#i think the solution probably lies in having other characters bring out different facets of them

[gratuiciel]

thinking about this side of hanma hurts so much tbh, this is probably the first time in his life he would have regrets and grieve someone (what if he's already had people close to him die but felt next to nothing (or maybe a vague sense of relief) because they were all objectively terrible/abusive to him? and so he was convinced that ppl dying was no big deal at all to him, and even enjoyed thinking this way bc not fearing for anyone's life = having no weakness that can be used against him). but then he loses kisaki and all of a sudden he's no longer the reaper of kabukicho who laughs in the face of death but a regular guy with (somewhat) regular emotions?? the fuck

and the way he easily said stuff like "i like you" (that word can also be read as love but iirc most translations ive seen have been playing it safe lol) or "life with you is like a circus" (= full of fun and amazing things) to kisaki but like, probably in a playful way (think brothel workers using sweet talk and compliments as a way to keep a client coming/make them attached even though they may not mean it) but thinking back on it, how sincere was he actually? did he catch feelings along the way? did he catch himself saying those words and actually mean it? aaaaa

bonten hanma where were u and what were u doing? how did mikey even agree to letting this guy in? was it because despite it all mikey still respected kisaki and took on the responsibility for everything he'd done? dude is so hard to figure out

time traveller hanma is so compelling tbh. could've been interesting to have two time leapers undoing each other's progress and fucking up the timelines even more. also rly funny to think that the one influencing every timeline the most is not even someone with super powers but just a tiny nerd with Big Dreams, and so whoever manages to influence him during his formative years gets to shape the future lmao (final timeline takemichi turning kisaki into a good guy™ and then in the future ceo!kisaki regularly donates thousands if not more to charity... that dude will Not half-ass anything) i think that's one of the things i like the most about kisaki tbh, the fact that he has the capacity to do either tremendous good or tremendous harm depending on where he sets his sights

ooo hanma playing the long game and trying to get revenge against the ones who made his world dull again, i'd love to read that (but would he still keep his drive for revenge when he sees the way mikey already self-sabotages and will definitely kick the bucket soon anyway? would he start to feel something like compassion for him? also would sanzu even let him approach his king at all skfhd that guy went full guard dog in bonten)

@gratuiciel ur tags hurt me (and I love that) I'm fascinated with depressed era hanma, the fact that he relaxed thinking that Kisaki got away! Only to find his corpse on the road. Keeps thinking about what he could've done, if he had hold on to the bike better, if he had spent less time fighting with draken, and yeah always looking back at these six (6!) months of his life where everything was so colorful and he took it for granted. Maybe the first time in his life where he actually (somewhat) cared about another human being, only to have it ripped out from him.

I always wondered how he came to be in bonten, especially as he wasn't that useful anyway. We joke about Hanma being just some guy at the end of the manga but there was something to be done with him that just didn't happen and it makes me sad. So many fanart of him going back into the past and meeting little Kisaki... I want to develop that idea cuz I feel like he would try to shape into the boy he remembers but at the same time he would be scared to death of something happening to Kisaki. Plus, with the kid not being lonely to death I doubt he would develop that same passion for Hinata. But even if Hanmas not a time traveller, just the idea of him taking revenge on Takemichi and Mikey in Bonten is just, chef's kiss. Wanna write something about that (girl who has 1384949 wips)

[feynites]

I had a thought earlier and thought I'd shoot you an ask about it: Do you have any tips on getting better at world-building (I think you're great at it btw)? Also, have you always liked world-building, in itself? I find myself often using worlds other people create, because I'm not very good at creating/thinking of my own, and was wondering if that was lazy of me? Just was wondering what your opinion was, on all that! Just food for thought. c:

Thank you! I’m glad you think I’m good at it!

World-building is a very interesting subject, but it took me a while to even really appreciate what it was. I’ve also spent a lot of time in other people’s worlds and environments, that’s pretty common among fanfiction writers, but I wouldn’t consider it lazy. Not unless you think any fiction set in our world is also lazy. There will always be parts of a story that some people are better at or prefer to focus on, or still need to build up their skills at. It’s normal.

I think a few things are very key to good world-building, though. Or at least in my experience, it’s the stuff I’ve figured out that’s helped me the most.

1. Nothing is original. You might not be entirely sure of where an idea has come to you from, but at the end of the day, there are only so many facets to human existence out there. Our imaginations only carry us so far, and our ideas come from the people around us, and also from their ideas. Artists draw from the things they see and experience, and use references to make stuff more realistic. So do writers. Do not worry that your stuff is unoriginal. Doing your best to abandon that fear is one of the biggest favours you can do for yourself as a writer; there’s a difference between similar concepts and ideas, and plagiarism, and only plagiarism is really a problem.

2. Nothing is without real-world context. This is related to the above. The things you make are coming from somewhere, and that means that they will have implications and real-world parallels. It pays to stop and consider where you’re getting your ideas, and what those ideas are implying about the world around you, too. In order to write stories, you have to be willing to take the stuff of your daydreams, and hammer it out into a narrative. It’s like turning a hunk of rock into a gemstone. You have to cut pieces out, decide what to reshape, what to keep, and what to throw away. If you can’t attack your own presumptions about the real world, you’ll have a harder time shaping a consistent fictional one. But also, at the end of the day, a rough diamond and a faceted one are both still diamonds. People will often be able to tell where you’re pulling your ideas from, so what you say about certain subjects can still have an impact on real-world concepts, and on your readers.

