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tamelee · 7 months ago

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Hi I'm the person who asked for education advice.

I would like advice on almost everything you mentioned, the learning aspect itself and breaking down goals mostly. Also just the fear of failure haunts me a lot. Also, you're in your 20s right? Do you live alone, on campus, with parents? Is that hard to adjust to, if you know about that? I really appreciate you answering asks and giving advice on things not related to Naruto specifically haha. Love your art! Can't wait for the chaptered manga you're making 💜

Hi! This took me a while as I was stressing over some things, sorry about that, and yes! Well, I live alone currently and am renting an apartment. It is not hard to adjust to for me personally because I used to live in a house that was empty since I was… well let's just say I’m used to it, but when I traveled and studied/worked abroad I did live with other people which I thought was more difficult to adjust to. All of a sudden there’s so much noise and drama aaahhh >< hehe.

I hope my tips are helpful for you— long post, read when you have time and grab your notes! 」(￣▽￣」)

.📙⤵

Small note: this system may seem like a lot of work or tedious for majority of people, but setting it up like this is the only thing that works for me and aids my struggle to focus. This post focuses on studying, but I apply this to a lot of other areas as well. I’m still readjusting parts where I feel like it can improve— of course, you can change anything in any way you like! I tried to make it as clear as possible ^^!

My documentation style: I personally use Notion (almost a year now) to track everything while documenting and organizing my notes. I love how you can create the most aesthetic pages and build your space anyway you like. It helps me structure my life so much better than the note-taking systems I used to have. I'm not kidding when I say it really changed everything for me. For studying, but also other area's, which is why I affiliated with them. There are paid subscriptions, but everything you need you can use for free!

I also have template recommendations if someone does happen to use Notion! (Let me know if you're looking for anything specific!) However, of course you can use whatever program you want to document things/your study. Whatever you use, even if you just write it down on paper, I do recommend keeping it all in the same place by creating a singular overview so you can track your progress more easily, but we’ll get to that later!

My roadmap to achieve (academic) goals:

Goal Setting

I think the most important thing is to set effective goals that are clear. Proper planning is essential to reaching goals and achieving good grades imo, as well as breaking down your tasks into manageable chunks to avoid feeling overwhelmed. It’s learning how you work, what fits your productivity-style and finding ways to make it easier for yourself.

So take a moment to think what exactly you want to achieve!

You can use the SMART-method (setting Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound goals), to give yourself clear targets to work towards and there are many articles on it if you want to know more about it (you can also look for helpful templates, there are many free ones you can find!), but I combined this with "The 12 Week Year”-method by Brian P. Moran and Michael Lennington.

(Although I would recommend this book, there’s quite a bit of fluff which will probably make it difficult to get through for people that are neurodivergent. If you’re interested you can also find summaries on Youtube in order to only gain the information you need if you want to use it to achieve goals, but I’ll break it down here as well. Summaries are incredibly helpful, but I’ll be honest and say I’m not sure how to feel about them yet.)

The 12 week year describes lag and leading indicators in the context of goal achievement. I use these indicators specifically in order to make sure I can Measure my goals.

I’ll explain with examples:

Regarding your previous ask, let’s take a goal like “getting high grades”. This doesn’t say much yet.

There are probably several subjects you want a high grade for, so let’s break that down first. There are many smaller goals that exist in that. It’ll look something like this:

Overarching goal: Getting high grades

Individual goals:

Getting a high grade for subject A

Getting a high grade for subject B

Getting a high grade for subject C

Etc,—

Great start in getting clear what you need to achieve, but it’s still too vague, right? Let’s see these subjects as separate goals and break it down further with indicators:

Indicators:

Lag indicators are the ultimate measures of success or results necessary to achieve your goals. They represent the outcomes.

Leading indicators are the actions or behaviors that directly influence the achievement of lag indicators. They are individual tasks and the steps that you take to achieve the lag indicator.

Note: Indicators must start with a verb (like: write, get, draw, finish, etc—) because it indicates directly what the action is you have to take. Example: “Assignment” doesn’t tell you what to do. Transform it into “Finish assignment on [x] before 16th of May” or something like that. It depends on the goal.

Now we get something like this:

(Overarching goal: Getting high grades) Individual goal: Getting a high grade for subject A

Lag indicators examples (what’s necessary to achieve the goal):

Write Essay on [x]

Finish assignment A

Setup project A

Start project A

Etc,—

It’ll look different per subject and it may look different for you. Maybe you know exactly what you need to achieve per period or maybe they only let you know what needs to be done one assignment at a time, in which case you can focus on that alone and take it step by step.

It’s already nice to just write everything down and gain a clearer view of the things you need to complete. You’re not pressured to remember anything, because it's all here (I get stressed forgetting stuff).

Now you have your overarching goal of wanting to get high grades and made a list of individual goals. We’ll consider these individual goals and focus on them because achieving those means your overarching goal will be achieved automatically.

If you gathered the lag indicators for these individual goals, you’ll now know what (currently) is necessary to get a high grade for subject A and we can start breaking those down into leading indicators.

It’ll look like this:

(Overarching goal: Getting high grades) (Individual goal: Getting a high grade for subject A) Lag indicator: Write Essay on [x]

Leading indicator examples (steps you take to achieve the lag indicator):

Understand exactly what the topic or thesis statement is

Research topic

Organize, etc—

Write everything you are going to do in order to ‘write the essay on [x]’ as leading indicators.

Reminder: as the SMART-method suggests: make everything as specific as possible so you can measure exactly what it is you need to do. Example: “Research topic” can still be too vague but you can clarify what you need to research for what topic, once you understand what it is exactly you need to do.

Putting in a little bit of effort and time now by breaking down goals like this helps me save a lot of time later, because I have to make less decisions and I’ll exactly know what to do and how much. Tracking your progress makes it a lot easier if you know what you’re tracking and as I said before: decision fatigue is a real thing and emotionally taxing! Making all the decisions before you start working really can help!

Tip: before starting on the leading indicators, check whether your goals and its lag indicators are SMART. Make sure all of them start with a verb! Tip 2: if you have trouble deciding where to start, you can refer to the ‘Swiss Cheese’ method which is a productivity “hack” that can help you identify which of your tasks takes the priority. This doesn’t help me personally, because if I planned out what I need to do that day it doesn’t really matter for me which has the priority because I have to rely on many other things, therefore I can’t plan what I do first. I feel like mentioning it anyway, because it can be helpful when making mindmaps.

So in short:

Determine your overarching goal.

Write down individual goals necessary in order to achieve the overarching goal.

Write down the lag indicators you need to complete in order to achieve your individual goal.

Break down the lag indicators into manageable tasks (leading indicators) and be specific on the action you need to take. (Example: don’t just put ‘writing the essay’, but ‘write [x]-essay for 20 minutes’.)

Now we can start planning!

Planning

Let’s say you have a week to finish this essay, once you have every leading indicator, you can start planning out what you will do on which day.

Efficient planning helps reduce stress, because you don’t have to wonder if what you’ll do today is enough. We’ll get to ‘tracking’ goals later, but stay open to readjust when necessary though! It is okay to re-plan because there’s always the possibility of something coming in between or you not feeling well!

As I said before, I use Notion to document everything and I have a separate page for the overarching goals which include my lag indicators, but in my overview I created a table that shows all the tasks (leading indicators) that I need to finish per (current) week. It sort of looks like this:

I automated it, so when I check off something the amount of times I need to do it (under frequency) that week, it disappears from my overview and I can quickly see my weekly (and overall) progress in percentages, but of course you can do this any way you like or just write it down somewhere. I think this way is great because I need less focus to see whether something's already done or not.

I know that sounds funny for people who don't have trouble with this, but genuinely anything I can do to make it easier for myself is helpful ><

We still need to keep deadlines in mind. I personally like to know what I need to do on which day within the week as well or I’ll end up having to do everything during the weekend. So, I divide these weekly tasks and assign a day to them on a simple weekly notepad I keep on my desk. It looks something like this:

These days aren’t set, as I mentioned: it’s also important to allow life to happen and still stay on track somewhat :’)

When I finish something I color it!

So in short:

Once you gained insight on your leading indicators, you can start planning. This will look different for every subject, but the method stays the same.

Create a weekly planning/overview somewhere depending on your deadline. And if necessary, divide the weekly tasks for specific days if you want on a separate planner.

Review your week on Sundays (or whichever day you like!) to see whether you’re still on track and readjust your planning for the upcoming week(s) when necessary.

Combine Studying with your personal life

The reason why I use a written, separate, weekly overview is because I combine areas of my life on here.

Aside from dividing tasks for my study (the leading indicators) for specific dates, I add appointments that I may have (which I keep in my calendar app), projects, administration/financial-tasks or random things I need to do at home or for myself/others.

I know a lot of people that create to-do lists have trouble with it. If that’s you (me too), then we’ll take it a step further and plan our tomorrow every day.

I use simple note-paper and sort of write things down in order for that day, because it’s easy and quick to grab and scribble on. This really helps to focus on what matters right now. It looks like this:

This is sort of like compounding habits, but with tasks. Some things are much easier to do after one thing than another. A regular to-do list may not work because it doesn’t take into account the rest of your day like appointments or a personal routine you want to work on. It’s hard to gain clarity when all you see is a bunch of intertwined, random tasks— so here you’d organize them bit and add whatever is relevant. Like a little mini-planning for the day.

On here I also write small silly stuff I have to do that day or keep notes I have to put somewhere else so I won’t forget. (Like appointments I suddenly get, or e-mails I have to reply to, something I want to check later, etc—)

Tip: Let’s say after a while you still have trouble with this daily mini-planner, you can also just write down (3 or so) your most important tasks for the day and “eat the frog”. You focus on that first while ‘hiding’ all the ones that may not be as relevant immediately. (I’d still keep the other mini-planner though or transform your other tasks into “bonus-tasks”.)

So in short:

Keep appointments in mind or days when you’ll be busy/outside when planning study tasks on specific days. Add the most important or time-consuming tasks first so you gain a clearer view how much time you have for the weekly study tasks.

Use this weekly planner to divide tasks throughout the week and then make a mini-planner for your specific day on a separate paper/document to organize the day.

Keeping track

As I said during the planning-step, you can use Sundays (or other days) to quickly review your week and adjust the next if necessary.

A lot within my system is automated, but even if you’ve written it all down, it shouldn’t take too much time (maybe 10 mins, probably less), because you’ve done most of the planning already. You can easily see what and where it needs adjusting.

Be prepared to adjust a lot in the beginning though if you’ve never done this! Eventually it gets easier and you gain better insight how long you work on something or what is realistic for you to do in a day, which is totally fine!!

Tip: If you are more interested in self-development, you can also apply a review-session monthly, quarterly or per project to gain insight on yourself and where you’d like to improve. I personally do this quarterly, but let’s keep focussing on the study~! Tip 2: If you aren’t sure how to create an overview, there are also many, free SMART-method templates you can use. If you’re usually more a visual person, I’d recommend creating visual boards or just add images to make it more appealing. It may seem like it doesn’t do anything, but especially in this current world of distraction, images do help you connect information much easier and can influence how you feel even subconsciously. I do highly recommend doing so. (I personally use a theme per quarter/season >< it’s so extra lmao it’s a good thing I live alone let’s be honest because I'm embarrassing.)

Studying & taking notes

Well this is a broad subject but I’d recommend sort of observing yourself for a while to really understand more specifically what it is you struggle with. (If you are.)

Here are some examples for ways you can use notes. I used the ‘Second Brain’ method for a while as well, but I’m most comfortable with the Cornell method. I set it up like this:

But the most important part here, is this:

I can clearly see the subjects and the necessary information. (I usually hide them under some toggle text to keep things organized and not muddy up my overview.)

Study cards don’t really work for me, because I need to connect information together, but it’s worth looking into! It might be helpful for you.

Tip: If you have trouble focussing because you get bored easily which makes you tired so you seek a quick dopamine rush even if that means you start cleaning your entire environment and you procrastinate, etc—… trust me you’re not alone. I do recommend researching whether a ‘dopamine detox’ will be helpful for you (which is not easy, I’ll tell you that). However, this may not work for everyone because sometimes there’s even more at play. That’s why a combination of strategies to make the actual act of studying as easy and clear as possible, is so important. Tip 2: Always allow yourself to experiment with your routines and keep your health in mind, but if you continue to struggle, please do seek support. Tip 3: If you’re like me and you had to watch/listen to a lot of material, find transcripts or use subtitles! If you have to write an essay on a movie, it’s much easier to get back to information when it’s written down. (And it saves you so much time...) For many movies you can find subtitle files and you can convert them online to remove timestamps if necessary. Tip 4: Ah, and for my fellow neurodivergent people… if noise annoys you and music doesn’t really help anymore, not even when it’s just instrumentals… see if ambient video’s that have slight random background noises (like a library for example) are helpful for you. For me personally, it’s such a game-changer holy sh-

Fear of Failure

Not sure if I can give you some advice on this, because I struggle with this as well. It gets a bit better though when I use this system because it lays down the groundwork for you and with that clarity it gets easier to focus on the task itself. Unless you plan it all out and then end up not doing what you set out to do, and you don’t readjust your planning weekly— it’s sort of hard to fail the action-taking-part.

If it gets really bad and you end up avoiding your tasks entirely, because you get reluctant to take the risk of failing at something, sit down with yourself for a moment and think whether you may’ve set extremely high standards for yourself. See if you can allow a bit more room in your schedule. Refer back to the Goal Setting methods.

Tip: If you’re interested in making it a habit to study, I’d recommend you read ‘atomic habits’ by James Clear, or find a video that breaks the method down for you if that’s easier.

Know that whatever it is you want to improve in, there are ways to do it. If you feel like you get stuck on an area of your life, most of the time focussing on it with frustration will make it worse. Keep your ears and mind open for solutions while taking a break.

I don’t think I’ve ever been anywhere, any school or anything where they teach you how to actually study in the first place. They should tbh. I think it’s ridiculous they don’t, especially because we get more and more distracted and everything is literally designed to grab your attention and hold it for as long as possible until the next thing comes by. And I’m not sure if that’s helpful to know, but I do believe that realizing that studying in general isn’t easy and schools making it seem like it is by treating it like it’s nothing “you just have to do it” while not teaching you how to do it effectively... is bullshit.

Lastly, it’s all trial and error so please don’t beat yourself up over any of this. If you’re a perfectionist, please don’t feel like you need to set up a system perfectly before starting, because it’s an ongoing thing and not set in stone. It’ll only make you end up procrastinating for the sake of perfecting a system, which may make you feel like you're being productive but you don't actually get anything done and it's not what we want. That’s why it’s so important to be okay with readjusting when necessary!

Hope there is something in all of this that can help you! Good luck 🌷^^~!

_______

Oh and thank you!! I also can’t wait to release the Manga. I practiced fic writing first and created a Cyberpunk-story, but I’m still a bit hesitant to share it >< (Perfectionism does make me slow as well, but I’m working on improving it 😌)

#asktamelee #study tips #goal setting #note taking #planning #study motivation #notion #well I didn't mean to make it so long #I got carried away #as you notice I'm very obsessed with it hehe #but it's also because I wouldn't have been able to #do things productively #aaahhhh

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dustyisforever · 3 months ago

Text

A Shadow of the Colossus Review

by DustyIsForever This is a review. It's about a video game, which is a kind of movie you watch with your hands.

In 2012, Shadow of the Colossus became the first thing I ever saved money to buy. After watching the “Nerd³ Plays” video where he calls it a “perfect game,” I began to daydream about it obsessively. I stuck the facetious label “Ye Olde Jar o Talents” on a mason jar and brought it to school so I could beg my classmates for funds. This worked, however incredulous it was, but I didn’t buy the game. I didn’t buy the game for years, and even after that I didn’t play it for at least a few months. It was like an old Russian novel to me: something that always existed in the future for which I could never consider myself prepared. And then I did play it and it was great.

You can either read it here or on a published Docs page. But be careful. It's pretty long.

This is a review of Shadow of the Colossus. It will contain spoilers. I first played the game a long time ago, but I went back to it a few times over the years. Recently I watched a close friend play it. We had some conversations about it. Soon, I’d like to see my wife play it as well. She can’t read this review yet because she is, incredibly, going to be playing totally blind. You can imagine how rare it is to play something like Shadow of the Colossus without knowing anything about it beforehand.

