Travis groaned before typing again. Hopefully this would be a one handed operation soon.

“You know you’re my favorite. Aww that’s so sweet of you yeti. Want to know a secret?” He watched you lean forward, holding your chest into the camera with practiced ease. “You’re my favorite too.”

Travis slowly stroked himself as you bit your lip, reaching behind you and finally freeing yourself from the lace. You had been truthful about how ill fitting it was, his eyes automatically drawn to the red indents on the side of your boobs. He fantasized about getting his mouth on them, of soothing your flesh with his tongue.

You didn’t try to act sexy as you balled up the bra and threw it off-cam, something he came to enjoy. You were this temptress, bane of his bank account and object of his desire, but you were also human.

As he saw you kneeling there Travis finally gave in and reached for his lube, because he was in his thirties now and using lotion to jack off felt awfully juvenile. He watched you run your hands over your body, just palming himself to the view of you playing with your nipples.

“We’re going to try something new today.”

The tone of your voice had him shifting, sitting up straighter and paying more attention. He didn’t have to wait long to find out what something new meant. You got rid of the last remaining hint of nothing hiding your skin before turning around into the most perfect reverse cowgirl POV he knew and there it was. Nestled between your cheeks laid a small plug with a deep red gem at the end that sparkled in the lights you used during your shows. A hot shudder ran through him as the grip he had on himself tightened.

“You know what to do if you like it.” You smiled at the cam over your shoulder before turning back around.

Travis debated between finally touching himself properly and sending you another donation when you positioned the toy he picked and he relented. He’d just send you another tip later. He was slow with his movements, teasing himself as you sank down on the toy. You stopped halfway, adjusting to the stretch, but Travis just continued to stroke his dick.

You were noisy, he liked that about the streams. You weren’t holding back but it also didn’t feel like you were putting on a show. You were simply vocal in bed and he loved it.

Treavis continued to work himself as he watched you ride the toy, torn between closing his eyes and imagining it was you that had a hand wrapped around his dick or even riding it and wanting to watch you take your pleasure with the toy on stream. He watched you move, the way you stretched around the toy with every rise and fall. It was mesmerizing, the shimmer of that salacious gem catching his eye only for his focus to be drawn away by the flex of your thick thighs, or the dimples on your lower back, or those sweet filthy moans that kept on leaving your mouth. He felt drunk on you, drunk on the fire running through him.

There was no rhythm to the way Travis was stroking his cock as he watched you, all pretense of following your movements abandoned long ago. He felt his orgasm approaching, considering for a moment whether he should try and draw it out, to wait for you and come together, before giving that idea up and quickening his pace. He came to the sound of your moans, all over his fist and with his head thrown back in ecstasy.

Travis let himself float only until the next moan tore his attention back to the screen in front of him. You were barely riding the toy at this point, grinding more than anything. Even with his muddled mind it was clear that you were on the brink yourself.

When you finally tipped over it was with a shout. Your legs shook, more violently than he had ever seen from you before, while your body contracted around the sex toys filling you up. He palmed his softening cock as he watched you fall apart, too spent to try getting another orgasm out of it but still wired enough to draw out that afterglow for just a little while longer. 

He watched as your orgasm came to an end, the shaking in your thighs never quite stopping even though the vibrations of your toy did. You removed the pink vibrator but that bejeweled plug stayed in place as you slowly turned around and sat in full view of the cam, leaning back on your hands and smiling. You were still breathing heavily but it only drew attention to your tits and Travis found himself reaching for his phone before he realized that his hand was covered in his cum and used his other one instead. He wasn’t good at typing with his nondominant hand but another tip found itself being sent your way soon enough anyway.

“That was fun.” You said, breathless but still smiling. No reaction to his message if you had even seen it. “We should do this again sometime.”

Travis got another long look at your body as you leaned forward to shut off the cam and then he was alone in his hotel room again.

Shutting his laptop before he got up, Travis went to wash his hands and clean up a bit of the mess around his dick. He would shower soon but there was something he had to take care of before that. His phone was still laid on the bed, even though he had to search through the sheets to find it.

Travis pulled up that all too familiar contact and pressed video call. You answered almost immediately, makeup still on your face but with your hair pulled back and a shirt thrown over your body.

“Was that good?” You asked as soon as the call connected. He could see you bite your lip, nervously, and he hated being so far away from you even more.

“You were perfect.” He answered, truthfully. “So hot, baby. Almost makes me want to set you up a real camming account just to show you off.”

The program you two had now was little more than a private video chat but Travis had tried to set it up nicely for you. It had involved a lot of awkward questions to one of the New Height techies but the chat worked amazing for your little cam show and your audience of one.

You just laughed at his antics. “No you wouldn’t.”

“No I wouldn’t.” He relented. “I don’t like to share, even if you’re the most gorgeous girl I’ve ever seen. And all mine.”

You laughed again. “All yours.” You confirmed before continuing, teasing him with an account of the new things you had brought for the two of you to try. Fuck. He couldn’t wait to come home.

[horrorvale]

HorrorVale Development Blog: End of Year

Hello, citizens of HorrorVale!

As the year draws to a close, we (or more specifically me, Dustin) wanted to put together a little blog to talk about HorrorVale! How launch went, what our current and future plans are, and more!

(Note that this blog post does not receive audio, so if you respond I cannot hear it.)

Dream Colosseum

First, before I start talking about HorrorVale's Launch, I want to discuss an upcoming patch.

Currently, we're working on a massive patch for HorrorVale that will include the following:

Even MORE bug fixes

Brand new optional dialogue for every single party member in the game for main story cutscenes

More skill re-balancing

Other minor things and scenes I still wish to include

But most importantly... The DREAM COLOSSEUM!

I originally didn't think many people would bother with the "Secret Bosses" in HorrorVale, but since so many of you enjoyed them and also desired to get more opportunities to mess with party combinations, I decided to punish you horribly!

The Dream Colosseum is a brand new feature that will allow you to fight Bosses you fought previously, now all scaled up to End game stats, with new moves and quirks, and all very difficult.

If you've fought the "Last Secret Boss", now you get to imagine what a Dream Colosseum version might be like.

It will require you to 100% the game to access, but won't give any unique rewards outside of a cosmetic change to Alice's bedroom so people don't feel compelled to torture themselves for completionists sake. Naturally, there won't be any new trophies either.

Right now we're working steadily on this update, and hope to have it out very early next year.

Now that that's out of the way, let's talk about how launch actually went for HorrorVale...

HorrorVale Launch

After 8 years in development and 5 years since announced, HorrorVale finally released on October 1st, 2024.

This reception has been tremendous.

Leading up to release, I was anxious but overall feeling pretty good about launch. There were minor things I wish I had included or changed, but knew that delaying what was otherwise a feature complete game would be extremely silly.

I actually intended on releasing these things as a patch in the first week of launch, in the hopes of catching most people before they get too deep in the game.

...What I did not expect however, was the unfortunate discovery of several bugs, some of which were game breaking.

What made these bugs especially frustrating is that most of them were NEW bugs, created from me adding things right before launch, or fixing other unrelated bugs.

Due to these bugs and the massive influx of new fans, comments, reviews, and more I found myself extremely overwhelmed, and it ended up being probably one of the most stressful 2 weeks of my life after launch.

In the end, everything worked out and I was quick to patch the game...

...Multiple times.

Still, despite these issues the reception was overwhelmingly positive. Certainly some critiques here and there, but the general response was that the game was so enjoyable that even the most egregious critiques could be brushed aside. All of the wonderful things I've read by people who had fun in the world I created... It truly means the world to me. The... Underworld you might say.

I'm sure some people are also interested in how the game actually DID. Good reviews and positive reception are one thing, but this is also a product being sold, so how did it DO!? Did it SMASH RECORDS and become bigger than UNDERTALE? Did it FLOP???

Well, to be honest I'm not entirely sure!

Which is a strange thing to say, but it's difficult to gauge "Success" when so many factors can change what that means. For a AAA game, success means something very different to a small indie game with a publisher, which also means something very different to a ragtag team of people with no real budget, no publisher, no marketing, and especially no notoriety whatsoever. Not to mention as first time developers we have little to compare it to...

But that being said...

As of right now, HorrorVale has sold...

1,000 COPIES!

That's an INSANE amount of people. If all of you were in a big room crowded around me, I would be very scared.

That's 1,000 new citizens to HorrorVale that have entered its gates.

If we gauge success purely based off "did it make back what you invested in it?", then HorrorVale was absolutely a success!

However, unfortunately it did not necessarily meet the expectations we had.

Going into the launch of HorrorVale, I had 3 goals in mind.

To make back what I invested in it (out of pocket, not including Patreon earnings)

To pay Matt, the composer full royalties for the HorrorVale OST (since he created the entire 170 track monster soundtrack for FREE.)

To be able to devote myself full time to Game Development

Of these three... Only 1 has been achieved so far.

While I generally try to avoid discussing topics like these, I feel like it's important context for the next piece of discussion. The future of HorrorVale.

HorrorVale: Act M

HorrorVale: Act M is a small side story featuring none other than Mothman himself! This spinoff game was greenlit thanks to HorrorVale fans reaching our Wishlist goal for the main game. This game will tell the story of HorrorVale from Mothman's perspective, giving you new insight into his side of the story, as well as elaborate on events leading up to and following that story.

I think there's something really special waiting for you in Act M, and I want to use it as an opportunity to experiment with the HorrorVale formula based off of feedback from the main game.

No matter what, this project will begin development and it will be in your hands....

...At some point.

Which is where the previous topic comes into play, because naturally how long Act M takes to make is dependent on the time I have free to work on it. HorrorVale sales could certainly pick up, and I might one day be able to devote myself fully to game dev, but for now Act M will have to follow the same development process as "HorrorVale", which means it's difficult to give an estimate of how long it'll take to make!

What I can say for sure, is that Act: M will be much, much shorter than HorrorVale. Don't expect a 50 hour experience! I'm aiming for something more like 8.

And yet, you might be asking yourself dear reader...

"How can we help?"

Indeed, you asked yourself that exact sentence and in the voice of the King from Zelda CD-I no doubt.

Which brings us to the next topic!

Patreon Revival

My original plan after HorrorVale launched was to completely retire the HorrorVale Patreon as it seemed unnecessary at that point, but since:

We did not reach our expectations of sales so far

Several fans expressed a desire to support the game in some way because of the Steam Early Access debacle

I thought it made sense to keep it up and give it a little makeover.

Now fully dedicated to "Act: M", you can expect Monthly Progress Reports here, just like the main game!

Not only that, but we've added a brand new "Cryptid" Tier, that will allow you... Yes YOU! The ability to design a Creepy, Scary, or Starry for Mothman to fight in Act: M! We don't want Mothman to just fight all the same enemies as Alice! He'd naturally encounter foes she never even knew existed. This is your opportunity to help the game out and get to be a part of it as well.

(Please note that in order to participate in this reward, you must be 18 years or older and willing to give all rights of your design to Batworks Software.)

(Also please note that Mothman will kill your beautiful creation with a crossbow and it will hurt very badly.)

Since as of now I can't "live" off of HorrorVale sales, instead my plan is to put it and Act: M Patreon earnings towards Act: M itself and Mystery Future Project. This will help ensure a smooth development cycle as possible. If you're interested in helping out the HorrorVale universe, now's your chance!

Of course, forking over your hard earned candy isn't the only way to help though!

Just enjoying the game and telling your friends about it is a MASSIVE help. Without a marketing team, word of mouth is a tremendous help to us, and it's thanks to that that we're here at all!