3. Let your setting be bigger than you. When writing, it’s extremely easy to get caught up in your own ideals and frames of reference, and that can mean that you design a world that acts more like how you think it should, rather than how it would. Worlds are big, and to some extent you can mitigate this by being aware that there is more going on than what you’re describing - that your story’s perspective is limited to the characters and events in it, and that contradictory things or mysterious unknowns still linger in the wider scheme of the setting. Your characters shouldn’t know everything that you, the author, knows, and you, the author, shouldn’t know everything about the world, either. An exhaustive list of details can even work against you, because it makes it trickier to keep track of what all your characters do and don’t know as well.

4. Big events are great, but cause and effect is better. When you look at history, you can see the way certain figures and events impacted one another, and connected together to get people to their ends or beginnings. A common mistake in world building is to take the big events - wars, coronations, the fall of empires, the rise of them, etc, etc - and just throw them into the setting without much thought for how they all interact with one another. But it’s like… if you have a nation that’s got a standing army, that’s expensive. Most nations have very small armies of professional soldiers, and instead tend to temporarily conscript people to bulk up their armies in times of crisis, because someone who is busy training and fighting isn’t doing other vital work, like raising livestock or farming crops or building homes, making babies, running households, etc, etc. But they still need to be fed and clothed and offered some kind of shelter from the elements, provided with equipment and a certain degree of entertainment, and things like that. Professional soldiers can spend their time focusing on being the best fighters they can be, so there’s an advantage to it, but you also need to justify having them around, especially if the rest of your country is having to work overtime to keep them fed. So a nation with a big standing army is going to be a nation that finds a lot of reasons to go to war - war lets you bring home spoils, lets you raid someone else’s farms to feed your soldiers, and expand your territory, and tax or enslave conquered peoples, and so on and so forth. You can start your world-building at the point of ‘I want this nation to have a big army’, or you can start it at the point of ‘I want this nation to be war-like’, or somewhere else on the chain of events - but certain things will also imply certain other things. It’s best to be aware of what those elements are when you’re laying out your setting. If you make a nation with a big army that is ‘peaceful’, you either need to explain how that works, or else people will probably think that the reputation is inaccurate (and that’s fine, too, as along as you’re willing to create a nation with one hell of a propaganda machine instead). But if you have a warlike nation, then there will also be other nations that have taken the brunt of its actions and conquests. So you will do better to let a few key traits expand into their implications, than to try and railroad everything into a framework that doesn’t flow naturally from those things. Because if you have your big nation with its standing army and militant inclinations, every other part of the world is probably going to be impacted by its quest for expansion, and if they aren’t, you need to be thinking about why, or else the pieces of your setting won’t fit together very well.

5. Avoid the Golden Mean Fallacy. The Golden Mean Fallacy, also known as the ‘argument to moderation’, is the idea that the perfect solution to any problem lies in compromise. But thereare some situations where saying ‘both sides are in the wrong’ requires a lotof false equivalents or narrative contrivances, even though people often tend to think that this is the most reasonable or neutral stance to take as the sort of arbitrator of the setting. Approaching societal conflicts in your world-building withthe idea that compromise is an ideal solution can actually be really offensive, though, and less ‘neutral’ than beneficial to aggressive qualities in the setting.For example, if one group is trying to commit genocide against another, looking at it and going ‘okay you guys want to live, but these other guys want to killyou, so I think the solution here is to just let them eradicate your culture –that’s really what they’re objecting to, anyway, and then you get to live andthey still get to destroy you, everybody wins!’ is not something you want to present as a fair solution. Sometimes people are just plainly in the wrong. That said…

6. Nevermake any culture/race/ethnicity/etc ‘evil’ in your stories. Doesn’t matter ifit’s orcs, robots, aliens, faeries, or what-have-you. The ‘savage tribe ofmonster people’ or Always Chaotic Evil Race™ is a bad trope and it needs to godie in a fire. If you want an ‘evil group’, you will do far better to alignpeople based on something like ideology or political corruption than race, geography, or traits theyare born with. There are other tropes along these lines that should be avoided, too, in fact there are more of them than I could successfully list in a timely fashion. As a general rule, though, if taking your world-building principles and applying them to real-life groups would result in an appalling statement, you should either change it, or else work it in as a form of propaganda and prejudice which you’re well aware of. That’s the difference between something like ‘mages are the most dangerous people in Thedas’ versus ‘the Templars believe that mages are the most dangerous people in Thedas’. One is you, the writer, making a blanket statement that some groups of people are just born dangerous, whereas the other is you, the writer, creating a scenario where prejudice exists in the setting.

7. Taking something out is often harder than adding something in. For example, building a setting without something like sexism or racism is usually much more complex than building a setting with something like magic or dragons or something. Fantastical elements are flexible, and you can shift the rules of them around to suit your needs without too many people crying foul. Whereas something like sexism is built into a lot of aspects of our society, and sinks into things that many people don’t even think twice about. Trying to create a fictional world where there is no sexism or history of it is, therefore, very hard, because you have to learn as much as you can about the ways in which this prejudice impacts our society and our presumptions, and then try and extrapolate how that would change everyone’s behaviour in a different world. And what you don’t change will immediately tilt your setting towards being the kind of place where biased presumptions are true facts of nature, rather than being a place where bad attitudes merely exist among the people and cultures there. This applies to basically everything, by the way, although it’s usually the most glaring when someone decides that they don’t want to deal with X kind of bigotry, and think that just going ‘it doesn’t exist in this world’ is the simple way out. (It’s not, the simple way out is to go ‘it exists in this world just the same way it does in ours, but I’m not focusing on it’.)

8. Keeping track of things is more important than knowing them off the bat. Everybody knows you’re making stuff up. That’s what they came to this party for. Inconsistencies can happen, but it’s also entirely possible to get so caught up in the planning stage that you never actually do any writing. So a good compromise between spontaneous invention and consistency is to just note the things you add in when you add them in, and then figure out how they might impact the other elements in your story, and set aside potential consequences in case they’re interesting or useful later on. Editing is your friend, and ‘I don’t know, let’s think about it until I do’ is also a vital element to incorporate into your thinking.