As I promised not long ago, I'm going to start writing essay-reviews of many games I enjoy. But first, I'd like to elaborate on my method. I have a particular framework for expressing my opinions of these games that I've developed as an alternative to a 10/10, 5/5, 40/40, 100/100, or other numerical art goodness judgment system. The aim is to provide the foolish satisfaction of a number score while cutting back on its pitfalls and biases. Number scores are unhelpful. In a 10/10 system, one finds that a 10 means that the reviewer idolizes the work, a 9, 8, or even a 7 can mean that they enjoyed it, and anything below that might mean that they disliked it, hated it, thought it was tedious, or simply misunderstood it. Opinions don’t fit neatly on a graduated, linear scale. Our value judgments are relative, as in: I liked this more than that; never absolute in the way numbers would suggest. We know this but pretend otherwise. How fun to bestow a cherished piece of art the honor of your perfect number! We're all pleased to think that our opinion is intelligent. My goal is to indulge that, but with restraint.

The first principle of my system is that I only bother rating games that I already know I love. Though there is surely as much to be learned from "bad" art as "good" art, I want to avoid negativity. Also, I find it’s easier to assign a score with restraint and thoughtfulness when a bad score isn't in consideration at all. It also means that I, as a critic, produce fewer reviews overall, which should make each review more characteristic and the overall corpus more consistent.

My second principle is that the highest number I'll use is three. Mr. Ebert was onto something when he made the alluring choice of knocking the tail off of the five-star format. It made all of his ratings look smarter. Five stars was for the common people; real intellectuals expressed their taste in the glamorous new fashion of four. Now it's my turn. I've one-upped the fallen old man, who once failed to appreciate John Carpenter's The Thing (1982). I dare to fly with merely three. And no halfsies, either. No point to it if I’m going to decide to give a game a one-and-a-half because that would be a six-point system in disguise, wouldn’t it?

My final principle is borrowed in part from Famitsu's thing where they divide scores into parts that can be treated either separately or summed. They do that with four reviewers. In my case, I cannot judge the work from the perspective of multiple people (I am only one person). Instead, I split my score into two numbers representing two priorities. That’s two numbers ranging zero to three, written X-Y. For instance, Shadow of the Colossus is a 1-2 game.

The first number, on a scale of zero to three, represents the aesthetic merits of the game. This can include everything experienced by the player. It may consider the art direction, the sound and music, and the narrative design. It also may refer to the dynamics of the design and the "choreography" of interaction, in a very formalist sense borrowed in part from Graeme Kirkpatrick's Aesthetic Theory and the Video Game. Interactive design is just as much a part of the media content of a game as the audiovisual presentation.

To be less academic—I like to summarize the first number as the question: "does it make me cry?" because it captures that it's often a sentimental thing. High-scoring games on the first number tend to be tearjerkers.

Why should Shadow of the Colossus get a one out of three in this category? Well, a one isn't really a low score in the conventional sense. My system is built to specify why a game is great. A zero would mean "this game is great, but it has nothing to do with the aesthetics." I consider Shadow of the Colossus to be aesthetically great, just not as aesthetically great as a few other games.

I like to call the other score “does it blow my mind?” to highlight that it pertains to games that impress me. Expect more elaboration when I get to the second half of the review.

When I first made up this system years ago, I tried to list a bunch of old favorites as examples. At that time, I stamped a 2-1 on Shadow of the Colossus. Mark the difference! It means that now I appreciate its technical achievement more but have tempered my feelings about its content. This change of opinion came to me when I recently watched a close friend play through the game for the first time, hanging out over her shoulder. The banter we shared dampened the emotion of the experience—for example, she already knew Agro was going to fall off a cliff sooner or later and by the time she did, it affected her more like the punchline to a drawn-out joke. I was a little offended. Her more detached play experience exposed some of the game’s weaknesses to me.

My original rating of two reflected the beautiful score and the sublime desolation of the game, which inhabited me then as it does now. When I take a walk in the woods, I am visited once more by the mystery of “To the Ancient Land.” It’s a good season in my life to return to the game. I’m in a forest often.

But unrelated to my time in forests, I’ve spent the last year thinking a lot about fantasy. I fell out with it some years ago and only recently began rehabilitating my affection for it. Shadow of the Colossus belongs to that estranged clade of fantasy, the fairy tale, which has become my favorite.

Fairy tales are mysterious but well-patterned, made from a pool of common morphologies, which folklorist Vladimir Propp called “functions” with perhaps excessive precision. A glancing comparison will hopefully show how much like a fairy tale Shadow of the Colossus really is. Propp’s functions came originally from his syntax of Russian folk stories. Shadow of the Colossus is neither Russian nor folk, through it deploys several such functions in an identifiable and properly consecutive fashion:

Absentation, interdiction, and violation all before the prologue is over

Trickery as Dormin tells Wander what must be done to revive Mono

Departure, as Wander begins the quest to slay the colossi, and various functions of the Donor, who is also Dormin

Quite a bit of struggle and branding as Wander does his colossus-slaying and dishevels himself gradually with dark magic

Pursuit (by Lord Emon)

And then the punishment and reward are cleverly reversed, because of course in this special video game that people who don’t call all video games art sometimes deign to call art, Wander was in error all along.

I think that to leave the analysis at that would be a failure to appreciate the particular flavor of this story. There are many video game stories where the player character ends up ethically compromised for some narrative effect, but the aesthetic appeal of Shadow of the Colossus is grossly different from, say, Spec Ops: the Line. Wander is more like Hamlet; he retains his hero-ness the whole way through, yet still the fate of his quest is doomed by circumstance.

What he must do is awful and painful to him, but he’s stuck on this path. The closing of the door to the bridge out of the Forbidden Lands is a literalization of this. The inciting events of his journey—the superstitious sacrifice of an innocent girl—make his goals noble from the start, and because he does not have the information to understand the cost of his deeds until it is too late, we cannot say that he is ever malicious. The player is clued in that something is wrong through visual suggestions that Wander does not necessarily see or understand, including the doves and ominous shadow-people which gather at the Shrine of Worship. These devices are not employed in any way that comments specifically on the medium of video games; nothing about them is procedural. They are very conventional vectors of good old-fashioned dramatic irony.

Furthermore, we don’t textually know at all that Dormin is evil. The antagonist Lord Emon who opposes Dormin and Wander is possibly responsible for Mono’s death. He reminds us, if we have played ICO, of the people who unjustly imprison that game’s hero on account of his “cursed” horns. Once we abandon the idea that the Lord Emon narrator/antagonist character is a trustworthy authority, we lose the only voice telling us that Dormin is dangerous. And at the end of the tale Dormin, surprisingly, keeps all of his promises to Wander: Mono is revived and Wander’s body is returned to him. He even gets his horsey back! Very sweet. And the final scenes, which play out leisurely beside the scrolling credits column, show a bright and sun-dappled garden. Mono, robed in her white gown, comforts baby Wander while surrounded by wildlife and green trees. A fawn appears. The imagery is positively lousy with symbols of innocence and spring.

And, if we’re going to permit ourselves to get biblical, isn’t it a little like a reverse Genesis? Wander follows the instructions of a higher power despite a warning from Lord Emon, who has special knowledge. As a result, a woman is saved from her “cursed fate” and the only way out is permanently closed, trapping the woman and the revived hero in the garden of paradise.

Shadow of the Colossus tells a tragic and subversive story, but it does it entirely within the syntax of its folktalesy story genre. It doesn’t have the flavor of subversiveness which comments on other works or the conventions of its own medium. To understand Undertale’s project, you need to be familiar with other JRPGs. Shadow of the Colossus would preserve its message in any medium.

This point isn’t really doing anything to bump my score up or down, but it’s a line of thinking I’ve revisited many times while writing about this game. I think that what really took Shadow of the Colossus from a two down to a one was the inconsistency between encounter designs.

My friend caught on quickly to the first several colossi, even prevailing where I remember having stumbled (my younger self was completely stymied by the sixth, called “Barba” by fans). But as the latter half of the game wore on, she spent more and more time running in circles. Numbers nine, eleven, and twelve all exasperated her. Each of them involves a special trick that must be discovered before they can be made vulnerable. Colossus number eleven, for example, is covered in armor that can only be broken by using a torch to chase it off of a cliff. But no other encounter shows you that there’s anything you can hold in your hands besides the sword and bow you start with. To even get the torch, you need to stand on a plinth holding up a brazier such that the colossus charges at you and knocks the torch loose. But my friend did not even realize that the plinths were climbable; they can only be grabbed from the sides, which is difficult to see and execute when you’re constantly charged at by an enemy that stuns you on the ground for a few whole seconds whenever it hits you. The tedium was too much, and the game lost its magic and atmosphere. The battle against the last colossus was pretty disheartening. No sense of an emotional climax came through. Instead, as I watched my friend fall over and over from its hands and shoulders and whatnot with all the tenacity of a lint-covered novelty sticky hand, I could only hope desperately that she wouldn’t put the game down right then and there.

In some moments, it’s plain to see that Shadow of the Colossus is testing the player’s patience with purpose and meaning. Each encounter culminates with Wander clutching to fur, often on the head of the colossus, holding on just long enough to get a good stab. The colossi shake and Wander dangles on, unable to get a steady hit. It’s frustrating to have to wait for a tiny window of opportunity to land a blow, but this is clearly by design. If the fight could be ended as soon as the player got into stabbing position, the anticipation would resolve too quickly. Giving the player sweaty palms, making them really clench the trigger button, serves to procedurally convey the ordeal Wander faces on-screen. You hold on (to the controller) to hold on (for dear life) in a very successful bit of hand-to-screen parallelism.

But at other times, the game slips away into pointless futility. In many fights, the trick that makes the colossus vulnerable is only effective for a short time, so the player must hurry to seize the opportunity. Often, the time window just isn’t long enough, and the player is compelled to retry, but the novelty of discovering the trick has already disappeared. The ninth colossus’s arena is huge, and when you knock it onto its side, you have to maneuver over to the far side of its body every time. It’s fiddly and protracted, and it’s a case where the game inadequately reacts to the player executing on what should feel like the turning point of the battle. It took my friend about four tries to ascend this colossus successfully. And it’s a turtle, so it isn’t even that tall. Really lame.

My own remembered experience, rooted in some British guy’s twelve-year-old YouTube video, is very different from the one shared with that friend of mine. I saw a game denuded of its majesty by our ongoing joke that Agro would be the final boss; a joke between pals on the proverbial gamer couch. A couch that, if it were not replaced in our case by the deep phenomenological chasm of several US states of distance and a Discord RTC, would be evocative of the one shared by Misters Cheadle and Sandler in the film Reign Over Me.

It’s a largely forgotten film, but consensus says it’s surprisingly well-regarded: Metacritic awards it an impressive 8.5 user score, which it labels “universal acclaim.” Adam Sandler plays a traumatized man who, after losing his family in 9/11, quits his dental career and whittles his days scootering around, playing the drums, and remodeling his kitchen over and over. Don Cheadle is his former college roommate, a successful dentist with a family, who runs into him late one night. The two rekindle their friendship and are both healed for it. This involves a lot of Shadow of the Colossus.

When Don Cheadle first sees Sandler, he can’t get him to stop and talk. Their second encounter happens when Cheadle drops off his daughter at a friend’s house. He intends to go back home to his wife to spend quality time solving a puzzle with her. Suddenly, Sandler flies by on his scooter. So instead, Cheadle gets him to stop and talk. He asks if Sandler is “practicing,” by which he means “practicing dentistry.”

“I’m practicing all the time, up in the valley. Took down twelve of the colossus so far” “The valley? What is that, is that a medical complex or something?” “It’s more… like another dimension. You take a journey, you discover yourself.” (Reign Over Me, 13:50)

He gets Sandler to sit down for Starbucks, where Sandler violates assorted social norms as per a 2007 movie’s notion of a traumatized person. Sandler acts as if he doesn’t remember Cheadle but they make conversation regardless and before you know it, Cheadle is at this guy’s apartment.

Cheadle needs to use the bathroom. Sad music begins to play. Cheadle briefly glimpses a room with furniture covered in sheets—evidence that this man once had a family. Then there’s a mournful-looking shot where the camera stares straight down Sandler’s darkened hall and distantly we see his TV. He’s climbing the first Colossus. That’s a funny thing to do if you’ve finished three quarters of the game. I guess he has more than one save file. So that he can practice more, of course.

As the movie goes on, the two intertwine into each other’s life in a conventionally dramatic way. Sandler is a broken man who throws tantrums and lacks responsibility and ropes Cheadle into a Mel Brooks marathon showing on the night Cheadle’s father dies, and in turn, Cheadle suffers various embarrassments to his career and family because he has compassion for his friend. And sometimes we get to see more Shadow of the Colossus, which Sandler often calls “Shadows” of the Colossus.

In its second appearance, Sandler is fighting the fifth Colossus—my favorite—and Cheadle takes the controller. We get a montage. He can’t put it down. Sandler teases Cheadle, he says he’s addicted (to Shadow of the Colossus). Cheadle jumps to his feet, paces around the couch in frustration: he demands one more try. He refuses Sandler’s suggestion to stop and “let it soak in,” he’s determined to get it this time. Number fifteen falls and Cheadle pumps his fist, shouting “co-lo-ssussss!” in a funny voice. The montage ends, and with it goes our brief window into an otherworld where playing Shadow of the Colossus actually looks like that.

Or, hey, that’s not so fair. Maybe, for Mr. Adam Sandler, playing Shadow of the Colossus is about practicing each fight over and over and pumping your fist triumphantly when you finally win. Maybe he got a New Game Plus save file when he picked it up on eBay that let him fight the colossi out of order. For his character—who, as I’ve neglected to mention, is named Charlie Fineman—the game is supposed to be a metaphor for 9/11, of course.

Back in ‘07, Kotaku managed to get in touch with Jeremy Roush, who worked as an editor for Reign Over Me. Apparently, the role of Shadow of the Colossus in the film was inspired by Roush’s father.

The Vietnam War left his father 100 percent mentally disabled with post-traumatic stress disorder... Unable to work, he spent the days and evenings watching sci-fi thriller Aliens over and over again until he actually had to buy a new VHS tape. "Aliens is a thinly veiled kind of Vietnam veteran kind of story," Roush explains, "and watching it is a way of thinking about it without telling yourself you are thinking about it." The movie was visceral therapy for his father… Refusing to accept the death of loved ones. Seeking out an escape from that truth. Giants falling in slow motion. "You could see where someone who was dealing with 9/11 would be engrossed by a giant that keeps collapsing over and over again," he says. Charlie's therapy was Shadow of the Colossus. (Ashcraft p.2)

Roush, who was responsible for the idea to include the game in the movie, had thought seriously about the thematics. In Reign Over Me, Charlie Fineman’s fixation on Shadow of the Colossus is a deliberate symbol of his grief, boxed into a safe and distant replica of tragedy which he can watch himself overcome again and again on the plasma TV.

Later on in the film, Cheadle manages to drag Sandler to weekly therapist sessions, but they go nowhere. Sandler refuses to speak about his family and leaves each session after just a few minutes. But he does say “I like to play Colossus!” (Reign, 1:13:29). In this movie’s understanding of mentally ill people, or at least in Roush’s, PTSD sufferers seek out proxy-triggers to act out the procedure of grieving with none of the pain. I think that I preferred the movie before I learned this. It just doesn’t make as much sense to say that the colossi are all supposed to be, like, the twin towers. Isn’t that bizarre? I mean, I had just assumed that the game was more broadly supposed to be a parallel to the ordeal of overcoming grief, and that the colossi were the grief. Grief is like a colossus, or like colossi, because it can feel so much bigger than the griever, so invincible and enduring. That’s why it was so strange to me that he never makes it further through the game over the course of the movie. In the very last scene, when he’s in his new and well-lit apartment, do you know what he’s doing? He’s playing it again, but he’s back to number thirteen. I really expected him to finish the game by the end, which would parallelize his grief struggle with a struggle to take down the colossi. It would represent something. However, the truth is that the colossus encounters are supposed to be 9/11, and he’s mentally recreating a facsimile of 9/11 every time he plays the game. Infinite, furry World Trade Centers getting stabbed by Adam Sandler over and over.

Sorry, that might have been a digression in poor taste. You didn’t expect to read a review of Reign Over Me within this review of Shadow of the Colossus and it was a little deceptive of me to jam it in there. But I thought about it so much, you have to understand! It’s fascinating to me how I could arrive at such a different interpretation of the movie than was apparently intended. The same difference goes for the game itself: Mr. Roush definitely got the gist of Shadow of the Colossus, but he applied the game to the movie in such a different way than I would have.

Let’s talk about the technical side of things instead for a short while. A nice palate-cleanser. It might seem unbalanced to devote one half of the score system to technology that is seldom appreciated by the audience—this score is more than that. Perhaps you were left confused when I didn’t explain it in much detail earlier, back when I was still laying out the way the system works. The slogan “does it blow my mind?” suggests that this category seeks to appreciate the craft of game development. A good example of something non-technological that “blows my mind” would be the dialogue system in Hades; the incredible effort of writing such a massive script and then organizing it so cleverly certainly does blow my mind, speaking as a game developer and a very slow writer.

