#i fully made this blog with the intention of it being a general dragon age blog but i fear vivienne may have taken over

[abyssal-ilk]

wow that one anon really doesn't know a damn thing about viv and it shows 🤭 anyway my favorite thing about her is that you DO have to earn her friendship and respect, and when you do she's INCREDIBLY ride or die. she does not accept disrespect and as Inquisitor expects the same of you and if you don't know how to do that she will show you and I think that's lovely

YES! i like having to work for companion approval in general, but it's especially true for vivienne. it makes sense that you would have to work harder for her approval, especially if your inquisitor is anti-circle– which my inquisitors typically are. that, plus all of her moments where she checks in with the inquisitor with high approval, gives them advice, compliments the designs you choose for skyhold,, she is so important to me.

her introduction scene is SO good and so powerful specifically because it reinforces the idea that, no, she won't handle disrespect towards you or towards herself. you WILL respect her and, with her at your side, people will have to respect you. and,, yeah she did set it up, but it's such a good power move from her that i could never be mad at it lmao.

[bluewizardmagick]

Hello There!

I figured introductions were in order for the small handful of you lovely people who followed me recently, and for anyone who stumbles across this blog. My name is Al, and in addition to being an erotic artist I am also a fledgling chaos magician. I’m going to detail a little bit of the journey that lead me to beginning to dabble in magick below, as well as talk about what I hope to do with this blog.

If I were to be a guest on Rune Soup tomorrow, my answer to traditional question 1 would be a resounding “hell yeah I was a weird kid!” I role-played alone with my imagination and nothing else, talked to trees (I believed they housed ancient dragon spirits), grew a Jedi Padawan braid in addition to a rat tail (I wanted to be Obi-Wan), and trained in martial arts from age 10 (I also wanted to be Tommy Oliver.) I defiintely saw life through a mythical lens as a kid.

In my teens I became something of a Christian mystic thanks to C. S. Lewis and John Eldredge, though this came with a lot of Pharisiacal baggage, judgemental thinking and other problems that I later had to work to undo. Still, I learned a lot about seeking spirituallly, had some experiences with Beings that might have been angels and demons, and in general life was still enchanted. (I also learned basic pranic healing techniques and chakra meditation at this time through martial arts.)

This enchantment lasted until I discovered proper philosophy in college, which while it taught me important critical thinking skills had the unfortunate side effect of tipping me into reductionalist materialism as I made the leap from accepting the scientific method to accepting “scientific” dogma. This was a very dark time of my life, as it was also a time when my Bipolar II symptoms worsened. The two things combined to make me feel helpless and meaningless.

And then I read the Dresden Files. No, seriously. Reading that book series was what bought me a ticket onto the syncronicity express, because suddenly the theme of Magick started showing up everywhere in my life. The mythical part of me started piping up again, I started feeling like I was being Shown something, like I had in my Christian mystic days (though I abandoned Christianity I never fully abandoned the idea of God/Gods/Consciousness, as I couldn’t ignore the experiences I had.) Around that time my partner @suzanneclay expressed to me her interest in magick and all things witchy, and I took that as the final sync that this was something I should pay attention to.

So I started goofing off with sigils. And I got some results. So I started reading, listening to podcasts, meditating off and on, just trying to get a feel for it. And I felt the Eye of the Cosmos on me, started having more syncronicities, more moments of the Universe winking at me. And I knew I was on to something.

That pretty much brings us to the present. I’ve been doing quite a bit of reading and listening (I swear I’ve consumed most of the Rune Soup blog backlog, and most of the podcast episodes.) I have a long list of books queued up to keep reading. I’ve started an ancestor altar (made contact with my Great Grandma. Left me in tears.) But I still feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface, like I haven’t quite stepped off the diving board yet.

And that’s what this blog is for.

My intention is to jump off this diving board now and get to work. I want to develop my divination skills, cultivate regular introspection/meditation practice, develop my energy work, and start using practical enchantment to further my personal goals. This blog shall serve as a place for me to document, to share any useful tech I discover, and to communicate with my fellow magicians and diviners. I’m ready to start pursuing this in earnest.