9. Be aware that you can mess up, and probably will. In order for any story to be inclusive of a wide enough range of people and cultures to make a whole world, it’s going to require you stepping outside of your own experience, or incorporating stuff that you have only a limited amount of knowledge on. You may very well fuck this up. This doesn’t mean the attempt was doomed, and it doesn’t mean you’re bad at world-building, and it also doesn’t mean that you have to defend your mistake in order to keep your setting from being deemed a worthless heap of junk. Your honour doesn’t ride upon whether or not you can make a convincing argument as to why your intentions outweigh the unintended implications of your actions. If someone points out a mistake, you should think about the ways you can go about handling it and/or fixing it. Maybe you just suddenly made your virtuous heroic group a lot more shady than you thought. Maybe you have to abandon a plot twist you were originally angling for. Maybe you have to make your narrator a lot more unreliable than you initially planned. There are solutions, and most importantly, you gotta listen to the people in the real world whose cultures or traits you borrowed from for your story. Just like when you borrow anything. If it’s not yours, you need to respect that and be mindful of how you use it.

10. Have fun. When you make a new world, there should be things in it that you love. That speak to your delight and sense of wonder. These are the things that often help the most when you’re deciding what to actually make in your world. You want unicorns? Put in unicorns. You want talking dragons? Put in talking dragons. Just think about how they would work, and how people would react to them, and how having them around might change the way the world operates. A lot of stuff will build naturally out of that.

I hope some of this helps!

[smokeybrandcompositions]

Blackjack

I’m blacker than the ace of spades, man. I love our skin tone. I love our swag. I love everything about being black, culturally. We are the most influential and imitated culture, worldwide, and at the same time, the most aggressively hated. When i was in high school, i asked a bigot who was a huge fan of Busta Rhymes how he could be such a hypocrite and he told me, i sh*t you not, “Love the sinner not the sin.” Being black was a sin to this motherf*cker but, since he liked our music, he compartmentalized our identity into something more palatable to his ignorant senses. He separated Busta’s art from Busta, himself, which i can’t even understand. Beethoven was black. You’re telling me his Fifth is any less a triumph of sound because of his moorish beginnings? I find it odd how people can just write off your ethnic identity when you don’t fit into the box they want.

My dad was one of the blackest motherf*ckers i have ever met but what does that mean? Yes, he was loud. Yes, he was intimidating. Yes, he was a petty criminal and drug addict. But he was more than that. He was also a brilliant mechanic and gifted athlete. He was amazing when it came to problem solving and often weeded out solutions most people couldn’t even see. Pops grew up in a single-parent home, in the ghettos of San Francisco during the 60s and 70s. He was a goon, that caricature you see in old black gangster movies like Juice. My dad was a ghetto stereotype and the polar opposite of my mother. My mom grew up in a two parent, upper-middle class, household as a kid. She didn’t see the world the same way my father saw it. She acquired a completely different set of skills, skills so alien to him, personally, he simply couldn’t reconcile my mother to his cultural experiences. To him, my mom was one of the “whitest” black people he had ever met.

Therein lies the question; What does it mean to be black? My father equated blackness to the ghetto gangster archetype popularized by rap music and what not, but my mother disagreed. She felt that blackness was more than that. She understood there were more facets, nuance, to the identity of our people. In the macro sense, i agree with that. We are man. We can be more. But, ultimately, even among ourselves, we make these superficial judgments over stupid sh*t all the time. I don’t think my mom is “white”. I think she’s naive. I think my pops thought that, too, but he couldn’t articulate it as eloquently. I think my dad was too stubborn or afraid to broaden his perspective about our culture, probably stemming from the trauma of losing his father at such a young age. My Grandpa died when my dad was five or six. Grandpap was a gangster. He was a pimp. He was a low level criminal, everything my father equated to “blackness.” I think he held on to that image as a means to hold on to his father and it became his overall worldview. When my father died, my sister kind of did the same thing. I didn’t because f*ck that guy. My dad and i hated each other. We were very clear on that.

Speaking of Me, i am blacker than the ace of spades. I mentioned that earlier. I, too, and this is probably because i am my father’s son in SO many uncomfortable ways, am very intimidating. I am wildly athletic, particularly in American football. I love hoop and Rap music, i hate cops and authority, and i have a healthy, organic, lust for big butts. I cannot lie. I grew up in the ghetto and, when need be, can become extremely, cartoonishly, hood. I have an unassailable pride in exactly who the f*ck i am and very aggressively protect myself from others less-than-sterling opinions of themselves. Now, all of that said, i hate fried foods, i f*cking love math and physics, i don’t care for watermelon, I'm not really a Democrat, and i don’t lust after white women. The love of my life, who we’ll get too in a minute, is Black, Mexican, French, and Native. I am stunningly intelligent and tend to live inside my head because most people are exhausting to me. The last time i was tested, i had an IQ of 154. Being smarter than most people you meat, just loving the process of learning in general, is something that is shunned with in the discussion of “being black.” If you’ve followed me for some time, or just give a cursory look at this blog, you can probably tell i am total and complete weeb. My Geek Card is punched and official. I play the sh*t out of video games and have since i was a Wee Smokey. Actually, I've been all of these things since i was extremely young. It’s funny because my two favorite genres of games to play are JRPG and f*cking NBA 2K. That little tidbit is a microcosm of who i am.