Shadow of the Colossus is an exceptionally technically impressive game that deserves more than the 1 I assigned it on the spot so long ago. Through optimization, fakery, and creativity, it packs in the most sophisticated graphics the PlayStation 2 can handle, including HDR lighting, self-shading, long-distance level-of-detail mesh transitions, real-time fur rendering, volumetric particles, and anisotropic light scattering. Most of these practices were considered next-gen at the time of the game’s release. Some of them still feel shiny and new in 2024.

Team ICO accomplished this through ingenuity and strict scoping. Out of any of my sources, I learned the most about it here. Of particular interest to me is the usage of procedural animation and inverse kinematics, of which I’m a big fan. If you are one of the few beautiful souls in this loving universe who have read my blog(s) before, you know that I’ve been working on and off for a long time on a project that relies heavily on inverse kinematics called Flower Pot. The inexpensive algorithm I use in my own work, called FABRIK, was not published until 2011. Furthermore, Shadow of the Colossus has very complex character models and needs to clearly telegraph the movements of the player character and the colossi. For this reason it also dynamically combines animation data keyframed by an animator with the movements computed by the inverse kinematics algorithms. They did this on a CPU that clocked at about 294 megahertz (see Diefendorff).

I won’t reproduce diagrams here because they’re already available in the translated article on Léna Piquet’s website, which I linked above and which may also be found in my sources. To be honest, there is less for me to write in this section of the review because there is not much new to say. The achievements and process of Team ICO have been extensively documented and explained, much more than almost any other game. What is especially unique about Shadow of the Colossus is that much of this dissection and documentation has been done by outsiders: fans who never had access to the team or their materials.

Of particular note is Nomad Colossus. I found a Fandom wiki article about this guy. It says, “Nomad Colossus is a well-known figure in The Shadow of The Colossus community. He's most well-known for his insane dedication to the game and downright jaw-dropping data-mining” (Team Ico Wiki). Passionate! But the article has no comments. Yet on the other hand, a skim of the community message log page shows that at least a dozen users have worked on this wiki within the last several months. A tantalizing window into a community, or one of a million lost corners of the internet? I cannot rightfully say.

Nomad Colossus uploaded their first Shadow of the Colossus-related YouTube video in April of 2010, four and a half years post-release. It’s been much longer than that since Breath of the Wild came out and I’m still surprised whenever I see someone running it in an emulator. The video is titled “Shadow of the Colossus - Through the entrance,” and it shows Wander on horseback in an area normally inaccessible except in cutscenes: the north bridge into the central shrine. He rides Agro through the narrow gate passage on the other end of the bridge. The path continues into a void for a long ways, but the horse stops as if running into a wall.

Since then, Nomad Colossus has published 346 videos (if I’m counting correctly) pertaining to Shadow of the Colossus, prying at it with camera hacks, model viewers, and data manipulation. He reveals mountains and plains and islands and ruins all inaccessible in normal play. Their work, comprising so many short, uncommentated videos, can be engaged with as a companion book to the game; Nomad gradually turns the elusive horizons of the Forbidden Lands back into data, into geometry stored in a file system. Numbers on computers permit no mysteries. A number is autological; before being applied to another end it represents only itself. A number is atomic, it has no secret compartments. Through the efforts of explorers like Nomad Colossus and their emulators, no pit has been left unaccounted for on the DVD-ROM. Nomad renders Shadow of the Colossus into a wholly unmysterious object. This is not a criticism of their work.

At the same time, the game continues to support an incredible abundance of perceived mystery. After all, this was why Nomad Colossus’s work began. The so-called Secret Seekers and their famous thread on the PSN forums were dedicated to unearthing what they imagined to be the mother-of-all easter eggs. They began with intense clue-hunting and then moved on to the less speculative arts of boundary breaking and data mining, albeit after dozens of pages of effusive discussion. The intentions behind the game’s design were a favorite topic. Their style of discourse was dense with wild, associative connections; the possibility of subtextual hints by means of biblical allusion was on the table before even the end of the first post (Quest for the Last Big Secret). “Fumito Ueda is infamous for his attention to the most minute, intricate detail,” this post says. But to say he is infamous for this—does that not suggest the consensus of many people? I suspect that the Ueda these individuals imagined was not an accurate model of the real one. There was no secret last colossus, after all.

These are only a few of many voices on the internet professing all kinds of opinions about the game, its content, its intentions and meanings and forms. A quick survey will show substantial diversity of interpretation: I found a passionate review on the “patientgamers” subreddit decrying Shadow of the Colossus as “one of the worst games I’ve ever played” for its “non-existent story” and “Genuinely awful clunky movement and controls” (AstraFuckingGooGoo). In “Shadow of the Colossus: a Retrospective View,” NoobFeed user BrunoBRS calls the game “a love story, of what limits can a man go for his loved one, but it is, most importantly, the tale of David and Goliath” in a passage of lavish praise for “what he truly believes is the greatest game of all time” (BrunoBRS). The similarly-titled “Shadow of the Colossus: A Retrospective,” an article on The Boss Key, calls it “a game all about and only about killing the boss monsters as a means to an end” (Koop). “Shadow of the Colossus Retrospective– A Tragically Beautiful Love Story,” brought to us by Taylor Lyles on DualShockers, says it’s “so much more than just a boss rush game; it is the story of a boy who cared so much for someone he loved that unleashed all sorts of hellish things to save her” (Lyles). Shadow of the Colossus retrospectives are, as they say, like assholes: everybody has one. I am included. Shades of consensus and contradiction are to be found in abundance in each discussion of the game.

And what of my own opinions? They depend on a perceived counter-opinion in many ways. My revised scoring suggests how I remember my past self. In my discussion of the aesthetic content of the game, I call for a new perspective that de-emphasizes the notion that Shadow of the Colossus deliberately works to subvert a convention of the medium of video games. But couldn’t I be accused of failing to establish that this notion existed in the first place? Let me provide an example of that notion, at least. Here’s another retrospective. It has the word “retrospective” in its title. It’s called “START/SELECT: Consuming Loneliness: A ‘Shadow of the Colossus’ Retrospective,” and it was written by Mac Riga for the Georgetown University student newspaper. Here’s Riga’s take:

Team Ico sought to make a game that laid bare the contradiction of video games. It held up this beautiful medium, the pinnacle of self-isolation and escapism yet one that fosters empathy and self-reflection more than any other, and begged the player to wrestle with that irony — to come to their own conclusions about what it means to be alone, what it means to consume video games and what it means to do both simultaneously. (Riga)

This is surprising. Riga isn’t talking about the moral irony of monster-slaying in video games, which is more or less the topic of the counter-opinion I imagined myself to be opposing. But he is saying that Shadow of the Colossus is trying to engage in conversation with a convention of the medium of games, and to me that was the important part. For Riga, it’s a game about “self-isolation” and “empathy.”

Maybe it would be helpful to check what Fumito Ueda has to say. Even if you’re the type to faithfully invoke The Death of the Author, you might still agree, I hope, that discovering the designer’s intent will provide a reference against which to compare other views.

“I’ve never thought that “cruelty” is something forbidden in video games. Video games seem to require cruelty as a means of expression, and that being the case, I wanted to try and present my own take on cruelty. That was really the seed idea of Shadow of the Colossus.” (Ueda)

Here in a 2005 interview with CONTINUE magazine, Ueda casts Shadow of the Colossus as a game about cruelty inspired by the cruelty he sees as required in games. My analysis is thrown into doubt even further! It was intended as a deconstruction all along. But wait—Fumito Ueda from 2019 might be here to save me.

Was the overall aim of SOTC to question why it is that most games are about killing and how we have grown so comfortable doing so in a virtual existence? Fumito Ueda: I play games where violence is a factor myself, so I do not dismiss such games. However, through the production of Shadow of the Colossus, I started having doubts about simply “feeling good by beating monsters” and “getting a sense of accomplishment”. I tried thinking if there were any other choices for different kinds of expression, then ended up with such settings and rules as a result. Rather than try to deliberately create some sort of antithesis, I focused more on the consistency of the design as a product and differentiation (from other products). (Taylor)

Apologies for another long block quote; I really think the context is worth leaving in here because it helps to illustrate that, while Ueda is not exactly contradicting himself, different circumstances have prompted two answers with very different implications. The interviewer in the latter source seems to be aligned with the popular view that the game narrative is chiefly an exploration of morality. Which I do not disagree with, either: I should reiterate that my disagreement is with the view that the game narrative is specifically an exploration of morality in the medium of video games. The interviewer suggests that by saying that “most games are about killing.” Ueda seems to dismiss the idea by going on to say that the game was not crafted as “some sort of antithesis,” but that those themes emerged simply by trying to make a unique story. But in the former interview, Ueda asserts that he was “inspired” by the prevalence of “cruelty” in games. We are deprived of an authorial view where we might find stability; such a thing would have protected us, maybe, from the wild menagerie of contrasting views we face instead.

And could it be possible, if you would excuse the sudden break, that Reign Over Me (2007) starring Adam Sandler and Don Cheadle might not have always been actively trying to frame Shadow of the Colossus as a pseudo-Freudian stand-in for 9/11? More importantly, do we have any meaningful way to be sure? No, I think it’s more likely that suggestive forces have moved in with us permanently and that their furniture is too numerous and heavy for us to kick them out. It is impossible to speak on the aesthetics of a work, especially one so widely critiqued as Shadow of the Colossus, without necessarily speaking on what was spoken before. It is impossible to even play the game without encountering these extratextual conversations.

When I watched my friend play Shadow of the Colossus for the first time, I must have already been faintly aware of this phenomenon. The process of finding an appropriate emulator and an appropriate ROM led her through websites already saturated with extratextual content that suggested certain ideas of the game content. She had heard me speak of the game before. She had already listened to much of its music, accompanied on YouTube by comments. Being someone interested in games herself, she had certainly already encountered discussions of the game content like this one. She knew damn well that Agro would fall off that bridge. From all of this it is clear to me that the “extratext” was always inescapable. If she were to encounter the game truly without prior knowledge it would still not have “saved” her because she would just discover the extratext afterwards.

And what of my wife? My poor sweet wife? Just as no dry beach is spared from the tide, she too will be inundated by extratext that will indelibly shape how she receives and interprets the game content. She will not be a source of a “pure” opinion, but only another source of interpretation. She will never play Shadow of the Colossus as it was when it came out in 2005.

The space in consideration is a “consensus blob.” It has no hard boundaries, but it has gradients. Within the blob there are many shades of interpretation, but few overt contradictions except when comparing extremes. The blob is uncentered because there is no single “correct” or most stable interpretation. Areas of the blob give the appearance of a “consensus,” a shared notion or common interpretation, but really the gradient is everywhere and always-changing, like an amoeba. Even the creator of the art object can sway from point to point in the blob, forgetting wherever it was they started. The consensus is heraclitean. The extratext is absolutely inseparable from the text.

Really, we shouldn’t be miffed about it. Shadow of the Colossus can be about a lot of things, it’s not like we need a single definitive analysis. It will be a joy to watch my wife play, and I will be delighted to see what she thinks. I’m sure it will be new and exciting.

Overall, I give Reign Over Me a strong 6/10.

Sources

AstraFuckingGooGoo. “Shadow of the Colossus (PS4)- one of the worst games I’ve ever played.” r/patientgamers. https://www.reddit.com/r/patientgamers/comments/ujnx5q/shadow_of_the_colossus_ps4_one_of_the_worst_games/. Accessed 8 Aug. 2024.

Binder, Mike, dir. 2007. Reign over Me. Screenplay by Mike Binder. Columbia Pictures.

BrunoBRS. “Shadow of the Colossus: a Retrospective View”. Noobfeed. 27 Sep. 2011. https://www.noobfeed.com/features/160/shadow-of-the-colossus-a-retrospective-view

Diefendorff, Keith. “Sony’s Emotionally Charged Chip.” Microprocessor Report, vol. 13, no. 5.

Koop, Brandon. “Shadow of the Colossus: A Retrospective.” The Boss Key, 10 Apr. 2014, https://bradenkoop.wordpress.com/2014/04/10/shadow-of-the-colossus-a-retrospective/.

Lyles, Taylor. “Shadow of the Colossus Retrospective -- A Tragically Beautiful Love Story.” DualShockers, 26 Jan. 2018, https://www.dualshockers.com/shadow-of-the-colossus-retrospective/.

Metacritic. Reign over Me. https://www.metacritic.com/movie/reign-over-me/. Accessed 15 Aug. 2024.

“Nomad Colossus.” Team Ico Wiki, https://teamico.fandom.com/wiki/Nomad_Colossus. Accessed 8 Aug. 2024.

Peeren, Esther. “Compelling Memory: 9/11 and the Work of Mourning in Mike Binder’s Reign Over Me.” Cultural Critique, vol. 92, no. 1, Dec. 2016, pp. 57–83. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1353/cul.2016.a617380.

Piquet, Léna, translator. “The Making of ‘Shadow of the Colossus.’” Froyok, Dec. 2007, https://pure.uva.nl/ws/files/2772150/175939_PUBLISHED_Peeren_617380.pdf.

Quest for the Last Big Secret / Mysteries of SotC. PlayStation Community Forums, archived May 2013. http://web.archive.org/web/20130505104658/http://community.us.playstation.com/t5/Shadow-of-the-Colossus-PS2/Quest-for-the-Last-Big-Secret-Mysteries-of-SotC/td-p/20178777

Riga, Mac. “START/SELECT: Consuming Loneliness: A ‘Shadow of the Colossus’ Retrospective.” The Hoya, https://thehoya.com/guide/start-select-consuming-loneliness-a-shadow-of-the-colossus-retrospective/. Accessed 12 Aug. 2024.

Taylor, Jay. “Interview Extra: Fumito Ueda (Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, The Last Guardian).” Cane and Rinse, 27 Aug. 2019, https://caneandrinse.com/fumito-ueda-interview/.

Ueda, Fumito. Interview for CONTINUE Magazine, vol. 25., 2005. Translated by shmuplations, https://shmuplations.com/ueda/. Accessed 13 Aug. 2024.

#essay #game criticism #game critique #game review #video games #gaming #shadow of the colossus #team ico #review #dustyisforever review

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talesofacorporatewizard · 4 months ago

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An Introduction, Some Words of Advice, and a Warning of Irritation

If you’re reading this, you already know that I, Alexan Drytus, was recently promoted within my Mage role at the Grand Celestio Counsel of Wizards. I’m constantly being sent inquiries from young wizards on how I got this position and asking for networking tips, so I thought I’d lay it all out in a recurring letter format. Please understand that though I am happy to help provide advice, my updates must come after my duties in my new position as a Mid-Level Mage at the Grand Counsel.

To begin, I know many of you are interested in getting into freelance king advisory, but we can’t all be Merlin. Most of us only lend advice to kings though the counsels, and working with them on a corporate level is a whole other beast (mostly metaphorically, unless you get stuck in communication with the Minotaur King of the Western Isles).

A large part of my position as a Mid-Level Mage is interacting with kings who desire magical boons. They sign up with the Counsel for a fee, and in return, us wizards concoct magical solutions to their problems. Most of the time these solutions are crafted in office and then sent out to the kings, but every now and then higher level mages are sent in person to aid the kings. That package is considerably more expensive so most kings opt to have their magic done remotely.

You’ll find many of the kings have a very difficult time utilizing the communication methods offered by the counsel. Even though all they need to do to contact us is throw a coin in a enchanted basin, many old fashioned kings insist on writing letters and sending them in by ravens, which of course makes our jobs all the more tedious as we have to reply by bird when the kings won’t pick up our calls.

Once you’re actually able to contact the kings, you’ll often find they actually have no idea what they want, nor do most of them have a modern understanding of what magic is capable of. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been on a call with a client who just wants “plague.” No indication of whether they want it widespread or focused and contained, spread airborne or by touch, or even the type of sickness they want. All they know is that they need to “plague” their enemies and expect us to read their minds. Of course, it would be incredibly easy to read their minds, but that’s against policy, and I expect I’d get a written warning if I brought it up again.

Additionally, many kings don’t know where to stop when asking us for magic, which can lead to liability issues. We leave notes about certain kings for each other, warning mages to check their recent requests. Far too often a king will ask us for a golden egg laying goose right after we’ve already granted them a bounty enhancement spell to improve their fowl farming productivity. Our policies are in place for a reason, and yet every king thinks they’re the first to try and cheat the system.

TLDR: kings are stupid and don’t understand how magic works, but if you talk to them slowly and repeat their questions back to them enough, you’ll get the information out of them eventually and you can finally get to work on your spell-craft in peace.

I hope I was able to give you a helpful look into the day to day routine of a Mid-Level Mage at the Grand Celestio Counsel of Wizards. I will continue to send out these letters as long as anyone is interested, so find ways to express your interest in the usual magical ways: raven, cat, wishing well, fax machine, etc.