Closing

In closing, I just want to say thank you to all of the HorrorVale fans that have supported us over all these years. The love that HorrorVale has been shown has been one of the greatest experiences of my life. As long as I'm able to, I'd like to read every comment and message I can, but I fear that if the game does get bigger one day I won't be able to see them all. Just know that the love you've given Alice and her friends mean the world to me.

Wait Stop Right There What Do You MEAN "Mystery Future Project"???

That's all for now goodbye!!!!!!

*The device he was speaking from explodes spontaneously*

[aihoshiino]

chapter 162 thoughts!

Chapters Since The 143 Kiss Happened And Went Entirely Unacknowledged And Unaddressed Count: 19

Aqua Hoshigan Status: uh oh, gamers

damn they dragged his ass right to hell, huh

I was perhaps overly optimistic in expecting an immediate resolution to last chapter's setup. It's becoming increasingly clear that this handful of chapters covering the Aqua-Hikaru confrontation are intended to be read in one go but because I am pedantic I will continue to review them one by one <3 This chapter very much has all the same issues as the previous chapter without quite as many of the things I liked pulling it up, but Mengo's art is back to going absolutely crazy and I got to see 2.5 new panels of Hoshino Ai so who can say whether it was a good or bad chapter.

Like last time, we're starting with Hikaru again and… basically everything I said I didn't like about this handling of him is still the case but with this almost definitely being his final appearance with no more opportunities to explain anything about him, it really sucks that the note we seem to be ending on is just "damn, bitch be crazy". Given that Tsukuyomi mentioned his previously 'noble soul' last chapter, I was really hoping we might get some sort of flashback or Hikaru POV giving some proper context to his actions but all we got this chapter was him being like "ughh i miss ai. GOD i love killing people" which is, uh, underwhelming as a final note for an antagonist like Hikaru to go out on, to say the least

The thing is, I didn't need or expect Hikaru to be totes 100% an innocent bean or anything like that (ch109 looms large), but if he was going to be the final boss like this, I wanted his antagonism to come from somewhere, to have any kind of connecting thread with the story's themes or to at least tell us interesting things about him both in coming to understand where his behavior came from and why he went down this path. But we don't know anything about Hikaru, really - we know facts about his life but as person and a character in a story, our image of him is shockingly unclear. As far as the story seems to be concerned, he came into existence as an 11yo boy being abused by Airi, blipped out of reality when Ai broke up with him and then idk digivolved back into society into a guy from a yandere otome game when Ai died. Like, how in god's name did Hikaru go from the boy we see being broken up with as a teenager to… whatever the fuck this is? How did he start killing? Why? What is it about killing that makes him feel Ai's supposed presence? And most importantly - why does he pursue killing Ruby as his means of achieving this when the narrative is doing everything it can to convince us she's Ai 2.0 and therefore a living person in whom Hikaru should be able to feel Ai's presence the most strongly since her death? Hello? Can anyone hear me????

We don't get textual answers to any of that - hell, we don't even really have any textual confirmation that he is actually serial killer, despite it being something I guess we're supposed to assume at this point?? Like, whatever happened to Aqua seemingly crediting Yura's death to Nino's involvement? What happened to Aqua saying that Hikaru being the mastermind made no sense? Like, I guess he was right, but jesus

Even things I can take the time to try and infer (which, see last review's discussions on Inferring Things) just make me feel like I'm doing the work the story should have done in terms of trying to get his character to cohere. As it stands, Hikaru isn't in opposition to Aqua because he has harmful beliefs or behaviours born from his participation in society that stem from or are in conversation with the story's wider themes, but because he has one very specific unhinged belief totally disconnected from reality focused on one specific person and manifesting in such a way that caused him to just be Ontologically Evil And Broken.

And it's not like this would even be hard to do! Hikaru is literally, explicitly an affluent and powerful person in the entertainment industry despite being someone who was broken by abuse perpetuated by those very systems of power. Why not lean into that? Why not examine the ways in which Hikaru and Ai converged in their experiences of abuse - Ai able to truly sever the chain and begin healing while Hikaru ends up making Airi's mistakes and enacting abuse and control on people with less power than him to try and regain agency and dignity?

Ryosuke (even post retcon) and ch154 Hikaru work so well because their specific beliefs about Ai reflect real world misogyny and parasocialism that are rife in the entertainment industry (and even outside of it) so they're able to contribute to the story's wider themes pretty well. But as of this chapter, Hikaru's stated beliefs about killing and apparent overall worldview are so fucking detached from reality and so lacking any foundation or grounding in textual events or theming that it doesn't even feel like an exaggeration of real world issues to a logical conclusion like Ryosuke does. He just feels like a cartoon character.

Not only is this shallow in general and really a huge wet fart of an ending for a character who has been built up for 4 actual years and 150 chapters of manga, it's also just bizarrely inconsistent. There's no proper connecting thread in the text between the seemingly emotionally disarmed and remorseful Hikaru of 154-5 and fucking joker slenderman ass here. The story spent so long making Hikaru deeply and viscerally sympathetic through exploring his history of abuse and exploitation mirroring Ai's that I'm not sure of what the point of that was in terms of authorial intent if we were always gonna end at this point of "you are Ontologically Evil and must die". Movie Arc backstory Hikaru flows quite naturally into 153-5 Hikaru but these specific beliefs and fixations on killing almost feel like they popped up from nowhere to force this confrontation to happen.

Ultimately, despite being given ample opportunity to do so, it just kind of feels like Akasaka just kind of lost interest in trying to develop Hikaru into a fully fleshed out and coherent character. We get flashes and teases of what could have come together into a fascinating and compelling antagonist but he ultimately fails to evolve past a vague sketch of a character, full of unconnected ideas and loose threads. In the end, Hikaru is only ever a cipher for the story to enact tragedy through with no real interest in his own feelings and interiority in relation to it - not even his own.

To scooch back a bit into the chapter, I will say that him being dragged down specifically by Gorou is interesting, especially since he seems to have returned to his scary ass Tokyo Blade rage ghost form. This seems to represent Gorou and his rage being sort of 'exorcised' from Aqua now his revenge is complete (as I theorized might happen last week) - his memories and existence obviously live on in Aqua (F… FOR NOW…..) but as a character in a narrative, this feels like a fine enough place to leave him.

Anyway, speaking of Aqua! How ya doing, champ?

that bad, huh

The back half of this chapter revolves around giving Aqua some emotional resolution of his own and even though I've been kicking and biting to get some Aqua introspection for so long now, this one left me feeling pretty cold. After all this time of floating around the 'why' of his reincarnation, the answer we're finally given is….. just that Aqua was reborn to be Ruby's guard dog lol.

The idea that the twins were specifically reborn to be together has been imo pretty obvious for a good long while and I think it's a perfectly fine idea on paper, but this framing of it just kind of falls flat to me. I don't like that it positions Aqua's rebirth not as a second chance for him to love and be loved in a way he wasn't able to as Gorou, a gift from Tsukuyomi to two people who showed her a selfless, thoughtless kindness but as just yet more of the story using other characters and their stories to try and prop up Ruby or imbue her with more importance in a way that I think feels forced and does the characters who are used in this manner a huge disservice. I'm sure we could conclude that this is just Aqua's feelings on the matter and I really, really hope that Tsukuyomi fishes him out and gives him a slap while yelling YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO LIVE FOR YOURSELF AND BE HAPPY IDIOT or something next chapter, but the extremely warm framing this is all given makes me think this is something the narrative both agrees with and approves of and as an Aqua enjoyer I just kind of hate that for him.

I also have to say that like… it doesn't not make sense for the story's finale and this aspect of the reincarnation plot to center Ruby specifically. She is one half of the titular Oshi no Kos and at least hypothetically the co-protagonist of the story. But suddenly making her the answer and central turning axis of basically the biggest ongoing mystery in the story like this feels kind of jarring when Akasaka spent a solid half of this entire manga not really doing her justice. This attempt to tug on our heartstrings via flashbacks to the twins' childhood also doesn't really do anything for me because as cute as it is, it's just disconnected flashbacks to brand new events in their childhood we never saw or heard about before. And it's weird because it's not like we don't have in-story examples of Aqua being over protective of Ruby, so why not flashback to those?

Idk. It's hard for me to articulate why this left me feeling kind of cold, but it feels like a symptom of this being part of an ending that Akasaka set in stone too early on and hasn't compromised for he way the character dynamics and story that made it onto paper have shifted and changed in ways that don't one hundred percent line up with the ending he wanted. If the twins' relationship was going to be this important to the ending and be so central to Aqua's existence as a character, I wish we'd spent more time on it. One of the major critiques of OnK that people had from like chapter 12 onwards that I still agree with is that Aqua and Ruby's relationship doesn't feel like a close knit connection between two people who grew up together for 1X+ years, and that continuing issue makes it kind of hard for me to feel the warm and fuzzy sibling feels right now. Which sucks because I LOVE the Hoshino family trio and I love Aqua and Ruby's family dynamic when we actually get to see it - their chapter of interlude and some of the scenes in their home in early OnK are some of my fave parts of the story for that exact reason. But this just kind of whiffed for me.

It also isn't lost on me that Ai is basically absent from these flashbacks despite them primarily taking part in the part of the twins' childhood they spent with her. I get that the idea was to focus specifically on Aqua and Ruby's dynamic there but it still feels kind of…

I've already written a short essay on this topic as it pertained to the initial reveal of Tsukuyomi's role in AQRB's reincarnation and the TL;DR of that post is that early in the series, Ai is centered as a character of as much significance to the reincarnation plot as Gorou/Aqua and Sarina/Ruby are, with the togetherness of the Hoshino family as a trio and Ai specifically as Aqua and Ruby's mother being emphasized as having a great deal of meaning and importance. But this chapter doubles down on essentially erasing her as a figure of weight and consequence in the twin's reincarnation in a way that is both inconsistent and just kind of leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Like… I'm sorry, but given how much of Ai's character revolves around her being the victim of exploitation, of objectification, sexual and otherwise, of being forced to warp herself to response to the filthy desires thrust on her by the people around her, it's really just gross and a huge misstep for her to be reduced to a convenient walking uterus. It is yet another example of Ai being reduced to just a stepping stone in Ruby's narrative and part of a pattern in this regard I've come to really dislike. Framed like this, Ai's own act of bravery and love in giving not just herself but Sarina and Gorou the family all three of them were denied all their lives is now nothing more than a vessel for Sarina's wish fulfillment. As you can imagine, I kind of hate this too!!

Depending on if volume 16 follows 14 and 15's trend of being 11 chapters long instead of 10, vol16 will end on either 162 or 163 - based on how 162 ends, my guess is that this is our volume ender so I'm curious to see what form 163 will take - straightforward continuation of this scene or focus switch to other characters to maintain suspense? I guess we'll see in THREE FUCKING WEEKS……. Akasaka i swear to god……………………….

sidebar but tsukuyomi just out here floating is kind of wild. what happened to 'it's a normal child's body' ya little twerp?

[andrewwtca]

Something really sad, and also INCREDIBELY telling, I found in the Ultimanias is how the Destiny Trio's bonds are described. like, Sora and Riku are kind of consistently described as best friends, but when Kairi gets involved, the bond just becomes childhood friends.

Sora: "Though he lived on Destiny Island with his childhood friends, Kairi and Riku..."

Riku: "A young man who cares deeply for his friends and is Sora's best friend and good rival."

Kairi: "A lively girl who possesses a pure heart of light and grew up on the same Destiny Island as Sora and Riku."

I found a translation, as well, of a character correlation diagram and they're the only trio that isn't described as best friends.