When i was in high school, i was considered hood as f*ck. I fought everyone i could, conditioned with the football team, skipped class at every opportunity, and dated a Brazilian chick for two years. That was the outward Me, the Me people assume i am. I cannot deny that version, that perception, is a part of who i am but i am so much more than that. The thing is, i skipped class to get home in time and watch Transformers: Robots in Disguise. My lady at the time and i met because of the poetry i had written in my spare time. Yes, i used to write poems. I was published a few times actually. She and i bonded over our mutual love for The Red Hot Chili Peppers and No Doubt. Bro, The Killers are my all-time favorite band. Mr. Brightside and Read My Mind are classics i know by heart. I conditioned with the football team but i only ever played my Freshman year. I don;t care for the sport at all. On the surface, the superficial, public perception of who i am, makes me as black as night. But who i am, totally, one could make the argument i am nowhere near negro. I find that contradiction fascinating.

As i stated above, my lady is a cadre of cultures but the two that stand out most are her Mexican and Black roots. Cats can mistake her for either but she usually gets Black. Like my mother and father before me, my lady and i grew up on the extreme opposite ends of the scale. I was a Dirty Ghetto Kid and she grew up rich. Yeah, i landed me a rich girl, what of it? I went to a school that had metal detectors at every entrance and she went to f*cking finishing school. I had no idea there were so many forks until i met her. I turned sixteen with no jail time, beating several not-so-flattering statistics. She had a Quinceanera and attended debutante balls. My lady, of course, had her own issues, things i have no way of properly understanding outside of a theoretical assumption. For all intents and purposes, because of her upbringing, because of the way she carries herself, she’d be considered “white.” The thing is, she can give MY hood a run for it’s money but the way she portrays that side of her, is way more palatable than how i do it. If I'm a blunt object, she’s a precision edge.

She didn’t grow up in an environment where masculinity was paramount and you absolutely had to destroy a motherf*cker if they pressed your manhood. She never had to interact with the streets so the street code was academic to her. She didn’t approach problem solving with physical intimidation and aggressive threats like i learned. I literally got my license after failing the driver’s test for a rolling stop, by punking out my instructor into signing my forms. That sh*t works for me. My lady is five-foot-nothing. She ain’t intimidating anyone. Her solution to this solution problem was to outsmart everyone. She is one of the quickest, most intellectually agile, people i have ever met. She can debate anything until they are literally, physically, exhausted. Our first real conversation was an argument over who the better character in DBZ, Vegeta or Gohan. I had to concede to her. I lost that debate. Me. That NEVER happens. I don’t lose arguments. I immediately fell in love. I’ve watched my lady bring grown men to tears after verbally undressing them. She’s that intense and i just kind of fanboy when she does it. But, according to the Laws of Blackness, that’s not how you do things. You gotta get in there and posture as hard as f*ck until you come to blows. Like Walruses.

There is no satisfactory way to conclude this exploratory essay into what defines blackness. There cant be. Being black is as fluid as the ocean and just as deep. My little sister is Desi, smart as a whip, and pulls in six figures a year. She has two degrees and is in school for a third in math just because she enjoys the process of learning, like me. She’s incredibly shy. bordering on agoraphobic, but let a motherf*cker test me or anyone she loves. She because the blackest motherf*cker i have ever seen since my pops and it’s adorable. She’s not even anywhere near black. Not a drop of the Afros in her lineage. Does that mean “being Black” is simply a state of mind? Is it just a catch-all standard of media perpetuated stereotypes? Does any of this sh*t even matter? No. No it doesn’t. Look, i got two kid brothers that i raised because my parents weren’t real good at parenting. One has grown up to be an Uncle Tom with next to no self worth. The other is a nomadic, pot-smoking, emo Skaterboi. Both of them will mash you if pressed. Both of them can recite Pi to the thirteenth number. Both of them love hoop and hate cops, just like me. Both of them game hard, the Hippie Skaterboi is actually a pro LoL player, and they both love anime. Most of that is my influence on their world but does that disqualify their blackness? Does my Weeby Nerdom which rubbed off during their development, make them any less black? No! F*cking no, of course not! This sh*t is stupid and I'm tired of talking about it.

There is no such thing as “being a bad black person” or “being a white black person.” That sh*t is dumb. Black folks are black. We define ourselves. Sure, a real good indicator is our skin tone and the way society treats us but, underneath that surface bullsh*t, we are so much more. I love Spider-Man, Godzilla, and Transformers. I love Rap, Nuwave, hip-hop, Grand Ol’ Oprey, classical orchestra, Post Punk, ska, retro wave, and so many more music genres. I am an NBA historian but know next to nothing about the NFL. I just don’t care. I’m a massive fan of Cyberpunk claims but absolutely hate anything Tyler Perry or budget Black cinema. Neon Genesis Evangelion is my all-time favorite anime and Hannibal is arguably the greatest show to ever air on US televisions. Star Wars hold a special place in my heart, along with Doctor Who, Batman, Dragon Ball Z, and Luther. I grew up in the ghetto, lived in the rich suburbs, and stay downtown. My first car was a 65 Mustang Coupe, then a Ford Probe, followed by 91 Accord. I've driven a 350Z since 2014. I held a nine to five job for probably a decade but now write professionally. I am l of this but, before any of that, i am blacker than the ace of spades.

[smokeybrand]

Blackjack

I’m blacker than the ace of spades, man. I love our skin tone. I love our swag. I love everything about being black, culturally. We are the most influential and imitated culture, worldwide, and at the same time, the most aggressively hated. When i was in high school, i asked a bigot who was a huge fan of Busta Rhymes how he could be such a hypocrite and he told me, i sh*t you not, “Love the sinner not the sin.” Being black was a sin to this motherf*cker but, since he liked our music, he compartmentalized our identity into something more palatable to his ignorant senses. He separated Busta’s art from Busta, himself, which i can’t even understand. Beethoven was black. You’re telling me his Fifth is any less a triumph of sound because of his moorish beginnings? I find it odd how people can just write off your ethnic identity when you don’t fit into the box they want.

