#i love our new place!!

[territorial-utopia]

Huzzah! It's birthday time! I'm slowly accumulating more and more things I like (latest additions this vest I made and a travel typewriter! Still need to fix the latter one though)

Sure has been a year.

[faaun]

what draws you back to your country what draws you back to your land when i was a kid i told myself if i ever left iran i'd never go back 2 years into living in the UK i started looking at news on iran again 10 years in and i visited it for the first time again and today i heard an iranian mother talk in farsi to her child on the train to london the way my mother used to and i wanted to cry i wanted to ask her whether they're still cutting the mountaintops whether the lakes are still drying today i showed the person i was with pictures of waterfalls and palaces and forests and snow-white north something odd pulls me back with increasing force i can't ignore it ever again

[rendiggitydog]

My old height chart is starting to make the rounds again, so here’s the most updated chart and the google doc with all the sources!

edit: THIS CHART IS OUTDATED! Check the tag ‘hermitcraft heights’ for the most recent version <3

[arrgh-whatever]

I've seen a few people remembering me from my BPD comic, makes me so happy

yeah, it's me, hi :]

[boylikeanangel]

2023 good omens fandom would never survive may 2019 when the entirety of season 1 got leaked on the emmy fyc site and me and several other blogs spent the entire month slowly feeding people spoilers and screenshots and we all shared the fucking google drive folder with the leaked episodes still with a watermark over them and spoke to each other about it publicly in riddles and it was the best month of our fucking lives. like we did that shit because it was funny it was like we were all staying up past our bedtime and getting away with it. you are all so boring now

[anotherdescentintomadness]

YiZhan Parallels: This WYB // This XZ

Sharing parallels, coincidences, and vibes from my bsky account, because we need more love in this fandom and in the world in general.

[supermaks]

| A breaking up and making up college romance story, set in Oxford University, that fails to accurately portray either of those things. | first, second, and third chapters now re upl0ded on ao3. Mature, read chapter warnings. Tbc.

[greyias]

I really don’t want swtor to shut down it’s the only eu thing that’s active we have left

I knew these asks were going to start coming in.

So for those who haven't heard, it was reported, and then later confirmed by Keith Kanneg on the forums, that EA is "selling" SWTOR to another developer, Broadsword. For those who want to read the article discussing it, you can read here: https://www.ign.com/articles/star-wars-the-old-republic-development-third-party-bioware

TL;DR -- It's not shutting down. The servers are going to stay active for a while

There's a few points to note here:

If I understand things correctly, EA actually owns Broadsword. So EA is in fact not actually offloading a property, I think what's actually happening is BioWare Austin itself is being divvied out and would not be surprised to see if that branch is shut down

At least half of the SWTOR dev team is part of this move, so the key things to keep an eye on is which members of the dev team are moving. If the narrative staff is kept intact, then we have more story ahead of us beyond what's been written, and they've confirmed we're getting 7.3, 7.3.1, and 7.4. It's important to note that their production timeline is generally a year out from things being written, so story-wise, if they have narrative staff, we'll likely still have some story drops ahead of us

SWTOR is profitable (it hit over $1 billion in profit several years ago), and I will admit I don't have the best understanding of video game finances, but my impresion it was far into the black and maybe not an enromous cash cow, but a decent consistent revenue stream. EA is a publisher that is about profits, so as long as the game is profitable, even if there's not new story drops, the game will stay online

Disney has seemingly taken a recent interest in SWTOR after mostly ignoring it after its acquisition of Star Wars, even going so far as to finally acknowledge the general KOTOR/SWTOR era in their presentations last year at Celebration. Does this ultimately mean anything? I don't know, but SWTOR is one of the longest running current properties with a stable player base. They're just as interested in profit as EA. Probably another indicator that the game will keep running for a while.

Other properties that Broadsword operates, such as Dark Age of Camelot and Ultima Online, are old games. Ultima Online was released in 1997, and the servers are still active. So like, I think regardless of what happens in regards of the story, we're not losing the ability to log in and play the game

Long term subscriptions - I remember reading, and forgive me, because I've long forgotten the source, that a key indicator if the servers are going offline is to also keep an eye on the six-month subscription option. Basically, if suddenly the only option for subs goes down to one month, that's when to worry about being able to actually play the game.

This is probably not about SWTOR, but BioWare as a whole. It seems there's a leadership issue at the main Alberta office that's causing issues. This is likely an Anthem issue all over again, but Anthem this time happens to be the Mass Effect and Dragon Age properties. Unfortunately, BioWare Austin looks like it's going to suffer the consequences of that, even though they've been running a tight ship overall compared to the rest of the branches. I feel for them. This sucks.

Now I'm not an oracle, I have no idea if this is ultimately a good or bad thing for the game itself. There's a lot of evidence for both sides of the coin, so right now the best thing is to wait and see. We at least have the promise of the next two patches. Let's focus on enjoying that, and celebrating what we love about our silly space game.

If you love the game, keep playing it. Spend money on it, and keep it profitable and it will stay around. Be kind and supportive of the devs, who regardless of how this shakes out, are going through a major transition. But immediately decrying an active game's death and going into doom and gloom is not going to help things.

Will we get more story beyond 7.4? I do not know one way or the other. I hope we do, but it's hard to say for certain on that front. But I do believe we'll still have our toons and be able to replay all of the released content for quite a while to come. Again, for now I'm just going to enjoy my favorite game, and support it as long as I have it. Even if this inevitably means it's going to change.

[yuichiroswife]

{ Happy 26th birthday to me. }

[bongosinferno]

Interesting thing with the Bethesda fallouts (I've been playing a bit of Fallout 4 recently) is that they, at least in my opinion, misunderstand the fun parts of the first 2 games. I don't think think the setting is a very important part in those games, it's a part of it but it's just set-dressing for the gameplay and fun quest stories and how the players interact with them. I think there's some potential in say Fallout 4 for interesting quests or stories (I've done a couple of quests but a lot of my knowledge is from the Joseph Andersson video), but the solutions to any story just leads back into the shooting gameplay loop. This is, I think, antithetical to the format of the originals, which were based a lot more in having the format of a TTRPG. If your TTRPG sessions all boiled down to shooting people with basically no alternative solutions to quests I think your players would get bored. Since it's got shooter mechanics this kind of salvages it, it becomes it's very different own thing. But the wonderful gameplay loop of those first two games is lost, and I kind of miss it. Man, I need to replay Fallout 2.

[cerise-on-top]

I am so sick and tired of there being no representation for people like me, so I decided that from here on out, no matter how unrealistic it may be, Ghost is schizophrenic, he's just really good at hiding it from the people who don't need to know.

[puffyducks]

[acebytaemin]

NYE fit (snoopy slippers included)

[pinguuu-ni]

hello guys <3 i've been absent for a looooong while but i want to know, how have you been doing?!

[saulgoodmanofficial]

fart

[hot-wire-this-old-car]

not to be sentimental on main but life literally gets so much better when u grow up