I understand that as a whole, their trio is supposed to represent growing up and how your bonds to one another can change - whether that means growing stronger and coming even closer or weakening and becoming distant - but you'll still care about each other. But it still is incredibly heartbreaking to see the main trio's friendship summed up as "they grew up together."

The only place I've so far seen to say different is the Story Before KHIII.

Sora:

Riku (ignore these god-awful screenshots I was literally watching a youtube review to try and read it because I couldn't find it anywhere else. Just trust me, it says 'Sora and Kairi's best friend since childhood'):

Kairi:

Now, I get it that maybe they don't want to use the same language, but it makes the most sense to me to say on Sora's bio to describe them as best friends, especially considering we see HIS bond with Riku and Kairi, but on Riku's? And the fact that Sora is always the 'friendship guy'? (This is just an outlier I wanted to bring up that calls Riku and Kairi best friends, and that's only if you take these translations as 100% faithful, which we have seen time and time again, that they often aren't.)

It almost feels like their friendship is at an all-time low. And don't forget this is the guidebook that leads up to KHIII, which should hypothetically be the peak of their bond, because they're all on the same level (not in terms of Mastery as Riku is the only Master, but in terms of all being Keyblade Wielders), they're all safe, they all have opportunities to tell each other their feelings. This book is a chance to be a celebration of their friendship, of how they overcome and yet?

'Childhood friends.'

I remember, maybe a few weeks ago, there was a question going around on Twitter asking 'if you have to get rid of one trio, which one would it be?' and most people said Destiny Trio and yeah, it's for a very obvious reason! A lot of these same people say that the games just don't do a good job of showcasing their relationship and they're all really good friends with each other, and everyday, it just more and more obvious it's just wistful thinking. This is as close as we can get as a 'word from god.'

And when you look at the game, it's obvious that they're drifting. The last meaningful conversation we had in this group was Sora and Riku in KH2. KH2!!! That was literally 18 years ago (like a few months for them, but that's not the point I'm making)!!! Meanwhile, we got meaningful interactions in both the other trios in KH3 - which, I'll concede, it was because they were separated for long periods of time that they were so meaningful, but if the game wanted to show us Destiny Trio having deep interactions, it could've! Literally, Sora and Kairi sharing a paopu fruit didn't even have a conversation! it was just Kairi inadvertently voicing her (VERY WELL JUSTIFIED) fears that they'll drift away from each other!

The reason Destiny Trio doesn't feel like a trio is because they aren't one! There's Sora and Riku who are homoerotically close, there's Sora and Kairi who have are growing distant, and there's Riku and Kairi who's only meaningful interactions were founded on guilt or Sora.

TL;DR: "Destiny Trio" is slowly turning into "Sora and Riku dating with Kairi constantly left out of the picture"

They really are Destiny Trio because destiny brought them together and that's about it. Destiny can't give them the same drive to save each other as it gave Seasalt and Wayfinders. I mean yeah, they'll physically save each other, but they're so out of touch emotionally with each other. Like Kairi still refuses to process Sora growing up. Riku has never told Kairi about the things he did to try and save her. He's never even told Sora about his jealousy of Sora and Kairi. And god forbid Sora ever tell them about his insecurities!

The apathy towards destiny in Chikai's opening feels like the perfect way to describe what's going on with them. Destiny is there. Destiny brought them together. And that's it. What else is there to care for?

It's also, once again, very telling that this same song then proceeds with very romantic lyrics about making an oath with someONE. Hm. It's almost like even outside the games, on written supplements, we're constantly being told the path the Destiny Trio is on, and we're constantly being shown that every step they're taking is leading them further down it.

Just. OUGH, these kids!!! I need them to stop sacrificing themselves for each other and making these oaths that are all too big for them, and sit down and just TALK. (And please please please let Kairi interact with someone other than these two. Please, it hurts to see her fall away with nowhere to land!!!)

[fatphobiabusters]

Product reviews on websites for plus size clothing brands are their own circle of hell. I feel like making a bingo card so I can create a depressing game of how many times these fat people who look like me write "Flattering!" "This hid my tummy and covered my arms perfectly!" "The best dress for hiding your imperfections!" "This didn't make me look pregnant, so that's always a plus." "Very stretchy fabric, which means you can continue to wear this even as you lose weight!" "I bought this because I've been sizing down and couldn't ignore such a great sale." "The color of this sweater is amazingly slimming!" "This super long dress with long sleeves wasn't modest enough [for fat bodies like ours], do not recommend." "This highlights the bits you want highlighted while concealing the worst parts of you. Five stars!" "A miracle! This skirt made me feel feminine for once!"

This is one of five million reasons why I wait to finally force myself to buy new clothes until all of my current clothes have become raggedy, ruined with holes, and faded to the point of only having half the original design on the t-shirt anymore. Not even buying clothes in size fat online lets me escape the immense fatphobia fat people are forced to experience whenever we dare to buy something that isn't a necklace.

-Mod Worthy

[freshwarrior757]

Played Class of 09 Flip Side last week...man, that sucked

I was honestly given high hopes for The Flip Side, and since my Class of 09 drawing that I made for Flip side is getting a lot of likes, I figured I'd make a post reviewing the game.

Pros:

The voice acting was incredible. Kayli Mills really gave her all in the therapy scenes, I actually felt heartbroken for her.

The FYE route was good up until the end...I'll talk about that in a bit.

The 7 seconds part was pretty funny.

Trody is still best boi

Emo Jecka

The Hatman

The Nicole Suicide route was one of the biggest requests for the Flip Side, and at least he listened to the fans on that. It was even more awfully crushing when seen from Jecka's perspective.

That's about all the good. Now the bad:

The foot stuff. That was like, a third of the game, and it was barely even funny the first time. If they were gonna do something like this, the least they could have done was not show the actual foot stuff taking place. In The Re-up, they didn't show Nicole having sex with men as a MySpace escort, and it honestly made the point even better (I'll talk more about this later). It's pretty obvious that SBN3 was just putting his fetish in to spite people.

The Dad was just tiring. I mean, his character was a good depiction of an abuser, but the joke honestly just got boring. It's like SBN3 saw how popular the "I WANNA FUCKING KILL MY WIFE" scene was, and decided to make that joke an entire character.

The jokes just felt off. The edginess was there, but it was all edge, no point. The "Flip a coin" scene was funny, as was the "7 seconds" scene and some others, but it kinda felt like SBN3 just got burnt out, or he fired his ghostwriter (I don't doubt that he wrote the game, but I'm pretty sure he had some help with some of the jokes).

The FYE Route had a bizarre-ass ending after all that good buildup.

Crispin did nothing but get insulted the whole game, even when he tried to help Jecka.

Mr. Katz became a pedophile because SBN3 didn't like the fact that Reddit liked him. He was one of the only male teachers who wasn't a pedophile, he was just a crackhead. But they had to massacre his character too.

The characters felt kinda...out of character. Nicole HATES men, like absolutely DESPISES them. She engages with men to manipulate them, and she only engaged in sexual acts with men when she was homeless, on drugs, and had literally no other options. She would never willingly try to have sex with a 50 year old man.

Also, she didn't get mad at Jecka for refusing to let her stay at her house when she was homeless, and she didn't get mad when Jecka refused to help her get revenge on Megan, or sell crack, or do some of the other stuff. But you're telling me she's gonna engage in sexual acts with her father because...Jecka didn't cut Nicole in on one of her jobs?! People may point to the Megan route in The Re-up, but Megan was a bitch to her for most of their interactions, whereas Jecka was Nicole's only real friend. Plus, she just asked Hunter for dick pics, she didn't actually try to have sex with him like she did with Jecka's dad.

To add on to this: The FYE Route had like, the weirdest and worst ending: Being sex trafficked by the Taliban. The other games were believable, even if the White Supremacist ending was kinda exaggerated. But holy crap, this made no sense.

Nicole gets kicked out by her mom and has to resort to selling her body? It's pretty fucked up, but it's really happened to people. Jecka finds out that FYE has a massive illegal porn stash they use to keep men in control, and gets sold to the Taliban as a sex slave to keep her quiet? It makes zero sense.

To add on to the last two things: The endings were not good. They were:

Jeffery OD's and Jecka becomes more toxic as a result of relying on Nicole

Nicole has "foot-sex" with Jecka's dad, and Jecka kills herself

Jecka drunk-drives and kills Ari

Nicole commits suicide, leaving Jecka all alone

Jecka gets sold to the Taliban, and Kelly fucking dies.

I mean seriously. Even the past two games had SOME good endings: Nicole becomes a YouTuber, Nicole becomes Valedictorian, Nicole graduates and becomes a better person, Nicole exposes a racist teacher...this game just felt like torture porn of Jecka.

I swear to God this anime better get picked up by Prime or Netflix or something like that, cuz I'll be damned if the series dies like this.

[egg-emperor]

Ohshima has said that Eggman isnt evil in his concepts, he is meant to be humanity

I see that people are passing this around again. Why do people love holding word of god with so much higher regard than what's in the media that's actually been reviewed, finalized, firmly established and published? What someone says outside of the games doesn't change what we see in the games.

What Ohshima said was literally in a Twitter Private message. Someone saying something in private DMs can't be where people get their sources from and have it hold up.

If this was actually the case in canon, it would've been clearly established there, which it isn't. Eggman knows and embraces that he's evil all the time in the actual games.

Ohshima is right about Eggman wanting to make the world beautiful using science and nature but it's in his own selfish twisted definition, not genuinely making it beautiful and nice for anyone else.

We see this by how he purposefully makes Eggmanland and the Interstellar Amusement Park dangerous and embraces and boasts the dangers. He even closed off Planet Wisp to the public because it wasn't "dangerous enough" for visitors yet.

Now Ohsima is specifically saying that Eggman isn't evil in Adventure but if we're gonna focus on that, this also straight up isn't factual there either. Eggman is not a hero in Adventure, he specifically awakened Chaos to destroy Station Square and only tried to stop him because he betrayed him and became a threat to him and his plans.

I made a big post breaking the DM down and showing how, using the game itself which will always be the real true solid source to go by, that in both in English and Japanese Adventure, what Ohshima said just isn't what's happening in the game. Here's a quick reiteration of that post:

Eggman specifically intends for Chaos to destroy Station Square, so he can build Eggmanland on the ruins. This was his entire plan behind summoning and feeding him emeralds in the first place and it was always his method of how he was going to go about conquering the city using Chaos.

Sonic story:

Tails story:

The only problem he has is Chaos betraying him and making him his enemy, which means he's now a threat to him too and that's when it's a problem.

Last story:

He specifically states that it's because he defied him/didn't follow his orders. Instead Chaos is doing it on his own terms and making him his enemy and attacking him too, meaning he can't build Eggmanland and is now in danger himself too. Otherwise he'd love that shit because it was literally his goal to destroy it XD

JP translations are showing me the context doesn't change and Eggman's reasonings remain exactly the same.

Sonic story:

Tails story:

Last story:

Yeah, he's extremely blatant with his selfish reasoning in both versions. The Egg Carrier 2 was always created as a back up in case Chaos betrayed him and because he did, Eggman tried to attack him.

It had nothing to do with Eggman being a hero and wanting to protect the world, unless you count saving the world for him to rule, which is always his selfish motive behind wanting to save the world, besides saving his own life.

I love and respect Ohshima and appreciate his work a lot of course, he designed my favorite character of all time. But this just isn't factual and canon information and should not be used as a source.

He can have ideas and his own takes on the characters but that's very different than him having a position in writing him this way in an actual game and it becoming official and confirmed.

