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lynxgriffin · 3 years ago

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DELTARUNE Chapter 2 Thoughts!!!

WOOO OKAY I stayed up WAY too late trying to finish Deltarune Chapter 2 last night!! It took me awhile because I suck at video games, but I finally did it!

While I normally type up commentary as I play first time, I didn’t get the chance to do that here, so I’ll get down all my general thoughts here!

Unspoilery thoughts: loved it, knew I would, will need to replay soon to see what all I missed, and am excited for whatever’s next!

SPOILERS FOR CHAPTER 2 under the cut!!

(These are just as I think of them, not in any particular order!)

Okay overall I can see why this took two years and a much larger team to complete, the second chapter is SO much more expansive and heavy on scene-specific animations! It all looks SO GOOD

I already love Susie but now I love her even more, her expressions were SO GOOD

Susie has a (little nubby) tail confirmed?? That’s adorable

Okay this game is definitely reading the chapter 1 data, which I find interesting because I didn’t obtain it through Steam last time

But like, I gave the “Susie eats chalk” response to Noelle last time, and in chapter two she gave Susie the box of chalk, so awwww!

Also I missed Onionsan in my initial computer playthrough, so they didn’t show up this time, just got a moment of Susie and Kris sitting by the river together!

I find it REALLY interesting that while Ralsei is a Darkner, apparently he can jump around to other Dark Worlds whereas other Darkners like Lancer and Rouxls can’t so much…hmmm!

It was so nice to see everyone filling out the town now, though!

Noooo Susie probably doesn’t have her own room at home, awwww

Kris just casually jumping up to the classroom and bringing everyone back tho, perfect

Was right on there being multiple dark worlds in other locations, but honestly that part’s the least surprising to me, that always seemed like a pretty standard path to take!

The werewires were creepy and great; difficult to battle tho

QUEEN IS MY NEW FAVORITE

EVERY LINE OF HERS WAS A+

I’m so glad that I didn’t really go anywhere with Jevil’s line about the Queen in PT; nothing I came up with could’ve topped Queen being an absolute acid trip of an antagonist in this chapter

NOELLE SO SWEET

Her lil’ robot disguise! Her being afraid of mice at first!

I kinda wish we could have had her in the party more? She was super useful as a party member, honestly!

But sadly I guess we’re not gonna get more than the three-person party, awww

B E R D L Y

I cannot believe Berdly basically became incel Falco but also had a sympathetic backstory

Like I laughed a lot at all of Berdly’s expressions and dialogue while also going BERDLY YOU ARE THE WORST

Noelle’s WHAT? WHAT? WHAT? WHAT? WHAT? WHAT? part = A+

I feel like Queen’s relationship with Noelle definitely had some uncomfy parallels with probably how she is dealing with her real mom

I AM NOT GOOD AT PUNCH-OUT AND THERE WAS A LOT OF THAT

I somehow missed the part where Susie is wearing Ralsei’s glasses??? Where is this

Also in general there was a LOT of puzzles and gameplay in the overworld map, which I was bad at but was also very cool

KRIS GET THE BANANA

The dolphin pop-up ads…

I DID NOT LIKE THE SPAMTON GUY

DISCOMFORT THE WHOLE TIME

Apparently he’s also the secret boss for this chapter?? That’s at least if the soundtrack is anything to go by. Maybe I’ll go back and try it on another playthrough, but aaaaagggghhhg

SO MANY GOOD SUSELLE MOMENTS

MY LIL SHIPPER HEART HAS A NICE SERVING AND WANTS MORE

The whole deal with the ferris wheel conversation and just awwwwuuuuuuh

Needs more Susiezilla now too (I picked the “something romantic” option because of course)

MORE PLZ, LET’S DIG DEEPER HERE

Also I cannot believe Susie has (at least) two people crushing on her and is just totally oblivious to it

There’s SO Many interesting HMM moments with Kris and that definitely included the entire acid tunnel of love scene with Kris and Ralsei

Interrupted of course by an appropriately silly Rouxls battle

But man the more we see (or often DON’T see) of Ralsei the more intriguing it gets

LET NOELLE RIDE IN THE TEACUP RIDE WITH SUSIE

I just knew going back to get that chest without Noelle would be something dumb

OKAY I ended up dying a lot to 1) the Mauswheel, and 2) the color-changing butlers?? So I ended up having to do the whole sequence with annoying dog blasting through everything in his path multiple times

I DID feel bad for Berdly during that boss battle where he was werewired; that was nice and body horror-ish

That said… “I NEED A KISS FROM A GAMER GIRL”

The giant mecha boss battle absolutely kicked my ass, though

Like it WAS badass but that took me a LOT of tries to get through

My thrash machine was very GUN’S

Overall the difficulty curve was definitely stepped up from chapter 1!

LOTS MORE DARK WORLD AND KNIGHT LORE FROM RALSEI HERE

And lots of talk about Noelle being pretty important to it, too!

I’m glad I got to bring Susie on the walkaround this time around town!

I AM GOING TO BE YOUR WACKY ROOMMATE NOW

King and Queen’s entire conversation was so hilarious

King just slides over to suck on that sweet, sweet giant hamster water bottle

BUNKER STILL BEIN SUSPICIOUS

Aww the pizzeria is not a creepy mascot Chuck-E-Cheese’s style, tho

Confirmation that Gerson was Alvin’s father! And I feel like there’s a lot we’re missing there, too

Still not allowed to see Papyrus…

Catti’s parents…

I wasn’t expecting this at all, but it feels like they may be introducing way more Lightners to the Dark World with each chapter, since both Noelle and Berdly ended up there?

And if that’s the case, I feel like it’s hinting that Catti and/or Jockington may be next

SUSIE STAYING AT KRIS’S PLACE FOR A SLEEPOVER WAS SO SWEET

IMMEDIATELY UNDERCUT BY KRIS GOING FERAL AGAIN

Like I dunno the whole scenario somehow managed to be both REALLY sinister and very funny at once??

Susie and Toriel are busy laughing and making a pie together, meanwhile Kris just sneaks the hell out and slashes Toriel’s tires because it’s KNIVES OUT TIME

Please let Susie watch more giant monster (and giant human) movies with her friends, she needs this

THAT SAID, THAT ENDING

HMM HMM HMMMMMMMMMM

SO THIS SEEMS TO BE INDICATING THAT KRIS IS THE KNIGHT

Which like…is in fact making SOME KIND OF SENSE in my head overall, but I definitely need more context to see how exactly

Like I’m all ��THIS FEELS RIGHT BUT I DON’T KNOW WHY, I NEED MOOOORE”

Considering Ralsei’s reaction to Noelle and Berdly trying to make a new fountain, this definitely seems to be setting up some kind of future confrontation between Kris and Ralsei, which! HMMMM

I THINK IT’S TIME FOR THIS GIF AGAIN

Basically I HAD A GRAND TIME, I NEED TO REPLAY, EXCITED FOR THE REST WHENEVER IT COMES

#deltarune #deltarune chapter 2 #deltarune spoilers #deltarune ch 2 spoilers #also of course we get another BANGIN SOUNDTRACK #which I get to have on repeat until the remixes comes out #and I put those on repeat for another two years

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felassan · 4 years ago

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Dragon Age development insights from David Gaider - PART 4

This information came from DG on a recent SummerfallStudios Twitch stream where he gave developer commentary while Liam Esler continued playing DAO from where they had left off in Part 1, 2 and 3. I transcribed it in case there’s anyone who can’t watch the stream (for example due to connection/tech limitations, data, time constraints, personal accessibility reasons, etc). A lot of it is centered on DAO, but there’s also insights into other parts of the franchise. Some of it is info which is known having been put out there in the past, and some of it is new. There’s a bit of overlap or repetition with topics covered in Parts 1-3. This post leaps from topic to topic as it’s a transcript of a conversational format. It’s under a cut due to length.

The stream can currently be watched back here. Next week LE will be streaming a different DAO playthrough with commentary from another guest. Two weeks from now LE and DG will return to continue this playthrough for another stream session like this one.

(Part 5, Part 6)

[wording and opinions DG’s, occasionally LE’s; paraphrased]

The Loghain sequences, where it jumps out of the HoF’s point of view to let the player see what Loghain is up to, were added quite late on in development. Some of the dream sequences (like the HoF’s dream of the Archdemon) were also probably added quite late. Those sequences were added as they felt that they needed to have more indication of the larger goings-on in terms of what Loghain was up to, since they had cut some stuff that was meant to have shown this. Cutting things can be funny like that as you’re then left trying to explain the holes.

An original Archdemon concept drawing had them as a lot more demonic as opposed to draconic, with blank all-black faces, a giant ornate crown, smoke, tentacles and a Cthulhu-esque feel. Things change a lot during the concept phase however. At the time, DG wasn’t sure if he liked the changing of the ‘demon’ into a ‘dragon’, but over time he digs it - it sorta implies some things about the nature of dragons in the world that they later decided “yes, that is probably the case”. They then worked that more into the lore so that dragons weren’t just there to be huge lizards. Given the difficulty the team had modelling things like tentacles and snakes, the original Archdemon concept would probably have been iterated on and would’ve had to become something else eventually anyway.

Having the party camp was probably always part of James Ohlen’s plan. Originally, there was going to be different camps in specific places around the map. They then made it a sort of ‘pocket area’ that the player always ‘took with them’, but here they had problems figuring out things like what would happen if the player rested while in an interior location as opposed to somewhere out in the wilderness, “like, does that change it?” For a while there was a complicated system where the party members would do things in camp that would give the player items and help out in such ways - like a party member who made potions, ones that could be interacted with and asked to craft, a whole crafting system relating to that, etc (this all got cut). This was supposed to act as a reason for the player to return to camp and have more interactions at camp; they didn’t want the camp just to be ‘the place you go just to talk to followers’. A good portion of the team considered dialogue to be boring and not an activity that was engaged in.

As soon as hair/beard hair came past the ‘clipping plane’ of the neck, they had real trouble getting it to move due to lack of proper cloth physics and the troubles they had with hair. Beards were rectangular strips that dangled from the chin with the beard texture attached to it. Sometimes certain points were connected to the chest which is why there’s the weird stretching if models move in certain ways. This happens with robes as well. The reason they did this is so that there’s no clipping. For some reason the BW animation team was so averse to clipping compared to other games from elsewhere which sometimes have a bit of clipping that they’re actually not fussed about. At one point they had a big fight on the DA team because the art team said “We need to make every entrance and doorway [including tents] about twice the size that it is, about Shale-size specifically, because of Shale” because they were worried that there would be scenes where Shale would clip through the wall, and about how this would look to players. Others responded that it’d be rare where Shale would be seen going through a door and also that nobody really cares (as in it’s not a big deal). DG half-seriously suggested that instead of making every door bigger, have it so that after entering the door’s texture at the sides and above it would look cracked and have an outline of Shale’s arms and head as if she’d just barreled her way through the stonework. In the end Shale’s size was reduced as a solution to this (so Shale was originally intended to be a lot larger). This is an example of a place where different parts of the team had different priorities in development. It was pointed out that in the end having giant doors may not have made much difference, as every interior in DA is massive in terms of floor and ceiling-space, as well as items (huge jugs of ale etc) anyway.

Weapons and staves hover on characters’ backs due to the team’s aforementioned aversion to clipping. Originally there were plans for scabbards and straps, but they didn’t have the resources for these and they were also concerned about staves clipping through straps, especially when being ‘drawn’ for combat, even though that would just be a second or so. So this is why we instead have floating magnetically-attached-looking weapons.

DG wrote Nature of the Beast including all of the Brecilian Forest, it’s possibly his favorite plot/questline out of the ones he wrote for DAO. It’s one of the plots that survived best from first inception to final result. One of the prominent cultural features of Ferelden is the werewolves, and so DG had to make ‘the werewolf plot’. All the initial plots were split up like that (the werewolf plot, the dwarf plot, etc). Originally there was a separate ‘elf plot’ but it got joined together with the werewolf one. DG had an idea for a being that was like male and female, terrible and kind, beautiful and horrible and so forth - both at once, like the way nature is. This was the vague initial idea from which this plot grew. The nature spirit encountered is the flipside of the being. The spirit of the forest is both male and female, or something akin to being bigender (both rather than neither). There’s not much difference between the Lady and Witherfang. DG finds it so weird hearing the DAO Dalish elves’ American accents (since their accents were changed for the next game). The American Dalish elf accents bugged DG enough that when they got to DA2, he said to Caroline Livingstone “can we just retcon this” and she was like “yeah”. “I think we underestimated how weird prevalent American accents in the game alongside the British ones would be”. Zathrian is voiced by Tim Russ (Tuvok from Star Trek).

The Cammen-Gheyna plot is a fairly ‘nothing-y’ sidequest relatively speaking, but is so complex in terms of how many options and paths through it that it has that DG got a big of a finger-wagging for it and some people were not happy. LE commented that this quest is “an extremely Gaider plot”, as the player can ruin everyone’s lives in it. Gheyna’s pronunciation of Andaran atish'an is incorrect. This phrase is one of the ones that got mixed up in the pronunciation guide and one of the ones that when they got to DA2, DG was like “ignore what we did before, here’s the new pronunciation files”. One of the first ‘images’ the team had of the Dalish was that they had reindeer-like creatures that pulled the aravels. In DAO aravels look more like standard wagons than the ones in the ‘images’, and they weren’t shown properly. Aravels are wagons but they’re supposed to have big sails (not naval-style sails on top) all over the place to catch the wind, so that they look like a bunch of ships being drawn across a field. They got closer to how they’re supposed to be in DAI. At one point the artists sat DG down and asked him what should set the Dalish apart visually. “Funny you should ask, I have some very specific ideas about what the Dalish should look like that have just never been done”. [I think here he meant hadn’t yet been implemented in the franchise] “Oh, we just thought they were ‘people with wagons’.” “Nobody reads documentation...”

The lamps in the Brecilian Forest are a bit random. They put light sources everywhere and it seems like the Brecilian lamp thing was art-asset use that boiled down to “guess it’s an elven forest?”. The Deep Roads were supposed to be properly dark. The team had a lot of conversations over how dark they could or should make the Deep Roads. They constantly had beams of light coming from above and it was like “this is supposed to be like a mile underground, why are there sunbeams coming through cracks in the ceiling” - the answer is it looks good and they didn’t want to do proper darkness. By DAI, they got closer to the ‘look’ the Deep Roads are supposed to have. This is a recurring theme in the DA franchise lol. “This was a weakness in our team and processes, that it took two titles before we got on board with each other and with the vision.” But they had plenty of good strengths too! DG wishes they had iterated a bit more on the werewolves’ look.

“Evil options” was always one of the big conversations that they had. DG wasn’t a fan of the evil options because they mostly boiled down to being a big jerk. The reason for this is a lengthy design discussion that relies on interface - proper, smart evil usually implies some kind of deception, and how do you indicate to the player that the option they’re about to take has a more cleverly-sinister aspect to it (as opposed to simple Intimidate options)? They didn’t really enjoy just letting the player run around being an asshole to people, “do we have to service this hyuk-hyuk-hyuk, particular type of enjoyment?” DG wishes they had figured out how to do the evil stuff a little better (feeling that in a game, doing good has less merit unless there’s temptation to do evil, and that evil paths should be more materially rewarding).

DG wrote The Dawn Will Come with some help from PW and Karin Weekes. It was the first song he wrote. Trevor Morris sent him the tune and he listened to it many times and wrote out the lyrics. PW and KW helped him make it “less awkward and cringey”. “They’re very good at that”. PW is good at poetry, KW is more musical and knows more about music. “If you get something which is as ridiculous as it is memorable, it’s probably Sheryl. If you get something that’s beautiful prose, it’s probably Mary. Something in-between is probably PW.” The DAI bardsongs were written by an external party brought in specially to do so. This required a fair bit of review and revision to make sure they followed DA lore. “It’s a problem we’ve always had trying to work with third parties, they tend to think that anything that falls under the umbrella of ‘medieval fantasy’ would fit in DA”. (Here DG groaned a bit thinking about Orson Scott Card.)

On the Grand Oak and co: “After I finished writing this I totally regretted it. It’s a big dialogue and there’s a lot involved in this quest. Do you know how hard it is to make somebody rhyme in a way that’s not completely cringey for the entire dialogue? I was three quarters into it and I so wanted to stop but I was past the point of no return. But I did it! And it worked out.” The Grand Oak should have been a LotR-style ent-like being in terms of animations and presence. When DG sees the Oak’s stationary pose he’s reminded of Silence of the Lambs. When he finished the Grand Oak and hermit quest he was like “I make way more trouble for myself than I should”. The Hermit cycles through random animations outside of conversation because he’s supposed to be twitchy and weird.

The haunted empty camp side encounter was a pain for the tech designers to make work because there’s no NPC to talk to. It was a pain whenever companions had to offer critical information like in these sorts of parts in fact, as they had to write 9 versions of each ‘line’ (1 for each companion).

There are certain spells/abilities in D&D that can make a GM’s life frustrating, such as teleportation, telling the future, resurrection. The fact that death is not permanent, for instance, should be a huge thing that affects society and how the people in it view death. This is why they were thinking stuff like “If every low-level mage in the setting had a skill like ‘Charm Person’, what would non-mages make of that?” This ties back to discussions in previous part/s where there are lore rules like no teleportation. DA was originally envisioned as a low-magic setting, but this didn’t last long [this subject is also covered in previous part/s]. The rules of magic didn’t really change though, they just weren’t really communicated that well to the other teams in the early days. They slowly realized that it was incumbent on the design team to explain and sell to the other teams the vision, not just expect them to read documentation. They were also constantly fighting against their own presuppositions of “DA is like D&D”.