My dad was one of the blackest motherf*ckers i have ever met but what does that mean? Yes, he was loud. Yes, he was intimidating. Yes, he was a petty criminal and drug addict. But he was more than that. He was also a brilliant mechanic and gifted athlete. He was amazing when it came to problem solving and often weeded out solutions most people couldn’t even see. Pops grew up in a single-parent home, in the ghettos of San Francisco during the 60s and 70s. He was a goon, that caricature you see in old black gangster movies like Juice. My dad was a ghetto stereotype and the polar opposite of my mother. My mom grew up in a two parent, upper-middle class, household as a kid. She didn’t see the world the same way my father saw it. She acquired a completely different set of skills, skills so alien to him, personally, he simply couldn’t reconcile my mother to his cultural experiences. To him, my mom was one of the “whitest” black people he had ever met.

Therein lies the question; What does it mean to be black? My father equated blackness to the ghetto gangster archetype popularized by rap music and what not, but my mother disagreed. She felt that blackness was more than that. She understood there were more facets, nuance, to the identity of our people. In the macro sense, i agree with that. We are man. We can be more. But, ultimately, even among ourselves, we make these superficial judgments over stupid sh*t all the time. I don’t think my mom is “white”. I think she’s naive. I think my pops thought that, too, but he couldn’t articulate it as eloquently. I think my dad was too stubborn or afraid to broaden his perspective about our culture, probably stemming from the trauma of losing his father at such a young age. My Grandpa died when my dad was five or six. Grandpap was a gangster. He was a pimp. He was a low level criminal, everything my father equated to “blackness.” I think he held on to that image as a means to hold on to his father and it became his overall worldview. When my father died, my sister kind of did the same thing. I didn’t because f*ck that guy. My dad and i hated each other. We were very clear on that.

Speaking of Me, i am blacker than the ace of spades. I mentioned that earlier. I, too, and this is probably because i am my father’s son in SO many uncomfortable ways, am very intimidating. I am wildly athletic, particularly in American football. I love hoop and Rap music, i hate cops and authority, and i have a healthy, organic, lust for big butts. I cannot lie. I grew up in the ghetto and, when need be, can become extremely, cartoonishly, hood. I have an unassailable pride in exactly who the f*ck i am and very aggressively protect myself from others less-than-sterling opinions of themselves. Now, all of that said, i hate fried foods, i f*cking love math and physics, i don’t care for watermelon, I'm not really a Democrat, and i don’t lust after white women. The love of my life, who we’ll get too in a minute, is Black, Mexican, French, and Native. I am stunningly intelligent and tend to live inside my head because most people are exhausting to me. The last time i was tested, i had an IQ of 154. Being smarter than most people you meat, just loving the process of learning in general, is something that is shunned with in the discussion of “being black.” If you’ve followed me for some time, or just give a cursory look at this blog, you can probably tell i am total and complete weeb. My Geek Card is punched and official. I play the sh*t out of video games and have since i was a Wee Smokey. Actually, I've been all of these things since i was extremely young. It’s funny because my two favorite genres of games to play are JRPG and f*cking NBA 2K. That little tidbit is a microcosm of who i am.

When i was in high school, i was considered hood as f*ck. I fought everyone i could, conditioned with the football team, skipped class at every opportunity, and dated a Brazilian chick for two years. That was the outward Me, the Me people assume i am. I cannot deny that version, that perception, is a part of who i am but i am so much more than that. The thing is, i skipped class to get home in time and watch Transformers: Robots in Disguise. My lady at the time and i met because of the poetry i had written in my spare time. Yes, i used to write poems. I was published a few times actually. She and i bonded over our mutual love for The Red Hot Chili Peppers and No Doubt. Bro, The Killers are my all-time favorite band. Mr. Brightside and Read My Mind are classics i know by heart. I conditioned with the football team but i only ever played my Freshman year. I don;t care for the sport at all. On the surface, the superficial, public perception of who i am, makes me as black as night. But who i am, totally, one could make the argument i am nowhere near negro. I find that contradiction fascinating.

As i stated above, my lady is a cadre of cultures but the two that stand out most are her Mexican and Black roots. Cats can mistake her for either but she usually gets Black. Like my mother and father before me, my lady and i grew up on the extreme opposite ends of the scale. I was a Dirty Ghetto Kid and she grew up rich. Yeah, i landed me a rich girl, what of it? I went to a school that had metal detectors at every entrance and she went to f*cking finishing school. I had no idea there were so many forks until i met her. I turned sixteen with no jail time, beating several not-so-flattering statistics. She had a Quinceanera and attended debutante balls. My lady, of course, had her own issues, things i have no way of properly understanding outside of a theoretical assumption. For all intents and purposes, because of her upbringing, because of the way she carries herself, she’d be considered “white.” The thing is, she can give MY hood a run for it’s money but the way she portrays that side of her, is way more palatable than how i do it. If I'm a blunt object, she’s a precision edge.