May the moon shine favorably and without hesitation upon you,

Alexan Drytus

#wizards #blogging #fiction #writeblr #writers of tumblr

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anomnum · 6 months ago

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Where I've Been

Hey folks, I just wanted to drop in and say that I am not actually dead or anything like that. Check the end of this post for information on what's actually been going on in my life, but before then, I just want to give an update on all of my writing projects.

Currently, I am in the middle of rewriting "Daughter of the Wild One," "The Brother and the Father," "Eden of the Soul, Volume One: Angels of the Dark," and "Fear Stops None, Salvation Seeker." There is also a rewrite of my oldest writing project, "Lost at Sea," being worked on, but it is not getting the attention it deserves in leu of my other fics. DotWO and FSNSS are the most actively being worked on, with TBatF and EotS taking a bit of a backseat to them. I also have multiple other unannounced projects in the background, which I occasionally work on in between the larger ones.

DotWO has been undergoing a reformat, as I wasn't a fan of the multi-part chapters, especially since AO3 doesn't allow for custom chapter numbering formats. I am instead splitting it into in-chapter Acts, which I plan to allow readers to jump to from the top of the page, so as to not overwhelm them with my admittedly mega-sized chapters. I'm attempting to drum up my motivation to keep pushing on the project, but it's slow going. The latest chapter is also still being worked on, but the rewrite and reformat is taking priority.

The rewrite of FSNSS has pretty much evolved from a simple rewrite to a complete and utter reboot, as I've gone all out with what I'm planning to do for the series. My biggest problem with the fanfics I wrote before 2022 and onwards was a lack of planning, which I've rectified by now doing an absurd amount of planning - this is part of why I've been so radio silent. I will say that I'm incredibly happy with what I've done for FSNSS, and I hope you'll all love it as much as I do when it finally releases.

A significant portion of my time has also been dedicated towards working on the latest update for my Fallout 4 mod, Anom's Sanctuary Hills Overhaul, which involves a lot of tedious navmesh rebuilding. I also have a large Metro System mod in the works, but I haven't put much effort towards it lately. My Starbound modding career is still completely dead in the water, but I'm thinking about porting all of my mods over to Nexus Mods.

Alright, time for the real talk section. My inactivity can be attributed to three things: a number of events that cropped up in my life which I'm still dealing with, a falter in my motivation to actually do a lot of things (which is sorta tied back to that first one), and the fact that nearly all of my ongoing fics are in the middle of being rewritten because my writing has drastically improved since I began all of them.

I've been reflecting a lot on my mental and physically health as of late. I do believe I have depression (hence my motivation issues, among many other problems), but I'm managing it well enough at the moment, and I believe it'll get easier to deal with once I start working. I've been going outside much more often, usually on hikes or walking through town every few days, which also contributes to my lack of actual progress on my art and writing.

I'm also fairly certain I'm on the autism spectrum, though I won't outright claim to be autistic here, as I don't have a diagnosis to back me up - a lot of the personal issues I've been dealing with just suddenly made more sense when I looked at it under this light. Especially one of my largest problems, which is my inability to work on my fanfics when I'm not actively hyper-fixated on the specific fandom they are a part of.

I apologize for pretty much falling off the face of the earth. I really need to start making these text posts, and using social medias in general, more often. I'm still kickin', and I'm still working on my projects.

#a talk with anomnom #text post #update

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captainschaos · 2 years ago

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hermit-a-day may 1: etho!!

I'm gonna try to do this!!! I make zero promises about making it all the way through the month, but I've wanted an excuse to talk about my fae hermitcraft headcanons for a while now, and might as well do it this way! I've touched on my etho hcs already in my liml writings so I won't have a ton for today, so I'll also use this for the basics of my fae system :] kinda long below cut whoops but hopefully not too bad

So hermitcraft is an almost entirely fae server! Fae are a widely shifting, hard to define group of creatures and folks, but in minecraft there is a large population of fae who are folk that often are some kind of recognizable fae creature and have a connection to the code/world in minecraft in a stronger, generally weirder way than standard players. However because it's such a strange and varied group of folks, there are definitely people who.... think they're fae? but might not be sure, alongside folks who know they're fae but have no idea what subsect they might fall into.

There are also different fae courts, based on the four seasons. Very roughly described below!

-winter: one of the major courts along with summer. a court focused on the power of the heart, with the mind being viewed as a tool to be used/manipulated. as a result, typically specializes in illusion magic, magic that tricks the mind and gives the caster power over the casted upon in that way. are also generally considered the more chaotic of fae but can typically be magically bound by pacts and promises made with them (but of course, all fae specialize in finding loopholes)

-spring: one of the minor courts along with autumn, and supports the summer court. these fae focus on how the heart can feed the mind, generally thought of as fae of art, using emotional works to inspire thought. generally inclined to similar magic as summer fae, but some more specialized spring fae feel they're better described as fae of the body than the summer's mind, and lean into transmutation magic

-summer: one of the major courts along with winter. a court focused on the power of the mind, with the heart being viewed as a tool to be used/manipulated. as a result, typically specializes in enchantment magic, magic that tricks the heart and gives the caster power over the casted upon in that way. are also generally considered the more lawful of fae and typically are bound by tedious magical rules like being unable to technically lie (but of course, all fae specialize in finding loopholes)

-autumn: one of the minor courts along with spring, and supports the winter court. these fae focus on how the mind can feed the heart, generally thought of as fae of games, using thoughtful works to inspire emotion. generally inclined to similar magic as winter fae, but some more specialized autumn fae feel they're better described as fae of the spirit than the winter's heart, and lean into divination magic

Anddd that's about the rough parts of my fae system! So now we can move onto the actual hermit of the day...

ETHOSLAB

court: winter

type: [unknown]

-Etho is known to be an incredibly powerful and cunning trickster fae, but it is actually unknown exactly what type of fae he might be! There's some speculation about him being a spriggan like some of the other hermits, highly dangerous and strong protectors, but he's a bit too... weird. to fit in properly with that.

-he has many standard faeish physical traits, such as pointed ears and a tail, which also contribute to his faeish heightened senses and agility

-his magic seems to be more focused in his physicality, with honed senses and supernatural control of space in how he conducts himself (ninja) but he does have illusory magic he uses sometimes, and is actually how he obscures his face most of the time instead of a physical mask!

#ethoslab #hermitadaymay #ik that's not actually the tag but I actually don't really want this rbed to the main account?#want to do this for fun but it's v rough yknow #mostly for myself :]#captain's words #will put it in that tho cuz it's more like actually composed than my bullshit chattering #but yeah this was fun :D and the upcoming ones should be much shorter so #easier to read and easier to write #except whenever I have to explain my elytra/winged hcs. idk we'll see

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comicaurora · 2 years ago

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This question has almost certainly been asked before, and apologies if it has, but I've been thinking about creativity and creative endeavors and such and I was very curious. This comic has clearly been in development for a long time, so my question is, what was the creative process of developing this world and story like for you? Where did you start, stuff like that?

Like many projects, it started because I was bored and unhappy and I wanted a fun place to put my brain. I was eleven-ish, socially isolated, ADHD-undiagnosed, internet-free and entertainment-deprived. When I read Diana Wynne Jones's Tough Guide To Fantasyland for the first time I had a sudden burst of clarity and realized if I couldn't have entertainment I liked, I could make it. (A lot of my issues were permanently resolved as soon as I got an internet connection, for the record. It's like an IV drip for an ADHD brain.)

I started building a fantasy world, initially just by throwing in everything I liked and every idea I thought was fun. It was like I'd just discovered the concept of drinking water for the first time - there was no strategy and no higher plan at the beginning, I just really needed it. At the time I thought my end goal was to create a comic I could read and enjoy, but I realized gradually that it's impossible for an artist to ever be their own audience - instead the enjoyment I was getting from the process was the actual act of creation itself. I liked having ideas and having somewhere to put those ideas. I liked fitting ideas together and finding bigger, more coherent patterns in the mess. I shifted away from "piling on every single thing I liked" and towards a more coherent strategy - building a world that actually held together, a magic system worth exploring, and a gradually-expanding cast of characters that were fun to play with.

At this point I'd say this wasn't too far off from how a kid would play with dolls. You have characters and dynamics and maybe even an overarching plot, but ultimately it's freeform; you're not aiming to construct a coherent narrative, you're having fun. But the idea that someday this world would be something I actually made was very useful for me, because it became something of an unreachable star I could orient towards.

As a side effect of Who I Am As A Person, I have a lot of trouble learning skills if I don't have a reason to want to know how to do them. The process would be incredibly slow and incredibly tedious until I was given something I could tangibly connect the skill to, at which point I would suddenly pick it up startlingly fast. For instance, I was initially slow to pick up how to read - I had the alphabet down, but putting the characters together into words was hard and boring. I could pick out the names of storefronts, but who cares what a store is called? And then my dad started reading me Harry Potter as a bedtime story and I got so invested I decided he was getting through it too slowly, and somewhere in that fugue state I apparently just learned how to read so I could get to the good stuff faster.

So before I had the beginnings of this world, I had been taught how to sketch and how to write, but in my head those skills were tedious to learn and pointless to master. I didn't want to sit down and draw owl wings from every angle, and I had no stories I wanted to write, so the good-natured attempts from my parents to teach me those skills were just deepening the tar pit of my constant, crushing (undiagnosed ADHD) boredom. But now I had a concept I wanted to create - and more than that, I wanted to do it justice. And that meant I had a lot of stuff I was suddenly very invested in learning how to do.

Art was the big one. I was also obviously bad at writing, but that was harder for me to notice. I knew when I tried to draw things they didn't turn out the way I saw them in my mind, and that frustrated me. This is when my habit of doodling in class went from a minor distraction to a full-on menace, and also when I started contemplating the logistics of actual comic creation and distribution. I knew from my mom that the comic industry was a huge pain in the butt and not a good way to get your story told the way you wanted it, and I also knew many comics were having newfound distribution success as webcomics, which at the time was a fairly new form of the medium. So that meant I had to learn how webcomics worked, and I had to either get really good at physical art or I had to start looking into the also-new field of digital art.

It kinda continued on like this. I got better at sketching, won a gift card in an art competition and used it to buy my first digital drawing tablet, honed my skills and continued to work on the lore and story of the world, which at this point was threatening to become too massive and unwieldy to do anything with. Some of my early digital art went into my college application art portfolio, so somewhere on some eight-year-old uchicago computer there's a very dramatic drawing of Falst and Kendal fighting in the rain. I was juggling a lot of different things at this point - the channel was just starting to become A Thing, so that was taking up some attention, and I was developing an interest in voiceover and prepping for college, so the story sort of ended up on the backburner for a bit. I think this was good, because a lot of projects like this really need time on the backburner so your subconscious can look them over, clean them up and drop in some editing notes for the next time you pick it up.

When I got back into it in the first year of college I'd started experimentally drawing comic shorts, character intros and chapter covers. I had the cast and overarching plot pretty solid at this point, so with the basic framework of the story ready to go, I just needed to make sure the art was up to snuff. And it wasn't. So I took a few more years, honing my skills by drawing lots of video frames and more test comics and getting acclimated with Clip Studio Paint's tools, and after I graduated when I was in the post-college haze of Suddenly Absolutely No External Stressors And Schedules, I said "fuck it" and bought the domain name.

This story, in a very real way, grew up with me. It provided structure and stability that my mind needed, and in return I could refine and rebuild it better and better over time. I didn't want this to be A Good First Try, I wanted to be good enough to make it good. I was a tool to make the story better, and the story was a tool to make me better.

I have no idea if this is applicable to literally anyone else, but that's basically been my process. All things considered, I'm quite happy with where we've ended up.

#asks #behind the curtain

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l-1-z-a · 3 years ago

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The Sims 2 Dev Twitter Thread Part 1 by Jake Simpson

Sims 2 Dev Thread.

I'm going to do several of these, all will be prefaced by this title, so those of you interested can find them easily.

I'm just putting stories and details in haphazardly, as I recall them, so don't expect these to be too organized:)

So firstly, who am I, and how come I can talk about this? Well, I'm Jake. I was hired by EA in Nov '01, right after 9/11. That actually impacted my ability to go to interviews at EA in SF at the time. But I was determined to get the job, and so I persevered.

Previous to this, I worked at Raven, on titles like Soldier of Fortune, Star Trek : Elite Force and Jedi Knight II. Before that I was at Midway, making Arcade games like NBA Jam, Revolution X and WWF Wrestlemania.

I was actually hired by my friend Jonathan Knight @jk00 - who was a producer on Sims 2 (and also a bunch of the Sims 1 expansion packs) - to work on Sim City 4, but before I ever started, the job was switched across to Sims 2, which I was extremely happy about.

I was the lead simulation and tools engineer for Sims 2, and was with it from about 3 months from inception to shipping, two and bit years later. When I arrived, there were about 10 people on the project. When we shipped, there was about 250 FTE's and contractors working on it.

I worked for the lead engineer, one David Gregory @dgregryc who was and is a terrific engineer, manager and tech director, who has gone on to great things since EA and remains a good friend to this day.

I also ended up EA's first release engineer for Sims 2, and at one point had about 20 object engineers reporting to me, who actually built all the objects for Sims 2.

So yeah, I can talk about development since I was there for pretty much all of it, deep in the inner circle of people making stuff.

So, where to start telling stories?

Sims2 was built on top of Sims1, unlike Sims3, which was a complete re-write from scratch (undoubtedly the right decision, since we inherited a bunch of tech debt from Sims1, and Sims3 could never have done what they did sitting on our code.)

As a result, we inherited the Sims1 tools for building worlds and those had to be rebuilt completely, since the plans for Sims2 were so much bigger than Sims1. Will Wrights tagline for Sims2 was "A more bitchin' human simulator'.

Now, I'm not going to reference Will too much in these stories because while Will is considered The Father of The Sims, he wasn't actually around that much. Will is very much 'been there, done that', and while he was available for consultation, he was already off in Spore Land.

I asked him a few times for advice when I was changing his base algorithms - and he's so smart that when I proposed things that wouldn't work, he could ask just one question for me to see where it would fall dow. Truly an incredibly smart dude.

But other than that, he was very hands off of his baby. He watched from afar but wasn't in many meetings, unless I made a point of pushing him to come because I was changing root functionality of the simulator.

We knew we wanted to make Sims 2 basically Sims 1, but with everything turned up to 11, particularly the rendering. We actually had two pHD coders in that area. We had specialist coders for the animation system, and another for path planning.

We had a huge production team and we actually tried 10-15 new game features in Sims2 that actually worked, but ultimately got cut for either UI reasons or because they just weren't fun, just tedious time sucks.

For example, we had a memory mechanism, where one sim who witnessed something first hand could actually communicate memories to another Sim. So if Sim A saw you pee yourself, Sim A could tell Sim B about it, and Sim B would react to you as though he'd seen it.

The problem was, Sim B would start laughing at you the moment he saw you, but you'd have no clue why - there was no easy UI way (without words) to tell the player why that sim knew something they'd never seen. So that idea got scrapped. We had lots of blind alleys like that.

Incidentally, The Sims as a franchise tries never to use words in UI, in order that there is little to no localization requirements for the game itself. In fact, that's where Simlish - the made up language for the Sims - came from.

Funnily enough, the number one bug report The Sims gets from non English speaking lands is that "I can't set the Sims language from English to my language". People who can't speak English think the Sims are speaking English!

We had about 8 people we used to generate that language, the same people used on Sims 1. They would literally sit in a booth and watch the animations the sims would do for interactions and then generate sounds to go with it.

Note, there is NO linguistic background for Simlish. All those websites that claim there is are absolutely wrong. It was entirely made up, of gibberish sounds, that was made up on the spot by the voice actors.

We were constantly amazed at people who felt they could see patterns where there were none. We'd pass round links to websites where people claimed to have 'worked out the language'. I guess you'll see what you really want to see...

The house construction tools for Sims 2 were rebuilt from scratch and at about half way through production, they were considered finished and then a lot of the Assistant Producers would spend days playing with them.

EA use to have small competitions to make the most amazing house on a lot using these tools, just to really test them and the rendering, so that not only could they be built, but they would also render at a decent frame rate.

Some of what they built were truly amazing, and I'm really sad none of these shipped. I remember one incredible castle structure one of the guys built, with torches and flickering lights everywhere. It was truly stunning.

Originally Sims 2 was supposed to ship with 5 neighborhoods. About halfway through production we began to realize that constructing a neighborhood took on the order of 2-3 weeks, and we were constantly having to dump what we'd built and start again, due to file format changes.

So this was pared down to 1 neighborhood, until I realised that all the design was being done in Excel, in a spreadsheet, and the painstakingly copied across, value by value, into dialogs in the tools in Sims 2.