Because that's not what this is, this is his opinion and I have no issue with him saying it because he's very clear about it being just that:

This is far from a declaration of canon, it's happening in DMs and he's literally just sharing his own idea for something but it hasn't been reviewed, developed, finalized and put into the final official media so it doesn't just become canon.

If what he was saying here aligned with what we see in the actual games and served as an explanation backed up by the games then it could be considered evidence but it isn't because the official media shows and tells us very very different all the time.

People really need to stop holding word of god over the official finalized media. It seems to often come from a place of hating the canon, so the second that someone who has worked on it in an official capacity says the opposite of what was shown in canon, people are eager to have it replace the truth

It's like how in official media, Eggman's age is established as "Unknown" but now people want to claim he's canonically in his 40s just because Iizuka estimated Eggman's age and said he's "probably under 50", even though in the finalized official media he's implied to be at least 50+. I broke that down using actual game canon evidence in this post.

People keep taking word of god when a creator says something on the spot that hasn't been finalized and established in canon and every single time, they omit the way said creator says it's just their opinion like Ohshima, or that something is probably the case, like how Iizuka estimated Eggman's age but said it still isn't confirmed.

Creators cannot suddenly change what's long established in canon on the spot and it does not replace what we see in the actual official media that's gone through all the necessary checks, development, and approval. I figured people would've understood this by now after famous authors infamously doing it and everyone hating it.

And in this case they're actually not doing what those authors did because they're not saying that it's the final canon fact. They're saying that it's just their opinion, or just a probable estimate. But fans want them to be like those authors that just randomly declare a bunch of stuff that contradicts the original media for some reason lol

[alexanderwales]

Game Review: Factorio: Space Age (pt 2)

This is the second part of my review of Factorio: Space Age, covering the planets. This will have more spoilers than the previous section, but also include more cohesive thoughts on the expansion as a whole.

Vulcanus

Once you've built a spaceship, you have a choice of three planets to go to, and you can do them in any order you'd like. Each planet comes with its own researchable rewards, which require you to build up a base on the planet capable of making a science pack and shipping it into space (or alternately, to remake all sciences on the planet, but this is stupid and pointless given what lies further down the tech tree).

I chose Vulcanus first. There are five resources here, three of which can't be found anywhere else: coal, sulfuric acid, calcite, tungsten ore, and lava. Lava gets used to make anything having to do with copper and iron using the foundry, which is most of the things in Factorio. Sulfuric acid gets used with calcite to make water, which is one of the notable things missing from Vulcanus, along with oil. Plastic requires a long chain to make: coal liquefaction into heavy oil into light oil into petroleum into plastic. Because rockets require plastic twice (LDS and blue chips), you eventually need to set up a fairly sizeable build for this.

I didn't find any of this to be too interesting. Infinite resources are at least different, but there was nothing that fundamentally changed how I view the game, and I ended up setting up a bus with more fluids than usual, mostly making on-site plates, pipes, steel, etc. The art for it is cool, and impassable lava is at least a little constraining, but I didn't feel like it was all that great.

Tungsten ore is the main material from Vulcanus, and it's defended by the other major thing that makes the place unique, the worms. Each worm has a territory, and until you've killed your first worm, you don't have access to a tungsten ore patch, only loose scraps that have been laying around.

The worms are long and segmented, very distinct from the biters. They disable electronics with their attacks, making fountains of lava beneath you, and overall I think they're cool ... except that they're a little too easy to defeat. I set up a grid of 50 turrets with armor-piercing ammo, and that proved sufficient.

This is a boring solution. I wish it didn't work. It was the first thing I tried, and afterward I thought ... well, what was the point of that? I don't have a good solution to what you'd want to do to stop this from working, but I do think this is sort of bad design, since it's a "more dakka" solution. I've also seen that you can build a tank and take one out with a single uranium shell, which is even worse design. What I wanted was a fight were I needed to use poison capsules, land mines, strategically placed turrets, etc., some kind of mixed-asset offensive package, and what I got was fifty turrets in a stupid grid. I really do try to not be one of those players that optimizes myself out of having fun, but it's hard to motivate myself to do something the pointlessly hard way when there's something simple, easy, and foolproof.

The other thing about demolishers is that they have their own territory, and that territory never changes. This means that if you want to expand beyond a relatively modest starting patch, you need to kill them ... but unless you're going for a megabase, you don't need to kill more than three or four of them across the entire time playing the game, and since they only attack if you build in their territory, those worm encounters become like 1% of the Vulcanus experience.

I would have liked if the worm territories changed. I think it would have been cool if they fought each other for dominance over an area in a way you could capitalize on, or if they would expand into places that no one had claimed, or places a dead rival had left behind. It would have been cool to require the player to build up some do-nothing machines or other infrastructure to keep the worms back, like a sort of "build this at the edge of your territory to be in constant motion to convince the worms that it's occupied" type of thing. But instead, you just kill the worms and that's that, you never see them again unless you go hunting them. According to my end-of-game statistics, I killed 8 small demolishers and 2 medium demolishers, which was probably 5 more worms than I needed to kill, since I ended up with a lot of empty space I didn't do anything with.

So overall, Vulcanus is the weakest of the planets for me, and I think that's at least partly down to the under-use of the worms and the simplicity of the "new" mechanics.

Fulgora

Fulgora contains the ruins of a vast civilization, and there are no resources except the heavy oil between islands and the scrap that's left behind. Solar is terrible on Fulgora, but there are lightning storms at night, and lightning towers can collect it into accumulators to power your base.

Scrap gets "recycled" into a bunch of different things, and so it quickly because a nightmare of sorting things out, dealing with excess products, and turning complex materials into simple ones. There are no iron plates, those need to be recycled from iron gears. There are no copper platers, those need to be recycled from copper wire. Blue chips, which in any other circumstance need to be jealously guarded, are found in abundance.

I found this to be great fun. The challenge is certainly unique, turning the production chain on its head, but it has a nice "ramp" to it, as first you get a pile of crap, then you turn it into things, then you uncover excesses that are gumming it up, and the problems keep coming, but they usually come after you've solved some other problem.

When I started, I did a sushi belt (ed. - a sushi belt is a belt that contains multiple unsorted good, controlled by circuit conditions which allow certain limits of each item to go by, named after conveyor belt sushi restuarants), which was good enough for the short term and got me all the basic technologies, but ran into all the problems that come with a sushi belt, and switched over to a belt-based sorting system of splitters that could handle two full green belts of scrap input.

There is, for me, one big miss on Fulgora, which is that the lightning storms are basically not a challenge at all. You set up a grid of substations, each with a lightning rod, and that protects your base. You set up accumulator fields on one tip of the island, and this is a pretty boring solution. If you went to Gleba first, you can instead set up heating towers that burn the fuel you get from scrap, but this doesn't seem like it saves terribly much more space, and either way you need the lightning towers, so I'm not sure it's worth anything, and I never implemented that plan.

One of the other big challenges of Fulgora is that it's a set of islands, and there's no way to place anything on the oil sands. Additionally, there are two types of islands, one with a fair amount of space and minimal scrap, the other with tons of scrap and almost no room. In theory, this encourages a rail world, but in practice, the first island I plopped down on was the one I stayed on the entire time, and my rail network, such as it was, extended to only two of the smaller islands to guarantee all the scrap I would ever need. I think I rolled high on one of those islands: 63M scrap is a ton, but that's what I ended up with on default settings. With the drills from Vulcanus, expected output is double that, and with the legendary drills I can now produce, it would be 787M. There's simply not a need to place rails elsewhere.

I do feel that Fulgora would have benefitted from some enemies of some kind, either those that lived on the oil fields, so you'd have to build defenses on the edges of the islands, or some kind of robot enemy that you needed to kill to take islands from. Given the setup of an abandoned high-tech planet, and the electrical weapons you unlock there, it would have been nice to have some reason or chance to use them. I've definitely played Factorio scenarios with bot opponents and buildings that can be captured after the AI's defenses have been breached.

Still, the scrap sorting puzzle was a good one, with many solutions, and Fulgora was a ton of fun.

Gleba

Gleba is a swampy fungi planet. There are no conventional resources except for stone, and pretty much everything else is derived from two plants, jellynut and yamako, that get broken down.

The main mechanic of the planet is spoilage, where materials break down over time. Jellynut and yamako last for about an hour, the products you get from them are much less, a material made from both of them, bioflux, lasts a lot longer, and nutrients, which are fed to the new building, the biochamber, last hardly any time at all.

Spoilage is cool because it requires a very different mindset. Normally in Factorio, you're building up big buffers to minimize downtime. On Gleba, you want as little buffer as possible, just constant rivers of materials flowing by to be as fresh as possible, because if anything stays still for too long, there's a chance it'll spoil, which will stop the machine trying to take the ingredient, which can create a spoilage cascade.

My initial plan was to have some kind of circuit-based just-in-time system, where every machine would be monitored in order to see what ingredients it needed, and everything would be made fresh-to-order.

I ended up not doing this, mostly because demand stays relatively constant, and where it doesn't stay constant, you can just eat the spoilage costs. There's so much abundance that you really don't need to care about half your crops going to waste.

The other reason I didn't end up going with this is because unfortunately, the "river of goods" solution has essentially no complications to it, and you can simply dump everything into a recycler/incinerator at the end. In some of the Factorio overhaul mods, this concept is called "voiding", a way of dealing with byproducts, and if you make voiding easy, you essentially remove a logistical challenge, which means less gameplay. I kind of get why they made this easy, but ... I don't know. I did kind of want something that would require a big, complicated solution, a factory that dances on the edge of clogging itself up.

I ended up with a completely belt-based system, with a belt of jelly and mash, then a belt of bioflux, all nutrients made on demand, and production lines in defined blocks. The final build does 520 science/minute, which becomes 2Ks/m with full-prod biolabs, most of which goes into the trash, since it's not actually consumed all the time.

One of my favorite little puzzles of Gleba was the metals, which are produced with bacteria that spoil in a minute, becoming ore. There's a process, with bioflux, of having bacteria make more bacteria, but if the bacteria ever stop flowing (if, for example, you have enough ore), then they spoil and die, and the whole production line stops. So you need to build in a little kickstart system that will inject new bacteria if it's needed, and I found that to be delightful to work on.

The other major thing on Gleba are the enemies, which are pentapods. Pentapod eggs are necessary to make biochambers and science, but after you have one, you can set up breeding, which is dangerous given they can make more of themselves, but definitely the way to go. There are three forms of pentapod, all with their own weaknesses, and ...

Look, I went to Gleba last, but I put up a defensive wall fairly early on using only materials that I had gotten from Gleba, and then basically never had any cause to think about the pentapods again. Because I slapped this down with blueprints, it took all of ten minutes, most of which was spent fixing the kind of scuffed corners (skill issue). So I would say the amount that I actually got to experience the pentapods was pretty minimal. I also shipped in four artillery turrets that are crowded around a box of ammo, supplied by site-made shells using imported tungsten, and the circle almost entirely contains my pollution cloud, so in theory it's just an easily solved problem.

It might have been different if I had gone to Gleba first, I don't know and can't say without actually doing that, but I would have liked a little more of a challenge, and this might be where being a veteran hinders me.

Overall, I really enjoyed Gleba, the mechanics were new and unique, the little puzzles inherent in design were interesting, and I thought that overall it had the best art direction of the four planets, which is saying something, because I think they're all great on the front.

Aquilo

On every other planet, a "cold start" is possible, building up from just what you find laying around. Aquilo is different: it's a planet with ammonia oceans and some scattered liquid vents, and part of the point of it is that you need materials from outside, including anything made from iron, copper, or stone. You can't softlock on other planets, but you can softlock on Aquilo.