Desire demons were supposed to be genderless. DG isn’t a fan of how the Fade turned out in DAO. The quests themselves were too long; they couldn’t do all the original plans they had for them so there was a lot of iteration, “then we ended up settling for something not very exciting”. Another big fight the team had was about whether they should have permanent death since DA was a more realistic world? One side’s argument was that ‘if you don’t allow for resurrection then we can’t have death in combat’. DG wondered if there was a different dichotomy they could get to but didn’t want to dictate how combat should work or tell combat designers how to do their job, as he wasn’t the one doing that work.

One of the best moves they made when working on DAI was the concept artist consulting cosplayers. This was good work not only in a fashion sense but also in that it led to making outfits for characters that someone could actually wear (contrast those with Sebastian’s outfit, which DG remembers cosplayers having trouble making functional/wearable and putting together). DG really wasn’t keen at all on Cole’s hat. When designing the clothing-clothing in DAO, the artists were trying to get the most variation for clothing out of assembling pieces. For the sake of variation they allowed pieces to go together that really shouldn’t go together. This allowed for a larger number of clothing options to be made out of a smaller number of clothing models/textures.

In Neverwinter Nights they added a “jiggle mesh” to the engine, it was used in only one place (Aribeth’s cleavage).

Writers are the first ones that jump onto a project, so when last touches and polish is being added to a game they’re often not aware of it. Once the writing is more or less locked down for a game, they start working on the next project. On every project at some point they had to have what they called the “profanity meeting”, where they decide what types of profanity exist in that world, what level of profanity they’re accepting, establishing the standard on this front, etc. This leads to fun meetings where they go through every profanity that they know and try to create new ones. “Maker’s breath!” and “Void take you!” are some of these kinds of things. They needed exclamations akin to “Goddamnit” but which made sense in this fantasy setting (“Goddamnit” implies the context of God, and the concept of damning, for example, so it doesn’t hold up) and weren’t just word substitution like “frack” instead of fuck or something.

The Grey Wardens gained their trademark blue and silver uniformed look for DA2. When the new art director Matt Goldman came on before DA2, he wanted to re-approach a number of things such as the darkspawn (mentioned in previous parts) and the Wardens. He wanted factions like the Wardens to be more uniform and easily identifiable at a distance by silhouettes and colors. He wanted factions to be more visually distinct and to introduce more color in general, as DAO was very brown and muddy. This was something of a standing mission of his when he came onto the project. He disliked the idea that there wasn’t anything unifying or distinct or ‘easily identifiable as a DAO screenshot’ about DAO screenshots, other than that brown muddiness.

Deciding how to design the Lady of the Forest was a long conversation due to the potential nsfw elements. It was a long haul to get her to look a certain way.

The thing DG found easiest/least painful to write was probably Zevran’s dialogue. He felt less pressure about it and had a bit more fun with it. Zevran has a certain story about trust that DG found pleasurable to build on; Zevran had grown up with a certain expectation of deceit and trauma, and when confronted with earnest feelings, that was the more puzzling part for [Zevran] to process. “When you expect everyone around you to deceive you, you’re kinda like, okay, this is life. But then to figure out, ‘oh, I guess it doesn’t need to be that way’, well how do you even... not?” DG remembers straight male players complaining on the forum after accepting Zevran’s massage tent-invite and not clocking that that was an invite of a certain nature. Overall Zevran was a more relaxed piece of writing for him. Shale came later but writing Shale was also a lot of fun. Like HK-47, “you can string together a few quirks that you find amusing and people will still treat that like a character and love it”.

In DA2 there was an entire subplot centered around the Carta and Varric. It spanned all three Acts. Mary Kirby had written it to completion and it was good. DG had to tell her it was among the cuts they needed to do because it was written a bit later relative to other stuff and because cutting it offered the most return according to the schedule and resources/subsequent downstream work. In cases like these they sometimes take the cut plotbeats and put it in a ‘box’, in the hopes that they may be able to use it for DLC or something later on. In practise this doesn’t happen very often at all. On DAO it did happen once with Shale. Shale was cut from DAO and had to be moved to become Day 1 DLC. Work on Shale therefore took place after most of the game had been finished. If they hadn’t done this, she would have been cut completely. It also sort of happened on DAO with Loghain. It originally had a whole plotline in Denerim involving him which had the player figuring out his background, motivations and interacting more with Anora. All of that got cut (requiring the cutscenes mentioned at the start of this post being added), and this is where the idea came of writing a novel (The Stolen Throne). This occurred in the period when the game had been delayed and DG particularly regretted that particular cut. He thought, “I could take this story that you were going to learn about the history of Loghain and his relationship with Cailan, and rescue it in a way.” [source]

[Part 1]

[Part 2]

[Part 3]

[Part 5]

[Part 6]

[‘Insights into DA dev from the Gamers For Groceries stream’ transcript]

#dragon age #bioware #video games #cole #spirit boy

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engineering · 5 years ago

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How Reblogs Work

The reblog is a beautiful thing unique to Tumblr -- often imitated, but never successfully reproduced elsewhere. The reblog puts someone else's post on your own Tumblr blog, acting as a kind of signal boost, and also giving you the ability to add your own comment to it, which your followers and anyone looking at the post's notes will see. Reblogs can also be reblogged themselves, creating awesome evolving reblog trails that are the source of so many memes we love. But what is a reblog trail versus a reblog tree, and how does it all work under the hood?

A "reblog tree" starts at the original post (we call it the "root post" internally at Tumblr) and extends outwards to each of its reblogs, and then each reblog of those reblogs, forming a tree-like structure with branches of "reblog trails". As an example, you can imagine @staff making a post, and then someone reblogging it, and then others reblogging those reblogs. I can even come through and reblog one of the reblogs:

A "reblog trail" is one of those branches, starting at the original post and extending one at a time down to another post. In the reblog trail, there may actually be some reblogs that added their own content and some that didn't -- reblogs that added content are visible in the trail, while the intermediate ones that didn't may not be visible.

You'll notice that the reblog trail you're viewing somewhere (like on your dashboard) doesn't show all of this reblog tree -- only part of it. If you open up the notes on any wildly popular post, you'll probably see lots of reblogs in there that you aren't seeing in your current view of the post's reblog trail. The above diagram shows the whole reblog tree (which you don't see) and the current reblog trail you're actually viewing (in orange). If you want to visualize a post's entire reblog tree, the reblog graphs Tumblr Labs experiment shows off these reblog trees and trails as kind of big floppy organisms. They're a useful visualization of how content percolates around Tumblr via reblogs. You can turn on the experiment and see it on web only right now, but here's an example:

The tiny orange dot is the post we're viewing, and the green line is a reblog trail showing how the post got reblogged along many blogs. And there are tons of other branches/trails from the original post, making dozens of different reblog trails. This is a much larger, more realistic example than my simplified diagrams above. You can imagine that my diagram above is just the start of one of these huge reblog trees, after more and more people have reblogged parts of the existing tree.

Storing Reblog Trail Information

The way we actually store the information about a reblog and its trail has changed significantly over the last year. For all posts made before this year, all of a post's content was stored as a combination of HTML and properties specific on our Post data model. A specific reblog also stored all of the contents of its entire reblog trail (but not the whole reblog tree). If you have ever built a theme on Tumblr or otherwise dug around the code on a reblog, you'll be familiar with this classic blockquote structure:

<a class="tumblr_blog" href="http://maria.tumblr.com/post/5678">maria</a>: <blockquote> <a class="tumblr_blog" href="http://cyle.tumblr.com/post/1234">cyle</a>: <blockquote>  look at my awesome original content </blockquote>  well, it's just okay original content </blockquote>  jeez. thanks a lot.

This HTML represents a (fake) old text post. The original post is the blockquote most deeply nested in the HTML: "look at my awesome original content" and it was created by cyle. There's a reference to the original post's URL in the anchor tag above its blockquote tag. Moving out one level to the next blockquote is a reblog of that original post, made by maria, which itself adds some of its own commentary to the reblog trail. Moving out furthest, to the bottom of the HTML, is the latest reblog content being added in the post we're viewing. With this structure, we have everything we need to show the post and its reblog trail without having to load those posts in between the original and this reblog.

If this looks and sounds confusing, that's because it is quite complex. We're right there with you, but the reasons behind using this structure were sound at the time. In a normal, traditional relational database, you'd expect something like the reblog trail to be represented as a series of references: a reblog post references its parent post, root post, and any intermediate posts, and we'd load those posts' contents at runtime with a JOIN query or something very normalized and relational like that, making sure we don't copy any data around, only reference it.

However, the major drawback of that traditional approach, especially at Tumblr's scale, is that loading a reblog could go from just one query to several queries, depending on how many posts are in the reblog trail. Some of the reblog trails on Tumblr are thousands of posts long. Having to load a thousand other posts to load one reblog would be devastating. Instead, by actually copying the reblog trail content every time a reblog is made, we keep the number of queries needed constant: just one per post! A dashboard of 20 reblogs loads those 20 posts, not a variable amount based on how many reblogs are in each post's trail. This is still an oversimplification of what Tumblr is really doing under the hood, but this core strategy is real.

Broken Reblog Trails

There is another obvious problem with the above blockquote/HTML strategy, one that you may have not realized you were seeing but you've probably experienced it before. If the only reference we have in the reblog trail above is a trail post's permalink URL, what happens if that blog changes its name? Tumblr does not go through all posts and update that name in every copy of every reblog that blog has ever been involved in. Instead, it gracefully fails, and you may see a default avatar there as a placeholder. We literally don't have any other choice, since no other useful information is stored with the old post content.

At worst, someone else takes the name of a blog used in the trail. Imagine if, in the above example, oli changed his blog name to british-oli and someone else snagged the name oli afterwards. Thankfully in that case, the post URL still does not work, as the post ID is tied to the old oli blog. The end result is that it looks like there's a "broken" item in the reblog trail, usually manifesting as the blog looking deactivated or otherwise not accessible. This isn't great.

As a part of the rollout of the Neue Post Format (NPF), we changed how we store the reblog trail on each post. For fully NPF reblog trails, we actually do store an immutable reference to each blog and post in the trail, instead of just the unreliable post URL. This allows us to have a much lower failure rate when someone changes their blog name or otherwise becomes unavailable. We keep the same beneficial strategy of usually having all the information we need so we don't need to load any of those posts along the trail, but the option to load the individual post or blog is there if we absolutely need it, especially in cases like if one of those blogs is somebody you're blocking.

If you've played around with reblog trails in NPF, you'll see the result of this change. The reblog trail is no longer a messy nested blockquote chain, but instead a friendly and easy to parse JSON array, always starting with the original post and working down the trail. This includes a special case when an item in the trail is broken in a way we can't recover from, which happens sometimes with very old posts.

The same reblog trail and new content as seen above, but in the Neue Post Format:

{ "trail": [ { "post": { "id": "1234", }, "blog": { "name": "cyle" }, "content": [ { "type": "text", "text": "look at my awesome original content" } ], "layout": [] }, { "post": { "id": "3456", }, "blog": { "name": "maria" }, "content": [ { "type": "text", "text": "well, it's just okay original content" } ], "layout": [] } ], "content": [ { "type": "text", "text": "jeez. thanks a lot." } ] }

Got questions?

If you've ever wondered how something works on Tumblr behind the scenes, feel free to send us an ask!

- @cyle

#engineering #how tumblr works #reblogs #npf

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cheriesjubiles · 4 years ago

Text

please don’t look under the read more i’m just testing

Can you imagine a world where we're all represented by a font? Huh, I wonder which one I would be? sees Arial Too straight. No! Not in that way! Just, straight, as in unexciting. sees Badaboom Too.. uh... Deadpool.... BROADWAY! Now that's the one! Now THAT'S the one! Hello Internet, welcome to GAME THEORY, where instead of putting a joke here I want to ask you a question. If your personality were represented by a font, what font would you be? Take a moment and put your font in the comments. I'm really curious to see what everyone has to say. Maybe find a couple new cool fonts to use. I'm getting bored with ol' Calibri 11. And with that out of the way, it's time to talk UNDERTALE. Now I don't think I've ever gotten this many requests to cover a game. Well, except for FNAF. And I suppose FNAF 2. OH and there was FNAF 3. Wait a minute, should I be worried about something here? Anyway, across the board on YouTube, Reddit, and Twitter, you all have wanted Undertale. And honestly, I'm glad you brought it to my attention. True loyal theorists will know that Earthbound is my favorite game of all time. So a self aware RPG in a similar style, WHOA MAN, it's like a gift from the indie gaming heavens. Undertale is a game where every character, from goat mom to grind fodder has a sympathetic design and a unique personality, motivations, goals, fears. Whether you're saving or slaughtering them, the game makes you feel something every time you enter an encounter. But to me, one character stood out amongst all the rest. SANS. A skeleton named after the font, Comic Sans, hence all the font references at the beginning of the episode. If you haven't played Undertale I'm sure that was a really weird opening. ANYWAYS, Sans is, well, there's a lot of mystery around this guy. And before we get into it, let me put up a very special spoiler warning: UNDERTALE is a game best experienced blind. So if you haven't played it, pause the video and come back after you've finished. I PROMISE YOU, I PROMISE you won't regret it. Alright, so everyone out of the pool and ready for the adult swim? Good. Because I'm feeling pretty determined to get to the bottom of Sans' mystery. So just to recap for those of you who haven't played the game and ignored the SPOILER WARNING, or just need a refresher, Sans is one of the two skeletal brothers who appears in the game. His partner is Papyrus, a loud, goofy trap lover also named after a font. But in the world of Undertale their origins are a big question mark. All you really know is what's given to us by a shopkeeper in Snowdin, who explains that Sans and Papyrus, quote, “just showed up one day and asserted themselves.” Weird, right? What's more is that, well, Papyrus is just kinda the goofy sidekick. Sans is much more complex. He likes fart jokes, but he's also incredibly powerful and deadly serious. Not only is his boss battle the hardest in the game, he's one of the only characters who has knowledge and power over space and time. He can take shortcuts around the world through ridiculous routes. Even is walking through walls. He also acknowledges that he's only one of infinite versions of himself, making self-aware commentary of the various timelines that you've played through in the game. He can even count the number of times he's killed you. He acts like an arbiter of this world, passing out judgements on the player's actions in the game, even explaining the secrets of EXP and LOVE, or EXECUTION POINTS and LEVELS OF VIOLENCE, just to clarify. In short, he just doesn't quite fit in with the rest of the world of monsters. But then, what, or who, is he? Well, the idea that he doesn't belong in underworld seems to be correct. The evidence seems to point the fact that he WAS, in fact, formerly a surface dweller. In the true pacifist ending of the game, as the group looks out onto the horizon, Papyrus asks Sans about the giant ball in the sky. Sans says, quote, “we call that the sun.”

This is important because A, the usage of the word WE, and knowledge of the sun shows that Sans has a kinship or knowledge with other humans, and B, that despite he and Papyrus both being skeletons, or, supposedly, brothers, and apparently appeared in underworld at the same time, they clearly-- uuuGGHH take two CLEARLY have two very different histories. Why would Papyrus not know the name of the sun but Sans would? We get further clues to Sans' origins as we hear him say multiple times he wants to "go home" or "go back." He says as much during his dinner date scene at the Mettaton hotel. He notices that the player wants to go home and says, quote, "i know the feeling." He then continues, "maybe sometimes it's better to take what's given to you." As though he ended up in the underworld by accident. AND in a genocide run during his boss fight he says, quote, "look, i gave up trying to go back a long time ago." End quote. And before you say he means going back to the surface world, that's clearly not the full story. His very next line of dialogue is, "and getting to the surface doesn't really appeal anymore either." Key word here, is EITHER. Yes, he seems to hail from the surface and wants to go back, but based on his dialogue he no longer considers it his home. It's as though the surface world he once knew is gone, as though he's from a different time. It's pretty intriguing. So we're left with a being that appeared out of nowhere, presumably from being from the human surface, but from a different time period, who seemingly has the power to teleport. That's a lot of questions and not a lot of answers. But here's where things get REALLY interesting. Sans has a hidden workshop that takes a fair amount of searching to find. You could say it takes a lot of DETERMINATION to unlock. Anyways, obligatory determination references aside, as you start to look for this easter egg Sans gives you a key to his room and says "it's time you learn the truth." After some searching you find the workshop which contains items that leave even more questions. A photo album featuring Sans and a bunch of smiling people you don't recognize, a badge, blueprints with illegible handwriting, and a broken machine hidden behind a curtain. In the latest update, one more detail was added. A handdrawn picture of 3 smiling faces with the words “don't forget.” so what does it all mean? Well a lot of Undertale theorists have been linking these details to a feature to a character named W.D Gaster. A ghostly character who never truly appears in the game. Honestly, covering him is a theory all unto itself, and probably one best saved for another day. Even still, none of the Gaster theories I've seen have been able to explain all the details. In particular, the photo album, and the badge. And that's what kept nagging me as I researched Undertale. A badge? That one in particular really stuck out to me. Why would such an oddly specific item to be hidden in the huge easter egg of a room? Something that supposedly reveals the truth about Sans? Badges just aren't important in Undertale. Then it hit me. What if this badge isn't from Undertale? What if this badge is from a completely different game? And was, in fact, the most important badge in the history of gaming? The Franklin badge. Now, for those of you wondering what I'm talking about, the Franklin badge is a pivotal item from the Mother series. You know, the one with Earthbound. Or, maybe you don't know that one either. Uh, you know, the one with Ness from Super Smash Bros? Yeah well, Ness is from Earthbound, and Earthbound is the second part in this larger Mother trilogy. Alright? Good. Anyway, the Franklin badge is a really important part of that series. It gets its start in the very first game and carries through the whole trilogy, saving your life multiple times in the process. It's SO important that nintendo has made it a staple item in the Smash Brothers series. So I asked myself; what if the badge in Sans' drawer was THAT EXACT badge?