I ended up building a Spread Sheet importer into the Sims 2 tools, and boom, three weeks work done in one key press. This is what enabled Sims 2 to ship with the three neighborhoods it did. At that point, we were limited by physical house construction time, which still took days.

The objects for Sims 2 (and Sims 1) are built by a new kind of content creator - Object Engineers. They would work meetings to work out what a new object would be, get some concept art, work out what Sim animations would be required, what sim requirements they would fufil etc.

Then they'd gather the art generated (3d models, with various states of completeness and brokenness) and also the animations the sims would require, plus sounds, and then they'd go away and write the scripts required for the Sims to be able to use this new object.

The scripting system was called SimAntics (there was some tortuous acronym for this, which I've quite forgotten, thankfully) and it was built into a tool that was built into the engine itself, so we could write and change scripts as the game was running.

We had about 20 object engineers on Sims 2, all producing content flat out. At one point, we worked out that given how much Sims 1 had earned to date, each object that an object engineer created was worth about $500k to EA. They took, on average, about 2 weeks to make.

Talk about a return on investment!

I built all the tools these guys used and the simulation stuff behind what the scripts did and how they interacted with the main game.

So because we'd had the experience of making Sims 1, and seeing all the expansion packs they'd made, we were in a much better position to build in stuff we knew we'd not use till those expansion packs came along.

For example, all the pet stuff was actually built and coded before the initial launch of Sims 2. We had pets in there, to test it, just we didn't build any. When the expansion came along, it was mostly just content creation (scripts, animations, models), not engine code.

Similarly, lots of the infrastructure for Open For Business was also there, ready to be used, when the expansion pack came along. That's not to say there weren't code changes, just the infrastructure to handle this stuff already existed.

There were LOTS of conversations internally about what we should ship with, feature wise, so we could leave ourselves space to make expansion packs down the line, because these were So Profitable for EA. The problem was, we were Sims 2, so more would be expected than in Sims 1.

But... we couldn't just load the game with all the expansion pack stuff from Sims 1 on launch. We couldn't have made all that content anyway, but still, it was a hard line to maneuver.

One thing that not many people know is that The Sims 1 was doing game analytics way before Analytics was A Thing. When you upload a lot to the web site, to share with others, you are actually uploading a bunch more data than you think.

Inside the house upload is also a bunch of information about your playing habits in The Sims. None of this information is identifiable to individual players - EA was way ahead of the curve in terms of player privacy - it was just data that indicated how people were playing.

Will was fascinated by this data. Real live big game playing data. He used to write lots of database queries to work out player trends and so on. This is actually where Spore came from; the idea that something you do, on your machine, can affect how others are playing their game.

The idea that you playing your single player game could affect someone else playing their single player game, by changing their environment in response to what you did in yours was like catnip to Will.

Anyway, Will identified four distinct player types for The Sims. The Maximizer, the Social Player, the Sadist and the Builder.

The Maximizer was someone who wanted to max out the Sims potentials. Top Job Track, best social interactions, biggest house, most money, etc.

The Social player wanted to explore the social interactions - see what The Sim would do in different contrived social situations. Lots of people saw a lot more in those interactions than there actually was code to drive!

The Sadist just wanted to find new ways to cause the Sim pain or kill them. Taking the exits away in a pool etc. On Sims 2, we added a bunch of random ways to kill a sim for this kind of player. E.g.

The builder was more interested in the house builder aspects of the game, often trying to build their own house, or their dream house inside the sims, using it more as an architectural tool than anything.

Incidentally, that's where The Sims came from initially. The original game Will set out to make was called DollHouse, and it was on a Mac. You had the house construction facilities, and the sims existed purely to come into the house and judge your efforts.

There was some rudimentary Sim controls, but it soon became clear that it was more fun to control the sims than to just build, and that's when it moved to the PC and became a 'real' product.

Worth also pointing out that Sims 1 had been in development for about a year at Maxis when EA bought them, and the number one thing that EA tried to do, several times, was cancel The Sims, because they had no clue what the game really was, or who the audience would be.

Anyway, back to the player tropes. What was interesting was that the 4 player types were split fairly evenly across all players, and even more interesting was that of the 4 types, they were split evenly between male and female players.

So, most sadists and maximizers were male and the social and builders were female. A fairly terrible indictment of the way the world is today, but also not terribly surprising.

Right, so lunch is over, and I'm going to get back to work now. I'll add to this thread periodically when I think of new stuff to say.

Oh wait! Before I go, one more story that is just too fun not to repeat.

During Sims 1 development, after EA had purchased Maxis, they really did NOT like the 'bathroom' need inside the Sims, where they had to hit the toilet.

They felt it was pretty revolting when the Sims failed to meet the need, and they wanted it OUT. Will, however, pushed back. "No", he'd say, "You can't have a human simulator without it." But EA was relentless on putting on the pressure on Will to pull it out.

Eventually, one Friday, Will buckled to the pressure, and said, last thing in the afternoon, "OK, I'll take it out."

Now, at this point, the bathroom system was in place and Will had populated the data values with stuff 'pulled out of his ass' (see what I did there?:) )

So, how many times a Sim would need the bathroom, how long they'd spend on it, etc, all of these values were just eyeballed by Will.

That weekend, there was a big article in the color supplement of the New York Times, talking about a bathroom Time and Motion study.

It turns out that the NYT article had all the details on the average visit, how many times a day, etc. And it also turned out that Will was ABSOLUTELY SPOT ON WITH ALL HIS BULLSHIT DATA. He was right on the money.

So that Monday morning, he went into work, faxed a copy of this article to EA, with an extra page on the end with the words "BATHROOM NEEDS STAY!" scrawled on it, sent that off, and EA never ever said another word about the Bathroom needs in The Sims:)

The End.

I was just thinking about both path finding and also how The Sims works, and thought I'd share some of those reminisces.

One situation that occurred with pathfinding is, do we let the Sims try and route to an object that they can't actually get to?

We actually planned out the entire route once a Sim decided to go use an object, so we could know "No, there are obstacles in the way, you can't get there", but we'd still let the Sims try, because otherwise they just looked precognitive.

Another problem we had was the Sims determining what next action to do. They knew their requirements and what objects are offering interactions that fulfill those needs. The issue was that if they took the best interaction, you ended up with the worlds greatest screen saver.

In the end, we basically randomized which interaction they would do, out of the top best 10 interactions they might possibly do. The function to do this was pretty intensive, and took a LOT of CPU time. We usually saw spikes when this function was run.

Oh, and one other thing that should be addressed. One of the surprising-initially things about the Sims 1 and Sims 2 team was that it was about 50% female. Now this, particularly at that time, was a Big Deal.

I very much attribute a lot of The Sims whimsy and fun to this fact.

The women who drove a lot of production and design carry most of the responsibility for how great The Sims, both 1 and 2, turned out.

More teams need more women on them, leading them, etc, because the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and The Sims is proof of that.

So the pee color story is absolutely true. We actually put in yellow as the color for the pee puddle and it was just SO gross, so our exec producer, Tim LeTourneau (one of nicest people alive), held a meeting where we sat and debated colors and how much gross we were OK with.

Just got home, had a cup of tea, and thought I might add to this.

So another feature we tried, that while it kinda made it to the final game, wasn't as we imagined it, was interruptable/add to interactions.

So with Sims 1, when you started an interaction, that's what the sim did, and that was that. With Sims 2, we added a queue, so you could queue up interactions. That was one of the first things I did.

Then we wanted interactions to be interruptable, so the Sim might start, oh, sitting in the hottub with friends. But then you could instruct them to go get drinks for friends, so they'd get out, go get drinks, serve them to the friends, then resume sitting in the hottub.

We actually got this working, but the problem was indicating to the player what was going on at any given time. The sim might be making dinner right now, but, what was his main interaction? How do we indicate that?

And was an interrupted interaction interruptable itself? If you were sitting the hottub, then going to make drinks, then some one rings the doorbell, are we still, in the original interaction? It all got very complicated very quickly.

One of the object engineers, using this system while it was still in place, built an incredible job simulation system. While the Sim was at work, in the "at Work" interaction, other sub tasks would show up in the task list on the side of the screen.

You'd have to respond to these sub tasks - e.g. "Got get paper", "Write a report" or "Arrest perps" or whatever was appropriate for the sims job. You didn't have to, but if you didn't respond to the individual prompts in time, the sims job performance would go down.

It was REALLY clever and really used the new system well, but because it was just so open ended and we couldn't work out how to limit it correctly, it got pared down dramatically in the final product.

The first object we built- and the one that was used as a test bed for almost everything new the simulator could do -was the hottub. It had multiple sims interacting with each other, it could offer interruptable interactions, it had everything we needed for test of all systems.

Right at the end of the project, I added a bug into the bug database that "When Sims are making Whoope (Sim Sex, basically), there was no 'invite' interaction". This was a joke - I was making a bug out of the fact that the Sims couldn't have threesomes.

This bug went all the way up the chain to the executive producer, Lucy Bradshaw, who marked it "Will not fix", with the comment "Not enough time for animations" :)

Maxis didn't say no to threesomes, just, they didn't have time to make the animations and scripts:)

Source:

https://twitter.com/JustJakeSimpson/status/1375520115920236544

#sims 2 #ts2 #the sims 2 #sims 2 beta #ts2 simblr #simblr #the sims #the sims 2 beta #Jake Simpson #twitter #game development #development #gamedev

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dmsden · 4 years ago

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A History Lesson - Looking back at D&D’s history

Hullo, Gentle Readers. Well, this is the 5th Monday in March, and that means I get to write about anything I want! It’s also my birth month, which means it’s my anniversary of getting into D&D (42 years!), and that has me feeling nostalgic. Coupled with a discussion I had recently with some friends, I thought it would be fun to look back at the various editions of D&D and give you all a bit of history. I’m not going to get into Gygax vs Arneson or any of that. I’m only talking about the published game itself, not its creators or its storied origins.

The original D&D (or OD&D as it’s sometimes called) came in a small box. It had three booklets inside - Men & Magic, Monsters & Treasure, and The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures - along with reference sheets and dice. Each was softcover and roughly the same dimensions as a DVD/BluRay case. The game was pretty rudimentary - for one thing, it assumed you already had a copy of Chainmail, D&D’s direct wargame predecessor. It also recommended you have a game called Outdoor Survival for purposes of traveling through the wilderness. It had only three classes - fighting man, magic-user, and cleric - and nothing about playing other races. It did have the insane charts that 1st edition would ultimately known for, and it was possible to play a pretty fun game of D&D with it, as its popularity would come to show.

The game expanded through similar chapbooks - Greyhawk, Blackmoor, Eldritch Wizardry, Gods Demigods & Heroes, Swords & Spells. With the exception of the last one, each brought new facets to the game - new classes like Thief and Monk, new spells, new threats. It was clear the game was going to need an overhaul, and it got one.

I consider this overhaul to yield the real “1st Edition”, as so much of the game didn’t exist in those original games. The game split into a “Basic” game, just called Dungeons & Dragons and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.

The basic game was a boxed set that included a rulebook, a full adventure module, and dice...or, well, it was supposed to contain dice. The game was so popular and new in those days that demand for dice outstripped production. My copy of D&D came with a coupon for dice when they became available and a sheet of “chits” - laminated numbers meant to be put into cups (we used Dixie Cups with the name of the die written on it), shaken, and a random number pulled out without looking. It was meant to introduce new players to the game, so it was a trimmed down version. Races were human, elf, dwarf, and halfling, and classes were fighter, cleric, magic-user, and thief. The box only included rules for going up to 3rd level, with the intention that players would then graduate into AD&D. This is where I joined, with the old blue cover box set and In Search of the Unknown, before Keep on the Borderlands even existed.

AD&D was the game in its full glory. Along with the races I mention above, we got half-elves, half-orcs, and gnomes. The four basic classes also had sub-classes, like paladin and ranger for the fighter, druid for the cleric, illusionist for the wizard, and assassin for the thief. There were rules for multi-classing, as well as “Dual-classing”, a sort of multi-class variation for humans only, which, when done in the correct combination, could yield the infamous bard...which didn’t actually yield any bard abilities until around level 13 or so.

This edition had 5 different saving throws for things like “Death Magic”, “Petrification & Polymorph”, “Spells”, and so on. It had the infamous Armor Class system that started at 10 and went down, so that having a -3 AC was very good! It also had specific attack matricies for each class; you would literally look on a table to determine the number you needed to roll on a D20 based on your class, your level, and your opponent’s armor class. It was fun, but it was very complicated.

It also had some, frankly, shitty rules. There was gender disparity in terms of attributes, which my group totally ignored. Because the game designers wanted humans to be a competitive the game, and because non-humans had so many abilities and could multiclass, non-humans were severely limited in the levels they could achieve in most classes. In fact, some classes, such as monk and paladin, were restricted only to humans.

As the years went on, things got a bit muddled. It probably didn’t help that the rules in Basic D&D and AD&D didn’t perfectly line up. In D&D, the worst armor class was a 9. In AD&D, the worst armor class was a 10. All of this led to an overhaul, but not one considered a separate edition. AD&D mostly got new covers and new books, like the Wilderness Survival Guide and Dungeon Survival Guide, Monster Manual 2, and the Manual of the Planes. It got a number of new settings, too. In addition to the default Greyhawk setting, we got the Forgotten Realms setting for the first time, details of which had been appearing in Dragon Magazine for years, thanks to the prolific Ed Greenwood. We also, eventually, got the whole Dragonlance saga, which yielded the setting of Krynn.

In this new version, Basic D&D broke off into its own game system to some degree. Elf, Dwarf, and Halfling started being treated like classes rather than races, with specific abilities at different levels. Higher level characters could be created using progressive boxes - Expert, Companion, Master, and Immortal, each with its own boxed set and supported by Mystara, a completely different setting that got its own updates over the years. It was odd, because D&D essentially was competing for players with AD&D, and I remember arguments with friends over which version was better (I was firmly in the AD&D camp.)

In 1989, when I was in college, they finally brought forth 2nd edition D&D. This streamlined things a little. Armor Class still went down, but now attack rolls boiled into a single number called To Hit Armor Class 0, or THAC0. It made the whole process of figuring out what you needed to roll a bit less cumbersome, but it was still a bit awkward. The classes got a lot of overhaul, including making Bard its own core class. But what I remember best about 2nd edition was the boom in settings. This was the age of settings, and many beloved ones got started, including Dark Sun, Planescape, Ravenloft, and Spelljammer.

It was also the age of the “Complete Handbooks”. They brought out splatbooks about every class and race in the game, as well as books expanding several concepts for the DM, such as the Arms & Equipment Guide, the Castle Guide, and the Complete Book of Villains. There were also splatbooks about running D&D in historic periods, such as Ancient Rome, among the ancient Celts, or during the time of the Musketeers. The game got new covers for the rule books again, and a bunch of books about options started coming out. It was a boom time for books, but many people complained there was too much.

Without going too deep, TSR ended up in severe financial troubles. They declared bankruptcy, and there was real fear of the game going away. And then Wizards of the Coast (WotC) stepped in. They helped TSR get back onto its feet, and they helped produce some modules specifically engineered to help DM’s bring an end to their campaign...possibly even their whole campaign world...because something big was coming.

That something big was, of course, 3rd edition D&D. The game got majorly streamlined, and many sacred cows ended up as hamburger. AC finally started going up instead of down. Everything was refined to the “D20″ system we’ve been playing ever since. Races could be any class. There were no level or stat limits for anyone. After years of the game being forced into tight little boxes, it really felt like we could breathe. I had stopped playing D&D, but 3rd edition brought me back into the fold. I often say that 3E was made for the players who’d felt constricted and wanted more flexibility.

The trouble with 3E, and its successor 3.5, is that it was still a dense and difficult game for newcomers to get into. It’s been acknowledged that D&D essentially created many of the systems we see and know in other games - experience points, leveling up, hit points, etc. But trying to break into the experience for the first time was difficult. The look of 3E was gorgeous, but I understood that it must seem awfully daunting to someone who’d never played.

4E and its follow-up, Essentials, was an attempt to course correct that. They tried to make this edition incredibly friendly to new DMs, and, frankly, they succeeded. By creating player classes and monsters and magic-items that were all very plug and play, they did a great job of creating a game that someone who had never DMed before could dive into with no experience or mentor and start a game pretty easily. Encounter design was given a lot of ease, and there were promises of a robust online tool system that would help out with many of the more tedious aspects of playing.