So. I hope this proves interesting and entertaining at the least, ideally it may become inspiring and informative. If you’re a fellow weird kid and want to say hi, please do! Let’s get on this wacky adventure together. It is after all dangerous to go alone.

[thesteadydietofeverything]

The Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy is a (fun) shallow novelty

In a recent Time interview, Sony Europe Exec Jim Ryan argued against the concept of backwards compatibility à la Xbox as a viable business plan, positing that for as many people that ask for it, very few actually take advantage of it.  “That,” he said, “and I was at a Gran Turismo event recently where they had PS1, PS2, PS3 and PS4 games, and the PS1 and the PS2 games, they looked ancient, like why would anybody play this?”  His statements may reflect the actual opinions of a certain segment of the gaming community, but they also come off as shortsighted and just kinda...dumb.  He’s (first of all) bashing products once made by his own company, which for pure business reasons sounds some alarms.  But more than that, he’s making an argument against the durability of games, asserting that unlike other forms of art, they have an expiration date, largely connected to the visual style allowed by the hardware limitations of the time they were made in.

While the Activision-produced Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy is removed from Sony’s legal grasp, to a degree, this ground-up remake of the classic O.G. Playstation platformer series is in line with Ryan’s realm of thinking.  This isn’t a “remaster” in the way that most games that bear that designation are, no mere cleaning-up and up-resing to make those chunky 90’s polygons tolerable on modern TVs, though perhaps it should have been.  Rather, this is more a Gus Van Sant’s-Psycho-kind of shot-for-shot recreation of the original games in a brand new engine, and the good news for the Jim Ryans of the world is that it looks great.  Fans of the original trilogy such as myself, whose ravenous nostalgia for all things pre-aughts knows no bounds, will undoubtedly spend the first few minutes of this game in slack-jawed awe at their childhood game rendered in all its colorful, rounded, shiny 2017 glory.

Some of that awe may go away, however, once those players get to, say, the second level of any one of the three games packaged, and start dying.  Players at this point might have one of two reactions - “Shit, I forgot how hard this game was,” or “Shit, I don’t remember this game being so hard.”  Both of these reactions are valid.  The original Crash Bandicoot games, once you got past the rollicking soundtrack and vaguely-creepy but mostly-cute anthropomorphisms, were occasionally grueling obstacle courses fraught with trial-and-error frustrations.  They were awkward 3D platformers that had trouble grappling with the idea of what a 3D platformer could even be, requiring the precision controls of 2D genre classics like Mario but in practice, controlling in the stiff, wonky way many games of the 32-bit era did.  Even if this was a straight remaster of the original games, many players may have found themselves running sideways off a straight platform because of the bafflingly 3D controls in ostensibly 2D sections only so many times before they became a little disillusioned at how unflatteringly these games have aged.  Naughty Dog may have gone on to be one of video game’s greatest and most celebrated developers, but it took a while to reach that peak.

But there’s more to it than that.  Sure, on the surface level, everything pretty much looks the same - Crash (or, in a welcome addition to these versions, his sister Coco) jumps, spins, slides and bodyslams his way through the same exact levels with the same exact enemy and box locations that he always has.  But upon mere days of the N. Sane Trilogy’s release, many articles and blogs ran about the ways the new game’s engine failed to fully replicate the physics and mechanics of the originals.  Now the developers at Vicarious Visions themselves have confirmed these departures, the two most egregious of which are faster falling animations and pill-shaped collision boxes - meaning that many would-be close-call landings of the original games are now perplexing misses of the new games.  As someone with the physics of the original games ingrained into my muscle memory, this deviation was particularly hard to accept for me; it wasn’t until probably ⅔ of the way through Cortex Strikes Back that I felt I may have finally mastered these new mechanics, just in time for the most hand-wringingly, hair-pullingly stressful levels of the game.