She didn’t grow up in an environment where masculinity was paramount and you absolutely had to destroy a motherf*cker if they pressed your manhood. She never had to interact with the streets so the street code was academic to her. She didn’t approach problem solving with physical intimidation and aggressive threats like i learned. I literally got my license after failing the driver’s test for a rolling stop, by punking out my instructor into signing my forms. That sh*t works for me. My lady is five-foot-nothing. She ain’t intimidating anyone. Her solution to this solution problem was to outsmart everyone. She is one of the quickest, most intellectually agile, people i have ever met. She can debate anything until they are literally, physically, exhausted. Our first real conversation was an argument over who the better character in DBZ, Vegeta or Gohan. I had to concede to her. I lost that debate. Me. That NEVER happens. I don’t lose arguments. I immediately fell in love. I’ve watched my lady bring grown men to tears after verbally undressing them. She’s that intense and i just kind of fanboy when she does it. But, according to the Laws of Blackness, that’s not how you do things. You gotta get in there and posture as hard as f*ck until you come to blows. Like Walruses.

There is no satisfactory way to conclude this exploratory essay into what defines blackness. There cant be. Being black is as fluid as the ocean and just as deep. My little sister is Desi, smart as a whip, and pulls in six figures a year. She has two degrees and is in school for a third in math just because she enjoys the process of learning, like me. She’s incredibly shy. bordering on agoraphobic, but let a motherf*cker test me or anyone she loves. She because the blackest motherf*cker i have ever seen since my pops and it’s adorable. She’s not even anywhere near black. Not a drop of the Afros in her lineage. Does that mean “being Black” is simply a state of mind? Is it just a catch-all standard of media perpetuated stereotypes? Does any of this sh*t even matter? No. No it doesn’t. Look, i got two kid brothers that i raised because my parents weren’t real good at parenting. One has grown up to be an Uncle Tom with next to no self worth. The other is a nomadic, pot-smoking, emo Skaterboi. Both of them will mash you if pressed. Both of them can recite Pi to the thirteenth number. Both of them love hoop and hate cops, just like me. Both of them game hard, the Hippie Skaterboi is actually a pro LoL player, and they both love anime. Most of that is my influence on their world but does that disqualify their blackness? Does my Weeby Nerdom which rubbed off during their development, make them any less black? No! F*cking no, of course not! This sh*t is stupid and I'm tired of talking about it.

There is no such thing as “being a bad black person” or “being a white black person.” That sh*t is dumb. Black folks are black. We define ourselves. Sure, a real good indicator is our skin tone and the way society treats us but, underneath that surface bullsh*t, we are so much more. I love Spider-Man, Godzilla, and Transformers. I love Rap, Nuwave, hip-hop, Grand Ol’ Oprey, classical orchestra, Post Punk, ska, retro wave, and so many more music genres. I am an NBA historian but know next to nothing about the NFL. I just don’t care. I’m a massive fan of Cyberpunk claims but absolutely hate anything Tyler Perry or budget Black cinema. Neon Genesis Evangelion is my all-time favorite anime and Hannibal is arguably the greatest show to ever air on US televisions. Star Wars hold a special place in my heart, along with Doctor Who, Batman, Dragon Ball Z, and Luther. I grew up in the ghetto, lived in the rich suburbs, and stay downtown. My first car was a 65 Mustang Coupe, then a Ford Probe, followed by 91 Accord. I've driven a 350Z since 2014. I held a nine to five job for probably a decade but now write professionally. I am l of this but, before any of that, i am blacker than the ace of spades.

[entergamingxp]

Half-Life: Alyx review – a legend returns in elegant form • Eurogamer.net

The Strider is the greatest of all Half-Life’s creations, if you ask me. Sure, you could argue that it’s just another spin on HG Wells’ tripods, but seriously, look at the thing! Those legs, so horribly long and horribly jointed, that hideous hint of poultry flesh and machinery spliced together, all pain and wrongness. In Half-Life 2, I watched one of this awful lot stoop to duck under a bridge, and the thing about the Strider is that it never reminds you of just one thing, always a horrible bodging-together – almost a flamingo as its joints worked, yet almost grandparent nipping up into the attic for something heavy too. An internal life: that sense of self-preservation and cruel intelligence they have, of seeing only their own priorities. That sense of being autonomous in the moment, but also deeply mission-driven. They give me goose-bumps because it’s so entirely clear that they can probably get goose-bumps themselves.

Half-Life: Alyx review

Developer: Valve

Publisher: Valve

Platform: Reviewed on PC with Index

Availability: Out 23 March on PC

I had been waiting for this moment, then. Half-Life: Alyx, set five years before the events of Half-Life 2 and delivered sixteen years – is that possible? – since Half-Life 2 and thirteen years since Episode Two, the last installment. (How we had talked at the time about that gap between the first two Episodes. We had no idea.) Suddenly, City 17 lies before me once more. I am on a rooftop somewhere: Alyx Vance, 19-year-old daughter of Eli Vance, on reconnaissance for the resistance.

The metropolis is a mess of alien cables, black and heavy, draped thoughtlessly and sagging over honey-coloured European architecture with its weary finials and tiles and crenelations. It’s VR, so a moment or two to look at the creamy skybox dithering into distant mist, then another moment to delight in a nearby radio, fiercely analogue tech, that can be picked up and heaved around, the dials turning and moving a little marker along the display, an aerial that properly extends and everything.

Behind me, inside a little conservatory, there is a video call from Dad, and more importantly there’s a range of felt pens that have been used on the dirty glass to map Combine movements, but which can also be used to – what? – do anything really. Graffiti, Killroys, my daughter’s name in my own instantly recognisable handwriting, somehow captured inside a video game space. I’m on the move, so I heave back a hidden door and explore a few dingy Winston Smith bedsit rooms. Then out again onto a different ledge and, do tell me, what in the world is that sound?