Well first off, it made Undertale connected to my favorite game, thereby making it even COOLER, but that's still a pretty big logical leap. I needed more. Let me tell you, as I started looking, more and more pieces started to fit into place. At the end of Earthbound you're given a photo album, covering your adventures throughout the game. To me it's one of the best, most satisfying endings in gaming to look back on your journey in picture form. And what does Sans happen to have in his other drawer? A photo album with pictures of Sans with people you don't recognize. Of course you don't know them, they're not characters present in Undertale. And note the word that's used here, PEOPLE you don't recognize. Not underworld monsters. So that's 2 items oddly linked to the Mother series. But then, how do the blueprints and broken machine fit in? Well, in the final stretch of Earthbound, Ness and his 3 friends must travel to the past in order to have their final battle against the evil alien Giygas. To do that, Dr. Andonuts (remember him, by the way, he's going to be important later) with the help of the science geniuses Apple Kid and Mr. Saturn, create what's known as the Phase Distorter, a machine that allows people to travel through time and space. Except, it comes with a cost. It can't transport organic material. As a result, the young heroes must put their souls into robotic bodies to use the machine, and thus, save the world. I played this game back in 1997 and I'm not ashamed to admit that when I first saw this scene, I cried. It's DEVASTATING. Doctor Andonuts says goodbye to his son, these characters you've grown to love and care about are suddenly promising to sacrifice their lives. For all they know, there is no possibility of them being able to come back home. It's this incredibly dark departure in the final moments of what was otherwise a fun, quirky, and colorful RPG. So what does all of this have to do with Undertale? A LOT, actually. But the first thing you need to know is that Mr. Saturns are known for their, let's say, unique linguistic style. That would explain the illegible handwriting on the blueprints. And the machine? I think a broken Phase Distorter is behind that curtain. Now that may seem like a stretch, but it actually explains a lot. If Sans wound up in Undertale via Phase Distorter, it could provide a reason for why he's a skeleton. He used the machine as organic matter and suffered the consequences. Not killing him, but turning at least a part of him into a pile of bones. That could also explain why Sans has given up hope for going home. Remember the Phase Distorter is a time machine. By being in underworld, he's not only in a different place, but based on how he talks, he's also in a different time, with no hope of travelling back to the time he came from. But the crossovers between Earthbound and Undertale continue. When you speak to Apple Kid at the end of Earthbound, he's blown away by the astronomical odds of Ness overcoming Giygas, saying that he's going to continue studying the trait called courage, in order to harness its power. Seems awfully similar to the same experiments happening in Undertale around the trait of determination, no? Especially since so much has shown that Sans was a key player in those experiments. But I'm sure you also want physical evidence right? Well don't worry, because I have plenty. During one of the endings of Undertale, we see Undyne and Alphys hanging out on the beach on the surface world. A beach that bears a lot of similarities to the tropical resort location named Summers that you play through in Earthbound. In fact, the geographic layout of the surface bears some striking similarities to the world of Mother. When Undertale's crew of monsters are finally able to reach the surface and look out over the earth, they're met with a beautiful sunset falling across the landscape of a tall mountain, a large city, and a sandy area adjacent to water. Notice the sun's reflection to indicate water, and a lack of trees in this middle section here, hence the sand.

Well, in Earthbound you have the big city of Fourside, complete with skyscrapers, which you reach via a desert that just so happens to be adjacent to some water, and to the east, the mountain in Onett where a meteorite lands on Earth. I always called it Aw-nett. But if that's not clear enough for you, Mother 1, Earthbound Zero, Earthbound Beginnings, whatever you want to call it, it's had a lot of names, had a map laying out the same geographic landscape. A tall mountain to the east of a large city, separated by a desert, with all of it up against a coast. I don't know about you, but to me it seems like there's a definite connection between the world of Eagleland (Eagleland? Again, unclear how its pronounced.) between the world of Eagleland and the surface world of Undertale. But the strongest physical connection, one that definitely unites these two franchises, comes from none other than Papyrus himself. He wears a custom-made costume known as his “battle body”. But if you look really closely at the design on the armor, you'll notice some markings on the chest. Is it just a throwaway detail? Ohoh NO, that right there is an exact match to the ones that appear on the chests of Starmen, the most iconic enemy of Earthbound. And look at the way he stands! I always thought it was awkward until i saw the two characters side by side. Papyrus’ curved arm and hand is a DIRECT match to the curved arms of the Starmen in the Mother series! In short, we have some incredibly strong proof that the Earthbound universe is somehow connected to the Undertale world, which brings us back to our initial question, WHO IS SANS? Well, what if we took it one final step and said that Sans happened to be Ness from Earthbound? Sent through the Phase Distorter during a test of courage, carrying the Franklin badge and his photo album and his trusty backpack. Not only do all the items in the workshop suddenly fit, but so does Sans’ behavior. Remember, Sans can seemingly teleport. And Ness just happens to have the PSI ability to teleport. Now look the way Sans always stands, hands in his pockets, directly facing the camera. It's a very similar stance to how Ness is depicted standing in most marketing for the game. It even explains why Sans bleeds when you finally hit him. He is, or at least, WAS, a human. Oh and finally, Sans is only one letter removed from being an anagram of Ness. That's just a fun one. I thought it was worth mentioning. But if there was any doubt, we have to look no further than the creator's previous work. Toby Fox, the man behind Undertale, had previously worked on a Halloween hack for Earthbound. But this just wasn't a simple reskin. The Halloween hack tells the tale of Dr. Andonuts after the events of Earthbound. Remember, I pointed him out? He's the one who made the Phase Distorter. In Toby Fox’s version of the story, we see that after Giygas' defeat, the souls of the kids never return home. Instead, by going to the past to defeat Giygas, they create a new timeline that they're stuck in. As a result, Jeff never reunites with his father Dr. Andonuts. And Dr. Andonuts goes crazy with guilt, because HE’S the one responsible for creating the time machine, and extracting the souls of his son and his son's friends to send them back to what he assumes was their death. In his mind, he's killed 4 kids. And in Toby Fox's game, he's lost his mind trying to deal with that guilt. I'm telling you, this hack is DARK. that said, you see a lot of Undertale in this game. The appearance of Amalgamates, the first use of the awesome song Megalovania, the prototypes for Flowey? And the theme of having the choice to be nonviolent in an RPG, SPARING your enemies. But then why's all this matter to the theory? Well, remember, in Toby Fox's version of the story, the kids don't come back. They're stuck in the past, with no hopes of getting home. Just like Sans. And, in the hack, one character is oddly missing, with no explanation as to why. NESS. Presumably in this timeline his soul is in a different place than his 3 friends.

In short, Undertale is a continuation of Toby’s version of Earthbound, with Ness never being able to get home, adopting the name Sans, and accompanied by Papyrus, a former Starman, an alien force able to speak English and still equipped with his armor, and signature posture, but without any knowledge of earthly things... like the Sun. The pieces all just seem to fit. Now all we need is an appearance from Pokey/Porky and we’ve got ourselves a true sequel. But hey, that's just a theory. A GAME THEORY! THANKS FOR WATCHING!

#it’s the sans is ness game theory video copypasta

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irondadgroupie · 6 years ago

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Bohemian Rhapsody: Chapter 1

A/N: This is the scene chapter that inspired me and @intoresus to write this story. As you will see, yeah, this is our cup of tea. Hope you enjoy, from what you can among all the angst.

Tony was awake through it all.

Maybe if he had not been so into singing, he would have seen it sooner, or even sensed it.

From the forest, a deer jumped to the road, its wide and innocent eyes staring straight at him.

Tony had no time to plan his actions, it was all on reflex: his arm shielded Peter while his leg slammed on the brakes. The tires screeched; the deer tried to leap back but the collision was inevitable. Car hit the animal and spiraled out of control. Tony tried to steer back towards the road but karma was against him.

The vehicle crashed down a steep hill and rolled over too many times to count. Air bags inflated and tried to hold the passengers in place as loose belongings slammed into seats and plastic parts.

Their ride ended in a lake.

Tony took in a deep breath, then another and opened his eyes: the windows gave nothing but darkness and diminishing light. His shoes were wet.

Awareness slammed back into him.

“Fuck!” He screamed and his voice echoed in the space. All the sounds were clearer: his breathing, the static of the radio and the quickening beats of his heart.

“Do- don’t worry, Peter,” Tony stuttered and gulped to gain control over his voice. “We’ll get-”

He looked at his right, expecting a pair of scared eyes and a silently panicking teenager. What he found was Peter, neck limp and head hanging against his chest, with a bleeding wound on his temple.

This - this was too much.

“Peter!” Tony struggled with his seat belt and crawled clumsily closer to the boy. Water was steadily filling their air space but for a moment the man forgot about it.

“Kiddo,” he whispered urgently like the boy was only sleeping during a crisis, which was exactly what Peter was doing: sleeping so soundly. “Peter,” Tony first checked the boy’s neck for possible fractures. He had minimal knowledge of spinal injuries but he deemed a break would be easy to detect. Once deemed safe, he straightened Peter’s neck, opening the constricted airway and the boy reflexively took in a breath.

“Good,” The man nodded with a smile and cradled the boy’s face in his hands. “That’s a good boy!”

Peter was alive and breathing, he could deal with anything thrown at his way as long as the kid would heal.

Water reached Peter’s knees and the car jolted from side to side as they hit the bottom of the lake. It was completely dark aside from dim car lights.

“Alright then,” Tony tried to keep up bravado with overly cheery commentary. He unlocked Peter’s seat belt and caught the limp body as Peter tilted to the side. “We need to get out of here.”

It was simple physics: pressure of the water was so strong car doors could not be opened until water filled the inside of the car and balanced the difference in pressure. Tony was secretly grateful Peter was out cold because the boy’s claustrophobia would most likely kill either him or both of them. Tony did not have a fear of tight spaces but the situation was making him develop one rapidly.

“Just a little while longer, kiddo,” He rested Peter’s head on his shoulder, keeping both their mouths and noses in the air. “Hang on tight, okay?”

A part of him wanted the wait to be over so they could get out. A larger part of him wanted to wait for the rescue. Maybe by some miracle water would stop coming in and they wouldn’t have to fight their way to the surface alone.

Tony spat out some water, hoisting Peter’s head higher. He could hold his breath but the boy had no control over his throat and muscles.

What if the car doors wouldn’t open? What if water filled the car and they would both suffocate slowly and the team on arriving to the site would have to bring up their stiff, rigid bodies?

Tony cursed himself for not taking his armor or gauntlets with him. The one day he actually needed extra help and he leaves them at the workshop!

“When this is over,” Tony laughed bitterly in the bluish light,”I’m never taking off the wrist gauntlets. Never ever, I’ll even sleep with them on. IronMan would have already helped us out but I-” Tony adjusted his grip as Peter began to slip away, he had taken off the boy’s coat but he was still so heavy ”I can’t do anything.”

Peter did not answer aside from steady breathing. The wound on his head was bleeding less and Tony took it as a promising sign.

They only had a few seconds of air left.

“Okay, kiddo, time to take in a deep breath.”

Tony filled his lungs as his other hand closed Peter’s mouth and nose.

And so they were both under the water.

The last few seconds felt like decades, and his body seemed to have conversations with itself. His heart screamed a mantra that consisting of nothing but “Peterpeterpeter”, his lungs added a bottom line of “Breathebreathebreathe” Then his ears filled with painful static, he could practically hear his blood flow in his veins. Tony’s eyes took a second to adjust to the murky darkness. His arm was wrapped around Peter with a hand still over the boy’s airways: if the kid was to suffocate it was best to do it dry than water in his lungs. He located the door handle and pushed.

Nothing.

Tony’s heart skipped a beat. He tried to ground his legs against the gear shift and pushed again. He managed to open the door slightly before the pressure got too huge.

No!

He should have checked the door before, made sure the crash hadn’t harmed the mechanism.

Why hadn’t he - after years of working with the strangest of inventions

- thought about getting his car water-resistant in the first place? His guilt complex invited himself to the song in his head: “Idiotidiotidiot” and his brain quickly shut it down. This was probably number one on the “worst places to get distracted in” list. Continuing to curse in his mind, Tony let go of Peter and forced his eyes away from the sight of his kid floating lifelessly in the water. He grasped the handle and positioned his shoulder against the window, ready to rip through the steel if need came.

Come on, come on, fucking open!

The door obeyed his mental commands. The screech was drowned by the water as the door gave in and allowed its prisoners to escape. Tony almost let out a breath of relief until he jolted back to reality. He turned around, grabbed the kid from under his arms and half-swam, half-scrambled out of the vehicle.

A small trail of bubbles floated up from Peter’s nostrils and through a slight opening between his lips. Tony closed the boy’s jaw although he had a feeling Peter’s mouth would open again in a couple of seconds.

But it seemed necessary at the time.

Training had included deep-water rescue and Tony considered himself a relatively strong swimmer. Half way to the surface, he began to doubt he had overestimated his endurance. Aside from the bruises and slight injuries from the crash, dragging a lifeless body with him was making the task much more arduous than anticipated.

His lungs began to rebel. He needed air and for a slight, frightening moment, he seriously considered letting go of Peter and swimming to the surface by himself. It would do no good to let both of them suffocate.

His paternal instincts, Papa-Wolf as Peter so affectionately called his other side, arose with feverish determination.

Peter needed help, he had to try.

He could see the light of the sun.

Safety was not far.

Just a little way.

He adjusted his grip of the boy again and kicked harder with his legs. He reached a hand up.

His fingers met air.

Tony broke the surface and his mouth opened before it was fully out of the water.

He gagged as his mouth filled with foul tasting liquid and- was that a fish? Vomit rose up his throat and the man could not help but spit the acids out. He was in shock, adrenaline making his body shake. He could barely feel his lips.

“Peter,” The man gulped in the air and struggled to lift Peter’s head above the water. Tony kicked with his legs to stay afloat as he stretched Peter’s body the best he could. He supported the boy’s neck with the crook of his arm and opened the small mouth. Peter’s lips had traces of blue in them and water dribbled down the corners of his mouth.

“Come on, kiddo,” Tony adjusted his hold so that Peter’s airway was properly opened, his neck aligned straight but it had no effect. The boy did not draw breath.

Tony tried to avoid falling into panic. Chances were high that the only reason it worked was because there wasn’t enough oxygen to allow panic to settle.

“Okay,” His almost numb fingers pinched the boy’s nose closed. Tony took a deep breath into his starving lungs but rather than use it himself, he pressed his lips tightly against the boy’s. Warm air traveled down Peter’s throat but Tony could not determine whether it had made it to Peter’s lungs or not. In the worst scenario, he had just blown air into the boy’s stomach and risked him suffocating in his own vomit.

“Come on, come on, Peter,” Tony muttered as he tried to listen to the air being exhaled. He thought he felt something but couldn’t be sure: cold, exhaustion and wind were messing with his senses. “Breathe for me, kiddo,” He forced another breath into Peter’s mouth, praying it would help the boy’s body to remember how it was supposed to work.

His prayers remained either unheard or ignored, with just a wave of warm autumn winds meeting his cheeks. He almost felt the panic level inside him rise to an unhealthy level, but the reaction luckily didn’t settle, his muscles using most of the air that he almost gasped in.

“You have to stay calm coming out of the water. Wouldn’t be much of a big rescue if you hyperventilate right after coming up.” Natasha’s voice echoed in Tony’s thoughts, and he tried to let his breathing slow to an acceptable pace before moving forward again. There was not much he could do for Peter at the moment - not in the water, anyway. Best he could do was bring them both onto solid ground, and rather quickly.

He tried his best to ignore the fatigue hurling in like a storm when the rush of adrenaline began to ebb slowly but steadily, and his limbs began to quiver.

Just another few meters. The shore was so close.

Tony’s fingers twitched again, and this time so roughly that he lost grip of Peter for yet another time, with the teenager‘s face sinking underwater for half a second before Tony managed to get hold of him.

“We’re almost there. Just stay with me, kid.” Maybe he’d be better off with saving the air rather than waste it by speaking, but it kept his worst anxieties from settling in. And hearing his voice might even help Peter find his way back to consciousness.

The second Tony’s feet touched dry land, his knees gave in and he fell forward, face burying in the grass. For a moment he doubted he could ever stand up again. The position wasn’t exactly uncomfortable, and all he wanted was to close his eyes and just rest for a second. He’d worked hard enough, hadn’t he?

May Parker’s voice jolted him out of that state, as clearly audible as if she was standing right next to him. If she ever found out he was taking a quick nap instead of helping her nephew, she would literally behead him.

Half crawling, half walking, he made the final steps before sinking to the ground again, the last bit of energy saved only for dragging Peter’s still motionless body out of the water.

“It’s alright, I got you now.”, he murmured, more to himself than the boy.

The blue in Peter’s lips had become undeniably visible, his skin pearly white in comparison to the deeply green grass below, the color intensified by the drops of water that their soaked clothes dripped. Tony’s heart sank to his knees and probably even stopped for a beat at the sight and a second passed before he restored his composure.

No different than training. He pretended. You know what to do, you know how to bring him back around.

Carefully, he tilted Peter’s head back, hoping, despite knowing better, that he’d started breathing on his own again during the time that had passed between his rescue breaths in the water and bringing him to the shore.

Hope is a cruel thing when not fulfilled.

This time however, Tony had more time and means to handle the problem that was easily found: In his unconscious state, Peter’s ability to control both his breathing and the natural reflex of closing his mouth when covered by water had died down, causing him not just to swallow water, but to catch everything else a lake provided for its ordinary inhabitants: Leafs, algas - when Tony reached inside to scoop the foreign matters out of the kid’s throat, he even felt some smaller pebbles scratching at his still half numb skin. If they had any more bad luck, the kid might’ve swallowed some more of those, too.