Aside from requiring pretty solid planetary logistics, Aquilo's main mechanic is heat. It's cold enough there that bots don't work very well, and everything has to have a heat pipe near it for it to function, including pipes and belts. To heat up a heat pipe takes either nuclear, fusion, or the heat towers that burn up fuel, and if the heat ever stops flowing, everything will seize up, requiring heroic efforts to get running again.

There's not all that much to Aquilo. You pull up slurry from the ocean, split it into ammonia and ice, use them together to make ice platforms, import concrete, and then combine oil and ammonia to make rocket fuel, which is used to both launch rockets and to toss into heating towers for power and heat to keep everything running.

The science pack is easy, though it require imported holmium plate, and my entire 200 science per minute production line was run off a tiny cluster of buildings that would have been pretty trivial to expand.

It seems to me that Aquilo is at least partly inspired by Seablock, an infamous mod where you start with almost nothing on a tiny island that you have to expand with the mineral sludge you dredge up with an offshore pump. But Seablock is a very long mod, one that typically takes hundreds of hours, and here ... well, there are a handful of challenges, and they're not all that challenging. I think I could probably list them out now.

Making ammonia also makes ice. You can void excess ice through repeated recycling, but ammonia can't be voided except by combining it with crude oil to make solid fuel, which can then be put in an incinerator. I solved this problem with a simple circuit condition.

Science and some crafting uses coolant, which must be cooled back down after use. If you just keep making coolant, eventually the system will seize up, since you won't be able to put more hot coolant into the system. But because this is a lossy cycle (you lose half the coolant) you can just hook a pump up to a tank and only inject more hot coolant into the system when below a threshold.

Outposts need their own heating for the pumps to work, and those outposts are, on default settings, quite far away. This requires setting up a self-sufficient little heating module that's either serviced by train or which runs entirely with materials found at the outpost. I ended up doing two different modules, one for oil outposts and the other for everywhere else ... but I never actually had to use them, because there were sufficient resources for tens of thousands of resources right next to the starting area.

As the "final boss", I am underwhelmed, and even as one of four planets I find myself a little underwhelmed. I don't know how much postgame stuff I'm going to do, but I can't see that there's going to be much challenge in going large on Aquilo, except that I might have to build another ship for moving in materials (as currently I have a single ship that makes a circuit of the solar system for materials and also handles shipments of science).

There is also, again, a lack of enemy. Once the rocket fuel setup was done, I had a single scare when ammonia backed up and stopped ice production, which shut down the water chem plant, which killed the turbines and stopped power to the entire base. But that didn't even freeze anything out, and it was fixed pretty easily from a restart module I'd built earlier, and after that, the ammonia issue was fixed to never have that problem again. If the cold is the enemy, it's not enough of one for my tastes.

Integration

With each planet you conquer, you get a new science pack, which opens up new technologies, and in theory you, can use them on other planets. These buildings are very powerful, and so there's some incentive to return to old factories, rip up old designs, and install new ones using the better buildings.

I did eventually do this, but I'm not sure how much I actually needed to. My furnace stacks were replaced by the foundries from Vulcanus, supplies by a hauler ship exclusively for calcite, though I did make an abortive attempt to just harvest calcite from space using a stationary space platform.

(I made four of them before giving up on the project, and found out only later that asteroid spawn rates depend on how many chunks large the ship is, so the ideal build has asteroid collectors on very long arms, and there's nothing in the game that tells you about the asteroid spawning thing, so ... whatever, it's opaque and very gamey hidden stuff, of the kind that I hate.)

I replaced my circuit production areas with the EMP, which saved vast quantities of resources and also made more circuits at a much faster rate within the same blueprint. I upgraded most belts to green.

I didn't end up using the biochambers much, in part because they need nutrients to run, and 50% prod with more module slots is great, but not so great that I wanted to set up a biter egg farm that could potentially blow up in my face.

Cryochambers just came too late for me to implement them anywhere, though I probably would if I kept playing to the megabase stage, or if I'm gunning for an achievement that requires updating Nauvis.

So I think, strangely, when considering how the planets impact each other, they ... kind of don't all that much? Yes, having foundries on Gleba means that you can make all your belts and things at a fraction of the cost, but how much doesn't that really impact anything? It meant that my ore production areas could be smaller, I guess. Is that worth anything? I kind of don't think so, if I'm considering the main gameplay to be in terms of design and decisions. Foundries saved me from having to lay down a furnace stack. EMPs saved me from having to have expansive red circuit lines to get the blue chips necessary for rocket launches.

Ideally, I would have liked one or two killer techs that mostly work through combining each planet's "thing". Like imagine that there was a combination recycler and foundry that melted down whatever was put into it, giving you molten copper and iron in exchange, creating a whole new kind of problem in exchange for ... I don't know, much much faster recycling, or less loss from recycling, or maybe a recipe that allowed true voiding. Or if you went to Gleba and then Vulcanus, and were able to bring biochambers that would allow the cultivation of some new specimen specific to that environment, maybe something that would allow better plastic production, or could pull water out of the air, both of which are kind of a pain in the ass on Vulcanus. Couldn't there be some kind of new bacteria swimming in the oil sands of Fulgora? Not something that would trivialize any challenge, something that would be a reward for having two flavors of research from two different planets. Ideally, there'd be six of these in total, allowing for each pair to benefit each other pair, but at that point I start to feel like I'm just asking for new content.

I cracked my game back open to check the tech tree, and all the Aquilo techs require all three planets. The are two techs that require mixed packs: Rail Support Foundations, which simplify rails for Fulgora, and Railgun Damage, which increases the power of the railgun. That's it. This screams missed opportunity to me.

So in terms of how the planets and their mechanics interact with each other ... I would say that they mostly don't, which is a bit of a shame. The biochamber in particular requires nutrients, which makes it effectively unusable on Vulcanus and Fulgora ... unless you're shipping in heroic quantities of bioflux, I guess, though I don't think that I could ever see myself doing that. I guess maybe on Vulcanus, which has the aforementioned plastics problem? But it feels like the kind of thing that would mostly be done for a stunt rather than because it was actually the right thing to do. And potentially on Nauvis, but it does seem like a megabase thing to do, rather than normal play. I will have to do the math, this too might be a skill issue.

(Real quick: 1 Bioflux makes 8 nutrients in a standard biochamber, which is 12 with prod, which is 24 MJ. A biochamber consumes 500kW, so with no spoilage nutrients allow 2 crafts of the 2 second oil cracking recipes, which means that every Bioflux can, at most, turn 960 heavy oil into 1080 light oil rather than the 720 light oil it would normally crack into. But obviously since the Bioflux has to be shipped in, it ends up being less than that. This is obviously more effective than shipping over oil itself, but ... man, I don't know, this seems very weak, even with adding in productivity to other steps. I guess the use case in Nauvis, where you're in theory shipping Bioflux anyway in order to feed captive biters, but that's still premised on an oil shortage that I never actually experienced.)

I do also want to say that quality had very little impact on my play. I tended to carry around some high quality quality modules and use them when crafting infrastructure, but in most cases it just wasn't much to write home about. It's most important for the ships, and for personal stuff, but it never felt that important.

And finally, I do want to give a shoutout to how easy and effective remote viewing was. One of the things I'm going to eventually do, after a Factorio break, is the 40 hour achievement run, and I have to imagine that a lot of that is just landing on a planet, doing the unlocks, building a rocket to get back, then having starter bots do all the actual base building for me, which is pretty cool.

Conclusion

Space Age took me about 140 hours, and I would say that about 10 of that was idle time while I was waiting for legendary ship parts or for a buildup of materials. The Jacknape-class ships have an issue with ammo production where they can more or less keep up with rockets, but the belt buffer goes from the front of the ship to the back, meaning that it empties from where it's needed most, rather than emptying where it's needed least, and yeah, having a fully stacked buffer takes a hot minute of waiting. Similarly, the quality module I made works over sufficient time scales, but especially while waiting on quality quality modules, there's a real temptation to just leave it running rather than actively playing.

130 hours for a veteran player is a long time for an expansion, much longer than I would have expected, even knowing what I knew about the expansion going in. Some of that time I don't count as expansion time, like all the parts where I was just doing normal Factorio stuff, and I did end up building adapted malls on each of the planets, which added on more time that could have been cut out by making an effective blueprint the first go-around, and which I don't really count as expansion time, because there's not much that's unique about making the new malls. But even if I'm arbitrarily cutting things out, that's still a ton of time.

Overall, I'm extremely happy with it, and I think I'll be more happy with it once there's another round of iteration, QoL, changes based on feedback, and modding. The modding scene for Factorio is really really good, and I have to imagine that the expansion is only going to make it better, particularly some of the changes that were made to implementation.

But I do think that it could have been more, and maybe this is just coming from a guy with more than a thousand hours in this game and multiple overhaul mods under his belt. It's very possible I would have had a better time with it if I'd chosen a higher difficulty, though of course that's very hard to know ahead of time. Certainly there were some design misses for me, and at least some of that is because I have enough experience that I can fix things with circuitry, plan a base that doesn't immediately become spaghetti, and see the deadlocks coming. I'm not saying that it wasn't hard, because parts of it certainly were, and I'm not saying that I made a bunch of perfect bases with no major flaws, because there were designs that needed to be ripped out and belts that needed to squeak through. But I think I would have preferred more complexity, more problems, more more more, and I'll have to hope that mods can give it to me.

All that said, this is the best expansion I've ever played, they put a ton of work into making sure that every planet was truly different from the others artistically and mechanically, and it's a 10/10 from me.

(I do plan on getting all achievements ... eventually. The "win in 40 hour" achievement seems very doable, and that's the hardest of the lot, though the others might take some significant time. It took me multiple years to finally getting around to doing the last green chip achievement, so I'm in no rush.)

[chuurroez]

𝗶𝗻 𝗯𝗲𝘁𝘄𝗲𝗲𝗻.

'⁀➷ pairing :: anton lee x gn!reader

'⁀➷ genre :: angst

'⁀➷ summary :: you thought that you and your best friend's relationship was more than silly movie marathons, video calls, and gaming sessions, it was a stupid thought, you will always be more than a friend, but less than a lover to him.

'⁀➷ notes :: first fic in a few months! sorry if i chose angst insteadof fluff, 3/5 of the fics in progress are angst LMAO. well, i hope you enjoy reading this fic! took like about an hour and a half on this? i have school tomorrow i should've done my homework but whatever :)

'⁀➷ word count :: 1155

You saw a glimpse of sunlight sneaking through your close curtain from your window, then you realized, you once again cried yourself to sleep again thinking of Anton Lee, the man of your dreams. No, nightmares, being with him every single day and having to contain those stupid butterflies in your stomach every time you eat, play, and hang out with him makes it so frustrating. Why was he like this? Did the gods from above have a grudge against you to send someone like him? Whatever it was, you hated it. You couldn't wait to go home from school after 9 horrifying and lovestruck hours seeing and being with him. You didn't even know why you were so excited to go home, it was worse! Maybe it was the fact you didn't have to see his frustrating but so damn cute smile of his, or you didn't have to see hundreds of girls try and give him letters and chocolates of their own. You didn't care anyways, right? Your relationship would never budge out of the middle between friends and lovers.

As you got ready for school, you thought to yourself, "Just a few more months until we part ways right? I wouldn't have to deal with this cycle again and again?" but you were oh so wrong, the fact that the both of you would part ways for college made your life excruciating. "Whatever", you thought to yourself, "I'll just cherish these last few months with him, i guess!". You got yourself together, said goodbye to your parents, and went outside to see Anton, waiting outside for you. "It's 6:30 in the morning, did this cycle really have to start now?", you told your mind.