That sound is a strider, horribly large and horribly close, heaving its carcass body up the side of a building, stepping where it wants because the crumbling world of human things is not really a concern for an alien invader. It stops. Has it seen me? I stare up – because it’s VR, I’m actually staring up – at this awful, wretched thing that I have always loved, and which is now here more fully than ever before, its knotty joints bolstered with servo-motors and shards of the Combine’s black-slate tech. It hasn’t seen me. It doesn’t care. It turns and unplugs a clump of cables from a nearby building – the human world is its junction box – and then it’s off into the distance. And yes! I had been waiting for this moment. And this moment did not let me down.

Not my only encounter with a strider in Half-Life: Alyx, but I’ll honestly try to spoil little more than that. What I should say is that for the last few days I have been a bit of a strider myself, strangely focused on a private agenda, strangely blind to the finer details of the human landscape around me, as I have navigated City 17 with a VR headset covering my eyes – two worlds, one laid over the other. All this, as I’ve taken on headcrabs and Combine troopers and all the rest, all this as I have puzzled and rewired and upgraded – while simultaneously bodging around my own PC set up by my desk. House cats and scarves dumped on the backs of chairs startled me when I brushed against them at the wrong moments – generally moments involving headcrabs. My daughter, moving a doll’s house behind me one afternoon, almost finished me off in a boss fight when we bumped together. “When you’re behind me, tell me you’re behind me!” I said. Five minutes later, when I was deep in the horror of the underground somewhere, she obliged, having snuck up close before announcing, “I’M BEHIND YOU, DADDY.”

In other words, Half-Life was always going to work in VR. But what’s fascinating is how it works. If you’re expecting an explosion of let’s-try-anthing creativity a la Boneworks, a game in which every conceivable kind of physics interaction is gleefully gimmicked together as you tumble through its wonderfully scrappy campaign, you’re going to be a bit disappointed. Half-Life would rather focus its ambitions – and in turn rein-in the scope of what you can do – than risk breaking the illusion or frustrating the player. Something is lost in that decision, certainly. It’s Alyx’s way or the highway. But a lot is gained too.

As a result, Alyx is marked by restraint. Which is to say, I think, that it understands that VR itself is still such a continuous gimmick for many people that it can play things straight, paring the Half-Life concept back closer than ever before. Yes, it has radios to play with and the inevitable VR piano to prod out a Goldberg Variation on, but it’s not one of those VR games that serves as the equivalent of those early 3D movies where people were forever throwing knives at the screen. Most of the time, it uses VR to steadily put you deeper and deeper into the fabric of this grimy, flaking Victory Gin world.

This is a simple story, direct yet consequential, studded with wonderful set-pieces, most of which are pitched towards a sort of sci-fi-tinged survival horror: you, a gun, ammo scavenging and them lurking all around as you slowly inch towards your next destination. VR is used to continue the Half-Life ambition, begun with that tram-ride back at Black Mesa and extended via the Gravity Gun and the magnifying glasses and the facial animation tech of Half-Life 2 to truly embed players in its reality. Cats, children, scarves and bookcases aren’t just victims of this approach. They feel like an important part of it.

The basics are straightforward. All I’m going to tell you of the plot is that you’re trying to meet up with your dad and figure out what big strange thing the Combine’s currently so excited about. Events zip along quite briskly and objectives are always clear. If there’s a problem, it’s that the game is hemmed in a little, in terms of narrative, because it so clearly has one specific job to do.

The controls are as clear-headed as the narrative. Playing room-scale or simply standing with a more confined space, you can choose one of four movement options, two of which work brilliantly as teleport jobs while the other two offer continuous movement guided by either the hand or the head and seemed to me pretty clumsy and nausea-inducing. Whatever movement you choose, one hand generally holds a weapon or gadget – switching them is as easy as pressing a button and waving your arm up and down – while the other is always free for interacting with the environment, opening doors, grabbing ammo clips from your backpack and ramming them home, priming grenades before lobbing them.

Both hands wear gravity-gloves, a cobbled-together precursor of the gravity gun. They’re beautiful things. Hold your hands up and it’s like some addled genius has built mittens for your out of diodes and Technical Lego, while little displays show you your health and ammo levels. These things are not for pulling sawblades out of walls and firing them into crowds of zombies, though. They’re precision affairs, a little flick of the wrist yanking a highlighted object out of the environment and bringing it into your hand with a neat little slap.

The gloves have been created by a new character, Russell, played by Rhys Darby, who despite being cast as a genius, stays wonderfully close to Murray, the dim and easily bruised band manager from Flight of the Conchords. Because Alyx also speaks – a performance from Ozioma Akhaga that is forever revealing different facets of personality, while being wonderfully alive to graveyard wit – the game is essentially a two-hander, Alyx out in the world while Russell monitors her progress from a distance, cowardly, prideful, tender and quirky by turns. I love this combination. Beyond anything else, following up the biggest video game in the world with a Rhys Darby simulator is a total power move.

The texture of the game these two travel through is relentlessly – and gloriously – practical, pragmatic and down-to-earth. This is a game about navigating space and killing everything you meet, but it’s all so carefully wrought. A nervous skittering on the soundtrack is ultimately the buzzing of an old fluorescent light tube. Puzzles are made of gravity, stacked boxes, and wood used to prop open windows. These challenges can be maddeningly clever, but Newton always keeps them honest at the same time. Elsewhere, a vaguely celestial sounding clue in the main plot turns out to have a very mundane solution, while car posters you pass on the remains of the subway show boxy Soviet saloons accompanied by ad-talk that’s even more oppressive than usual: Reality Defined. This is science-fiction with both feet on the ground.

This works because the interaction, enlivened by VR, is tangible and playful. It elevates everything, from wiring puzzles – a real theme of this game, using both a gadget that allows you to see electricity flowing through gates inside the walls, and a bit of good-old-fashioned cable-following – to hunting for ammo and other supplies, including the worm-eaten hockey pucks of grey stuff you use as currency in the machines that allow you to upgrade your weapons.