There was also a lot of shake up in terms of choices. Suddenly, new classes and races were proliferating like crazy. We got the dragonborn, the tiefling, and the eladrin right in the core book, but we said good-bye to the gnome and half-orc at first. Suddenly the warlock was the new class everyone wanted to try. We got paragon paths and epic destinies that would really shape a character as time went on. The game went very tactical, as well, which some of us loved. The concept of rituals came into the game. Later books like the Player’s Handbook 2 and 3 gave us back gnomes and half-orcs, and also gave us minotaurs, wilden, shardminds, and githzerai. We got new psionic classes, brand new class concepts like the Runeknight and the Seeker...

But there was a tremendous backlash. People felt that, in making the game so very plug and play, they’d taken a ton of choice away from the players. Without the tools (which were never that robust, frankly), it was almost impossible to navigate the massive panoply of options. And, worse, it was harder and harder to develop encounters without those tools. People complained that the game had gone more tactical in order to sell miniatures and battlemats. Given that I have never played the game without miniatures and battlemats (since I started in the days when D&D was still half-wargame), I found this odd, but I also understand my style of play isn’t everyone’s.

The one argument I will never understand is that it didn’t “feel” like D&D, or it was somehow ONLY a tactical game and not a role-playing game any more. Again, given that the original game didn’t even call itself a role-playing game, this felt odd. Personally, I roleplay no matter what game I’m playing. If I’m playing Monopoly, I’m roleplaying, doing voices, and pretending to be something I’m not. I honestly enjoyed 4E, and I know a lot of folks who did, too. A lot of it may simply come down to style of play. But I also enjoyed all the games that came before, including Pathfinder. To paraphrase the YouTube content creator The Dungeon Bastard, “Does your game have dungeons? Does it have dragons? Great. I wanna play.”

As a sidenote, in the months leading up to 4E’s release, a lot of internet videos were released by WotC emphasizing the nature of change and talking about differences in the rules. They also released some preview books showing the direction they were heading. WotC must have anticipated that people were going to find this edition very different indeed. They also cleverly brought in some very funny folks - Scott Kurtz from PVPOnline and Jerry Holkins & Mike Krahulik from Penny Arcade - and got them to play D&D for podcasting purposes. Looking back, this must’ve brought in a lot of listeners who might never have played D&D and given them a reason to try it out.

After its release, WotC clearly noted that missteps had been made, as this edition of the game was losing them players. They began work on what they referred to as D&D Next, and, this time, they did massive amounts of playtesting, some of which I participated in.

I don’t feel like I have to describe 5E to any of you, Dear Readers, as you could go to virtually any store and pick it up. I am a big fan of 5E’s simplicity and elegance, and I suspect this is the edition of D&D we’re going to have for some time to come, especially given its popularity. Given the effect of podcasts like Critical Role (and I might save an article on Critical Role’s importance to D&D until my next Freestyle article), D&D is likely more popular now than it’s ever been, with a much wider and more diverse audience than ever before.

I know I’m painting with broad strokes here, but I hope this was, at least, entertaining, and maybe you learned something, Gentle Readers. Until we next meet, may all your 20s be natural.

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diaryofabeautyfiend · 4 years ago

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Small Time Witch Ch 2

So I guess I’m writing a series. Part two of this story is starting to build my narrative. This story will be a super slow burn. Sorry if you’re looking for smut right off the bat. I like a plot. Check out Marvel Wiki for more info on Witches. Stay tuned for more.

Since Director Fury’s office was on the way to the training room you decided to drop off a few reports to his office. Since you were stopping by his office you decided to bring him what you assumed would be his third cup of coffee. You also knew he hadn’t eaten breakfast so you grabbed him a bagel too. Popping your head around the corner his assistant didn’t look up from the computer screen but she heard you. “He’s not in.” You didn’t say anything. You juggled your things grabbing your bagel with your teeth and headed down to the training room. You turned to push the door open with your back nearly falling over when someone grabbed it for you. You stumbled and almost dropped everything. You did not look up and made your way to the nearest table to set everything down. Fury was waiting watching you struggle.

“Oh hey. I have the third quarter budget ready for you to sign. I brought you a bagel and another cup of coffee. Hot bitter and joyless. Just like you like it.” He laughed. It wasn’t weird to you but everyone else in the room was stunned.

“Thank you, y/l/n. Go easy on them.”

“I make no promises, sir.” He shook his head still laughing to himself and left the room.

You turned around only expecting Loki but all of the Avengers were staring at you. Your bagel was hanging out of your mouth and one earbud was still in. You put it all down and muttered an apology. For a solid thirty seconds they all just stared at you. Tony was the first to break the silence.

“How and I mean HOW did you get Nick Fury to laugh? I swear I didn’t know he had teeth. Hand to God I’ve never even seen him so much as smile. Not even a smirk.” You didn’t answer immediately.

“I don’t know. I guess I’m funny.” You tried to sneak away and sit in the back but Steve stopped you. He directed you to a chair facing everyone and you felt like you were in trouble. Loki and Wanda were in your sight line trying to make you feel comfortable. It wasn’t working.

You were aware of everything around you. Clint tapped his pencil. Natasha shifted in her chair several times. Tony popped his gum. Bucky stood in the back with his arms folded. He had his eyes trained on you. Sam watched Steve. Rhodey checked his phone and sometimes stared out of the window. You heard the fluorescent bulbs buzzing over head. The air conditioning caught the plastic blinds on the window causing them to tap every few seconds. After a moment you were interrupted by Steve clearing his throat.

“Let’s get started. Y/N we are here to talk about your training schedule. We know in the past you were far away from danger in the van. For this next mission we’re afraid you won’t have that luxury. We are asking you to put yourself in harms way...”

“Essentially what Capsicle is trying to say is we won’t be able to protect you so you’ll have to protect yourself.” Tony interjected

Your eyes widened. You wished you could be sandwiched in between Wanda and Loki. They felt so far away even though it was just a few feet. Steve continued, “Are you up for this? We can really use your help but we can’t afford any mistakes. This is a very dangerous endeavor. A lot of moving parts. We won’t have each other’s sixes.”

“Uh yeah. I think I am. When you say training schedule....” Steve handed you a piece of paper with times and initials hand written. It was all in military time.

“0400 is that four in the morning? Like am?”

“Yes, ma’am. I know it’s early but we have a lot of ground to cover. Today you’ll spend half your time with Tony and Rhodey going over the schematics of the buildings we’ll be infiltrating. They’ll show you a replica of the security system and how they think it’s dismantled. The rest of the day with be with Loki. Tomorrow morning is when the physical work begins.”

You read further, “Weapons training?!”

“Yeah. That’s with Clint and Bucky. Nat will work on hand to hand. You’ll work with Sam and I in the gym.” This was all too much. All you could do was nod your head and take it all in. Steve kept talking. You felt like your insides were knotting and pulling. You squirmed in your seat. All of these things were imperceptible to everyone but Loki. He watched you and became more uneasy with every passing moment. Your psyche was reaching for him begging him to step in.

“Captain perhaps we should give Y/N a small break.” Steve clenched his jaw and was visibly irritated at Loki’s mere presence.

“This is important.” he said in a harsh whisper.

“Yes, I understand. You haven’t given her a moment to breathe. She was not forewarned that her first time out with all of you would include such high stakes. Let the poor girl eat her breakfast at least.”

Steve nodded and stepped away. Loki handed you your coffee and gave you a small half smile.

“I suggest you switch to tea. You are too frazzled for caffeine. We will not do anything strenuous this afternoon. You can relax.”

“Thank you. I’m about ready to bolt for the door and tell Fury to fuck off.”

“Now that would be fun to watch. I hope you don’t though. I’d certainly miss you.”

“You don’t even know me.”

He cocked his head to the side and thought for a moment. “No. I suppose you’re right. I feel strangely connected to you though. Your absence would create a hole in my life from which I’m not prepared to recover.”

Strangely you knew what he meant. You felt inexplicably bonded. You sat quietly taking small bites of your bagel while Loki studied you. The din of the room melted away and you felt calm. After a few moments Tony interrupted. “Hey, kid. You’re with us. We’re headed back to the compound.”

“Ok. I’m parked in the garage. I’ll meet you there.”

“Nonsense. Ride with me. I promise I won’t bite.” You laughed but weren’t so sure if he was joking. You looked back at Loki.

“I’ll see you this afternoon. Have fun.” He waved and you followed Tony.

Tony was far more chaotic than everyone else but you sort of enjoyed that about him. He talked fast thought fast and, much to your dismay, drove really really fast. He had a ton of questions for you. You answered but mostly he liked to hear himself talk. He was trying to figure out what headspace you were in. Were you evil? What were your intentions?

His lab was incredible. So many buttons and screens. You enjoyed the whir of the machines and the pattern of beeps and dings. Tony saw you looking around with wonder. He let you take it all in before he got down to business.

“Rhodey is joining us shortly. If you want to take a look here we can get started. Here is a mock up of the security system and the power grid.”

“It looks like the security system runs on its own power source here and the mainframe for power is on the opposite side of the building. I can’t take out both at the same time.”

“How much time will you need at each location?”

You bit your lip and tied your hair back so you could really think. “I’m not sure. There are back up generators. It would make more sense for me to cut power completely to security than to the building. I can be around 100 yards from the actual site so I won’t be detected. Better than going in blind.”

He bit the tip of his pen and smiled “I completely agree. FRIDAY run it.”

“Sure, Boss.”

Rhodey came in and they discussed tactical placement based on reconnaissance from SHIELD. It was tedious but weirdly fun. “Ok, kids. That’s lunch. Good work. High fives all around.”

The rest of the team started to file into the little kitchen off the lab. You helped yourself to a sandwich and a bag of chips. Bucky eyed your choices and you felt judged. “Enjoy those chips now. Once Steve gets a hold of you you’ll only get protein shakes and sadness.”

“Wait...why?”

Sam chimed in, “Cap’s all ‘food is medicine..blah blah blah’. Fact is you need fuel for your body to promote stamina. Cheeseburgers don’t help you run fast.”

You rolled your eyes and they both laughed. “You’ll get used to him.” Bucky added, “or you’ll stab him.”

Speak of the devil. “No stabbing, Buck.”

“But I like stabbing. I’m good at it.” he whined.

You loudly crunched a chip and Steve raised one eyebrow. “Chips huh? That’ll cost you tomorrow.”

“See? Sadness.”

Throughout the rest of lunch you joked and laughed with everyone. You were starting to feel more comfortable. The questions were easier “Where are you from...do you have a family..” You finished chatting and excused yourself to find Loki. Steve caught up with you in the hall.

You could feel that he was tense so you tried to ease his mind a little. “Apologizing again?”

“How’d you know?”

“Lucky guess. You don’t have anything to apologize for. I know what I signed up for.”

“You’re interesting. I don’t know quite how to read you. You seem so timid a lot of the time. I’m afraid to put too much on you. The other times you’re right up in the fray with the team. I don’t know where to step with you.”

“Electrokinesis is not my only power, Captain. I’m an empath. When tensions are high I feel that from everyone and the weight of that can be crushing. When you’re calm I’m calm.” He wasn’t quite sure how to respond . He’s come across all sorts of enhanced people and aliens and gods in the last few years it makes his head spin. This was the first time he had been so intrigued by one.

You glanced at your watch and saw you were late. Steve still looked puzzled. You patted him on the arm, “Ok, Captain. I have to go but good talk.”

“See you at 4. Am. That’s in the morning.”

You smiled at him over your shoulder.

Loki was in a conference room pacing and looking mildly annoyed. He had no real agenda for you today. There was no reason for you to be “on time”. He just hated to be kept waiting. And, the more he sees you the more he wanted to see you. You his little puzzle box aching to be undone. He was so engrossed in thought that he didn’t hear you come in.

“Sorry! I got caught up.”

“I do not like to be kept waiting. You’ll do well to remember for next time.”

You but your lip and furrowed your brows. “I’m sorry. Steve and I were talking and I kind of lost track of time. I won’t let it happen again.” You moved closer to him to touch his arm. You intended to put him in a better mood but he caught your wrist.

“I know what you’re doing. Your tricks won’t work on me, pet.” He squeezed grinding the tiny bones in your wrist, “Do you need to be reminded who is the pupil and who is the teacher? I am a god foolish little girl...”

Before you could stop yourself from saying the words you mumbled, “A demigod”

He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He was silent for several seconds before breaking out into raucous laughter.

“You do have guts I’ll give you that, mortal.” You relaxed a little and laughed too. When he felt your body settle down he pulled you to him so hard your head snapped back.

“Demigod or not I can still split you in half with the flick of my wrist. Now sit.” he growled.

You sat in the chair rubbing your wrist. You fought back tears and didn’t make eye contact with him. He sat across from you and started to speak when he saw your chin quivering. He pulled your face toward his and spoke in a gentle tone, “That smart mouth is going to be the death of you, pet. I’m sorry I lost my temper. When you’ve collected yourself we can finally get started.” You tried to take a deep breath but started sobbing instead. He rolled his eyes and tried to comfort you the best he could. He rubbed your back and silently cursed the fragile mortal ego.

“Please don’t cry. I don’t know what to do when people cry. You know when I was a child it always made me feel better when I hurt Thor. Would that make you feel better hmm? Would you like to hurt Thor?” You laughed. He wiped tears from your face.

“There. That’s my girl. Do you feel better?”

“Yes. I’m sorry I was such an ass earlier. I guess I was over confident with our friendship or whatever this is.”

He scoffed, “Of course we’re friends. I fear we’re more alike than I care to admit. I have learned the hard way that magick can’t always be the answer.” He put his arm around you and pulled you closer to him. You snuggled onto his shoulder. In the stillness of the room you embraced.

He placed his hand on your forehead to extract your memories. Easier to watch instead of talk about it. He saw you running. Saw you pleading with your mother to come with you. Saw you trying to save the younger members of your coven. He heard the screams. The remnants of spells cut short. The roar of Hellfphyr. He felt your fear. Your pain. Your rage. These were things he understood well. Last he saw the most curious thing.

He watched you stand in the field where your coven performed your most sacred of rituals. You retrieved a small piece of parchment from your pocket. You raised your hands to the sky and said the incantation written there. Your eyes turned white and you were bathed in a bright white glow. Once it reached its peak it released and exploded. Everything around you was ash. Fat tears dripped down your face splashing on his hand. “Y/n, tell me about the spell.”

“My mother gave it to me. She said I was the only one strong enough to protect the coven’s magick. I’m not entirely sure what even happened when I did the spell. I blew stuff up I know that.”

He shifted so he could see you. “I think you took in all their magick. That’s what I’m feeling.”

The gears were turning in his head trying to figure out how to access what was inside of you. He paced and bit his thumb nail. Every now and then he would look up to say something but it wouldn’t quite make it out. “Come. It’s late. You need dinner and I need Wanda” he pulled you up by your hands, “Come now, darling. I have planning to do. Text Wanda. Ask her to meet us in the kitchen.”

Wanda was waiting when you got down there. “Hey. Y/N you look wrecked. What did you do to her?” she swung her head to look at Loki. He shook his head.

“I didn’t do anything. Listen. She’s a conduit!”

Wanda’s eyes widened, “No shit.”

“What’s a conduit? You asked but they kept talking over you.

“She performed a spell. I presume it was written by the leaders of her coven. The spell allowed her to take in all their magick when they passed.”

“That’s what we’ve been feeling..”

“HELLO?!” you shouted, “What’s a conduit? I know what the word means but in magical terms what does it mean?”

Wanda and Loki looked at you like they forgot you were there.

“When you did the spell you took in all the magick your coven had. All of their abilities all of the power that manifested on those sacred grounds now reside in you. Your mother must have known or else she wouldn’t have taught so hard to keep you safe.” Loki explained.

“Y/N do you have anything that belonged to your mother? The other members of your coven? Loki, maybe if she has something of theirs we can channel that energy.”

“Yeah my place. Let’s go. Shit. I don’t have my car. I’ll get us a ride.” You pulled out your phone and scrolled your contacts. You dialed Fury’s number. “Director Fury. I’m at the compound. Loki Wanda and I need to get to my car so I can get home. We discovered something. I need a ride.”

“Be outside in five.” He sounded less than amused.

“Thank you, sir” you hang up, “Ok. Our ride is on its way.”

They both looked at you like you grew another head. “Ok one day your are going to have to explain your relationship with Fury. Like who has his number?”

“He knows power when he sees it.” Loki said under his breath.

“You have explaining to do.”

“Later. Let’s get going.”

You moved quickly to the front gate constantly looking over your shoulder like you were doing something wrong. It’s not like you weren’t free to come and go. Not like you lived there. You just felt like you were escaping. It didn’t help that Bucky appeared out of nowhere.

“Where are you three off to?”

“My place.” He cocked an eyebrow and fixated on Loki.

“Witch stuff.” Wanda said to distract him. Just as he started to walk away a chopper descended in the open field. That ought to get everyone’s attention.

“That’s us!” You yelled motioning for the helicopter. Loki gave Bucky a thumbs up and smiled as you ascended.