One can only wrestle with this kind of no-cigar approximation for so long before one starts questioning what the point is.  Why remake these games in this way?  Most players of the original games will be put off by the subtle-but-ever-present gameplay changes, while newcomers will likely be nonplussed by games that, graphical overhauls and Unity-based physics changes aside, still feel stuck in gaming’s awkward pre-teen phase.  The answer, unfortunately, is probably financial.  An HD remake of a nostalgic favorite among a certain generation of gamer is an easy cash-grab - $40 seems like a reasonable enough price for three whole games that have been completely made over from scratch, and even if the details of the way the games play start to grate on players, most will presumably still get what they wanted from the experience, a quick and shallow indulgence in nostalgia with little critical considerations.  Truly replicating the original in every way likely would have been a costlier endeavor than deemed necessary for the kind of experience this was meant to be.  The apparent success of this release has even sparked conversations about giving other PS1 classics, such as Spyro the Dragon, a similar treatment.

All of this complicates the question set out at the beginning of this review, about the aging process of video games, graphically, mechanically, or otherwise.  I will always assert that no such expiration date exists.  Developers of console generations long past were limited by the technology they were working with, but that doesn’t mean the art they made wasn’t intentional and worth celebrating.  The early 3D era, both in play and look, may have not aged as gracefully as the late 2D era that preceded it, but the blocky, fuzzy-textured art of Crash Bandicoot and other games of its era will always hold a strange sort of appeal to me, and not entirely for nostalgic reasons.  This was an era of radical, thorny change, full of potential both realized and missed by developers who had no clue what they were doing, but did it anyway, in a brand new dimension.  Exploring the games of this time can be both exhilarating and slightly embarrassing, but rarely boring.

That’s all to say that the Crash Bandicoot N Sane Trilogy really never had to happen.  A remaster would have been nice, and I will never argue for anything less than the total preservation and accessibility of video game history, but to gloss over the style seems to me the creation of a wholly different thing, just as it would if one were to modernize the English in an old piece of literature.  This kind of remake feels like little more than a shallow novelty.  It’s a fun shallow novelty, for sure.  Despite whatever complaints I maintain about its mechanics, I still played it enough to 100% Cortex Strikes Back and enjoy a considerable amount of the other two games.  In returning to them, I still felt the same itch to smash every box, collect every gem, and even give those speed runs a shot.  Pulling off a difficult clusterfuck of obstacles unscathed in the later levels is still as exhilarating as ever, and breezing through the early ones is still as satisfying.  I expect that others will appreciate it equally.  But a shallow novelty it remains.  Thankfully, though, the game prepared me to expect little more, so at least it’s not a disappointing shallow novelty.

6.3/10

[raynbow-shimmer]

B, C, H, J, L, M, P, T, U, V, Y & Z?

Woo, alright! Thank you! Break because long.

B - A pairing–platonic, romantic or sexual–that you initially didn’t consider, but someone changed your mind.

Ohh, probably Supercorp. I don’t know. I usually stick with what the show or book has until someone dangles something else in front of me. Like, I have to be walked into everything. But once I get ahold of something, I love it and nurture it and guard it like a vicious dog. You just…gotta show me first.

C - A ship you have never liked and probably never will.

Listen, my buddy, my pal…I will never ship Eowells with anyone. Nope. Can’t really ship Harry with anyone either. Basically, no shipping allowed for any sort of Harrison Wells, unless it’s original Wells with Tess. Other than that, N.O.

H - What is your favorite source text for fandom stuff (e.g., TV shows, movies, books, anime, Western animation, etc.)?

If this is asking where I draw information and stuff from…uh, definitely comics and comic properties.

J - Name a fandom you didn’t think about until you saw it all over Tumblr. (You don’t have to care about it or follow it; it just has to be something that Tumblr made you aware of.)

STEVEN UNIVERSE. Oh my god, I saw the gemsona craze going around and I had to figure out what in the world was going on. This was like a week after the first Steven Bomb and Jailbreak aired. Google led me to Stronger Than You and I never once looked back. Also Voltron. And Sense8 and Stranger Things.