Once the airway was clear, he repositioned Peter’s head a final time, took a deep breath that his lungs greeted with thankfulness before giving the next one to his mentee, using the hand not occupied with pinching his nose shut to rest it on Peter’s chest in hopes of feeling it rise a few centimeters. There was barely any detectable movement at all and the amount of water sputtering out with the reflexive exhale didn’t exactly appear promising either. Tony attempted calming himself with the mental reminder that he needed the water to come out. The second breath did not help either: Peter’s chest was barely rising and he heard gurgling from the boy’s throat as some water dribbled down the sides of his mouth.

“This isn’t working,” Tony breathed heavily and with effort grabbed the boy from under arms. It wasn’t that the kid was heavy, no, he was sturdy but surprisingly light given his muscles; must be a mutation thing. But Tony was already exhausted and the boy’s wet clothing, even without jacket, added unneeded weight that nearly toppled them both over.

“You’ve got to work with me, kid,” The man sat Peter up onto his lap and wrapped his arms around his middle. He fisted his right hand and covered it with his left, he could feel how swollen Peter’s stomach was. He had no time to waste.

He pulled in.

At first there was nothing but a grunt from the boy and gurgling.

“Okay, again, come on, Peter.”

He used more force, made the movement sudden, sharp but pressed long and then foamy water spurted out from Peter’s mouth and nostrils.

Tony’s heart leaped: “Yes! Good! Good, Peter!”

He continued the Heimlich maneuver for a while, making sure Peter’s head was hanging low so the water couldn’t run back down the boy’s throat and suffocate him. Foam covered Peter’s already wet clothes and some made it to Tony’s sleeves as he pounded the boy’s middle, willing his lungs and stomach to empty.

“Throw it up, kiddo, all out,” he cleaned the boy’s mouth after a spurt that brought up even more of the lake life. He threw the leaves to the side and leaned Peter against his chest as he started the thrusts again.

Tony tried to pretend this was nothing more than a practice in first aid class, but again, then he had not dared to press his hands so deeply into Peter’s diaphragm. He tried to pretend this was similar to when Peter had almost choked on a piece of steak.

But then he had had a conscious, panicked and loudly gurgling boy in his arms.

This Peter was limp and so blue in the face.

What had first been sudden, powerful spurts of water had now regressed to pure foam.

“You okay?” Tony asked although he knew he would get no answer. “All gone? Think I can breathe for you now?”

He used more care than necessary to lie the boy back on the ground. With swift fingers, he turned Peter’s head to the side. He wiped Peter’s mouth and face clean of whatever it was he had brought up and pinched his nostrils to clean them.

“Okay, third time’s the charm,” Tony pulled the boy’s head back, closed the boy’s nose and set a hand on Peter’s chest. He took in a deep breath and locked his lips with Peter’s blue ones.

He prayed this would work.

Please let him get air.

Peter’s chest rose in a beautiful arch.

“Yes!” Tony cried and listened to air leave the boy’s mouth. There was still gurgling but he could deal with this. As long as Peter got a lungful of air, the boy could deal with some of it remaining in his system.

Next, his still shaking fingers moved down on the Peter’s neck, coming to a rest right above his carotid artery, and Tony started praying again.

One second.

Two seconds.

Three- and there it was, a flutter so weak that Tony almost missed it. He would’ve relaxed a little if the next thump didn’t take almost five more seconds in coming. Even an idiot could’ve understood the simple maths that was telling Tony that this rhythm was far away from being effective, let alone enough to supply oxygenated blood to all parts of Peter’s body - including his brain, including the organ that made Peter Peter.

Still succeeding in keeping the panic at bay, the mechanic traced with his fingers along Peter’s chest until he located the end of his breastbone and used the position to find the right spot for his hands to do effective compressions.

Prepared for thirty pushes down on the chest, he started counting mentally, and his world began swirling when he physically did the first: a sudden rush of pain almost blinded him.

Tony tried blinking away the tears that were suddenly blurring his vision, and the feeling of nausea after literally feeling something shift in his right hand. There was no doubt it was broken, and now, with the last bits of adrenaline vanishing, the pain hit him like a train. His heart began speeding up, his breaths quickened, and his cold and wet clothes didn’t exactly help with his shivering. He was so incredibly exhausted that he felt like he could collapse any second.

His hands still rested on Peter’s chest, and he stared down at him, not sure if he could still find the physical strength to go on. His body‘s natural reflex to avoid harmful inputs told him not to. Not to put any more pressure on his battered hand.

But he couldn’t. He couldn’t just sit there waiting for Peter’s heart to refuse making those few pumps it still did. So he ignored the pain, ignored the blur of his vision, ignored the grunts of agony leaving his mouth and just put the weight of his entire body to push down.

Once, twice.

He was supposed to do 100 compressions a minute at least, 120 if he really wanted to do it perfectly, but that seemed impossible, even though Tony tried his best.

“I need you to work with me, kiddo.” He said, no longer seeing or hearing anything aside of the blood rushing through his veins. “I can only do this much for you, you have to fight yourself back around.”

Never before had he been so happy to finish counting to thirty. His brain enjoyed the break from pain when he relaxed his hands and moved up to Peter’s head again. Resting his hand on the teen’s chest was now just a way of having his wrist in a comfortable position, but he wouldn’t deny that it was reassuring to feel the chest rise and it made his thought’s drift away from the cold of the boy’s lips and the water he could still hear rattling in his lungs.

One breath.

Two breaths.

He dreaded resting his fingers on the side of Peter’s neck, fearing not to feel anything anymore, fearing to be forced to continue the physical and mental torture that the first aid means were to him.

It was still there, that slow flutter, but it was a flutter after all.

Tony’s curse sounded more like a snarl between shaking teeth.

“Come on Peter, come on! You’ve made it through stuff worse than this.”

He forced himself through agony, blindness, cold and dizziness to do the required compressions the way they were supposed to.

He has an enhanced metabolism. Tony reminded himself. And you have to be a freaking enhanced rescuer.

A rip cracked down below, loud enough for him to hear it beside the blood rush in his ears and he could’ve laughed in relief. If anything, the compressions were at least hard enough. Maybe the effort would be enough to convince Peter’s heart to pick up pace.

“It’d be a disgrace if you deserted us like this. Spider-Man killed in a car crash. You wouldn’t want that as your reputation kid, you wouldn’t.”

Talking helped push most of the discomfort away, but the words made Tony’s heart hurt and only caused him to go on even harder and faster, watching Peter‘s shoulders twitch involuntarily with each press, stomach bulging in response - a sickening symphony. He was glad to only see it in a blur.

When he breathed into the kid‘s lungs this time, his head still hammered, not cooling down even after seeing how perfectly his chest rose. Tony approached his breaking point now, his body slowly overthrowing his mind, the heroism, the urge to save that valuable life below him.

One breath. Two breaths. It all happened in a flurry now.

Please let him breathe.

Let me just have the chance to relax.

But instead, the answer to his mental wishes came out as a slap in the face.

A thump against his fingertips.

Then nothing.

Nothing for an entire six seconds before he could feel another sluggish movement.

And Tony lost it, because he just didn‘t have any strength left.

“Fight, kid, goddammit!” His left hand leaped forward in an instant, hitting Peter’s cheek hard. Peter didn’t fight, didn’t gasp, nothing: his head just lolled lifelessly to the right.

Tony couldn’t stop the tears from falling anymore when he got his hands on Peter’s chest to start yet another round of compressions, begging for it to work, begging to hear another rib crack, or some gasping that would indicate that he was breathing again.

“Peter, please. Come on. You have to come back.”

As if the boy obeyed, Tony saw him move a little, realizing after a second that progress had finally settled in. He didn’t exactly draw breath, but some part of his brain had started working again after all, knowing that the body needed air, that air required breathing. Peter was trying to open his mouth weakly and Tony stopped the compressions, feeling manic laughter bubbling from his stomach.

“That’s it kiddo, we can totally work with that, just hold on, keep working with me.” The movement of Peter’s lips felt strange and unnatural when he gave the kid a warm breath, but Tony reminded himself that this was good, maybe all he could ask for at the moment. He filled both their lungs, he was working for two and it was getting a toll on his mind, head and body, but Tony was not ready to give up.

“You can do this, Peter, you are so close,” He crouched over Peter’s chest and began the compressions again. He could think of nothing but the pain, but the pain was good. It meant he was doing something, this was helping.

Another rib cracked.

Then Peter gagged. It was a weak sound, purely reflexive but the boy’s tongue moved.

“Yes!” The man cried and cradled Peter’s face between his hands. “Come on, kiddo, breathe for me. Just a little breath!”

All movement ceased, Peter became as lifeless as before. Tony’s heart sank to his stomach.

“Peter,” he asked weakly and slapped the boy’s face hard. “Hey! Hey! Snap out of it!”

Tony’s body became numb with shock as he pressed his fingers to Peter’s neck and vein. His other hand grasped the boy’s wrist. He counted, he waited, seconds lost all meaning.

Too long, too long.

A beat.

“Oh my God!” He collapsed on the boy’s chest and could not help turning his head to the side so his ear was against the bones under which Peter’s young, warm and stubborn heart resided. The thumb echoed and so slightly raised the boy’s sternum with the pulse. It was still beating.

“You can’t do things like this to me, kiddo,” Tony whispered and resumed CPR. “I’m an old man, you can’t go scaring me to death at a time like this.”

His compressions were strong, sharp, precise but his hand was in agony. He couldn’t take much longer of this.

“Peter, you have to wake up!” He screamed as the boy grunted with each compression. There was an occasional cough as faster circulation of oxygenated blood started waking up Peter’s brain and lungs. It was a terrible scene to witness.

If Tony was grateful for something, it was that Peter did not have to resuscitate him. He didn’t want anyone to have to witness bringing a drowned person back to life.

If it was him that hit his head, if Peter had to force breath back to his lungs, watch his mentor throw up half a lake and dig dead leaves from his throat-

The roles were better this way. Tony had seen more evil, faced more hardships and trauma, he could take this, he could resuscitate Peter and deal with the nightmares but Peter-

He completed the compressions and again shifted closer to Peter’s head. The blue on his lips had started to vanish only slightly. His throat was constricting like the boy was trying to cough.

“You’ll be okay,” Tony pinched the boy’s nostrils closed and breathed into Peter’s mouth. He watched from the side how the air filled Peter’s lungs and listened how the boy exhaled. He would never take the movement of that small chest for granted, he would love every single breath, cough and hiccup madly because he knew how empty the world was when Peter was lying half-dead and at his mercy.

Again, he positioned himself for compressions, and all relief vanished in a second. His body was winning, his trembling hand refusing to obey any more commands.

Tony knew he had to keep going, but he had lost most of his control. He had lost feeling in his right hand entirely, and he couldn’t hold himself upright enough for one handed compressions either. He collapsed over Peter.

“I-” Tony gasped and clutched Peter’s shirt with his left hand. “I can’t, kiddo. I- you- please-”

His chest shook with weak, tearless sobs as Peter laid unmoving underneath him. It took way too much effort for him to lift his head enough to press his head close to Peter’s and caress his face. His fingers traced the boy’s cheekbones, his nose, eyelids, the features he knew by heart. He could describe them with accuracy but had he ever really appreciated them.

His fingers found the boy’s lips, he had gotten too familiar with them. They were cracked, cold, wet- and still moving. Peter’s body was not ready to give up. It was reaching for the impossible and putting faith in someone to help him.

Tony felt sick.

Would Peter give up in this kind of a situation? Would he let a broken hand stop him?

No, Peter wouldn’t. Peter would try his all and find out the best alternative.

There was always a chance for life.

Precordial thumbs have proven shown effect in several cases of approaching cardiac failure. Tony had no idea when he’d read about that, but it hardly mattered in the puddle of his memories. It was all he could do now, all that could possibly work, all he felt up to. He fisted his good hand and slammed it into Peter’s chest: the boy’s body twitched slightly but no other reaction came.

Tony felt the warning signs of a breakdown.

“Goddammit, you son of a bitch!”

He slapped Peter’s face again. He didn’t care to be gentle. Peter was not being easy with him. Tough love had been needed to snap Peter out of his complexes of proving himself even at the risk of his life. Maybe tough love was needed again to give Peter the final push.

“You have to breathe!” He slapped Peter’s face again, leaving ugly imprints of his fingers and palm. “Fucking breathe now!”

He hammered a fist into Peter’s chest again, just where his heart resided.

“Work goddammit!”

He screamed from the depths of his lungs “You can’t give up like this! You have to try! You’re not even trying you fucking quitter, worthless little shit!”

The deities finally seemed to have mercy on him.

After the third thump, Peter gave a grunt, gagged and then gasped for real this time, his chest expanding properly, and though the boy was still out cold, it was the sweetest sound Tony had ever heard before.

“My God,” Tears made his voice heavy and wet and for a moment Tony could do nothing more than take in the sight of Peter breathing and coughing. The boy’s eyes were still closed and his movements sluggish and weak but there.

Peter was there.

“Kiddo,” He sunk to the ground and gathered Peter’s into his arms. “My brave boy, my little buddy.”

Despite popular misconception, Tony loved physical proclamations of love. He hugged his friends frequently but with Peter, he sometimes did not know where their relationship stood. Sure, he had the habit of tugging the boy under his arm, for both safety and warmth but they hugged very occasionally.

This time, he peppered the boy’s temple with kisses, the kid had deserved each of them.

“You did it kid, you did it,” Tears rolled down his cheeks as he listened and felt Peter’s chest rise and fall. The boy gagged and spit out some water.

“That’s good,” Tony patted the boy’s back and rubbed his chest. “If there is more to come out, just let it. I’ll help, I’m here, I’ll help you.”

Wind blew and Tony’s teeth started chattering.

They were still not out of danger. Peter needed immediate medical attention and Tony suspected he also was due to at least one night at a hospital. He looked at the sky, wishing to see some sign their emergency signal had been spotted at the compound. They couldn’t be too far. Someone had to be coming for them.

“Don’t worry, kiddo. We just need to save energy,” The man whispered but he was spent. All he could think of now, was how tired and cold and miserable he was, His thoughts were starting to circle. Peter was the only name in his mind, the boy needed care.

It was not easy while lying down but he somehow managed to set Peter into recovery position, moving the boy’s arm under his torso and hand under his chin. Tony wished he had something dry to wrap the kid in and instead, he shifted closer and wrapped his arms around the boy. He moved as close as he could and clutched Peter as tightly as he dared. It would not do to get Peter’s breathing back but accidentally smother him in a hug.

Peter’s breaths were slow but even, and the sound of them made it easy for Tony to drift towards unconsciousness.

#bohemian rhapsody #my fanfiction #irondad #fanfic

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tessatechaitea · 5 years ago

Text

The Extremist #3

I'm disappointed that this half picture doesn't match up exactly with the half picture from Issue #2.

It's probably good I didn't post any of the blurbs that tried to bribe him with a handjob in the backroom of the Portland Comic-con.

Anyway, let's see what happened in "July, Nineteen Ninety-Three"! I'll try to baby it up so Tumblr doesn't shit its diapers.

Peter Milligan begins this issue all Peter Milligany.

Remember that this was written in 1993 when Peter Milligan makes mention of how a person could, at some point, be alone in anything. But also imagine now how the death of an intimate would go in 2019. Back in 1993, Judy is surprised to find that she's whisked away from her grief for long interludes by the bureaucratic machinations of a death in a capitalist democracy. This same kind of thing probably still happens except with more texts and emails and less phone conversations and driving to speak to people in person. But also imagine the non-bureaucratic side of death. We probably have far less close intimate contacts in our physical space now than we had in 1993, at least by percentage when compared with all people we would consider contacts (intimates who now live in another part of the world, people we know only from online, friends of friends we've maybe met once but now sometimes interact with over social media). In 1993. it would be phone calls and personal visits with flowers and cake or cookies. In 2019, you probably receive a deluge of crying emojis and people replying "*hugs*" to your post about your world crumbling beneath you as you try to stagger on with your remaining years bereft of the person you thought you could never live without. I suppose there are plenty of apps where people could send you cakes and cookies so I suppose it wouldn't be too terrible. Should I create an app that sends cakes and cookies to people when they've lost a loved one? It wouldn't cost anything. You'd just have to send me a small cake and some cookies with every use of the app! I can't wait to get extraordinarily fat! The journey is going to be so worth it!

Grief is a savory, selfish feast.

Peter Milligan has a way of expressing potent, terrible truths in such a casual manner that most people probably don't even notice them. There's an almost expressible power in believing you're experiencing something that nobody else has or will ever experience. Or just in knowing that you lived a part of your life unknown to your closest friends and family. I cherish, greedily, the moments of my life spent alone and far from those closest to me and I parcel them out as stories in only the most meager of manners. Hell, I've probably told more about myself and my experiences here on this blog exactly because I know my friends and family don't read it. I might say this every commentary until this series is over but I still don't know if I understand the point of the overall plot. But I do understand that the plot is a way for Peter Milligan to be Peter Milligan. I understand the need for a framework to say things you want to say. Or to just put scenes out there that you don't want to bother encasing in some kind of larger whole that you're less interested in. So here's another scene Peter Milligan had to have thought about and then needed a place to mention it:

Of course people still get horny for their dead partner! But how often does anybody talk about it?! Maybe it's common and I'm just consuming the wrong kinds of media. Alex Trebek never once asked a contestant if they jerk off thinking about their dead spouse!

