#i finally start to write this and my brain makes the windows xp shut down noise

[crab-instruments]

Dust in the Wind Part 1 (tbb)

Master Part 2>

Pairing: Hunter x Reader

Rating and warning: General audience, not much happens (yet)

Words: 597

a/n: hello, I’ve never written a fic before, but I’ve had ideas. This is the first time I’m trying to. If it works out, this will be a Hunter fic, slow burn, multipart mess. It’ll be based much after the events of episode 12, since that’s the time of writing, not connected to the show. I don’t know what I’m doing, I just have an idea and a need to push it out there, and possibly make some other readers, like myself, happy there is more content to consume. It’s not beta-read. I thought that maybe if I wrote and posted it, I’d get it out. Nothing happens here. It’s just an intro. Holy Kenobi, what am I doing?

You clutch your backpack close to your stomach as you run, unable to have put in on fast enough. You push past people on the street, rounding a corner, finding a landing dock. You look behind you, catching a glimpse at your chasers before disappearing from their view. You hoped you had more time here, just starting to get used to the area, kriff, you even had a favorite stall to buy fruit from.

However, now wasn’t the time for worrying about that. You needed a place to hide.

The lot was empty of people, only ships and crates. Your footsteps echoed as you frantically weaved through the ships. One ship, a ship that certainly looked like it had seen its fair share of battles, had the loading ramp down. Bingo.

A quick look showed no one was in your immediate area to see you slip into the ship. Standing in the main hold of the ship, you quickly found an area to hide in, the refresher. You quickly ran in and shut the door. The grip on your backpack was tight, showing the whites of your knuckles. You push your back against the wall, sliding down to your knees.

I’m safe… for now. Breathing felt hard, but you closed your eyes and focused on keeping quiet. You listened real hard for the sounds of footfalls. After a few moments, you heard what you were listening for, fast and heavy, but the voice that followed wasn’t the one you expected.

“Tech, get us out of here, fast! We are being followed!”

By the amount of footsteps, you could tell there was more than 3 people jumping on the ship. It rocked, knocking you out of your cocoon. Shots were fired. The ship climbed in altitude and your life on this planet seemed to come to end as your immediate options were slowly dwindling.

This wasn’t what I planned to do today...

“Jumping to hyperspace!”

Your body lurched to the side. Your arms flew out to find purchase on something and your right arm slammed into the wall behind you.

Oops

When things seemed to settle, the realization that you are a stowaway on a ship that you don’t know the crew of sets in. How do you even begin to explain your situation? They seemed to be running away from less than stellar circumstances, what if they aren’t understanding of your situation?

Your eyes shot to the door as you heard muffled voices outside and footsteps came closer. Your presence was known.

First impressions are everything. Do you go out swinging? Do you beg for your life?

The door slip open with a hiss, with 3 men with dark gray and red accented trooper armor looked at you. The man in front had longer hair held out of his face with a red bandana. The two others seemed to fade back as you stared in his eyes, frozen, like a lothcat in a speeder’s headlights.

His face seemed to softened from the surprise, seemingly coming back to the situation.

“Boys, step back, I’ll handle this.”

He stepped forward and shut the door.

Your mind raced. It felt like the thoughts in your head spun like a wheel in one of the game holoshows you saw, not slowing down on a next move.

The man in front of you kneeled to get to your eye level, let a breath out, and looked at you with the most beautiful of eyes.

“I’m not going to hurt you but what are you doing, sitting on the floor in our ‘fresher?”

What a good question.

Part 2

[radramblog]

The default Microsoft XP Games

This evening I have decided to write some nonsense. It’s my god-given right to bullshit, and a gift I’ve been cultivating for years. Also because I’m tired and have other things to be spending precious brainpower on.

After pondering some ideas, some silly, some sillier, I landed on this. The original plan was to go through the Google Doodle games, but A. I couldn’t find a repository of them in the approximately one minute I tried looking, and B. There’s probably, like, a lot of them. Plus, XP was the OS of the family computer when I was a kid, so you bet your ass I tried these out. Er, most of them. Because when you’re a 6-year-old looking for shit to do and the edutainment well is running a little dry, you turn to some odd places. So I have little a nostalgia, as a treat.

Okay so, first on the list is….a bunch of Internet games. Backgammon, Checkers, Hearts, Reversi, and Spades. Now, I’ve heard of most of these in board/card game form (dunno what Spades is), but it’s hard to give these any sort of love because… you know… I didn’t play them. At all, ever. Kid me wasn’t going to be able to figure out how to get an online game running in 2004, let alone sign up for an account or even connect to the internet when we had dialup. At the same time, I imagine these would have ended up kinda popular, because hey- loads of people have nostalgia for the default games, and these were ones you could play with other people! I’m surprised they didn’t have Chess on there, actually.

They really looked like that, huh.

Anyway, you can’t play any of these anymore, the server support ended in….2019?! Who the fuck was running the XP Internet Checkers service in 2019? That’s a full 10 years after updates and support for the OS actually stopped. Why did it take so long to shut down these random servers?