L - Say something genuinely nice about a character who isn’t one of your faves. (Characters you’re neutral about are fair game, as are characters you merely dislike. Characters that you absolutely loathe with the fire of ten thousand suns are exempt, as there is no point in giving yourself an aneurysm over a character that you hate.)

H.R. Wells is very good at hiding his true intentions. Also very good at charming people to get them to do what he wants. :|

M - Name a character that you’d like to have for a friend.

Cisco Ramon. I just love his passion and enthusiasm. And his immense knowledge of pop culture offers so many interesting conversations. He could pose so many logical arguments to answer age-old fandom questions. And he just seems down to do almost anything as long as it’s fun. All-around good guy to be friends with. YEP.

P - Invent a random AU for any fandom (we always need more ideas).

Dog show AU for the Flash? Ah, hmm…basically, everyone works with dogs? Liiike, Barry and Wally can be dog walkers or trainers, Iris can be the reporter for a pet magazine writing an article about the latest upcoming show, Caitlin could be a groomer or vet, Cisco could own a pet store, H.R. could own a prize-winning dog, Joe could be one of the most prestigious breeders in Central City…yep. They’re all connected. Replace dogs with dragons for maximum fun.

T - Do you have any hard and fast headcanons that you will die defending?

Alright, I’m aginst canon on this, but that’s ok because canon was wrong. Barry does not own S.T.A.R. Labs. Nope. Uh-uh. S.T.A.R. and all of Eowells’ assets went to Cisco. Why in the world would Eobard leave his stuff to the man he HATES and not the man whom he considered a son (and subsequently killed with little remorse)? Barry didn’t deserve S.T.A.R. Labs, Cisco did.

U - Three favorite characters from three different fandoms, and why they’re your favorites.

The Flash - Cisco Ramon

Bubbly and charming, he’s a caring and loyal soul at his core. You can bet if you’re in trouble, Cisco will there with you, fighting to get you out. He’s intelligent and capable, always making better and smarter tech to solve problems you might not even think of. I mean, have you seen the roster of things he’s created? That man is a genius. Not to mention he has some super awesome powers. Also, his hair. I think that says it all.

Steven Universe - Peridot

Peridot is quintessentially me. Rule-following and a know-it-all, she is going to accomplish the task set out before her with great efficiency and attention to detail. Cold and calculating on the outside, once you break her shell she’s all yours. She has a tendency to flare up with frantic anger when agitated, but only because she don’t know how to properly react to her situation. She might not know everything, but she always takes strides to learn, especially from her mistakes. 

Star Trek: The Next Generation - Guinan

Guinan is wise. She’s seen and experienced a lot in her days. From living through the 20th century on Earth, to the annihilation of her people, to now serving aboard the Enterprise, she’s been through more than most. But she uses the things she’s learned through the years to help others. Always a listening ear, she offers counsel to anyone at her bar who needs it. And you’d be surprised at the number of things she can do. Guinan is a mystery that will never be fully uncovered.

V - Which character do you relate to most?

Peridot. From hissy fits about technology to being utterly confused about emotions, she is someone I really really relate to.

Y - What are your secondhand fandoms (i.e., fandoms you aren’t in personally but are tangentially familiar with because your friends/people on your dash are in them)?

Doctor Who, Stranger Things, Lucifer, Supernatural, Game of Thrones, Assassin's Creed, Sherlock…probably more I can’t think of right now.

Z - Just ramble about something fan-related, go go go! (Prompts optional but encouraged.)

Fandom wars. What even? I feel like I’m approaching thin ice on this, but ugggh. What is the point of fighting over all this stuff? If you like something, great! If you don’t like something, don’t comment on someone else’s post telling them they are wrong for liking the thing. Just ignore the post and move on. In the same way, don’t comment on someone’s dislike for a thing. It’s hard, I know, especially when you feel like a certain post is calling you out for liking something. Vague blog (and I really mean VAGUE) and move on. Ignore said person. Block if you need to. There’s arguing for sport and then there is arguing for spite. Don’t do the later. Also, tag anti’s. Be mindful with your tags. And remember, you never know who you might be attacking, so maybe don’t. Just let people be and move on with life.

Fandom Asks