"What are you doing here Anton? It's so early and you're like almost always late for school? Is this even the real you? I'm surprised", you told the boy. "You told me you needed help studying for the math test we had? I heard from Hanni that it was 80 items, gosh i hate math.", he replied. "Oh, Hanni. I heard she likes you? It's pretty obvious that she likes you, I mean, she always wants to partner up with you and gives you snacks! The both of you would be good for each other!", you say with regret, why would you say that? It just lessened your chance to be with him, but its not like you had one to begin with. "You are right, but I'm not interested in anyone right now, all I care about is getting my grades up and trying my best to get into Yonsei! It's one of the best universities here in Korea!" , he followed. He really was perfect, caring, handsome, loving, and cares about his grades. No wonder hundreds of girls fell for him, you included. "Well, with how you're doing currently, you'll get in, in no time! Let's go now! We have a math test to review for!", you told him before the both of you walk to school.

.

While on the way to school, Anton asked " What university are you thinking of enrolling in, y/n? You could try out for Yonsei as well! I know we'll both ace the entrance exams!", he said followed by a smile, the smile you hated but loved at the same time. "I could, but I'm thinking of going abroad? I feel like I could show more of my capabilities and talents overseas!" you responded. "I'm proud for you, y/n! I'm glad you're becoming better and better every single day!" Anton complimented, you smiled at him and before you know it, the two of you are already at the gates of the school and head for the school's library.

.

-time skip to after the exams-

.

"That test was actually pretty easy! Don't you think Anton?", you asked him, "It was! I was surprised by how most of the things we reviewed for was actually there, haha!", he says happily. "It's lunch time, right? Let's head to the rooftop? I heard that since it's spring, the trees look absolutely stunning all the way up there!", you invite the boy to which he agrees. On the way up, Hanni bumps into you both, "Oh! Hi Anton, I was just looking for you, and hi y/n!", the girl says, to which the both of you smile and greet her as well but you knew damn well Hanni only looked for the both of you, for Anton. "I was just with Jiwoo and she told me to give this to you!" she announces and gives Anton a heart-shaped box with cookies inside and a letter on top. Hanni says her farewells to the both of you and you reach the rooftop and Anton decides to read the letter. "It was just another confession, I don't know why they won't stop! I already said again and again that I'm a study first type of guy. They just don't get it." the boy speaks, "But the cookies are good, here get some!", the boy adds. The both of you laugh and go back to the classroom just before the bell ran.

.

-time skip again to after classes-

.

Anton decided to walk you home after classes ended, and god did you hate it. You were fine being with him during the day but being with him after classes? You agreed, of course, I mean, what type of bestfriend would you be if you didn't? One the way home, Anton told you, "You know, I really see you more as a friend, you're just that someone I wouldn't mind being with, even if I didn't want to.", you tried your best to hide your blushing face by pretending to look for something in your bag, thankfully it worked. "Same! You're so kind and caring, it's almost hard to hate you if we were enemies." you reply, you hoped the thing you wished for was happening, but you knew that it wouldn't happen, "You're like, the bestest of all bestfriends in the entire world!" the boy tells you, with you saying you feel the same way with the same regretful feeling you felt earlier in the morning coming back again to torment you. You both reached your house and Anton said goodbye to you, you walked in your house feeling like a fool, you fooled yourself into thinking he'd feel the same way as you did. How stupid you were. You got ready to do your homework right after you got home, oh wait, you didn't, you went straight upstairs as you feel tears rolling down your eyes, you inevitably fell down to your bed as another crying session begins, was this your 4th or 5th one? Whatever, all your mind focused on was that you and Anton's relationship will always be glued in the middle, after all, the both of you were more than friends, but less than lovers.

[luvhughes43]

say yes to heaven (track one) | tz11 x reader

cruel world [masterlist]🕊

word count: 2.1k

Rolling Stone

Date: June 28th, 2023

Growing up, Yn Ln always dreamt that she would become a singer. Her inspirations were figures well beyond her years, taking inspiration from the likes of great artists from decades past. Her melancholic style became instantly notable when she first hit the scene a few short weeks ago with her debut single, video games. Of course, none of her earlier works can be found on streaming services anymore, but her style has remained consistent over the years as she now releases her debut album in 2023. 

interviewer: Yn, your album “Cruel World” has become an instant cult classic for music reviewers and fans alike. But what everyone really wants to know is what, and who, inspired you?

Yn laughs lightly, rubbing her palms on her jeans before she starts talking.

Yn Ln: It was [pause].. it was a long process. I was inspired by my real life [another pause] and my friends' lives. A lot of things went into creating the album. I’ve spent years working on it. 

interviewer: Are you aware of the rumours surrounding the album? That every song is about an ex of yours? Trevor I think his name is?

Yn tenses briefly at the mention of her ex and swipes her palms against her jeans once more.  

Yn Ln: Like I said, the album was inspired by things I've gone through. I don’t feel the need to put names to songs.

She laughs lightly trying to ease the tension of the room.

Interviewer: Well, regardless, Cruel World is an amazing album.

Yn smiled politely, taking a sip of her coffee.

when yn hughes first laid her eyes on trevor zegras, she felt a spark. when she went to bed that night she didn’t dream about her favourite characters, or books, she didn’t even create perfect little scenarios. no, she fell asleep to thoughts of her brothers best friend. his soft hair, the way he glided the puck across the ice, his smile and enthusiasm when his team did well… yn hughes was doomed from the start. 

‘cause ive got my mind on you

i’ve got my mind on you

you didn't actually meet trevor face to face till a week after first seeing him. your twin, Jack, had invited him and a few other friends over to the house for the day. you laid in bed, eyes closed listening to all the commotion below before you decided to go downstairs and greet everyone. 

when you finally made your way to the group, you stood awkwardly at the bottom of the stairs. the wood chilly as you watched your brother and his friends play fight. 

“I’m trevor!” one of the boys beamed as he stepped away from the group of rowdy boys. 

you smiled softly in response as trevor ruffled his hair. “i’m yn-”

“jacks twin! right, i've heard so much about you! you know, i always wondered if it was true that twins had like, intuition? Is that a thing?” trevor rambled, his words fast and inquisitive, a habit which presented itself quite frequently. 

you laughed, nodding in the small breaks of trevors words as he kept talking about twins and their behaviours he had apparently heard about. 

when he finally stopped his speech, yn answered his first of many questions. “i mean i dont know about intuition but…” 

“trev!” jack called, “get over here, stop talking to yn!”. he was shaking an xbox controller, gesturing for trevor to come join their group of friends who were lounging on the sofa ready to play. 

“but he always seems to pick up on when i'm having a good time” you smiled cheekily. 

trevors face burned red and he rubbed at his neck absentmindedly as he looked you up and down. you watched his eyes trail, and you had never felt so giddy in all of your life. butterflies fluttered in your stomach until trevor broke away from you. 

“Ill uh- ill.. i’ll see you around,” trevor finished lamely, clearly feeling the same giddiness you felt as he sharply turned away from you and sat next to your brother. you stood in your spot for another second, watching as trevor tried to hide his smile from your brother. 

the house was quiet as you made your way into your kitchen for a glass of water. you had fallen after working on some music and you woke up dazed and a little confused.

you open the fridge, the little light partially illuminating the kitchen. a figure moves out of the darkness causing you to jump and let out a little shriek. 

your breathing speeds up, one of your hand coming to rest over your mouth as trevor steps into the light of the fridge. 

“Its just me!” trevor says, voice hoarse with sleep. he lays a had on your shoulder, watching you with wide eyes as you try to calm yourself down.

“what are you doing here?” you asked breathlessly as your breathing started to slow. “uh your parents let me and a few other guys stay over tonight” trevor explained, hand still resting on your shoulder.

“what? when?” trevors hand falls from your shoulders and moves to brush through his hair. 

“after dinner. you were up in your room playing… the guitar was it? It sounded really nice”

“thanks…” your face heated and you were so glad that you hadn't decided to turn the kitchen light on. 

“what were you working on anyway?” trevor changed the subject as he opened the fridge and pulled out a jug of milk.

your nose crinkled as he grabbed his discarded cup and poured himself a glass. “oh you know,” you shrugged your shoulders. you didn’t know why you did it but you never wanted to talk about your music. with all your brother's talents and successes, you felt that you choosing music was an embarrassment to your family even though you knew at heart that it wasn’t true. 

trevor must have picked up on your hesitancy so he shrugged, bringing his glass of milk to his lips as he took another swig. 

“milk?” you questioned, and trevor held the glass out for you to take.

“want some?” he asked, tilting the glass towards you.

“definitely not”

“it makes your bones strong and stuff, you should try it” 

“Trevor i've drank milk before,” you say sarcastically.  

“well yeah but like, you know what i mean” 

you rolled your eyes playfully, “okay fine give me the glass,” you reached your hand out and trevor passed his cup to you. you peered into the cup.

“its just milk it's not gonna hurt you” trevor laughed as he leaned back against the kitchen counter. 

you tentatively took a sip and when you finished you passed the glass back to trevor. 

“how was it?” “gross”

“yeah okay,” trevor rolled his eyes, leaning his head back as he finished the rest of the glass. 

you reached past trevors shoulder, grabbing a glass to fill with water. 

“well, im going to go to bed,” trevor nods to you as he sets his now empty glass in the sink. 

“goodnight,” you respond as you fill your glass.

“yah night,” trevor walks out of the kitchen and you watch him leave.

what the hell was that? you whisper to yourself, downing the rest of your water before heading to bed yourself. 

the next few weeks followed similarly. you and trevor would have these weird random moments, and you would both awkwardly smile at each other and move on with your days. that was until the boys decided to have a bonfire now that your parents were out of town to celebrate the start of the summer. 

you felt the warm heat of the fire on your legs as you sat near the pit with your friend. you watched absentmindedly as trevor talked to his friends before you felt the weight of your friend's hand on your shoulder. 

“you know yn, if you want him that badly then…” you whipped your head around at your friends words.

“what?” your eyes were wide in shock. you hadn’t told anybody about your growing feelings for trevor. 

“I’m just saying you’re not being really secretive…”

“he's my brother's best friend” you shrugged, your eyes drifting from your friend and back to the boy in question. He was nursing a beer he had somehow managed to sneak past his own parents.

“okay… what does that have to do with anything? hes hot” your friend shrugs. 

“hes also jacks teammate it just, it wouldn't work out the way i’d want it to” you expressed your reasons on why you couldn't date trevor and it sounded more ridiculous each time. you knew you wanted to be with him, and honestly, jack wasn't what you were worried about. you were more worried of the possible rejection. sure you and trevor had spent time together and talked. but majority of that time was when the two of you were alone. what if trevor doesn't want anything more than the private meetups? 

“how do you want it to work out?”

you fiddled with your hands, ignoring your friends question.

“he clearly likes you though, if that's what you're worried about” you hummed in response, lazily turning your head to look at trevor again. He smiled at you when he caught you looking. you didn't have the energy to look away. you knew then that you'd rather be rejected then not with him at all. 

let the fear you have fall way

i’ve got my eye on you

i’ve got my eye on you

say yes to heaven

say yes to me

“trev!” you hear jack call from across the fire pit, “can you go get us more marshmallows?” the boy easily agrees as he stands up from his lawn chair and begins to make his way inside. 