Once all three of you had your cans on the pilot informed you that you’d be to your condo in less than 20 minutes.

“So we have time. Explain to me why Fury is so invested in you.”

“Just like Loki said. I’m powerful. He knows it. Just like he tried to acquire you but Hydra got to you first. Wanda it is no secret amongst the magical community that you are the most powerful witch alive. I’m surprised the Kales haven’t come after you.”

“Who are they?”

“A family with an ancient bloodline who controls the demon Helphyr. They sent it to murder my family. I was the only survivor. Now I know why. They won’t stop coming after me.”

That made Loki nervous and crazy angry. “You should come back to the compound with us. We can protect you.”

“No you can’t. I’m safer alone. My condo is warded. And if they come for me, they come. I won’t put any of you in harms way. I especially won’t endanger the lives of America’s mightiest heroes. You two can hold your own. The rest of them wouldn’t survive.”

Wanda looked out the window at the city sparkling beneath her. She thought about what Steve once said about everyone having their own agenda. She supposed she was part of Fury’s. She was well aware of her power but made her own choices. She was afraid that, because you were in such high favor with Fury, he was attempting to get you to persuade her to join SHIELD. The compound was her home. They were her family. She would never leave them.

She kept staring at you. You could feel her tension rising. You held her hand but didn’t attempt to influence her. You just held her hand. She and Loki were the closest friends you had right now. Sure Fury always has an agenda. It’s not exactly what Wanda thought. Fury’s personal mission was to never let any one group gain too much power. He knew it was a risk to introduce you to the two of them. You’re loyal to no one really. So, he treats you with more kindness than he extends to anyone else and takes good care of you. Loki wouldn’t completely join forces with you. You were a small time witch as far as he was concerned being a demigod and all. But you and Wanda joining forces could be devastating. That would certainly rankle the magical and mutant communities alike. Fury couldn’t have that. That’s why he put you under the watchful eyes of the Avengers. They are just enough to keep you from going rogue. But just though.

#captain america x reader #mcu x reader #steve rogers fanfic #loki of asgard #loki x reader #slow burn #mcu witches #marvel au #tony stark

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nintendowife · 4 years ago

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The year is nearly over and it's time for my personal game of the year picks again. Finished a record amount of games this year (53, full list of games at the end of the post). COVID-19 pandemic didn't really cause an increase in my gaming, the main contributing factor was Xbox Game Pass for PC which allows me to easily pick up and try out a variety of games. As a "blast from the past" I finally beat a Nintendo 64 game Blast Corps together with husbando, a game I had been stuck in in the 90s. Like usual, I didn't play many games released in the current year so most of my picks are older games. But without further ado, here are the best of the best.

1st place: Yakuza Kiwami 2 (PC, also available on PS4, Xbox One)

Thrilling and serious crime drama featuring the legendary ex-yakuza Kiryu who finds himself in absurdly hilarious situations at every turn. This is a game you don't want to miss, but playing Yakuza 0 and Yakuza Kiwami prior to this is recommended.

+ Amazing story with various charismatic and memorable characters + Some incredibly funny side quests and entertaining minigames + Gorgeously detailed environments in 4K + Cool soundtrack and superb voice acting + Majima Saga is a nice continuation to events of Yakuza 0 + Well-made PC port with no issues besides occasional amusing ragdolling - Lack of different fighting styles make battles a bit repetitive - No Ansel support

See my posts about Yakuza Kiwami 2

2nd place: Octopath Traveler (Switch, also available on PC)

Classic JRPG of modern times with quality of life improvements and gorgeous presentation. Each characters' stories, the game's engaging turn-based battle system and mechanics kept me glued to the screen for over 125 hours.

+ Fun and rewarding battle system with a good amount of team customization and strategy with subclasses and skills + Beautiful visuals mixing old-school sprite graphics with modern lighting effects + Splendid soundtrack, dual audio option and great Japanese voice acting + Likeable characters with their own individual stories and engrossing overarching story that lets you find the connections of the characters + Quality localization with rich language. I learned many new words and H'aanit's old manner of speaking added a new layer of immersion. + Nice quality of life features like fast travel and seemingly unlimited inventory space - Random encounters (they didn't actually bother me much in this game as the battle system was engaging) - Sudden crazy difficulty spike when encountering the real final boss

See my posts about Octopath Traveler

3rd place: Portal 2 (PC, also available on PS3, Xbox 360)

Immersive sci-fi first-person puzzle game with fascinating game mechanics and tons of great humor. Portal 2 lives up to the universal praise it has gotten.

+ Interesting premise and great writing + Well designed physics-based puzzles + Difficulty is just right, not too hard and not too easy + Super good voice acting and soundtrack that fits the environments spot on + Great humor right from the starting tutorial + The first-person camera immersed me into the game - Some issues like autosaving at unfortunate moments

See my posts about Portal 2

Honorable mention: Xenoblade Chronicles X (Wii U)

Sci-fi action JRPG with a surprising twist in its story and a peculiar setting where the player isn't really the protagonist. Battle system is fun and rewarding once you get a hang of it.

+ Impressive world that made me go "woah!" and "ooohh!" + Cool sci-fi story + Great use of Wii U GamePad + Skells (flying mech suits) make traversing the vast world pleasant + Online multiplayer is still active - Tedious fetch quests (wiki/guide recommended) - Soundtrack isn't consistently good

See my posts about Xenoblade Chronicles X

Honorable mention: Ruiner (PS4 & Switch, also available on PC, Xbox One)

I'm in love with this game. I've played it on 4 platforms already and I'm waiting for my Switch physical copy. Ruiner was in my top 3 games last year so I'll just give it a honorable mention now.

+ Amazing world-building and atmosphere + Great soundtrack + Fast-paced action gameplay that stays fun even after multiple playthroughs - Some glitches in PS4 version, Switch version aiming doesn't feel as accurate as on other platforms

See my posts about Ruiner

Honorable mention: Death Coming (PC, also available on PS4, Switch, mobile)

Kind of like a point and click isometric Hitman game. Humorous game where you need to figure out how to reap as many souls as possible, causing fatal accidents with the environments.

+ Fun assassination gameplay with well-designed, wildly imaginative levels + Charming graphics and presentation + Hilarious ways to kill targets - More levels would have been welcome

Nominees for my personal Game of the Year 2020

Only games I have finished in 2020 have been included.

A Plague Tale: Innocence (PC) ACA NeoGeo: Metal Slug X (PC) Bayonetta (PC) Blast Corps (N64) Carrion (PC) Cat Quest (Switch) Costume Quest + Grubbins on Ice DLC (PC) Death Coming (PC) Doki Doki Literature Club (PC) Etrian Mystery Dungeon (3DS) Final Fantasy XV + DLC episodes (PC) Gears 5 (PC) Gris (PC) Helltaker (PC) Her Story (PC) Hypnospace Outlaw (PC) Katana Zero (PC) Kirby: Triple Deluxe (3DS) Lonely Mountains: Downhill (PC) Mario Kart 8 (Wii U) Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite (PC) Mr. DRILLER DrillLand (Switch) My Nintendo Picross: The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess (3DS) Observation (PC) Octopath Traveler (Switch) Paper Mario: The Origami King (Switch) Pikmin 3 (Wii U) PictoQuest: The Cursed Grids (Switch) Pikuniku (PC) Pokémon Shield (Switch) Portal 2 (PC) Radiant Historia: Perfect Chronology (3DS) Rainy Season (PC) Ruiner (PS4) Ruiner (Switch) Star Fox 64 3D (3DS) Stella Glow (3DS) Streets of Rage 4 (PC) Super Bomberman R (Switch) Super Mario 64 (N64) Super Mario 64 (Switch) Super Mario Sunshine (Switch) Tacoma (PC) Tetris Effect: Connected (PC) The Gardens Between (PC) The Messenger (PC) The Touryst (PC) Thimbleweed Park (PC) Watch_Dogs 2 (PC) Wilmot's Warehouse (PC) Xenoblade Chronicles X (Wii U) Yakuza Kiwami (PC) Yakuza Kiwami 2 (PC)

Wishing you all a safe journey to a brave new year 2021! May it be blessed with plenty of quality gaming.

#game of the year #goty #yakuza kiwami 2 #octopath traveler #portal 2 #xenoblade chronicles x #ruiner #death coming #pc #nintendo switch #wii u #ps4 #nintendo 3ds #nintendo 64 #n64

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echobeachimagines · 4 years ago

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‘ bizarre love triangle ’ || brad bakshi imagine

Except this is less an imagine and more a snippet to see if anyone wants to read it. This will likely have a few parts. I will avoid gender specific pronouns the best I can. It is going to be an ‘x reader’ fic. Feedback is very much encouraged. Also the title is just a song i was listening to on repeat while i while i was writing this so i figured “meh, why not?”. titles aren’t my strong suit.

Shockingly, the concept of hiring an assistant had eluded Brad up until he had seen Jo around the studio. Jo was David’s assistant which she was undeniably terrible at, but her willingness to do just about anything Ian asks of her had enticed Brad. In any case, with time to dwell on the potential of a virtually work-free job, Brad had concluded that this may just be his best idea yet.

With that, he wasted no time putting a carefully crafted advertisement out with the help of C.W. Had this not been a factor in who he would manipulate into doing his dirty work (Not all of it of course. Only the tedious details he’d rather not deal with. He still wanted to have some fun.), Brad likely would not have bothered to read the colourful notice. While he would certainly have to admit that C.W was an incredible writer, no decent and/or experienced assistant would respond to this. Tragically for his future assistant, this was ideal for his needs, and with some minor changes he now had his hands on what he believed to be the key to a stress-free existence.

This leads us here, to Brad, as he interviews candidates. He was careful in how he planned the interviews, this of course meaning he scheduled them all on the same day. After all, imbuing young and impressionable souls with the competitive spirit early on has done wonders for capitalism.

The system is built on fear of losing and Brad Bakshi discovered long ago how to turn that beautiful, beautiful system against itself for his own gain...

#mythic quest #mythic quest: raven’s banquet #brad bakshi #brad bakshi imagine #brad bakshi imagines #danny pudi #danny pudi imagine #mythic quest imagines

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i-write-sometimes-blog · 5 years ago

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Cold Eyes (Dark Rey x Reader) [Part 12]

Summary: After Rey opened up with you she is still conflicted with your words and you discover an even softer yet passionate side of her.

Words: 3, 250

Warning: slight smut, not descriptive. And not really good to be honest. awful to be honest

A/N: why did this take me so long? And why is it easier to write smut without fearing screwing the plot? Idk but enjoy. Please pretend you didn't know this was coming.

No nightmares. For the first time in a very long time there were no terrifying images hunting you in your sleep, no painful screams rumbling in your ears, no the dreadful pain that came after. The nightmares were gone, all thanked to the woman who originally caused and starred them. Instead of hurt you like it always happened in your dreams she held your body in a delicate and protective way that allowed you to have some rest, real rest in months.

But now her warmth was gone, leaving you alone under the cold sheets. Half asleep you searched for her on the other side of the bed finding only the memories of the previous night. It was still hard to believe she was there talking with you just like the old times and it made a warm sensation filled your body.

“I see you’re already awake.” you heard Rey said while you were finishing getting ready for a new day in Mustafar. She was on the doorway with a soft smile on her lips.

“Sorry, I know we had training this morning” you told her “Won’t happen again.”

“No, it’s fine. Don’t worry” she said “I had some… work to do anyways.” she said as her eyes darted at her hands, you didn't need to ask what she was talking about you knew what she did. “I have a tactical meeting, can you come with me?” she asked.

“I’m not sure your generals want me there.” you said to her “Specially Hux.”

“I don’t care if they don’t want you, I want you. And you’re my apprentice, therefore they should respect you as much as me.” she told you and you smiled for a moment “I’m going to make sure they understand that. Now, come on.” she told you offering you a hand and after a brief moment you took it.

"Okay" you murmured.

How strange was it to hold her hand as you walked through the dark hallways of the fortress. It seemed so childish in this time of war, and yet it was a really simple action that denoted such affection, you liked it.

Eventually you made it to the meeting room where at least a dozen of generals and commanders waited patiently for their leader, some of them shivered in fear when they saw her stepping into the room. She let go of you to take her place in the head of the table but pointed one of the chairs for you to use.

“Shall we begin?” she said rather serious, a woman stood on her feet and activated the hologram table that revealed a system, some planets had the First Order’s on them, their conquest probably.

Across the table you felt an intense glance laying on you. General Hux stayed focused on you, watching your every move, his green stare letting you know how much he distrusted you. When he noticed your the killer stare you gave him back he grinned at you before he turned his attention back to the matters the meeting was discussing.

****

It was already night when you headed to your room, hoping to have a rest after the long and tedious day, already wondering if Rey would come this time just like she did the day before but probably not, you haven’t seen her after the meeting, she was out on a mission or so she told you moments before you saw her disappearing into a dark ship.

As you approached to your room you noticed a couple of stormtroopers waiting for you outside the door. They rose their weapons as a greeting, the same way they greet a general or even the Supreme Leader herself when they saw you. One of them spoke before you could asked them something.

“Supreme Leader asked us to take you to your new quarters, Miss.” the female voice under the helmet. It was still very strange for you to be treated as a superior, specially by the troopers that you used to fight.

“Why’s that?” you asked perplexed.

“We don’t know, Miss. Just following orders.” the other trooper, a voice that sound rather like a teenage boy told you.

“Lead the way.” you said to him and both of them started to march guiding you to your new room, why? You expected a cell, you’ve been in one before and you stayed there for a quite amount of time but there was a reason way. Now, now was different, you didn't know why would she wanted to change your room or where. This was nothing compared with what you expected as the troopers stopped in front of Rey’s personal chambers.

The soldiers gave you a small bow with their heads before leaving you in front of the big heavy metal hatch that opened slowly before you.

“Y/N” you heard Rey inside the room “Come in, please.” she said and you stepped inside. The room was incredibly big and yet so empty, a big bed was pretty much what was there. Rey was watching outside a big window that revealed the dangerous landscape of the planet.

“You’re back.” you said.

“Easy target,“ she told you “didn’t like the planet, a desert.” you nodded understanding why she came back so soon but didn’t realized how much of an effect it had on her until now. She was quiet, distant, lost on her thoughts as she kept staring at the big window. Rey looked at your for a moment, you were still standing close to the door that closed immediately after you were inside.

“Your room was so small” she told you changing the subject, answering a question that never left your lips. “I thought you’d be better here, with me.” she said returning her sight to the window, she looked beyond affected by this mission.

“Thanks” you said and she nodded slowly, her eyes never meeting yours, you felt the need to make sure everything was right with her even if she was the big bad woman you still hated to see her upset. “Something’s bothering you, Rey. What is it?” you asked softly. You noticed her jaw clenching as she swallowed uneasily.

"I've been thinking" she said looking at the vast darkness in front of her, the red of the lava seemed to trace deadly figures on the ground. "in what you said. I can't stop thinking about those questions, I don't know why, they just keep repeating I'm my head" she told you.

"What do you mean?" You asked confused, many things had happened recently and so quickly.

"A few days ago, you asked me if I regret my actions. Never really answered you."

You remembered the fight that day after the training, you asked her if she felt any remorse of what she had done, that time seemed to be a very long time ago in way different circumstances.

"I do" she continued "I regret a lot of it, but there was not other way."

"There's always another way, Rey" you murmured glancing at her.

She gave you a humorless laugh and then she looked outside the big window again. "You know what's funny? I never considered Jakku my home, it was just sand everywhere and bad people doing whatever it took to survive another day… and maybe it's what I regret the most."

You observed her, the way she was struggling with her words and she kept admiring the dark sky full of stars.

"It was a horrible place, but it was the only home I ever knew" she said, you caught a single tear running down her face that she rushed to clean away. "Sometimes I watch at the sky and imagine it's still there but I know it's not" she gulped trying to contain the lump in her throat "I destroyed it" she looked at you then as a new tear watered her cheek "and I destroyed yours too, Y/N"

Quietly you moved next to her, you felt her eyes laying on you as you were standing next to her. You glanced outside for a moment, to the sky and the void where you supposed your home planet used to be and sighed.

“Feels so strange to watch at the stars knowing it’s no longer there.” you told her as you keep staring at the emptiness of the space.

“Did you had family there?” she asked doubting a bit though she already knew the answer. You gave her a tiny nod and swallowed hard before you rose your voice again.

“My father was a mechanic, he taught me everything I know” you spoke as slowly and calm as your body allowed you. “And mom was a pilot, one of the best I’ve ever know” you told her trying to remember their faces, but you had left them a very long time ago and the memories were blurred.

“And I killed them.” Rey said as she silently cried, her voice was serious and yet there was pain in her too as if every one of your words felt like a dagger on her chest. You had the only thing she ever wished for and she took it away from you. A family. “You have all the rights to hate me after everything I’ve taken from you, I understand it now, Y/N” she told you.