Moving on, we have Hearts. A…local version of the Internet Hearts, I suppose. This is one I definitely remember attempting to play as a kid, but apparently I never tried reading the actual instructions. Or if I did, I sure couldn’t parse them. I just remember losing a lot, a streak I have clearly continued, as I sure have still yet to Get Good At Games. I’m going to be honest, I probably can’t be bothered figuring them out now. Even if I did, who am I going to play with? You need 4 players for this game, exactly, and I have a hard enough time getting 3 other people to play Magic with.

Next thing, going very alphabetically here, is Freecell. The other one I never figured out. At least with hearts, I could make moves, pretend like I was playing the game, but I’m pretty sure with Freecell I just never actually figured out how to start the game. After a brief moment of research, it appears to be a Solitare variant (oh we’ll get to you), and considering I’ve never heard it brought up elsewhere, it’s probably not a very popular one. Something to be said about messing with what works. According to good old fashioned Wikipedia, it’s a version where almost every single theoretically possible hand is winnable, which is nice, but I’m sure most people are still going to cock it up.

Speaking of Solitaire variants, might as well bring up Spider. I definitely actually figured out how to play this one at some point, likely a result of having figured out regular Solitaire. It is, however, much more complicated, I believe, what with using more than one deck and just having stacks of stacks. This also makes it more difficult, and thereby, more frustrating- apparently as opposed to Freecell this one has approximately a 1 in 3 winrate if you know what you’re doing, and I don’t really like those odds. Of course, apparently regular Solitaire (aka Klondike, but most people call it Solitaire because of Microsoft) is even worse, so.

Remind we why this is called Spider again?

Finally the big one, Regular Fucking Solitaire. Known by many names- Patience, American Patience, Demon Patience, and Triangle. Wikipedia, what the fuck?

I think at this point Solitaire is not just iconic of XP, but of Windows in general. Perhaps I’m showing my age a bit here, since I’m sure it was in a version of the OS long before I showed up to give it a shot, but obviously its what I know it from. Aside from just the game itself, even the victory screen itself is well remembered, cards duplicating and cascading across the screen. I don’t know who programmed that, or who decided it should be a thing, but they made a good choice- it’s incredibly satisfying.

Solitaire is just kind of really satisfying. It’s a simple enough puzzle, with a huge amount of potential depth and billions of possible combinations, making it kind of the perfect timewaster. Did they know what they were doing when they added it to Windows in the first place? Imagine how much productivity that decision cost offices worldwide.

Nahh, those fuckers weren’t getting up to anything anyway.

There are two games remaining to talk about, and we might as well get Minesweeper out of the way. I don’t know why, but I never really got into Minesweeper. Just bounced right off of it. Actually, in retrospect, it’s probably because 1. I didn’t know what I was doing, and B., even when I did figure it out, I definitely took a while to figure out the right click -> flag mine input. The game is not especially appealing to kids when you don’t have that sorted, and honestly, I’m not sure it gets much better when you do.

Finally, the last and clearly best game on the list, motherfucking  3D Pinball Space Cadet. Apparently this is actually one map included as a demo for an actual buyable game with a whole 3 boards, but I can’t imagine anyone buying it. For one, it’d have to be pretty cheap to make that worth it, especially since we already have one for free- and yeah, we have a third of it already, who needs to buy it.

I’ve always really enjoyed Pinball, even if I’m not very good at it. I’m not the type to obsess over it, or get competitive like people apparently do. I just really enjoy it, and would love to have my own table someday. And I think this game is the cause.

Unlike the previous entries on this list, 3D Pinball feels more like an actual game rather than a timewaster. It has art, and sound effects, and flashing lights and everything. Those sound effects are absolutely burned into my brain at this point. Considering only it and Minesweeper aren’t existing things you could already do with playing cards (or in the case of the Internet series, various boards), they’re the only ones you can really apply video game design philosophy to.

And the result I think is fairly interesting. 3D Pinball, despite having the full power of early 2000s processing at its fingertips, plays much like an actual machine as compared to other Pinball-based video games. One could argue this is a result of its default inclusion- too much Stuff would alienate the gentile audience they were going for, after all. The choice of Space Cadet as a theme suits well the 3D design- both three-dimensional games and, well, Space travel felt similarly ambitious for a while, and I’m sure this game was a lot of people’s introductions to 3D on a PC.

I don’t think this game has had the longevity of Solitaire and Minesweeper in the greater public eye- likely a result of them being around for longer and available in more than three versions of Windows- but for those around my age, who grew up on XP and were attracted to the shiny thing, I could argue it’s just as memorable.

And that’s the full listing. A bit hit or miss, but you have to keep in mind that these were both free and developed by Microsoft before they really had a games studio. These days, what with Xbox, Microsoft not making games really seems odd to think about, but outside of a limited few like these, that was just the facts.

And then they went and made some really weird ones for Vista and 7, and they weren’t good (except Mahjong but they didn’t really make that so much as port it), and then for Windows 8/10 they made them downloadable and…put ads on them….

Man, bring me back to those days, huh.