Weapons are real presences because of VR. It’s not just that you have to change clips and pull that slidey thing at the top of the pistol before you can shoot the zombie that’s already groaning towards you. It’s that they have a complex, weighty, rattly presence in your hand. You can sense these guns are each one thing made from many smaller things working together. Valve has always been good with this stuff, and the upgradable weapons of Alyx are very special. From that pistol and a shotgun to something a little more exotic, they’re filled with character and a sense of power, even before you start adding laser sites and bigger clips.

Gun management as well as gunplay, wiring puzzles as well as hacking challenges, traversal with physics hurdles so nicely weighted that you can predict the outcomes in your head: all of the various aspects of Alyx appear simple, but they all work together to bed you deeper and deeper into the game until you reach the point where, if you’re like me, you’re talking back to Russell out loud as you catch up after each fight.

Oh man, but never forget: at the very center of it is all is those incredible gloves. The gravity gun has always had a habit of working its ways into other games for me. Not directly, of course. It’s just that I’ll be playing Gears of War and I’ll see a grand piano or a panel truck and think: I wish I could just lob that somewhere. The gravity gloves have already gone beyond that. They have a habit of getting into my head. I’ll be lying on the sofa and thinking: I wish I could just flick that book from the other side of the room into my hand. At the front door I’ll wish I could turn around and grab my keys from the stairs. The things I could do with Jaffa Cakes, mate.

The gloves are a less ostentatious kind of magic than that offered in Half-Life 2 – again, you won’t be chucking a car at anyone with them – but in some ways they’re a more startling kind of magic. I was half an hour in and pausing mid-reload to pull an interesting bit of set design off a distant shelf and inspect it. The levels are filled with bits and pieces to pick up and examine: cutlery, pipes, video cassettes. Chuck in the reloading and this is stuff you can get good at – you can master it until you’re fighting through the apocalypse and foppishly checking out the detailing at the same time. Half-Life has always sought to startle, which is probably why the last instalment came out in 2007. The right material, the right opportunities, take time to present itself.

What detailing that lost decade or so has allowed for! This is a game that has been allowed to percolate. City 17, strangely noble in its ravaged state, a faded relic being steadily eaten by alien technology, is still one of the great locations in video games, even if you tend to just see bombed out apartment buildings, train yards and subway stations for a lot of the campaign. But the greatest details this time around are the Combine tech, which has never been so monolithically grim. Outside it’s grey sheeting and stark angles: designs that could give you a nasty cut. Inside, though, it’s often big chunks of offal instead of circuitry, as if Darth Vader had teamed up with Fergus Henderson, the man behind the nose-to-tail eating movement. Health stations, pretty much unchanged from the first game, are so much more visibly present in VR. You inspect the squealing white worm that is squished to make the lurid Mountain Dew healing substances, and then you have to pull down a plate and rest your hand on it, enjoying the dancing jabs of a dozen little syringes while you scan the surroundings for oncoming threats.

All of this stuff comes together with wonderful set-pieces. Due to the exhausting nature of VR combat, massive pile-ons like Nova Propsekt are out of the question, ditto the open-world ram-raiding of the White Forest. Instead, troops are dropped in surgically – their strangled tannoy barking giving you a moment to panic and hunt for ammo and hopefully come up with a plan. As for the bestiary there’s a shocking new enemy who I won’t spoil, but even the old guard return and bring a vivid kind of enhanced fear with them. I had dreaded VR headcrabs, and then the game not only introduces them but immediately loses the first one in some pipework. That was a nice two minutes. (I regret to inform you that there’s a new kind of headcrab now too, even if its design can’t quite match the queasy supermarket horror of the original.) Elsewhere it feels like a testament to the brilliance of the original creature design on this series that you feel dread rather than nostalgia whenever one of the classics turns up again. Or maybe it’s another sign of the sheer weight of immersion Alyx can conjure: there’s a real sense of apprehension when the game leads you out of the light and back underground for a spell. You live in these spaces while you move through them.

There are ingenious set-pieces, increasingly piling up towards the end of the campaign, but I’m so struck through by the sheer thrift of a lot of it. It’s that restraint again: make the VR work, get a handful of killer things out of it, and then repeat and remix without breaking the spell. There are Hollywood moments that will stick with me, but I also remember being in a room filled with oil drums while a tank of explosive gas was being winched up towards the mouth of one of those horrible limpet things that sit on the ceiling. That’s the kind of clock Valve likes to put in a scene to add suspense. Hitchcock would be proud: you can see all the moving parts and yet the magic is still there.

And the more I played of Alyx, the more I thought about how VR and Half-Life were made for each other. And the more this left me thinking about the G-Man, the shadowy figure in a suit who turns up at crucial moments throughout the series and does intriguing stuff. The G-Man is the focal point for a lot of lore conspiracies in Half-Life. Who is he? Is he human? Is he Gordon Freeman himself?

Let’s not worry whether he makes an appearance in Alyx or not. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Because throughout the course of this game, I think I worked out who he really is. He’s Valve. Think about it: inscrutable Valve, a company that seems to see further than most, that seems to have a separate agenda to that of most developers – and who, granted, doesn’t always seem to be entirely benevolent. The G-Man disappears for long periods of time, but then turns up just as events have caught up with his intentions. It’s his way or no way at all. He waits for the right pieces to appear, and then he makes the most of them with little apparent effort.

from EnterGamingXP https://entergamingxp.com/2020/03/half-life-alyx-review-a-legend-returns-in-elegant-form-%e2%80%a2-eurogamer-net/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=half-life-alyx-review-a-legend-returns-in-elegant-form-%25e2%2580%25a2-eurogamer-net