Netflix's Dead to Me has some pretty frank discussions about the loss of a spouse but while Christina Applegate talks about being horny and wanting to fuck somebody, I don't think she ever says she masturbates thinking about her dead husband. If the point of this story is about dealing with loss, I'm beginning to get it. And that would completely explain why I missed it at twenty-one. I'm only three pages into this issue and it's kicking me in the face with existential issues. Was I too dumb at twenty-one to understand any of this or just too sheltered to really feel it? Maybe I was just too fucking young. Judy finds the key to Jack's Extremist apartment. After looking around the place, she thinks, "It was like having Jack die all over again, but this death seemed more profound. 'I never knew you,' I thought." It's an easy statement to point out that nobody ever really knows anybody. But once, because Jim Starling wrote a terrible run on Stormwatch, I wrote an entire rant about how we all hide our innermost dark secrets from even the greatest loves of our lives. I was essentially asking how can we know anyone if we won't even let those closest to us know our most vulnerable thoughts and terrible crimes (I don't mean crimes in the law and order sense! I just mean like that time you put your finger in your ass and then made sandwiches for your friends and they all got sick and you didn't do it on purpose but you made the connection and nobody must ever fucking know! You know, those kinds of crimes. But not that specific one! I totally just made that one up for effect). So I could repeat myself or just link to the rant or just (and — Spoiler! — this is the choice I'm going with!) move on to page five of this comic book. Judy discovers an old diary written by The Extremist (but not Jack!). Then she finds some of the tapes he burned and salvages a few. She hears Jack speaking about murder and getting pissed on and, most appallingly, calling her "poor dull dead little Judy." She smashes the place up, finds The Extremist's gimp suit, and tries it on thinking, "What the fuck?! Maybe I'll feel sexy and start speaking in sex metaphors!" Then the phone rings. And I suppose the rest is history! And by history, I mean Issue #1! Except I'm only on page seven so maybe I'm jumping the gun. I guess we need to learn how Judy met Patrick and why she decided her life would be better by going out at night murdering people until she comes hard in a leather suit. Oh, I hope that last sentence wasn't too adult for Tumblr! A bunch of pages are taken up by the plot stuff that I apparently paid the most attention to in 1993 and which is the least interesting part of the story (so far!). Patrick "accidentally" runs into Judy and he pretends he doesn't know who killed Jack. He offers to help her find out if she'll pose as The Extremist and do murders and blow jobs for him. Judy is all, "What the hell! Maybe I'll understand Jack a little more! Maybe I'll know why he needed a boring piece of shit like me when he was having such fantastic fuck and murder adventures!" No wait. That's what I would say. Judy just wants to find out who killed Jack and to, maybe, feel a little closer to him. I don't think she's as amped up as I would be about the loads of indiscriminate sex and murdering of the most perverse perverts. The main story ends with Judy making her first kill. She learns that her problem was that she was always living in the past and the future. So even if she had wanted to kill somebody in the moment before, she'd be all tangled up in the past and whether the person deserved it and maybe some of it was her fault and perhaps she's been too hasty with her murder decision. And she'd also be lost in the future like how the person will stop existing and how she might wind up in prison and how the victim's guts are going to be hell to clean up off the floor. But in the moment, she can just satisfy the need without consequence or conscience! She discovers it's a thrill! Well, I could have told her that! I've been playing Dungeons and Dragons since I was ten! Never worry about what the orc did or if it deserved it or if it has family or if you're actually the asshole raiding its lovely home! The actual issue ends with Tony, the black guy on the stoop, sitting in The Extremist's apartment listening to Judy's tapes. He's just finished the last one where she says she's going off to kill Patrick and he's completely caught up in the drama. He wants to know who killed who just as badly as, well, not me but I'm sure some readers were on the edge of their seat at this point. The Extremist #3 Rating: B. I don't find myself caring about the framework. But Peter Milligan has thoughts and those thoughts are well worth the admission price to this story. In a way, this is just an extension of his run on Shade the Changing Man. It's almost the same story if you squint your eyes and unfocus your vision and punch yourself in the genitals. Patrick is the guy on Meta who was pulling the strings to get Shade to go into the Area of Madness and eventually Earth (I forget his name! I bet it was Patrick!) And The Extremist is Shade and Kathy too (they both have similarities to both Judy and Jack, so I don't mean to say either Shade or Kathy is essentially one or the other). The Extremist has crazy missions where they kill and fuck just like Shade and Kathy had! I think. I mean, probably! And Tony is just Lenny in someway that I haven't spent any time thinking about but they were the only characters left!

#The Extremist #Peter Milligan #Ted McKeever #DC Comics #DC #Vertigo

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doodlefox-beta · 6 years ago

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ｂｕｎｇｕｓ

can you imagine a world where were all represented by a font? What font would I be? Hmmm, no, not Arial, that's too straight. No! Not in that way! Just, straight, as in unexciting. Too uh, deadpool.... BROADWAY! Now that's the one! Now that's the ONE!!! Hello Internet, welcome to GAME THEORY, where instead of putting a joke here I want to ask you a personal question. If you're personality were represented by a font, which font would you be? Take a moment and put you font in the comments. I'm really curious to see what everyone has to say. Maybe find a couple new cool fonts to use. I get bored with old calibri 11. And with that out of the way, it's time to talk UNDERTALE. Now I don't think I've ever gotten this many request to cover a game. Well, except for FNAF. And I suppose FNAF 2. OH and there was FNAF 3. Wait a minute, should I be worried about something here? Anyway, across the board on YouTube, Reddit, and Twitter, you've all been wanting Undertale. And honestly, I'm glad you brought it to my attention. Truly loyal theorists will know that earthbound is my favorite game of all time. So a self aware RPG in a similar style, WHOA MAN, it's like a gift from the indie gaming heavens. Undertale is a game where every character, from goat mom to grind fodder has a sympathetic design and a unique personality, motivations, goals, fears. Whether you're saving or slaughtering them, the game makes you feel something every time you enter an encounter. But to me, one character stood out amongst all the rest. SANS. A skeleton named after the font, comic sans, hence all the font references at the beginning of the episode. If you haven't played undertale I'm sure that was a really wierd opening. ANYWAYS, sans is, well, there's a lot of mystery around this guy. And before we get into it, let me put up a very special spoiler warning: UNDERTALE Is a game best experienced blind. So if you haven't played it, come back after you've finished. I PROMISE YOU, I PROMISE you won't regret it. Alright so everyone out of the pool and ready for the adult swim? Good. Because I'm feeling pretty determined to get to the bottom of sans' mystery. So just to recap for those of you who haven't played the game and ignored the SPOILER WARNING, or just need a refresher, sans is one of the two skeletal brothers who appears in the game. His partner is papyrus, a loud, goofy trap lover also named after a font. But in the world of undertale their origins are a big question mark. All you really know is what's given by a shopkeeper in Snowden, who claims that sans and papyrus just, and I quote, "showed up one day and asserted themselves." Wierd, right? What's more is that papyrus is just kinda the goofy sidekick. SANS is much more complex. He likes fart jokes, but he's also incredibly deadly and much more serious. Not only is his boss battle the hardest in the game, he's one of the only characters who has knowledge and power over space and time. He can take shortcuts through the world on ridiculous routes. He even is walking through walls. He also acknowledges that he's only one of infinite versions of himself, making self-aware commentary of the various timelines you've played through in the game. He can even count the number of times he's killed you. He acts like an arbiter of this world, passing out judgements in the game, even explaining the secrets of EXP and LOVE, or EXECUTION POINTS and LEVELS OF VIOLENCE. In short, he just doesn't quite fit in with the rest of the world of monsters. But then, what, or who, is he? Well, that he doesn't belong in the underground seems to be correct. The evidence shows he used to be a surface dweller. In the true pacifist ending of the game, as the group looks out onto the horizon, papyrus asks sans about the giant ball in the sky. Sans says, quote, we call that the sun. This is important because A, the use of the word WE, and knowledge of the sun, shows that sans has a kinship or knowledge of other humans, and B, that despite he and papyrus both being skeletons, and BROTHER, and apparently both appearing in the underworld at the same time, the clearly have two very different histories. Why would papyrus not know the name of the sun but sans would? We get further clues to sans' origins as we hear him say multiple times he wants to "go home" or "go back." He says as much during his dinner date scene at the mettaton hotel. He notices that the player wants to go home and says, quote, "I know the feeling." He then continues, "maybe sometimes it's better to take what's given to you." As though he ended up in the underworld by accident. AND in a genocide run during his boss fight he says, quote, "look, I gave up trying to go back a long time ago." End quote. And before you say that means going back to the surface world, that's clearly not the full story. His very next line of dialogue is " and getting to the surface doesn't really appeal anymore either." Key word here, is EITHER. Yes, he seems to hail from the surface and wants to go back, but based on the dialogue he no longer considers it his home. It's as though the surface world he once knew is gone, and as though the surface he's from is from a different time. It's pretty intriguing. So we're left with a being that appeared out of nowhere, presumably from being from the human surface but from a different time period, who seemingly had the power to teleport. That a lot of questions and not a lot of answers. But here's where things get REALLY interesting. Sans has a hidden workshop that takes a fair amount of searching to find. You could say it takes a lot of DETERMINATION to unlock. Anyways, obligatory determination references aside, as you start to look for this easter egg sans gives you a key to his room and says "it's time you learn the truth." After visiting the workshop you find some items that leave a lot more questions. A photo album featuring sans and a bunch of people you don't recognize, a badge, blueprints with illegible handwriting, and a broken machine hidden behind a curtain. In the latest update, one more detail was added. A handdrawn picture of 3 smiling faces with the words “don't forget.” so what does it all mean. Well a lot of undertale theorists have been linking these details to a feature to a character named w d gaster. A ghostly figure who never truly appears in the game, honestly covering him is a theory all unto itself, and probably best saved for another day. All of the gaster theories i've seen haven't been able to explain all the details. A photo album, and the badge, and that's what kept nagging me as i researched undertale. A badge? That one in particular stuck out to me. Why would such an oddly specific item to be hidden in the huge easter egg of the room. Something that supposedly reveals the truth about sans. Badges just aren't important in undertale. Then it hit me. What if this badge isn't from undertale? What if this badge is from a completely different game? And was infact the most important badge in the history badge in the history of gaming? This franklin badge. And for those of you who are wondering what i'm talking about, the franklin badge is a pivotal item from the mother series. You know, the one with earthbound, or, maybe you don't know that one either. You know, the one with ness from super smash bros? Yeah well, ness is from earthbound, and earthbound is the second part of this larger mother series. Good? Yeah, well anyways, the franklin badge is an important part of that series. It gets its start in the very first game and carries through the whole trilogy, saving your life many times in the process. It's SO important that nintendo has made it a staple item in the smash brothers series. So i asked myself; what if the badge in sans drawer was THAT badge? Well first off, it would make undertale connected to earthbound, thereby making it even COOLER? But that's still a pretty big logical leap. I needed more. Let me tell you, as i started looking more and more pieces started to fit into place. At the end of earthbound you're given a photo album, covering your adventures throughout the game. To me it's one of the most satisfying endings to a journey. And what does sans have in his other drawer? A photo album of people you don't recognize. Of course you don't know them, they're not character present in undertale. And note the word that's used here, PEOPLE you don't recognize. Not underworld monsters. So that's 2 items oddly linked to the mother series linked to the mother series. But how do the broken machine and blueprints fit in? Well, in the final stretch of earthbound, ness and his 3 friends must travel to the past in order to have their final battle against the evil alien giygas. In order to do that, with the help of dr. andonuts (remember that, he's going to be important later) along with science geniuses apple kid and mr. saturn, create a machine known as the phase distorter, a machine that allows people to travel through time and space. Except, it comes at a cost. It can transport organic material, as a result the young heroes must put their souls in robot bodies in order to save the world. I played this game back in 1997 and i'm not ashamed to admit that when i first saw this scene i cried. It's DEVASTATING. Doctor andonuts says goodbye to his son, these characters you've grown to love are suddenly promising to sacrifice their lives. For all they know, there is no possibility of them being able to come back home. It's all a very dark departure in what was otherwise a fun, colorful, and quirky RPG. so what does all of this have to do with undertale? A LOT, actually. But the first thing you need to know is that mr. saturns are known for their, let's say, unique linguistic style. That would explain the illegible handwriting on the blueprints. And the machine? I think a broken phase distorter is behind that curtain. Now that may seem like a stretch but it actually explains a lot. Sans wound up in undertale via phase distorter, it could provide a reason for why he's a skeleton. He used the machine as organic matter and suffered the consequences, not killing him, but turning at least a part of him into a pile of bones. That could also explain why sans has given up hope for going home. Remember the phase distorter is a time machine. Based on the way he talks, he's not only from a different space but from a different time, with no hope of travelling back to the time he came from. But the crossovers between earthbound and undertale continue. When you speak to apple kid at the end of earthbound, he's blown away by the astronomical odds of ness defeating giygas. Hes going to continue studying the trait called courage, in order to obtain its power. That seems awfully familiar to the experiments happening in undertale around the trait of determination, no? Especially since so much has shown that sans was a key player in those experiments. But i'm sure you also want physical evidence right? Well don't worry, i have plenty. During one of the endings of undertale, we see undyne and alpyhs hanging out on the beach of the surface world. A beach that bears a lot of similarities to the tropical location summers that you play in earthbound. In fact, the geographic layout of the surface bears some striking similarities to the world of mother. When undertales crew of monsters are finally able to reach the surface and look out over the earth, they're met with a beautiful sunset with a tall mountain, a big city, and a sandy area adjacent to water. Notice the sun's reflection, hence the water, and a lack of trees in this middle section, hence the sand. Well, in earthbound you have the big city of fourside, complete with skyscrapers, which you reach via a dessert that just so happens to be adjacent to water, and to the east, a mountain on onett where a meteor hits earth. I always called it onett. But if that's not clear enough for you, mother 1, earthbound zero, earthbound beginnings, whatever you want to call it, it's had a lot of names, had a map laying out the same geographic landscape. A tall mountain to the east of a large city, separated by a desert, with all of it up against a coast. I don't know about you, but to me it seems like there's a definite connection between the world of eagleland (eagleland? Again, unclear how its pronounced.) and the surface world of undertale. But the strongest physical connection, the one that definitely connects these two franchises, comes from none other than papyrus himself. He wears a custom made costume known as his “battle body” but if you look really closely at the designing on the armor, you'll notice a few marks on the chest. Is it just a throwaway detail? Ohoh NO, that right there is an exact match to the ones that appear on the chests of starmen, the most iconic enemy of earthbound. And look at the way he stands, i always thought it was awkward until i saw the two characters side by side. Papyrus’ curved arm and hand is a DIRECT match to the curved arm and hand of the starmen. In short, we have some strong proof that the earthbound universe is somehow connected to the undertale world, which brings us back to our initial question, WHO IS SANS? Well, what if we took in one final step and said that sans happened to be ness from earthbound. He hopped through the phase distorted as a test of courage, carrying his franklin badge, a photobook, and his trusty backpack. Not only do all the items in the workshop suddenly fit, but so does sans’ behavior. Remember, sans can seemingly teleport. And ness just happens to have the ability PSI teleport. Now look at how sans stands, hands in his pockets, legs out, it looks very similar to how ness is shown on most of the marketing for the game. It even explains why sans bleeds when you hit him. He is, or at least, WAS, a human. Oh and finally, sans is only one letter removed from being an anagram of ness. That's just a fun one. I thought it was worth mentioning. But if there was any doubt, we have to look no further than the creators previous work. Toby Fox, the man behind undertale, had previously worked on a halloween hack for earthbound. But this isn't just a simple reskin. The halloween hack tells the tale of dr. andonuts after the events of earthbound. Remember i pointed him out, he's the one who made the phase distorter. In toby fox’s version of the story, we see that the souls of the kids never returned home instead, by going to the past to defeat giygas, there stuck in a new timeline. As a result, jeff never reunites with his father andonuts. And dr. andonuts goes crazy with guilt, because HE’S the one responsible for creating the time machine, taking the souls of his sons and his sons friend to what he assumes aws their death. He's killed 4 kids, and in toby fox's game, he's gone crazy with guilt, trying to deal with that. Im telling you, this hack is DARK. that said, you see a lot of undertale in this game. The appearance of amalgamates, the use of the awesome song megalovania, the prototypes for flowery? And the theme of being nonviolent in an rpg, SPARING your enemies. So why is this important to the story? Well, remember, in toby fox's version of the story, the kids don't come back. They're stuck in the past, with no hopes of getting home, just like sans. and , in the hack, one character is oddly missing, with no explanation as to why. NESS. presumably in this timeline his soul is in a different place than his friends. Which brings us back to undertale. 3 faces, with “don't forget” written on it? Its ness, trying to remember his 3 friends. In short, undertale is a continuation of toby’s version of earthbound, with ness never being able to get home, adopting the name sans, and being accompanied by papyrus, a starman, with knowledge of english, his armor, and his signature posture, but without any of his memory of human things, like the sun. The pieces all just seem to fit. Now all we need is an appearance from Pokey/Porky and we’d have a true sequel. But hey, that's just a theory. A GAME THEORY! THANKS FOR WATCHING!

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designresearchkelvin · 3 years ago

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Critical Commentary

The creative practice I am more drawn toward the most is photography, especially how a photographer is able to convey a certain emotion or narrative through a still image. Personally, the type of photography I practice myself as well as the type of photography I am interested in the most is black and white photography. I love how black and white images look and how it is able to enhance the way an image looks even though you’re taking away a quality which is colour, often seen as a key attribute in design and photography to strengthen a certain theme or message. Through this project, I have focused on photographers' contexts and methods within the photographs they have taken. I picked eleven photographers as well as a photograph from them that I am fascinated by to analyse what I am able to understand through the contexts or methods they have created or used. I have also picked one of my own images to add on to this postcard set to see how it fits in with the images or photographs I am drawn towards.