“I don’t hate you” you told her, Rey turned her head in surprise but it was you who was more surprised by your own words. She gave you a bittersweet look.

“I’m in a war with your friends, who used to be mine too.” she added “I held you as a prisoner and I killed not only your family but the whole planet” she said as the tears pooled on her eyes “Why wouldn’t you hate me?”

That was a big question, one you haven’t really ask yourself until this moment. You didn’t need her to remind you the terrible things she had done, you’d probably never forget them and still you didn’t hate her, you couldn’t, not even after all you’ve been through, you were still seeing her as the girl who stole your heart a long time ago in a planet very different from this.

You couldn’t deny the dreadful things her actions caused, not even tried to justify them or thought on forget them, you knew sometimes she looked like a whole different person rather like a monster but deep down she was the same scared girl from Jakku and right now she was next to you sobbing slightly.

“I thought it was clear.” you looked back at this journey and it wasn’t nor an easy one nor short either, felt like years had passed and not even that could erase the feelings for her that were buried deep inside you, covered by the fear and the pain. “You mean so much to me, Rey.” you confessed “I’m in love with you, since the first day you came into my life.” the words left your mouth with honesty and yet your were surprised to admitted it, the first time you confessed your feeling for her was in this same fortress a long time ago.

“The Rey you fell in love is gone, Y/N.” she told you. Carefully you cupped the side of her face, softly cleaning the tears off her face with your thumb.

“No, she is still here and I’m looking at her right now.” you murmured as her hazel eyes admired you for a moment, filled with a mix of emotions that made your heartbeat race a little. Hesitating you leaned closer to her, lips closer to hers for a few seconds before capturing her lips carefully, you kissed her sweetly almost shyly for a moment.

Then you broke away just enough to see her reaction, she kept her eyes closed enjoying the ghost of your lips on hers. When she opened them again you saw astonishment over them as well as tenderness and even for a moment you thought it was love what made her eyes shimmer softly.

She couldn't find proper words to express how much your action meant to her, what it made her feel. She didn't know who to trust in a world of liars and yet your kiss felt real, authentic.

She leaned to brush your lips again, long and delicately while her arms slowly wrapped around your waist pulling you close to her body making you smile between kisses, you enjoyed her closeness, her warmth against your body. A warm shiver ran down your spine when her lips traveled to your jaw and then to you neck, leaving subtle kisses there as well that made you softly gasp.

“Rey” you softly whimpered as she found that sweet spot in the side of her neck and you could feel her smirking against your skin, delighted with the way her name sounded in your lips. But still she stopped her work on you for a moment, a bit of shyness in her voice.

"Sorry" she said "we can just leave this here, if you want"

"No" you mumbled with a smile "I want this." You assured her and gently guided her lips back to your own kissing them passionately as every cell of your body started to urge to meet more of this woman.

You felt your body warming up with every move of her lips on your skin, feeling the need in you growing with each passing moment that seemed like a dream for you.

Kisses became deeper, faster, filled with desire. The gently touches became more intense, eagerly pulling each other’s bodies close until you couldn’t resist more the growing need inside you and the heat between your thighs, a longing to meet her skin, never really realize how touch starved you both were until this moment. You wanted her and you wanted her now. You guided her towards the big bed on the other side of the room, and she seemed so surprised with the unspoken invitation you gave her.

“Are you sure?” she murmured inches away from your lips.

“More than sure.” you told her and a big lustful grin curved her lips and suddenly she didn't seemed shy anymore but way more passionate.

"As you wish, then" she said, a big smirk on her face as her hands roamed gently over your body, tracing figures as they traveled down your back fastly working on your clothes and moments later they laid messily across the floor.

You wanted to help her out, take her out of the long dress she that covered her body, clumsy hands wandered over her back searching for a way to free her body. Rey gave you a small laugh, you were sure she enjoyed the way you were looking so desperately for her.

The moment later the black dress fell to the ground gracefully pooling around her feet leaving her vulnerable and defenseless in front of you, you admired her slim figure covered only by a few pieces of cloth that you were already yearning to take off too.

She crawled on top of your and she gave you a glance full of love before her eyes scanned your exposed body her features filled with desire as she that only made your cheeks flushed red

“You're beautiful, Y/N” she murmured staring down at you before she captured your lips once again hungrily making small whimpers leave your lips.

“And so you are.” you mumbled between kissed,

“But I’m going to make you feel way more beautiful” she told you with a smirk darkened with lust she started to make her way down you body taking her time to leave little pink marks all over your body, from your neck to your breast where she sucked gently and careful on them making you gasp and moan before she keep her way to the middle of your body.

Her hot breath in the lower of your abs made you shiver as her hand went teasingly over your heated core massaging in circles carefully torturing. She stared at you as with such intensity that ignited every hidden passion in you as your chest rose and fell each time faster.

“Rey!” you breathed out as your hips bucked up urging for her touch.

Skilled fingers moved gently in you already heated core as she traced delicate figures in an intoxicating rhythm that poisoned your body with a new wave of pleasure with each stroke and every caress and eventually turned you into a whining mess. She kept you steady into the mattress, hearts thundering, breathe quickening a your combined moans and groans filled the big room completely with the sounds of the lover’s ballad.

A few weeks, even a few days ago the simple idea of this would have seen rather crazy for you, blinded for your pain and fear you wanted to be as far from this woman as possible but now you yearned to feel her closer. Now things had changed, after she opened up with you you couldn’t see her as an enemy but as the woman you once fell in love with. This girl who were taking you closer and closer to your high. Having her between your thighs was the most beautiful image you’ve ever seen and it pleased your senses more than you've ever felt before.

Your high took the breath from your lungs, you could hear yourself calling out her name as your fingers grasp into her hair as the waves of pleasures spreaded all over your body in an euphoric moment.

Slowly she kissed her way up your still shaking body taking care of the sensitive spots on your thighs, your belly and your neck until she finally met your lips again and let you taste yourself before she smiled down at you, with her messy hair and panting on top of you as she admired you with such tenderness in her eyes that made you fall once again for her.

****

Calmed down and with your heartbeat and breath finally coming back down to normal, you laid just a little later huddled up to Rey’s side beneath the dark blankets, you looked at her with a content smile as you softly ran your hand through her soft hair.

"Y/N" she muttered.

"Mm?" You hummed.

"I know this isn't enough and it may mean nothing but… I'm sorry, really" she said looking uneasily at you.

"About…"

"Everything" she cut you off "all the terrible things I've done to you, I'm sorry." She murmured.

She was right, apologizing wouldn't solve anything, nor bring back all those people back to life. The things she did you knew you could never forget or at least it would take time. But it was a start.

You gave her a tiny nod accepting her words.

"The other day in the battlefield I made you a promise, Y/N" she muttered laying a hand on your cheek.

"Yeah, I remember" you told her and you did remember the day she saved you from those troopers.

"I mean it" she said caressing your face "I won't let anyone hurt you again." She told you sincerely. For a moment you just stared at her as a warm sensation grew in your chest. You closed the distance between you to pull her into a sweet delicate kiss before you shifted a little closer to her feeling how your tired body started to melt in her arms and soon you were asleep.

Tagging: @cpt-bolter , @elvencantation , @jay-birf03 , @x-a-gay-disaster-x , @redleysjazz , @hstoria , @iamafangirl-fightme , @leilei-draws , @hayley-the-comet , @snoot-snoot-toot , @1-800-depressedlesbian , @empresspalpatinee , @xgaygremlinx

(In case you want to be tagged for specific things or everything I write, just let me know)

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loveafterthefact · 4 years ago

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Love After the Fact Chapter 22: Convergence

Adam is sent to Daibazaal to research and eavesdrop. He totally does those things.

First Previous Next

Adam sits in a Daibazaani medical library, digging through records and case studies, nutritional guides and texts on growth spurts, season, and prenatal care. It’s tedious work, and most of it is only applicable to your average Galra, not one with a growing disorder. He'll gather data on what he can, and use it to make inferences in regards to what he can't.

He hasn't heard a single word. Not a whisper. Whatever rumors Lanval spoke of, they're either not here, or someone has gone to great lengths to make sure he doesn't hear about it. Figures. It's probably just some nonsense a few courtiers made up to entertain themselves. What a waste of time.

“I was told you were here.”

Adam looks up, adjusting his reading glasses to better see- “Takashi? What are you doing here?”

The captain smiles, stepping into the room ears-first. “I’ve taken some leave. I’m just out of my season and need a few days to recover.”

“Your- Oh, yes, of course. I forgot. You’re like Keith.”

“Yes. So what brings you to Daibazaal? Please, I’m so bored.”

Adam looks Shiro up and down. He seems quite tired, thinner than he remembers. Instead of leaning in the doorway of the reading room, he’s now leaning against the desk. “It seems boredom might be a good idea, given how you’re unwilling to stand for any length of time.”

“Season is… exhausting.”

A thought occurs to Adam, staring at Shiro. He sits back. “Tell me more. Lance sent me here in person to research such things, so a first-hand account could be invaluable.”

"I suppose. Why in person?"

"He wants me to keep my ears to the walls, listen for signs of unrest. That's all I'll say on the matter."

“Understandable. Well, it’s one of those things people don’t talk about…” Shiro’s smile widens. “But I don’t think it would do any harm. When you’re in season, you’re in this sort of haze. Time holds little meaning and your thoughts aren’t coherent. It can feel like it’s been days when it’s been minutes and minutes when it’s been days. You’re uncomfortable, like a fever but without the temperature. You forget to eat and drink, except for moments of extreme thirst. You’re ah, you’re wet, between your legs and you ache there. You can divine the rest of that.”

“So you what, lie in a daze and wait for a pack of other Galra to come ravage you?” Adam raises an eyebrow, frowning at the Galra.

Shiro laughs, displaying sharp teeth. “No, nothing like that. My gods, you Alteans really do think us animals, don’t you? Well, I wait for that, yes. But to say every sire within a certain radius is fighting for a chance to put a kit in me is absurd!

Our species mates for life, and we only ever have one mate. It’s an incredibly powerful bond, not something to be trivialized. You don’t choose someone at random. First mating while one of you is in season forges the strongest bond possible, but even then, it’s something decided beforehand, when actual consent can be given. When you do have a mate, they’re there to care for you, ensure you do not suffer too harshly. Everything else is meant to come second. ”

Adam stares, sighs. “Well, that was far more useful than everything I have read in the last six vargas. You have my thanks.”

Shiro simply smiles, one ear twitching as Adam types furiously on his datapad. “You really are a strange one. Not like the rest of your species.”

“No, I am not. My people are a foppish, silly gaggle of overgrown children who know little of the harshness this universe has to offer. Those who do are soldiers, and they have seen things they do not wish to speak of.”

“Alteans have never experienced invasion. They have the luxury of feeling safe in their homes.”

“A luxury indeed,” Adam murmurs. Silence stretches on for some time before Shiro speaks again.

“I think it’s high time you see something of Daibazaal's beauty, as opposed to our launchpad and the library.” Shiro stands, offers the slender Altean his arm.

Adam stares at it. “Where will we go?”

“Out of the city. Something… exceptionally rare is about to happen. I’d like for you to witness it with me. Besides, I could use the fresh air.”

“Seems to me what you could really use is a big meal and a good sleep.” Adam looks Shiro up and down, hazel eyes registering… hope. Shiro’s hopeful. He very much wants Adam to come with him. It’s enough to make him blush. He’s not used to this. “V- Very well.”

Adam cautiously takes the Galra captain’s arm. Shiro grins, visibly delighted.

They walk through darkened streets, the citizens still out of their dens, loose clothing drifting on a light breeze as they let pets out, fetch water, watch their children chase some kind of luminescent, flying reptile. It’s quiet, getting quieter by the minute. There’s a certain anticipation humming in the air.

The people watch as they pass by, glances giving way to stares as a well-dressed Altean walks by with a large Galra clearly fresh out of season. Adam ignores their gazes, looks straight ahead. The farther they go, the more red structures give way to red earth and scraggly plants. There is beauty here, Adam believes, if only his people could learn to appreciate something different. Perhaps it’s beautiful because it’s different.

“How has my… ‘brother’ -I think that’s the word- been these last few phoebs? He’s written to me, but it’s difficult to tell if he’s lying in writing.”

“He’s adjusting well. He’s begun training select men in combat on Alfor's orders. He threw a man across the room for disrespecting him. Lance particularly enjoyed it… Lance is the one beginning to struggle, I think."

“How so?”

“He’s essentially raising his spouse. It makes him uncomfortable. He said the other day it almost feels like he’s grooming him or manipulating him.”

Shiro throws his head back with a laugh. “Well you can tell your prince that there’s not a person alive that can groom or manipulate my brother into anything. He’s a stubborn little brat that does exactly what he wants. He follows orders because he chooses to. If he disagrees, he doesn't follow.”

“Sounds like he does what he wants either way.” Adam finds himself smiling at the humor, the fondness in Shiro’s voice as he talks about the youth he calls his brother.

“Exactly.” Shiro’s smile turns sly as they pass the last of the dens. “You know… there’s really only one reason I can think of that Lance would worry about such a thing.”

“And what reason is that?”

“They’re growing close.”

“They are, though independently from one another. Both are laboring under the delusion that they’re the only one developing feelings. Which begs the question: How can two strikingly intelligent, beautiful people be so singularly stupid?”

“A question for the moons. Speaking of which, we’re here. Sort of.”

In front of them is a rickety-looking bridge, wood and vines strung together, ends wrapped and woven around a pair of boulders on either side. They’re standing on the edge of a massive chasm. Leaning over, Adam can see water far, far below. “Hypothetical question: If I were to be thrown off this bridge, would I survive?”

“No. But don't worry. I won't let that happen. Now come on. You're about to see something incredibly rare and unbelievably beautiful.” Shiro somehow manages to slip Adam’s hand down to his own, guiding him onto the bridge. Adam hesitates, though he’s not sure if it’s due to the warm hand fully encompassing his or to the terrifying drop below. “You’re safe, Adam. I promise.”

Adam meets Shiro’s gray eyes, sees a smile there, takes a deep breath, takes a step. The bridge creaks beneath his feet, but he barely notices, following those ears that are always following him. Once they reach the middle of the bridge, Shiro does something almost as horrifying as being thrown off the bridge: he sits, tugs Adam down beside him.

Shiro sighs, swings his legs back and forth over the edge. He’s gazing straight ahead, fur glistening in pale moonlight. Adam follows his gaze, eyes growing wide. Two moons, enormous and full, hover over the canyon, nestled perfectly between its walls. As they watch, the silver moon begins to cover the golden one.

“Wow.”

“Tonight is a complete superimposition. Thanks to actual mass and some weird science stuff involving magnetic somethings and polarity and other stuff I don’t understand, we’re fortunate that our little system is stable with moons this size. And that superimposition won’t destroy us all. Instead it’s just… remarkably beautiful.”

Adam watches, sitting silent, the drop below forgotten as the two moons find the same center, blindingly bright, outshining the stars. Subconsciously, he leans perhaps a spot to the left, head and shoulder resting against Shiro’s side. He's not sure if he wants to keep his eyes open and watch or close them and savor the moment.

“Better than your research?” Shiro murmurs.

“Much better. Although if anyone asks, I never left the library.”

“Of course not. You only care about your work... Thank you for joining me.”

Adam hums, eyes half-closed as the moons gently slide past one another, quiet and discreet, rising high into the sky. It's a fleetingly short display, like an eclipse. He has no more reason to stay here, now that the show is over, but he finds himself unwilling to move, soaking up the warmth of Shiro’s body as more and more warmth leeches from the seemingly arid planet.

“We should get back before we freeze. It’s only gonna get colder.”

Adam sighs, nods, sits up so Shiro can stand. The moment is well and truly over, and worldly concerns -like hypothermia- have returned. Yet something lingers, hovering between them like warmth as they return to their realities.

It lingers as Adam returns tirelessly to his research, as Shiro brings him something to eat. When Adam finally surrenders to his burning eyes and aching head, he realizes that Shiro never left. He’s still there, asleep with his head on the desk.

For the first time in his life, Adam’s not sure what to do. So he leaves a note, steals some tablets, goes home. Wheeling his craft around for one last glance, he gets a ping on his comms device.

See you soon?

-Takashi

Adam bites his lip. He knows far better than this. Nobility though he may be, he's the crown prince's attendant. It's not his place to go fooling around with captains. And yet...

Hopefully

-Adam

The sad part is, Adam really is hopeful. This is going to be a major pain in his ass.

#LoveAftertheFact #LAtF #klance #galtean au #altean lance #galra keith #adashi #altean adam #galra shiro #voltron legendary defender #vld

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