“Yn im thirsty!” your friend quickly says, pushing you up and off your seat. “can you get me a root beer?” she pleads, causing your brothers and his friends to shift their attention to the two of you. you quickly catch on to what she's doing, and you nod with enthusiasm. 

“does anyone else want something?” you ask the group as you slowly back away. Jack asks for water, and you nod before following Trevor into your house. 

the house was silent as the two of you worked your way around the kitchen. just as trevor was about to make his way back outside again, you stopped him. your hand tugged on his wrist and he was turning back to face you.

“trevor,” you breathed out, a little shocked at your sudden courage.

“yn,” he whispered back. you could hear the faint sound of the fire crackling and everyone's laughter out in the backyard.

it felt magnetic, the pull that brought your lips up to meet his. the kiss was soft and innocent. something that could easily be explained away as a spur of the moment thing. you refused to let it.

“yn,” trevor whispered again, this time painfully.

“trevor,” you were hopeful. 

he kissed you again, one of his hands coming down to settle on your waist as your arm wrapped itself around his neck. 

when you both pulled apart, trevor rested his forehead against yours, his breath slowing down as you both relaxed. 

“we cant do this,” trevor said almost regretfully as his head turned at the sound of your brothers loud voice teasing cole. 

“we can do whatever we want” you replied, ignoring all the background noise.

“jacks your twin. he's my teammate. my best friend. i can't just-”

“say yes to me” you blurted and your face heated up instantly. 

“It's not that easy-”

“yes it is. trevor just say yes to me and we can figure out what to do with jack later,” 

trevor seemed unsure of what to say for the first time. 

“What's taking you so long! damn!” jacks voice pops the bubble you and trevor had built not even a minute earlier. 

“sorry i couldn't find the marshmallows,” trevor mumbles, stepping away from you and towards your brother. 

“why didn’t you help hin y/n? don't be rude” your brothers voice seemed to pierce the quiet of the kitchen.

“he didn’t want me to help,” you replied quietly, reaching behind you for the water bottle jack had asked for earlier. 

“well that was stupid. she literally lives here z she knows where everything is,” jack responded cluelessly.

“Yeah, right, my bad” trevor nodded along with his words as he watched jack reach into a corner cabinet to retrieve a bag of marshmallows. 

I’ll put my red dress on, get it on

and if you fight, i’ll fight

it doesn’t matter, now its all gone

i got my mind on you

ynhughes

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ynhughes ❤️

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yourbff hottest bff ever🤤

ynhughes love u

jackhughes “❤️”

ynhughes if u dont leave me alone…

[insta dms]

trevorzegras: I’m sorry about that night

trevorzegras: I just don't want jack mad at me yk? I do really like you and I shouldn't have just left things like that

ynhughes: what are you trying to say?

trevorzegras: That i'm saying yes to you

trevorzegras: and that i’m sorry

present day

ynhughes

liked by lhughes_06, colecaufield, yourbff, and others

ynhughes say yes to heaven, mv out now❤️ i love u all so much

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yourbff im crying real tears i love you so so much

ynhughes i love u more forever

fan01 just listened to say yes to heaven for the first time and it's soo beautiful

fan02 love you so much yn

liked by ynhughes

lhughes_06 very cool

[lyra-kane]

The naturals review (spoiler free)

i'm not really good in spoiler free reviews, so I hope this doesn't suck

• Description: Seventeen-year-old Cassie is a natural at reading people. Piecing together the tiniest details, she can tell you who you are and what you want. But it’s not a skill that she’s ever taken seriously. That is, until the FBI come knocking: they’ve begun a classified program that uses exceptional teenagers to crack infamous cold cases, and they need Cassie. What Cassie doesn’t realize is that there’s more at risk than a few unsolved homicides—especially when she’s sent to live with a group of teens whose gifts are as unusual as her own. Sarcastic, privileged Michael has a knack for reading emotions, which he uses to get inside Cassie’s head—and under her skin. Brooding Dean shares Cassie’s gift for profiling but keeps her at arm’s length.Soon, it becomes clear that no one in the Naturals program is what they seem. And when a new killer strikes, danger looms closer than Cassie could ever have imagined. Caught in a lethal game of cat and mouse with a killer, the Naturals are going to have to use all of their gifts just to survive. (This is goodread description )

Review: 4.5/5 🌟

Surprisingly I enjoyed this book more than I enjoyed the grandest game and don't ask me why I don't know myself, even if I love the grandest game characters more than the naturals but this one was more fun to read.

The first 50% of the book felt more like an introduction to the program of the naturals. What is the natural program ? how to think like the fbi? You also get to know the characters, their abilities, and their interactions with each other. That doesn't mean it was boring, It was actually fun to get to know them and their interactions with each other. I think Jennifer is great at writing characters, i also love how her chapter are short and how fast pased her books are! Even when they were working on cold cases, you feel like you're a part of the team, too, like you're also learning how to investigate and if you've read tig you will see thing and notice clues faster.

As for the other 50% is when the real investigation begins! Is the serial killer on the loose? Who is it ? Are they gonna be able to catch it before it's too late? You will want answers and won't stop reading till you get them.. I couldn't put the book down .at the last pages, my mouth was like an o and me screaming "WHATTT" in the middle of my room.

As for the romance, ik it says it's a love triangle, but to me, tbh it is clear while reading who she's gonna end up with ! 🤭

I haven't got spoiled on who she actually ended up with btw but it's obvious! I will write more of my thoughts on another post because there will be spoilers.

In conclusion, I definitely recommend it . It deserves so much more hype, tbh I didn't have that much high expectations since it's not popular, like I expected it to be good but not THAT good.👌❤️‍🔥

Tw: There's descriptions of the serial killer torturing their victims, letting you know in case you're uncomfortable!

[thommi-tomate]

Interview with Thomas (January 9, 2011)

By: Andreas Burkert for Süddeutsche Zeitung

Mr. Müller, where is the Golden Shoe for the best World Cup shooter?

At home, in my games room, where the dartboard and Play Station are. Everything that has now accumulated is on the windowsill. Before it gets dusty in the boxes, I'd rather put it outside.

The reason for your award, Germany's World Cup performance in South Africa, was part of every annual review. Did you watch it when this Müller suddenly walks through the picture?

Of course I've also seen Müller in a few previews. But I don't necessarily have to watch the whole thing. The year went really well and I'm always reminded of that, even if I forget about it; I can't avoid it anymore. But it's over now. I can't buy anything for it anymore. Now I have to prove myself again.

What came up in your personal review of 2010 on New Year's Eve?

It was the World Cup. But there wasn't just one moment for me, there were so many great moments.

You only made your debut for the national team just under ten months ago, in Munich against Argentina.

Yes, that was special. When I heard the national anthem, I thought: Now I've made it, now I'm really where I want to be - (A German tourist of an older age approaches the table and wants an autograph. Müller asks for her understanding that he can't now, but will be happy to do so later) - Well, since the World Cup, even those who don't know much about soccer recognize you.

Just older ladies?

Nah, nah, all the age-group are already there.

Does at least your grandma, who you greeted on TV after the round of 16 against England, have some peace now?

In the meantime, yes. The problem was that my parents, my grandma and the people here in Pähl didn't have a media manager like we did at Bayern or the DFB. But I was back home over the Christmas period and everything was nice and quiet.

People who know you well say: Müller, he doesn't take off, not even now, he doesn't drive a Ferrari yet. Don't you have a quirk? And how do you reward yourself after a year like that?

I once asked myself the same question. We have a great sponsor, so I don't need a new car. But I do sometimes walk past watch stores, but then I see that they are sometimes really expensive. Then I'd rather not, it's not worth it to me. I'm also not a bird of paradise who dyes her hair. My wife rides, which has now become important for us. Apart from that, I really do have everything. I'd have to make my own problems if I wanted to have any.

Do you ride yourself?

I tried it out a year and a half ago. Well, I didn't fall off directly, but I felt sorry for the horse afterwards. The risk is too big for me and the horse.

2011 has started for you with the loss of a title: You no longer have the thinnest legs.

You mean because of Luiz Gustavo? Well, we haven't measured his thighs yet, but it's possible. People always joke about my legs, I know they always have. But don't worry, my mother has already noticed that they don't break much. They were never a problem for me, in fact I think they helped me, even when I was younger. Because if you don't just have your body to fight back with, you also have to use your brain to run certain routes to avoid direct duels.

Is that how this urge came about? Müller goes up top, to where the ball suddenly appears?

Certain things are certainly trained automatisms. But often it's a certain instinct, a feeling for the spaces. I'm glad to have this ability.

In any case, it's difficult to compare your style with another player. Do you perhaps know one?

No, I am somehow unique. There are dribblers who are pretty similar, strikers too, but what am I actually?

Yes, what is Müller?

Hm. Well, what am I? A Raumdeuter (space interpreter) ? Yes, I'm a Raumdeuter. That would be a good title, wouldn't it?

In any case. Because, if I may say so, you do score goals, but particularly beautiful ones are rare. But you are there.

That's true, I'm not known for scoring beautiful goals. But the important thing is when it's in. I've often been accused of being lucky, but if it happens five times in a row at the World Cup, there must be another reason for it

Your former amateur coach Hermann Gerland once said: "Müller can play like shit for 90 minutes - but then he scores a goal.

The statement is correct. I consciously take risks in my game, I often try things on the direct route towards goal that are perhaps great in terms of the idea, but difficult to execute. Mistakes happen, but you have to say to yourself: no more, next time I'll try again. Reviews sometimes say: He tried a lot but didn't succeed. Yes, then it just didn't work out. I try a lot, and there are a lot of rejects. I know that, and that's why I don't drive myself crazy.

Did you get the impression after the World Cup that your opponents adjusted better to your unconventional style?

Not really. The first half of the season was a bit different, I mainly played on the right or left. It just didn't go well for the team overall, no individual player was able to break away from the trend, not even me.

Your roles change frequently. Where would you have Müller play?

I would put Müller behind the front line, which is the position at Bayern that is closer to the opponent's goal and therefore more dangerous. I can penetrate the gaps better from there. You have to be more tactically disciplined on the right and left, and the number seven position in the national team is a different right than at Bayern, because the DFB always swap sides with Mesut Özil. I need a bit of freedom to be able to play on the left or right. That's why I see myself behind the front ten. But I'm versatile and also like to play other roles.

Van Gaal said last season: "Müller always plays for me". Has this confidence made your rise possible?

He didn't even need to make that statement. Because I always had the feeling that he was counting on me.

How did you notice that, his confidence? A year ago it was said that some players were afraid of van Gaal.

Oh, I like talking like him too. He wants to create a certain amount of friction, which is why he prefers his way of talking. I really like his direct manner, we're similar in that respect

You, but also other players, were unusually outspoken in your support of the coach during the critical fall weeks. Out of gratitude?

No, there was no agreement between us, but I think everyone deliberately supported the coach. You could have asked each player individually, independently of each other, and everyone would have told you how convinced they were of him and his philosophy. Of course, in a squad of 25, there is dissatisfaction from players who don't play. But even colleagues like Hamit Altintop or even Martin Demichelis have spoken positively about the coach. And when you see what's happening here in Doha at the training camp, how they're stepping on the gas: This team really enjoys working with this coach.

Were you not worried when President Hoeneß was sharply critical and things were tight with the headstrong coach?

Not really, and after the contract extension I had the feeling that the club management was counting on him. We were all very happy about that, and the coach was also pleased that he had the support of the whole team. That's why there was never any talk of a rift between players and coach.

Then you would actually have to persuade van Gaal to stay as long as you and the others who have now signed such long-term contracts.

I think if push comes to shove, you might be able to do something about it. However, the pressure here in Munich is certainly exhausting and I don't think you can be Bayern coach for ten years without damaging your health.