While analysing the images I have picked for my postcard set as well as some images that did not make the cut, I have noticed that contexts within black and white photography can vary. When thinking of a black and white image, an emotion that is commonly associated with it is sadness. Although that may be true to a certain extent, it is also able to convey serious topics and document important moments. Out of the twelve images in my postcard set, I analysed the context/s of six of those twelve images. In those six images, the context of those images conveyed a narrative and/or a topic.

Starting from the photograph taken from Charles Peterson, it documents how glamorous the London punk scene looked to him. He wanted the image to encapsulate the lifestyle of famous artists as well as see through the eyes of these artists and how it feels to have many people looking up to you. Secondly, the photograph taken by Jim Goldberg narrates a mood as well as a story. The mood of the image is very sad and it shows a man in a drunken state. Through certain techniques which can also be linked into methods category in this project, the photographer has used text and setting to enhance the narrative of the image. Jim Goldberg added handwritten text by the model in the photograph to give more context to the image. The text summed up explains how lonely and insecure the man is. He was also photographed in an empty hotel room, drunk showing how unstable his life may be. Next, I analysed a photograph Duane Michals had taken. Similar to Jim Goldberg’s photograph, Duane Michals documented the death of a young boy's grandfather conveying the mood of sadness. The boy in the image is seen standing at the foot of his grandfather's bed as his grandfather slowly closes his eyes. Also like Jim Goldberg, Duane Michals added some text to give more insight into the context of the image. The text reads “Grandpa goes to heaven” which was written by the boy himself insinuating that his grandfather had just passed and is on his way to heaven. The photograph taken by Nolan Ryan Trowe, reveals the difficulties of having no mobility. It shows a man facing a wall looking outside which implies that he wants to be outside but because he has this mobility issue, he is feeling helpless and worthless. This image communicates how the man in the image feels. Afterwards, I started analysing the image taken by Robert Frank. This photograph showcases the lives of the privileged and the unprivileged. It documents the racism that has occurred in the past as well as the present. The people of colour in the image are seen sitting at the back of the bus and the white people are seen sitting in the front. This was a serious issue because only the colour of someone's skin determined special treatment or mistreatment regardless of medical health or age. It is amazing how he was able to showcase the inequality in the world in one image. Lastly, I analysed Shirin Neshat’s photograph. Like previous photographers, Shirin Neshat also used certain techniques and methods to enhance the context of the image. Shirin Neshat added written words that were taken from religious texts. The image shows the relationship between women and their religious views in Islam. It documents what it is like being a woman in a male-dominated culture as well as the physical, emotional and cultural implications of women in Iran.

The methods used in black and white photography were also quite different in each image I analysed in the postcard set. A lot of different techniques were used to enhance the context or narrative of an image. Just like the contexts of the images I analysed, I also analysed six methods of photographs taken in the postcard set. When thinking of methods, I found out that methods are a way of enhancing the context of an image.

Starting from the image taken by myself, I used a digital camera to take the image then edited the image to look like it was taken from a film camera. This is my own personal style of photography. Usually, when photographing images, I do a lot of exploring. In this specific image, I was out with my friends, and we walked around looking for new locations and settings to use as an interesting background for a portrait since I was intending to take portraits of my friends. Before taking the image, I plan a certain outfit/wardrobe the model/my friends would wear that day to fit the aesthetic and mood of the image which was a grunge and moody aesthetic. While taking the image, I purposely take the photo slightly underexposed to enhance the moody aesthetic I was going for. Then after the image is taken, I edit the image by adding a black and white filter followed by more adjustments to make the image look like it was taken by a film camera. Secondly, I analysed the photograph taken by Willem Verbeeck. Unlike me, Willem Verbeeck takes his images straight from a film camera and uses black and white film. The model in the image is smoking a cigarette and the image was taken from a slightly lower angle to portray the model in an intimidating and dominating way. Willem Verbeeck also used a shallow depth of field to make the model look like he is right in front of you which also enhances the way the photographer wants the model to be portrayed. Next, I analysed another image taken by Duane Michals. Just like Willem Verbeeck, Duane Michals uses black and white film photography. Duane Michals instructed the model to cover their face with their hands and used natural sunlight to add some brightness to the image. The image was then printed on a larger piece of photographic paper so there would be some space to add some handwritten text. The text was handwritten by the model with a thin black pen right under the image. The text was the model's name which implies that the photographer was going for a personal approach with the image. This makes it so the instructions given by Duane Michals to the model to cover his face with his hands was deliberate. Duane Michals wanted to show the personality of the model, who was probably shy. Again, I also analysed another image taken by Jim Goldberg. Jim Goldberg also uses black and white film photography. The image was taken with flash and the image seems to be slightly overexposed. The image was taken on the street and the model is seen holding and smelling a rose. The image was then printed on a larger piece of photographic paper so some handwritten text could be added. The model in the image wrote on the image with a red marker which also seemed to have run out of ink as she wrote. From all the techniques and methods used by Jim Goldberg in this specific image, it makes me think that the image is about a heartbreak and shows how the model in the image is coping with it. Afterwards, I started to analyse the image taken by Rosanna Jones. Like the majority of the previous photographers I have mentioned, Rosanna Jones uses black and white film photography. The image was taken in front of a white backdrop and the model seems to be looking upwards as she screams. The photograph was then printed out and yellow tape was used to stick onto the image of the model, covering her mouth. The tape covering the model's mouth insinuates that the model is being silenced which could be related to the sexism that is present in our society. Lastly, I analysed an image taken by Helena Almeida. Helena Almeida also uses black and white photography. A recurring theme that I am noticing is that I have a huge attraction towards black and white film photography. The model in the image is seen looking into a mirror. After the photograph was taken, the photograph was then printed out and was painted onto with a paintbrush and blue paint. The paint was painted from where the brush was positioned in the photograph to make it look as if the model in the black and white image was painting herself.

In conclusion, black and white photography can be really interesting and people don’t give it as much credit as colour photography. Through all the contexts and methods I have analysed in the postcard set, it has given me more insight into how the image was created as well as what it is about. I have learnt a lot from these other photographers and I see myself trying to develop some of the skills these photographers have showcased in their work. Even though I am not the best at photography, it is my favourite creative practice by far and I am interested in learning more about it and developing new skills in the future.

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chibi-chaos · 7 years ago

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Voltron Season 5 Theorizing

Right so I’m just putting this all out there - and man! I cannot wait to see the new season!!!!!

I’ll add imaged to this later when I have time ^^”

THEORY ONE: TWO LEADERS

Basically for those you saw the season trailer you guys might have noticed that Lance has commanding or ‘proactive’ lines. I am not saying he’s gonna be Black Paladin, cause I doubt it would be on the books this season.

BUT

There may be a split or even schism.

Firstly look at the trailer. For one there’s two clear groups forming for fights. You have one lead by ‘Shiro’ with Matt and Pidge making the team. And then you have the second team lead by Lance with Hunk and Allura as part of it (leg buddies?). Shiro remains the leader, but in some ways I’d say Lance is becoming a ‘shadow leader’

For one they both have equal amounts of proactive comments:

Lance:

‘Everyone get to your lions, we’re going in’ - in this on we see Lance, Allura and Hunk followed by a quick scene of their lions

'3, 2, 1.’ Going by the loudness of it, this is during the climax - a battle and Lance in this is calling the shots, presumably on a maneuver. .

‘Shiro’:

‘Stay in formation, and don’t touch the sides’ - this one we see all of the members and their lions

‘It may be time to consider taking the next step’ - This one shows Allura and Pidge, followed by all the lions.

In a way it makes sense that these two are going to be diverging. First in the last season Lance made orders to get out of dangerous before investigating, which ‘Shiro’ over-ruled. And look where that got them? On a planet being pushed into the ground by gravity increasing, before only just escaping an explosion.

On top of that look at the video called ‘Lance’s Upgrade’ - in Lance comments about Shiro not taking him serious - ‘I don’t think Shiro has noticed’. In a way it make sense with these two. Lance was Keith’s right hand man, not Shiro’s. Shiro always turned to Keith. And with Shiro not looking at Lance as his new right hand, it is causing tensions. Same as like with last season his actions are causing more with Allura’s comment - ‘we seem to be constantly at odds’.

Add on: If you go by ‘Lance’s Upgrade’ it’s safe to say that he still supports Shiro - he’s not trying to over take Shiro or assume control, in fact he has worked to smooth the worries Allura has with Shiro. ie. ‘you both have the coalitions best interesting at heart, don’t forget that.’

Another add on: The ‘Operation Lava Base’ just emphasizes how Lance in this is not taking over or trying to overpower Shiro’s control. He’s following Shiro’s instructions just as everyone else is. So in the end Lance is the ‘shadow leader’ or ‘right-hand man’ who’ll support Shiro unless he feels like there’s a better alternative and would voice it. It’s possible to argue he’s working on trying to get Shiro to take him more seriously/understand that he is the right hand now. After all, Lance is shown to be training by himself in ‘Lance’s Upgrade’ - it something that isn’t really shown except with Keith and that was because of how seriously he took his role.

THEORY (MORE LIKE COMMENTARY) TWO: LANCE IS NOT KEITH

Okay so this comment has been floating around a little, and I would like to basically prove otherwise. In the first season Iverson compares Lance to Keith, but that doesn’t mean he is being compared to or becoming Keith now.

In fact Lance has been for the past two seasons compared to someone else.

Alfor.

When Red called, Allura points out that like with Alfor with Zarkon, Lance accepted Keith as the better leader and settled for supporting.

And then with Lance’s Bayard changing, Allura comments about it being the same type of sword that Alfor wielded.

Similarly their personalities echo, Alfor goes from being young going head first in fights and having a joking tone to him, to maturing to become an ideal king and paladin. Similar is happening with Lance as he goes from being a jokester to a form of support for the others. They both accept being the right hand man, and are not afraid to call out then leader if need (ie. Alfor with Zarkon’s obsession of studying and experimenting with the quintessence - ‘This is madness’, and Lance when Keith was still adjusted to the role and was still focused on get Lotor when the other members were lost - ‘Keith, you’re splitting up the team.)

On top of that - the introduction of the sword is something to be expected. So far every red paladin has used a sword, and it links to how the Red Lion controls the sword for Voltron. By having Lance receive the third form of the bayard, it not only demonstrates that Lance is developing to fit his role more (hence why he didn’t instantly get the sword), but also shows how Lance will need to develop an understanding of the sword to help him with using one with Voltron formed. Also the fact that it’s his third bayard point out how he isn’t Keith, he’s main form is a gun, and with adding the sword it’s demonstrates him as a jack-of-all-trades.

Lance isn’t becoming Keith, he is adapting to the role of the Red Paladin. Just like how he adapted to become the right hand man for Keith, and how he adapted to save Plaxum and her people from the Baku with not much support from his team (since it was only him and Hunk, and Hunk was brainwashed for a bit).

OBSERVATIONS (Basically things I am still working on):

1. Keith is definitely having more time and development.Looking at it this way, for one he has unlocked his blade properly and is using it in battle. It means that he has figured out something that potentially was holding him back, and that might take a bit to illustrate. Some of the images also kinda reflects on this, for instance, the isolated Keith in the wide expanse is a style shot that usually reflect journeys.

2. Sendak returns with a larger arm... what this means... I am not too sure. I have a small hunch that Lotor’s gonna fight him, if you go by the fact they both had scene that are set at night in a galra base.

3. Shiro, Pidge and Matt seem to be hearing out Zarkon’s deal. What is interesting is what could convince them to hear him out, which would be something they have in common, or they all can agree is important. It potentially though could turn south, especially considering these three may all be in the scene which Kimiko Glenn (Ezor’s voice actress) leaked - Shiro and Matt shown and there’s a hint of green as well that could be Pidge. Even more so with the background of Pidge fighting in the trailer might match the leaked image. It makes sense that the leak is at that point, because on top of all that we know it will have Shiro, Matt and Ezor, and Ezor is seen behind Zarkon (Lotor’s generals having turned to Zarkon for the time being)

4. There’s a big ol’ fight on Olkari, it’s probably here where the ‘new age of warfare’ is being introduced full time. Considering Olkari is one of the main contributors to Voltron’s side of the battle - having helped made the teleduv which badly injured Zarkon - it makes sense.

5. The hints of a sixth lion in the previous season with the cave drawings seems to be correct, as the White lion is introduced. And it seems that Allura was have some form of tie to it. It could be to sort out the 6 paladin, 5 lions thing - BUT the white lion has turned up before, and in the original Voltron... It wasn’t anything good.

6. Shiro’s a clone - really I’m just putting it in cause why not. But by this point I think pretty much everyone had concluded that, and it’s only just reinforced more with ‘Lance’s Upgrade’ where Allura comments about Shiro being different.

7. ...okay there’s no seven... I really wanted to put something in for Hunk. But literally there’s not much given about him for this season. So I’ll say this. We have some people’s opinions on Lotor, I’l explain Hunk’s probable reaction. He won’t trust Lotor, he is a cinnamon roll BUT with new characters he has always been cautious. In a way it goes to his anxiety, where he is cautious with new environments/situations. He made a point to say he didn’t trust Rolo and Nyma, so naturally with everything he knows on Lotor he won’t trust him as far as he can throw him (which is pretty far). He’ll be suspicious, and will be the voice of reason, which often enough he has been shown to be (think first ep where he questions sneaking out, or with Nyma and Rolo, and several other moments). So he’ll approach Lotor with cautious, treating him with a great amount of suspicion but won’t shake the boat if it seems to be contained enough. But the moment the warning bell sounds too much, Hunk will upgrade from commenting about his distrust to trying to point out and convince people what he sees is happening.

#voltron #voltron legendary defender #voltron season 5 #voltron season 5 theory #voltron season 5 observations #voltron lance #voltron keith #voltron shiro #voltron allura #voltron pidge #voltron matt #voltron hunk #I wish i could find things to refer to Hunk with...

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greyias · 7 years ago

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Sorry for the delay on these, Nonnies. I’ve been so far down this rabbit hole I fell into, I’m pretty sure I need a change of address form.

(Somewhat spoilery anon asks and answers under the cut)

Hey Nonny! (Or is it Nonnies?) I understand your fear. I kind of had a bit of a panic moment going “What the fuck, Lana?”, as at least on my playthroughs, the level of anger and aggression here was out of left field. But after a few minutes, I started to get suspicious, as I always seem to do. Something about this letter just seems off to me.

I had a much long post about this written up (as indicated by the timestamps), but honestly, it seems to be a landmine at the moment (so if a tiny bit of salt peeks through in some of my commentary, please know that it’s definitely not directed at you Nonny, just some things that kept popping up on my dash last week that irked me), and I’m finding the Uprising stuff, as well as Indo and Zildrog’s codex entries and lore to be far, far more interesting (and probably having a much a greater impact on the next story drop than this.)

So, a quick summary of what went through my head:

Scenario 1:

Lana’s with us on Team Oblivious. She was inexplicably given two different reactions in Umbara (”sorry bro, but we ought to catch Theron” or “RAWR TR8R LANA SMASH”), and then suddenly they realized that didn’t play well into their final act so they forgot a double carriage return and added the last paragraph to make things SUPER CLEAR to the audience, sweating the entire time going “Ahahaha, nothing suspicious here”.

This doesn’t sit well with me. If this is true, then it means that Lana has suddenly lost one of her defining character traits, a quest for the truth and to question things that don’t fit as part of a ham-fisted attempt by the writers to give her an unneeded emotional arc rather than one that progresses naturally with the storyline. It certainly seems to be the straightforward and obvious answer. But then I asked myself, the rest of this storyline is not straightforward and laid out plainly, why would this be here? Why didn’t Lana just go into full-on Sith mode regardless of our choices in Umbara? What’s the purpose of this suddenly being put int here now? I’m suspecting this is a red herring, and it’s been placed here to intentionally distract you from something else. But why would they need to distract us, both in-character, as well as out-of-character?

Well, you see, they finally dropped the big clue we accidentally deciphered all the way back in August. That the mysterious “Order” is the “Order of Zildrog”. And, as much as I love Lana, that is far, far more interesting (not to mention much better writing) than a needless Virmire-style choice between her and Theron, and the Alliance suddenly shattering to pieces because the mean, mean old spyboy violated all of our trust because he forgot how to use his big boy words.

Thank you, Tyth. Have a rage!cookie. And turn off caps lock.

That’s before even bringing in logistical things like the heavy handed hints that we’re getting a major storyline next year (possibly an expansion), the fact that breaking up the Alliance and going back to a two-party scenario would split their resources between two storylines rather than one with minor divergences, and the fact that Lana and Theron are both extremely popular characters, and removing them from future story content would very likely negatively impact their subscriber base.

So no, I don’t think we’re going to have to choose between Theron and Lana and lose one of them (and in that fashion, lose them both as major characters from here on out). It doesn’t make much sense.

That said, if this is the route they were going, the only way that it would, for me personally, ring true and make me not annoyed as hell is if it led to Lana and Theron finally having a Big Kid™ discussion where they both state plainly “Hey remember that time you got me brutally tortured? I didn’t like that and would like an apology?” and the other goes “Remember that time you tazed me before blowing up a fucking train? That really sucked!” and they’re both forced to awkwardly hug it out because the Outlander secretly loves group hugs. And then they go off to fight the big bad because the BroTP aren’t stupid.

And trust me, this big bad isn’t going to be neatly wrapped up in the next story drop. There’s no time for Lana to indulge in out-of-character and over-the-top Sith torture/murder shenanigans.

Scenario 2:

Lana’s on Team Undercover. This makes far more sense with her character. Because, all of the other weird bits aside (her and Theron’s strangely voiced, almost coded conversation at the beginning of Umbara, her weird delivery after we leap off the train, that weird ass nod at the beginning of Copero), Lana should be able to put the clues together to figure out that he is undercover. How would she not question the fact that the shot she intercepted for you was a stun blast and not a killing blow? How could she not question that there were just enough crystals left for the Alliance to grab and drive off the opposing faction from Iokath? How does she not realize that this is a complete 180 on Theron’s established characterization, considering the fact that she’s known him just about as long as the Outlander, and was roomies with him for nearly a year when they were on the lam back during Shadow of Revan? Like, seriously, questioning things is what Lana does. We meet her in Forged Alliances and she’s questioning the timing of the ops, she questions her boss who she had trust in. Lana puts aside her personal feelings to find the truth. After the Empire ceded to Arcann, I don’t have the reference in front of me where I found it, but I had in my notes for something I was working on that she was suspicious of the tributes to Zakuul, because they were excessively excessive, and that investigation led down a bunny trail that eventually led to the Outlander in carbonite.

And then, well...

And let’s not forget the fact that both Lana and Theron are intercepting and spying on each other’s messages all throughout KotFE.

I mean, come on you two, I know there’s some hard feelings after Rishi and Ziost (and Theron especially can hold a grudge for a ridiculously long amount of time), but this is excessive.

So, no, at least for me, Lana suddenly trusting Theron completely to the point where she’s as blindsided as us just doesn’t strike me as consistent writing for her character. You can headcanon this anyway you see fit, but there’s very little on-screen evidence for her to genuinely be as all over the place as she’s been, without there being an ulterior reason, or the writers just saying “fuck it” and doing whatever they want because “lol wut’s characterizaton”.

So then the question becomes, if Lana is on this plan, why would she insert that weird ass paragraph in an unrelated note about the progress on reassembling that map. Gosh, that’s weird.

Either Lana wrote it intentionally to try and keep you focused on Theron the Red Herring if you’re suddenly questioning the validity of his cover identity in front of, say, a Chiss Ascendency liaison agent who hasn’t been fully vetted for 7/8 of the Class Characters. And also cecause there’s still someone (or someones) on Odessen who has infiltrated and reporting back to their higher-ups. Listening in to your conversations when you don’t realize.

Or maybe she’s just afraid my Outlander’s dumb butt will blow his cover in the middle of a Snake Cult meeting by making another HoloNet address to the galaxy telling Theron how much she loves and appreciates him going undercover to save everyone from the Apocalyptic Death Cult, but if he comes home right now she’ll give him two fleets of warships for the price of one? And Bioware realized this and all of the rest of you have to suffer on my behalf.

#damnitgrey #OfficialHighwindApologyPackage

Scenario 3:

Or, you know... perhaps the mail on Odessen isn’t very secure. Thank you Minister of Paranoia and Secret Agent Suspicious for intentionally building in a backdoor to spy on people for “the good of the Alliance”.

This isn’t even counting all of the pieces of mail you get from these guys on them intercepting communications to Kaliyo, and other members of the Alliance. Like, I love my advisors to death, but if you design an e-mail system with security holes to spy on everyone, it’s not unheard of for a nefarious third party that’s really, really good at slicing to use that against you. And it’s not like Theron has ever been overconfident in his skillset to the detriment of something overall (please note the sarcasm), and when the Alliance’s best slicer and one of the architect’s of this insecure system has gone off to play spy, that could be open for further manipulation. Specifically from a third party whose entire modus operandi has been to get everyone in the entire galaxy fighting each other. Keep you fighting either Lana, or focused on fighting Theron and ignoring them. Either way, focused on everything but their larger goal.

So, in the game’s context, it’s not completely unheard of for a communication on the Alliance’s HoloNet to be intercepted and altered before being delivered to its final recipient.

If we remove ourselves from the story perspective however, this probably won’t be the case, as it’s very, very rare for mail items to directly impact future cutscenes. (Conversely, that also works for Lana being on Team Oblivious). So, all in all, Lana’s letter? Interesting food for thought, but one that, once again, distracts from a much larger question. In my opinion, this letter is another red herring.

So I ask: Why are they so insistent on getting us hyperfocused on Lana and Theron to the detriment of everything else? What’s really going on here? And who’s behind all of this?

For that answer, we need to look at the Uprisings, and back at the Heralds of Zildrog, as well as Iokath. Because you guys will be surprised what answers you’ll find there, as well as tucked away in the codex entries.

#anonymous #sorry it's delayed nonny #this was going to be much longer #but i'm so far down the rabbit hole on this other trail #there's no coming back

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tusoktusok-blog1 · 6 years ago

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Foie gras taho and the appropriation of poor food

There was this fine restaurant in Bonifacio Global City (now closed) that served a thing called foie gras taho as part of their multi-course set menu. Its description of ingredients, which I quote from a screenshot I took of their now-defunct website, reads: “Steamed foie gras custard, sherry syrup, tapioca, green apple, miso, mushroom, chives”.

And to add to that, the name of the dish itself is “Inadequacy & Retaliation”, comparing the transformation of taho into something gourmet with Rizal’s assimilation into European society. This is how it was further described on the website by the chef (italics were added for emphasis): “This journey from [Rizal’s] inadequacy to empowerment inspired me to transform something so simple, almost poor into something decadent and worthy of international merit drawing a juxtaposed inspiration from both our hero’s journey in Spain and the reinvention of our local street dish into something more inspiring”.

The thing is, this doesn’t even sound like taho anymore. Taho is probably one of the simplest of Filipino street foods – the traditional type consists of three main ingredients: sago pearls (or tapioca balls), arnibal, and silken tofu. There are flavored types of taho, for example, strawberry taho is especially popular in Baguio because the fruits grow abundantly in the cooler climate of the mountains. But gourmet taho or not, this hardly sounds like the thing it’s trying to “improve” on in the first place. From the description alone, it seems to be inclined to more savory flavors, which would make it virtually indistinguishable from “normal” taho, which we all recognize as being sweet, even sometimes sickeningly sweet.

But its unrecognizability as the taho this dish is trying to be isn’t even the main aspect that makes it problematic and conceptually iffy. We have to pay attention to the wording, the adjectives used to describe the two tahos that were made to be two contrasting entities: the taho that was in need of elevation and improvement, and the gourmet, foie gras taho. The former was described as being “poor”, “inadequate”, and lacking in inspiration. On the other hand, the reinvented taho was, well, everything but that – it’s the antithesis of everything poor taho stands for.

Does poor taho need retaliation, though? Have there been groups of diners and chefs calling for the rejection of street foods, in favor of more elevated versions worthy of “international acclaim”? Or is taho some sort of dying, endangered dish that needs revitalizing to bring it back into the attention of Filipino diners via presentation through a fine dining lens? Of course, none of these are even remotely true. If so, the most important question that needs to be asked is: is making taho “more inspiring” just an easy euphemism for making it more in line with the tastes of the rich and the more cultured, AKA, the ones who don’t consider street food to be in their vernacular diet? Arguably, taho and other types of street food are already inspiring enough – they have survived decades, if not centuries, feeding masses of everyday, working Filipinos.

Of course, chefs are much like artists; their main goal at the end of the day is, or at least should be, innovation. After all, on the other hand, it would be downright lazy and a fraud for a formally trained chef to serve the exact kind of thing you’d see being sold on the street, with little to no reimagining or transformation, for a much, much higher price. But, unfortunately (or fortunately), whether in food or in art, our actions have implications, and they are rooted in ideology. To put it simply, it seems that these dishes can only be considered worthy of culinary attention and acclaim when they are cooked with expensive ingredients and served in very controlled, civilized spaces. In the appropriation of the concept of taho, and fine, maybe even the image of it, it fails completely in not only representing it accurately and respectfully. But most importantly it fails in making no comment on why exactly they think that Filipino street food is uninspired, boring, and “poor”. But I think we can hopefully figure out why. (Hint: it’s classism.)

This appropriation of poor food into spaces like fine dining restaurants, expensive buffets, or fancy hotel lobby cafes isn’t a niche phenomenon. In fact, it’s indicative of a larger phenomenon sociologists and anthropologists have penned the “Omnivorous Theory”. Cultural omnivorousness describes the marker of “high status as signaled by selectively drawing from multiple cultural forms from across the cultural hierarchy”; it is defined by a breadth of taste and cultural consumption (Johnston & Baumann 2007). In other words, relying on what has been traditionally considered as highbrow (French food, fine dining, the like) is now ineffective or passe as a way of exercising elite-ness – the elite now turn to exploring their freedom to dabble and appropriate cultures that have been not traditionally seen as “high” from different ethnic and class cultures. With the Omnivorous Theory in place, we can recognize that the co-option and appropriation of food across social classes, particularly from the bottom up, is one of its main manifestations.

Parallel phenomena like our foie gras taho is observable everywhere. For example, fishermen have their own sub-cuisine, which is part of the larger culture which they are a part of. Often, a “gourmetship” is developed based on the smaller and less profitable products of their catch, and the result may taste superior than the “good” products, in turn commanding a higher price once it has been popularized and co-opted by those who want “in”. The San Francisco cioppino is an actual example of this. Another prime example is soul food. Food like collard greens, chitterlings (pig intestines), barbecued pork, and sweet potato pie were once the old-time food of the rural and impoverished American south, ergo, the food and symbol of the Black Power movement in the 1960s and 1970s. However, soul food eventually became the food of the African American elite, and when white elites tried it, they loved it. Black Power activists then sought to reevaluate the symbols of African American culture, as soul food took on great prestige and began to be served in the best restaurants, and not just African American ones (despite racism being a continuously lasting and powerful force). The leafy couve tronchuda in Portugal was once considered the food of the poor, but it has been revalued as a “nostalgic ethnic marker”; it is now a key ingredient in many Portuguese soups, and is found virtually in every gourmet restaurant in the country. Polenta has origins as “poor food” too, but it is not on gourmet menus in Italy, and is recognized globally as a hallmark of Italian food (Anderson 2005).

In the Philippines, having an extremely rich food culture that varies from region to region, and a very powerful middle class, this is very apparent currently in the local food scene, especially in urban areas. The Filipino working class also has valuable food systems that are critical in their lives (such as street food, the carinderia, et cetera). As mentioned earlier, street food is beginning to find a new and odd place in upscale Filipino restaurants, with it being framed as a “nostalgia food” or a taste of authentic Filipino-ness. They are served in a way that values aesthetic presentation, perfectly and deliberately arranged. It’s even consistently featured in international food festivals in business districts, in Makati or Bonifacio Global City.

Now, nobody is saying that eating is a no-fun-allowed zone, where reinvention and experimentation with food is forbidden. The point isn’t to say that food is static, and that it must belong to a certain group of people eternally, safeguarded so no “outsiders” can access it. Like language, cuisine grows and develops through the exchange or borrowing of ideas; there is no such thing as “purity”. It is defined by change. However, and this is a big however, this inevitability of change does not include an inevitability of misappropriation, of subscribing to a I-follow-no-rules approach. It’s… a lot to unpack, but it’s important that we try to, anyways. Just because food and cooking are things that makes us feel good, doesn’t mean that they are exempted from being distasteful or problematic in terms of concept or how its served. It’s just like art in a sense; a beautiful and expertly-made painting doesn’t mean it’s immune from criticism just from how amazing its outward appearance seems to be. We must be critical and discerning towards the intent behind what we eat, its social implications, its tone, and what kind of narrative it wishes to push about the people and culture that it “borrows” from. Again, nobody is outright banning you to eat any other incarnations of the foie gras taho if you really want to experience it. But we cannot be amnesiacs and selectively blind when it comes to being mindful that in appropriating “poor” food into “rich” contexts, no useful or insightful commentary is being made. There is no innovation in commandeering the aesthetics of the working class, while simultaneously treating them with disdain and patronization.

References:

Anderson, E.N. Everyone Eats: Understanding Food And Culture. New York University Press, 2005, pp. 110; 124-129; 136-139.

Johnston, Josée, and Shyon Baumann. “Democracy versus Distinction: A Study of Omnivorousness in Gourmet Food Writing.” American Journal of Sociology, vol. 113, no. 1, 2007, pp. 165–204.

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redrikki · 7 years ago

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Lady in Waiting? I really love your take on Rey - it feels very genuine!

Alright, here goes my first DVD commentary. I wrote this story for @sosobriquet as part of the @fandomtrumpshate‹ exchange. She had a couple of different requests and, after struggling to decide I went with “Rey and Poe bond while Finn’s in a coma. You can read the story without commentary here. Story with commentary below the cut.

The staff was cutting Finn out of his clothes by the time Rey found the med bay. The grey medical droid sliced along the seams while the human doctor peeled off the resulting rags. The exposed wound on Finn’s shoulder was both better and worse than Rey had imagined. It wasn’t bleeding or anything, but it shown an angry red against the dark brown of his skin and smelled strongly of overcooked meat. Rey swallowed hard and looked away as the doctor gently rolled Finn onto his side to examine the slash across his back.

I actually had this scene planned out and bouncing around in my head way before anything else. Like, even before I got the prompt. It was nice to be able to work it in somewhere. I find it always pays to stick those random ideas somewhere because you never know when they might come in handy.

Rey’s gaze landed on Finn’s jacket, crumpled like a dead thing in a heap on the floor. It had been spared the same fate as his shirt and was largely intact. There was still the small burn on the shoulder and the larger, more horrifying one which bisected the back, but Rey could fix that. She darted forward and snatched it up.

Unfortunately, someone else had the same idea. No sooner had Rey gotten her hands on the collar than somebody grabbed a sleeve. Rey glared up at her competition. He was a human male, maybe ten or so years older than her with dark, sweat-soaked curls and light brown skin. A pilot too, judging by his bright orange flight suit. Rey felt like she should know him though she couldn’t say how or why.

Disconcerted by the feeling, Rey narrowed her eyes and tightened her grip. “Scavenge from the dead, but this is Fin’s,” she said and yanked.

Rey often gets portrayed as this ray of sunshine, and she’s really not. She’s fiercely territorial and used to fighting for every scrap of everything.

The man let go so fast Rey overbalanced and stumbled backwards, crashing into a tool-laden cart. Medical instruments clattered to the floor, drawing the doctor’s attention.

That’s one way to win at tug-of-war! This is the start of a pattern with Poe. Every time Rey expects resistance from him, he does a yielding parry instead and utterly disarms her. Seriously, start counting the number of times it happens as you read this.

“Are you hurt?” She frowned first at Rey, then the man, and back again.

They both shook their heads. Rey’s back was one massive bruise from where Ren had thrown her into the tree, but nothing was broken or bleeding or burnt.

“Good.” She jerked her head toward the door. “Now get out so I can help your friend in peace.”

The man reached for Rey’s arm, but she shook him off and saw herself out. In the hallway, she squared her shoulders and braced for the fight. She didn’t want to hurt him, not like she’d wanted to hurt Ren, but she would if it meant Finn would wake up and wear his jacket again.

“You must be Rey,” he said with a disarming smile. “I’m Poe.” He offered his hand, but didn’t seem bothered when Rey didn’t take it.“Thanks for looking after BB-8.”

So, I part of the reason it took me so long to write this story was that I wasn’t really comfortable writing Poe after seeing the film. There didn’t really seem to be enough to get a good read on him. I went out and bought the Before the Awakening book and then read all the Poe comics. Not only did it help a lot, it was really entertaining.

It took a moment for his words to register. “Poe? Poe Dameron?” BB-8â’s kind-brave-master Poe? The-best pilot-in-the-Resistance Poe? The original owner of Finn’s jacket? That Poe? “Finn said you were dead.”

You know both BB-8 and Finn just gushed about this guy to her. He’s practically a Han Solo-level legend for her thanks to them.

Poe just shrugged. “The way we landed I thought he was dead. Good thing we were both wrong.” He glanced back at the closed med bay door with a furrowed brow. Then he sighed and the tension melted from his face. “We can’t do any good here. Let’s say we grab a bite. My treat,” he added with another one of those easy smiles.

Rey’s stomach rumbled at the mere mention of food, but she hesitated, looking back toward the med bay. It felt like years since those few mouthfuls she’d snatched at Maz’s, but what if? What if Finn woke up and she wasn’t there? What if the medical equipment broke and she wasn’t there to fix it? What if he died?

My Rey has a lot in common with Anakin. They both have lost so much and have so little left that they tend to cling. Also, she’s spent so long being responsible for pretty much everything that the idea of letting someone else handle it has to be kind of terrifying.

“Rey?”

She turned back toward Poe’s patient, smiling face and sighed. He was right. There was nothing they could do here. Standing blocking the hallway wouldn’t make Finn wake up any faster than wearing her hair the same way for ten years had made her parents come back. Poe hadn’t said anything about claiming Finn’s jacket, so Rey shrugged it on and let him lead the way.

***

Poe was ridiculously friendly, and not just with Rey. They’d barely sat down with their food trays when what seemed like half the planet stopped by. They crowed about their victory. They wept over missing friends. They even asked about Finn. More people came in five minutes than passed through Niima in five months and somehow Poe knew all their names. Some of them stared at her curiously, but Rey just kept her head down and made the most of the free food.

Poe seems like the kind of guy who is effortlessly popular, mostly because he takes the time to learn everyone’s name and actually listens when they speak.

It was easily the best thing she had ever eaten. Like the prepared meals she’d found on her Ghtroc 690, it was meat and vegetables in a sweet and sour sauce, but this was served over some sort of cooked grain. It was all so fresh the vegetables crunched. Rey devoured it like a starving gnaw-jaw. She was already eating her last forkful by the time Poe had finished socializing long enough to take his first bite.

This bit about the Ghtroc 690 and the food came from the Before the Awakening book. The bit about her just shoving everything into her mouth came from her behavior in the film and the common traits of kids who grew up with persistent food insecurity. I did quite a bit of research on that even though it only showed up for, like, 10 seconds.

His eyes widened as she lifted the plate to lap up the last of the wonderful sauce. “Wow. I guess you really like sweet and sour shaak.”