At 21, you are part of the Lahm/Schweinsteiger generation, which is gradually replacing the Ballack generation. What are the differences?

Football-wise, that's certainly a level. But I think even Michael Ballack experienced different times as a young player when it was more difficult to integrate into teams. There are now many young coaches who bring in their philosophy, with a flatter hierarchy. That perhaps makes it easier for us young players today.

At 21, you've already achieved a lot. What else is there to come?

I want to bite down hard, at a very high level. In ten years' time, I want to say that I've always played at the very top for a decade and my body has endured it, and fortunately so has my head. That's my main goal.

[prickly-paprikash]

Don't you just hate it when one of the biggest grifters online decides to like a piece of media you like?

Gatekeeping is wrong. Forcing someone to like something in the specific way I interact and consume a piece of media is wrong. Art is meant to be viewed through a multitude of lenses, and each individual will have their own way of interpreting that creation. And that's good. That's fine. That's human.

But when an Anti-Woke Grifter who thinks alcoholism is a really cool personality trait and decides to brand everything about themselves as that; who has historically engaged and criticized films and shows and games and books in bad faith; who has put down women and POC's and Queer representation in media; who is one of the biggest dicks in the online space decides to actually pay attention to an art that is pretty much dipped, coated, laminated, and injected with fucking GAY, ANTI-PATRIARCHAL ENERGY—that's when I get mad.

For those not in the know, Critical Drinker has posted a review for Blue Eye Samurai, saying he likes it.

You know... Blue Eye Samurai?

The show that oozes Queer Wrath? Feminine Rage? Curb-Stomping Toxic Masculinity and the Patriarchy whenever and wherever it can? That Blue Eye Samurai?

See, he's done this before with Arcane.

He says he likes it. Him and his ilk say that, "Finally, the wokies have done something actually good!" and point to Vi and Jinx as strong female characters written well!

But they also say, dang, feels like all the men in that show are idiots and that they had to be dumbed down to make room for the rainbow-haired girlies brigade. Who have all remarked that Vi and Caitlyn's relationship is forced and being shoved down our throats because god forbid women like women!

I got sick of watching his Arcane review halfway, and this was before I knew what a douche Critical Sucker was.

So I ain't watching his Blue Eye Samurai review. Why?

His Glass Onion review was done in bad faith.

I didn't like She-Hulk, but that's because that show was a byproduct of abused VFX animators, creatively bankrupt executives, and writers desperately trying to manage a convoluted shared universe that continues to buckle under its own weight. Political Stinker over here thinks that it's pandering, stupid, feminist garbage. He is one of the biggest Anti-Feminist voices in Youtube.

Him and his incel brigade have an obsession over hating Captain Marvel and Brie Larson. These basement dwelling cucks rant and rave over a mediocre duology and an actress that just lives in their tiny heads rent-free.

He says that they are removing men from leading roles and roles of great importance!

So why would I want to listen to an inebriated libertarian's opinions on a show that has become the show for lesbians, trans mascs, and other lovely brands of gay and feminism that he oh so despises? He'll most likely praise the action and violence and shit like that, then probably say that Mizu and Taigen's homoerotic rivalry isn't gay actually. Or that Mizu and Akemi's narrative foils don't scream enemies-to-sapphics. Or that Mizu, WHO'S NAME MEANS WATER AND HER ENTIRE CHARACTER REVOLVES AROUND FLUIDITY ISN'T IN ANY WAY SHAPE OR FORM FLUID IN HER GENDER AND SEXUALITY.

Fuck. I'm sorry. I don't even care if he doesn't say that. He's made so many disgusting, disparaging remarks about any piece of media that shows an inkling of progressive themes that what else am I supposed to expect?

If anyone watches it and sees this, lemme know. Watching an Anti-Woke bullshit video with just myself is just straight up wading through the desert without proper protection. No thanks.

Anyway watch Blue Eye Samurai again. Because I know you watched it. Watch it again. And again. And when you're done, watch Arcane. Watch She-Ra. Watch Dragon Prince. Castlevania. Watch anything "woke". Consume trans-positive shows. Make all the haters and even the ones who like it but have no ounce of media literacy irrelevant. Let them dry out and die, please.

[captainimfangirling]

Here's something I don't understand. I see many reviews say how they feel bad for Lydia because Beetlejuice has been torturing her for 30 years.

Warning: Spoilers

Edit: Lydia actually did say she can feel him every now and then so he wasn't entirely unsuccessful. But still I don't think it was torture and she always had issues way before she met him.

How is Beeltejuice torturing her for 30 years when she didn't even notice him until recently? Beeltejuice said so himself that she's been ignoring him for 30 years and finally saw him "that last time" so he's been UNSUCCESSFULL at getting her attention for 30 years. Yes Lydia has mental health issues but it's not just because of what happened with Beeltejuice in the first movie. I mean the girl wanted to die as a teenager. She's been having mental health issues way before she even met him.

I think interacting with ghosts for 30 plus years is the main reason for her mental health issues as an adult. It's all fun and games when you're a teenager but I'm sure it took a toll on her over the years (so she started taking pills at one point) and because of the TV show everyone knows about her gift. Basically everyone knows about her life. Also not having the Maitlands around anymore for who knows how long. Lydia and Delia didn't become close until Lydia became popular or had her own TV show (something like that correct me if I'm wrong but think Lydia said this). All Lydia had as parents were the Maitlands and she did anything to keep them/save them but they're gone. Her birth mother is alive and most likely doesn't acknowledge Lydia's existence. Even Delia thought she was dead. Sadly even her own daughter ignores her because Astrid thinks she's a fraud.

Sorry I'm just annoyed because I feel like so many aren't paying attention to a lot of things. If I made a mistake about anything please let me know because I've only seen it once. I'm willing to listen if you don't agree with me.

[katapotato55]

How to write a good metaphor

yall seemed to like my post on "how to write good horror" so i figured i should make another one of these.

1- do. not. explain. the. metaphor.

don't.

"oh but how will the audience know my deep and meaningful message- "

SOME PEOPLE WONT GET IT. if you explain what you mean then suddenly the metaphor won't be deep anymore. it becomes a generic forced message.

i know you are tempted to make a character infodump about everything, fucking don't.

followup on this:

2- a good metaphor should potentially have multiple interpretations.

"but i don't want people to get the wrong impression of the story!"

then you either need to make damn sure its an elegantly written metaphor, or none at all. the death of the author is the idea that everyone has their own vision of a story they read, rearguards of authors intent. you need to come to terms with this or else you won't improve your writing skills.

you need to trust that your audience is intelligent enough to understand the metaphor on their own without bashing them over the head with it. sometimes people misunderstand meaning, it is a fact of life.

The game little inferno was thought of as a metaphor about pollution, in which later the creators went out to say it was actually about capitalism and wasting your life with things like exploitative mobile games. you just need make it SUBTLE and hope for the best.

3- The story/gameplay/etc should inform the metaphor(and sometimes reference real life examples)

To mention little inferno again, the "you must wait x amount of time for in-game item to be given to you" is a mirror of mobile games in the real world that use timers to leach money from you.

another example: analogue horror.

broken old technology is scary on its own, but many good analogue horror artists tend to use this to the advantage.

analogue horror can be used as a metaphor for dying trends and technology, like how in the 30's through 70's we used asbestos in the walls. Analogue horror makes a great parralel to this idea (see Blue_channel by gooseworx for a good example.) . the audience questions WHY this is on an old CRT tv and not just a smartphone, perhaps to imply this was an event that happened years ago.

undertale is another example, where most RPG's encourage you to fight and to level up, undertale uses this as a simple metaphor about obsessive control and being cruel to get an arbitrary achievement (i recommend the escapist's video on "why i didn't review undertale" on youtube for way better examples)

tldr: a metaphor is stronger if you lightly reference real life occurances and implement your metaphor in the medium presented.

4- the curtains are blue because they are blue.

not everyone is going to understand your metaphor

and not everyone is going to notice every single little metaphor you add to your story.

remember those teachers that would constantly stretch to imply something in a story is a metaphor and that the curtains are blue because of some deep metaphor for death and sadness and shit?

those teachers are full of it. ignore them.

metaphors are allowed to be simple. not every metaphor needs to be a hyper deep depth defying world changing thing. I could even argue a bunch of small metaphors connected to each other can be better than one big metaphor depending on your story.

relax. don't think too much about it because your average audience member won't.

5- study movies, tv, books, games, etc and understand why their metaphors work.

don't fall into that "the curtains are blue because of a deep message" English teacher mindset mind you.

"but how do i tell what is and isn't a metaphor?" you may ask

simple. trust your gut. you won't understand everything you come across but the human brain has a way of telling what is and isn't a metaphor in stories.

(spoiler about bugsnax)

I could argue Bugsnax is a metaphor about drug abuse and addiction. The characters have personality traits commonly associated with people vulnerable to drug addiction. An athlete, a hippy, a married couple going through a rough spot in their marriage with the threat of divorce, a mentally ill person with trauma and paranoia, etc.

It isn't obvious, many people may disagree with me, but you can't deny that there are signs i may be right.

(end of spoiler) the point i am trying to make: don't stretch to find a metaphor when you don't see one. if you are curious google other people's theories and make your own opinion. metaphors are hard and you will learn over time. and finally 6- do not ever do "it was all just a dream" or "the character is secretly in a coma" etc this applies to writing in general but it is still related to metaphors. the only time i have seen this done well is driver san francisco, but what it did right was A- make it so the players can guess ahead of time the mystery, such as the radio saying voices of your character in the hospital, or if you zoomed out you could hear a heart monitor. and B- it didn't completely un-do the entire story. that is my core issue with this trope. it either wastes your time un-doing the entire story readers worked hard to finish, or it is just nonsensical and terrible. "dora the explorer is actually in purgatory!" "spongebob is a metaphor for the 7 deadly sins!" "ash is in a coma and that is why he never ages! " ooooor it is a cartoon and you are forcing meaning that doesn't exist in something that doesn't even imply it. the world being a bit weird is not enough to be a metaphor for anything. If you want to make a good metaphor: do more effort than just slapping a lazy "it was all a coma" thing at the end. Like horror, stuff like this needs to be built up properly. also consider authors intent. I understand death of the author and all of that, but do you really think a retired marine biologist made spongebob to be a complex metaphor about sinners in hell ? (rip Stephen Hillenburg btw. we didn't deserve him.) thank you for reading, hope this helps. and please, learn to understand the tropes of metaphors before you attempt to make the story of a generation. edit- adding a couple more things i forgot 7- "the darkness is going to destroy the land or whatever!" i see this used all the time. spooky wookey dark shadowy bits going to destroy a land and is the hero's generic bad thing to fight. stop it. it is not a deep and complex metaphor about depression or whatever the hell you are on about. its lazy and stupid. 8- a story should stand up on its own regardless if audience members understand the metaphor or not I don't like Gris. it is a very pretty game with lovely visuals But also the entire story is just the main character moping about artistically and shit and go on about how artistically sad and dramatic this all is. if i don't understand the story without understanding the metaphor, then your story and your metaphor sucks. an example of a metaphor done well: spiritfairer without the metaphor, it is a simple game about running a traveling boat. even if you didn't care too much about the deeper meaning it is a cute story and the gameplay is fun (spoiler) if you look deeper, it can also be taken as a metaphor about greif and learning to accept your loved ones will one day die. things like the boat being filled with empty houses you can't remove is a good example of this. (end of spoiler) your story needs to stand up on its own to be good. don't use a metaphor as a crutch.