Rey has never heard of table manners. Seriously, what are those even?

“Ah uh,” Rey grunted. It was amazing and the only complaint against it she could make was that it was too moist and squishy to be stuffed in a pocket for later. If only she had a rigid container. Who knew when she’d be able to have something like this again?

Hoarding is another thing kids who grow up with food insecurity tend to do.

Poe shook his head with a rueful laugh. “Well, the kitchen will be glad to know at least one personâ’ll be happy eating it every other week.” He wrinkled his nose and dug in like a man rushing through an unpleasant chore.

What sort of worlds had Poe lived on that he could turn his nose up at fresh vegetables and real, actual meat? His attitude probably wouldn’t have hurt so much if Rey hadn’t known such worlds existed. She had though. She’d flown simulations of them and lived off their scraps. She had yearned for them, but never reached. It hurt to know she could have eaten like this ages ago if she’d had the courage to fly away with Devi and Strunk.

Devi and Strunk are another book reference. I really liked the idea that she’d a) had friends who betrayed and abandoned her and b) had opportunities to leave that she refused to take because of her family. It makes Finn coming back all the more poignant.

“You planning on sticking around?” Poe asked.

Rey shrugged. She was stuck here at least until Finn healed, but beyond that? She thought longingly of her island. Too bad it was only a dream.

This story is about Rey learning to let go of her fears in order to move on with her life. She needed a reason to want to leave and, honestly, looking for Luke Skywalker wasn’t good enough. She has zero connection to him. She had expressed zero interest in learning how to Jedi. The island, on the other hand, could itself be draw thanks to her dreams and the Force.

“You’re from Jakku, right?” Poe pushed his plate away and lounged back in his chair. “I was stuck there for just one day.” He shook his head. “I can’t imagine you want to go back there.”

“I do or I did. Before Starkiller, I mean.”

Poe quirked an eyebrow and Rey flushed. He must think she was mad. Why else would anyone want to go back to sand and starvation once they’d gotten away? “My family. They left me there when I was a little girl. I thought…I thought if I just waited long enough, they’d come back.”

Poe’s easy smile slipped from his lips. “They never came back, did they?” he asked quietly.

“No, I—” Tears gathered in Rey’s eyes. She snuffled and dashed them away. “I knew, deep down, that they wouldn’t but…” She shrugged. “It was easier to stay and pretend. I didn’t have to live, just wait.”

“So what now?”

Rey stroked the sleeves of Finn’s jacket. She had never felt so loved as she had wrapped in Finn’s embrace. “I’m going to fix Finn’s jacket. I’m going to stay until he’s better.” She had been waiting her whole life for someone to come back for her. She wasn’t about to leave him.

“And then what?”

“I—” And then what? Had Rey ever thought about that before? She used to tell herself stories where her family came back, but they always ended there. Finn would wake up and then they would do….something.

The island, the island, the Force seemed to whisper. Go soon, go now.

“I don’t know,” Rey lied and pushed the Force away.

****

BB-8’s map slotted into place, completing the galaxy. It filled the gloomy command center with the light of more stars than Rey had ever dreamed. They sang like a calling.

I feel really proud of the phrasing here and also in the first line of the next paragraph. It’s almost like poetry, if I do say so myself.

Poe wandered through the constellations, tracing the glowing path that led to Skywalker. He tapped the planet at the end of the line with a slow smile. “General” —he turned to face her— “I can have the Black Squadron there in an hour.”

General Organa raised an eyebrow and favored him with a sardonic smile. “And bring Luke home on your lap?” She shook her head. “How about something a little roomier than an X-wing?”

“I can pick Luke up with the Falcon,” Chewie offered.

Canon never bothers to translate Chewie, but damn it, I was going to. Rey speaks Wookie. There was no reason for her not to understand exactly what he was saying.

Poe nodded crisply. “And I’ll go with him.”

Rey’s stomach sank. Chewie and Poe were the only conscious people she knew on this base. They couldn’t just abandon her.

The general pursed her lips, considering, then shook her head. “It won’t work. Finding Luke was the easy part. We need something, someone to lure him back here.”

The weight of her gaze fell on Rey and suddenly it was hard to breathe. The stars’ song swelled to a crescendo as the scent of the sea filled the air. The Force was like a push at her back. Go, go, it whispered. Rey shook her head to clear it.

The Force is aggressive and has issues with boundaries and consent. Rey’s lucky it didn’t knock her up.

“Rey” —the general took her hands— “you are strong in the Force. You have his lightsaber. It has to be you.” Her eyes were like quicksand, sucking Rey in until her words seemed reasonable. She could find Skywalker where everyone else had failed. She would just have to leave Finn to do it.

Look, I enjoyed the film, but there was no logical reason to send Rey as articulated by the movie. Finding him has been Poe’s mission, pretty much since he joined the Resistance according to the comics. Leia is his twin and Chewie is one of his oldest surviving friends. Any of them would have made more sense as someone to send to pick Luke up. Heck, R2 and C-3PO would have made more sense than some random girl who’s lineage and connection to the Skywalkers was never explicitly established. It took me a long time to come with a reason to send Rey and it’s still a pretty shitty one.

“No!” Rey wrenched her hands from the general’s grasp. “Finn’s hurt. He needs me.” She backed away. “I haven’t even started fixing his jacket.” Hands reached for her, the stars reached for her, but Rey shook them off and ran.

*****

She wasn’t hiding, Rey told herself. She was working. It just so happened that the med bay was a quiet, perfect place to do both. Rey sat hunched in a chair by Finn’s bed, struggling to repair his jacket. The leather that had felt so supple and soft pressed against her face as they hugged was proving surprisingly tough. It took real effort to force the needle through. It would probably be easier if she had an awl or something to pre-punch her holes. As it was, her fingers ached.

“The general wanted to send me,” Rey recounted as she worked. Talking to an unconscious man felt a bit like yelling at the desert, but the doctor said it would help. All the more reason for Rey to stay. Who else was going to come and talk to Finn? “Skywalker’s her brother,” she grumbled, stabbing with the needle and yanking it through the resulting hole. “She should be the one to go and—”

My thoughts exactly, Rey. I mean, I guess she has to general and shit, but, it still makes more sense then sending a complete stranger. Whatever. Work with what canon gives you.

The whoosh of the med bay door cut her off mid rant. Rey looked up from her work to glare at whoever had found her. Poe. The general must have sent him to talk her into the mission. Well, it wouldn’t work. Rey braced her shoulders and raised her chin. The only way she was leaving was if Poe dragged her out of her chair.

Rey’s stomach clenched as Poe strolled across the room. Her tension only mounted as he claimed the chair on the far side of Finn’s bed and proceeded to ignore her. “Hey buddy,” he said quietly, taking Finn’s hand, “you having a good nap?”

I love the way Poe calls BB-8 buddy, so naturally I had to use it here.

Finn, of course, remained silent except for the faint sound of his breath and the steady beep of the heart monitor. His doctor was keeping him in a medically induced coma to keep him from moving until his back was healed. He’d only be allowed to wake once the bacta-jell bed had worked its magic. Rey tried to tell herself that watching him sleep was better than watching him suffer, but the unnatural stillness of his normally expressive face was all wrong.

Finn being unconscious when she left didn’t make much sense unless it was a medically induced coma. I mean, he could have passed out from the pain back on Starkiller, but there’s no medical reason he should have still been unconscious when she left based on his injuries. If anything, she should have been in a coma after being thrown into that tree and knocked out for several minutes. That’s some serious brain damage right there.

The three of them sat their in increasingly uncomfortable silence as Poe stared at the monitors and squeezed Finn’s hand. Any moment now he would start in on her. Her muscles quivered with anticipation. Any minute. “Well?” Rey finally demanded, unable to take it any more.

“That’d be easier if you used a punch,” Poe said mildly, nodding at Rey’s sewing project.

Like her cramped and aching fingers hadn’t already told her that. Rey ground her teeth in frustration. “Why are you here?”

Poe crossed his arms and leaned back in his chair. “Finn’s my friend too, you know,” he said. “In fact, he was my friend first,” he added with a smirk.

He was.

Rey colored and looked away. Finder’s rights on a person was a pretty dubious claim, but she got what Poe was saying. He had just as much right to Finn’s bedside as she did. She cleared her throat awkwardly, searching for something to say to reset the conversation. “Finn said he helped you escape?”

Poe smiled fondly. “I’ll never forget the first time I saw his face.” The smile slipped from his lips and, for a heartbeat, he looked almost haunted. “I’d been captured, tortured, had my memories just” —he ground his fist against his temple— “ripped out of my head. I’d blown my mission, given Ren everything, and I thought they were going to kill me. Then this guy showed up.” Poe’s grin reappeared like the sun bursting out from behind a cloud. “‘This is a rescue,’ he said. I have never been so glad to see anyone in my life.”

For real, what happened to Poe was awful and traumatizing and I don’t think he magically got over it just because he escaped. I hope TLJ touches on that, but it probably won’t.

That certainly sounded like Finn. Rey smiled faintly, remembering. She had more or less rescued herself back on Starkiller, but the sight of Finn, the feel of his arms around her? That was the moment she knew she’d be alright. “Then you understand why I can’t leave him.”

Both of these people are just so into Finn, but really, neither of them know hardly any thing about him. They’ve both built him up in their heads based on some fairly intense encounters. He’s Poe’s hero. He’s the family that was promised Rey. Once he’s awake, he’ll have a lot to live up to.

“Do I?” Poe leaned forward, the intensity of his gaze pinning Rey to her seat. “During the months we looked for Skywalker, my team and I went up against a monster, got trapped in a high-security prison filled with dangerous prisoners, and almost died more times than I can count.” From anyone else it would be a litany of horror, but Poe made it sound like the time of his life. “I wouldn’t trade a second of it, but you’re what? Giving it up to sit here and sew?”

Poe’s an adrenaline junkie of the finest order who grew up on stories of the heroes of the revolution. The idea that anyone would not want to be part of that is just so foreign to him. Also, I had a line here originally where he mocks her sewing abilities but I cut it. Being unnecessarily dick-ish isn’t Poe’s style.

A surge of hot anger took Rey’s breath away. Her fists clenched tight around the jacket. “You know it’s not like that.” The mission might succeed. The island might be real. Finn and his love for her were the only sure thing in her life. She wasn’t going to give that up just for the possibility of an adventure.

“You could be a Jedi, Rey, but instead you’re just” —he threw up his hands— “doing it again.”

“Doing what?”

“Waiting.” He reached out and squeezed her hand. “Please, don’t make Finn your next excuse not to live your life.”

And here we come to the crux of the story. I needed a good wham line to get her to let go of her insecurities and actually leave.

****

Rey sat and watched the gentle rise and fall of Finn’s chest. She hadn’t even left yet and she missed him with an intensity that made her own chest ache. “We’ll see each other again.” It was a promise to herself as much as to him. “I believe that.” She laid a kiss on his forehead. “Thank you, my friend.”

And now we’ve caught up to canon.

They would see each other again. With each step she took away from his bed, she reminded herself of that. They would find their way back to each other. They had done it before; they would do it again. Finn would wake up. Rey would come home. For now though, Rey was done waiting.

The end.

#star wars #dvd commentary #My fic #shameless self promotion #rey #poe dameron

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willswalkabout · 8 years ago

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Hanoi, Hue, Hoi An

I had one night in my own room in Bangkok. Once again in Bangkok, Arsenal were playing at 2 in the morning. Luckily this time I woke up to find we’d managed to beat a non-league team on a dodgy pitch escaping with only 1 injury.

I flew the next morning to Hanoi. Having felt like I’d spent too much on taxis in Bangkok, I launched a new plan to avoid taking a solo taxi at all costs. In general while traveling I’ve left couples alone unless they join a larger group. However while approaching the taxi stand I heard an English accent and practically threw myself at one. I knew all the hostels in Hanoi are within a couple of blocks, and it indeed turned out that the guy was from Manchester and was only a 10 minute walk from my place. The walk saved me £10 as the taxi was split between 3. My first night in Hanoi involved going out for some food with 3 dutch backpackers. I had a fun conversation with Elsa, the girl in the trio, about the trials and tribulations of a long distance relationship. Characterised by very fuzzy Skype conversations and the occasional drunk text, where the receiver is either eating lunch, or already in the next morning. We also went to see a film, even writing this now I’m struggling to remember the name, I’ll have to look it up when I get internet (writing from seat 17F on 20:50 Da Nang - Ho Chi Minh flight). The film was awful and 3 of the 4 of us fell asleep a good hour before the end. The next day I met Harry, a Kiwi who was at the end of spending a couple of months in South East Asia as a way of breaking up his move from NZ to London. I spent the day wandering around Hanoi’s French Quarter, though this exploration was delayed by Air Asia letting me know that morning that they’d moved my flight to the Philippines 8 hours later, something that was going to cause me major issues, and led to some infuriating use of their “web chat unsupportive service”. Hanoi gets mixed reviews from travellers which I personally don’t understand. There’s lots to do, it’s incredibly cheap, people are friendly and it feels very European due to the French architecture and street layout. I went out that night with Harry to ‘beer corner’. It was classic Vietnamese organised chaos. Thousands of little stools and tables, shared by travellers and locals, as beers are served at 50p each, by someone that claims to own your stool.

The next morning I had coffee and visited a market with Harry. I’ve got to say it was the first point that I’ve really missed London, as I enthusiastically reeled off all the places he should go as he frantically took notes. I wasn’t feeling great that afternoon, but it was a pleasant surprise to return to my dorm and find that my roommates were now 5 Norwegian girls, who in turn created the nicest aroma I’ve ever experienced in a hostel room. I can only put it down to an apparent desire to keep themselves and their clothes clean on a routine basis. A characteristic very few other backpackers appear to possess. Some, who proudly tell you they’ve worn “this vest for 6 days straight now”, in one of the world’s most humid countries…

That evening I only ventured out to Hanoi’s 5* Intercontinental hotel, as they had one of the best viewpoints over Hanoi’s west lake. The same beer I’d been drinking the night before was a horrific £2.80, but one was worth it for the view. Walking back I saw a bar on the other side of the street which has the PS3 emblem on the outside. On entering they had 4 TVs set up with people playing FIFA 17. It was an opportunity I could not miss. I spent the next 2 hours playing FIFA with 4 Vietnamese guys who were evidently confused as to how I found the place, and who could speak very little English. Not that this stopped them from producing a pronunciation perfect cry of the Swedish striker Ibrahimovic, as he scored a last minute winner.

The next morning I was picked up for my Ha Long Bay tour at 8am. I had booked for 2 days 1 night, sleeping on the boat. The 4 hour drive was one of the worst I’ve experienced. With no leg room on the small and crammed minibus, rough roads, and a driver who seemed intent on using the drive to practice his overtaking before an upcoming F1 fixture, it felt far longer. The bay itself is breathtaking. For that reason I was glad I hadn’t paid more for any added extras/experiences, because for the bottom rate you see what you came to see in all its grandeur and mystique. We visited a cave before kayaking on the first day. That evening I played cards with my roommates, a woman from Azerbaijan (but living in Bow, London), and a woman from Argentina. I also met my first, and to this point only gap year students. Another 2 Norwegians, though due to their schooling system they were 19 and 20. After sleeping with probably the greatest view I’ve ever had from a bed, the next day involved a trip to a particular rock where they’ve built a viewpoint and artificial beach. I was somewhat oddly the only member of the 15 person group who fancied a swim. It was indeed fairly cold outside but the water was a perfectly tolerable temperature. On exiting the water I discovered that quite a decent crowd had formed, to observe this strange white man swimming In the sea in February. It was as I dried myself that this one gentleman pictured above, chose to thrust his phone in my face for a selfie. My only rule when it comes to this situation is to demand one in return, and it may well be one of my favourite photos of the travels so far. I got back to Hanoi late afternoon and was pretty tired, so other than enjoying the well written about ‘Bahn Mi 25’ experience, I retired to reorganise for the flight to Hue the next day. I was fortunate enough to overhear 3 of my Norwegian friends from a couple of nights previous, booking their taxi, and so I got in on that deal, once again saving me a fair bit.

I arrived in Hue in the rain, and made it to my oddly Wild West hostel. It was however one of the nicest beds I’ve had so far. The evening continued with me getting an Indian with 2 Irish guys and a Bristolian. It was actually quite an upmarket restaurant we found with the £8 cost being the most I’d spent on a single meal since Hong Kong. The food was great, and it was fun discussing the Arsenal, Manchester United rivalry with some passionate fans. They also shared my desire to find a pub that would show the England vs Italy 6 Nations fixture. It was a bizarre fixture to watch. If you watched the game you’ll understand that trying to work out Italy’s ruck tactics was hard enough for the players and the pundits, let alone us watching in a noisy bar with no commentary. The same evening I found out that it was meant to rain all day the next day, scuppering my plans to scooter the 5 hour journey to Hoi An. Luckily the company I had organised the rental with were happy to use my deposit to book me the bus to Hoi An, which was about $7.

The next day I got the incredibly comfortable sleeper bus, (though taken in the morning), to Hoi An. 3 rows of double decked 80% reclinable beds, allowing 40 or so passengers to travel in unrivalled comfort. On arrival in Hoi An I went straight to a tailor that had been recommended to me by my Dutch friend in Hanoi. There in ensued 3 extremely stressful hours. Getting my full navy cashmere suit made, took up about 25 minutes of that period. The rest was spent trying to convey what Ellen and Kate wanted made, with the help of measurements they’d sent me and pictures of the items. I would have found this easy if I hadn’t then been asked a multitude of questions I had no clue how to answer. How long does she want the skirt? What kind of fabric does she want? Does she want this double hem? Which pattern is best? I was feeling the pressure enormously, however to be fair to the girls they were both pretty on hand on whatsapp at what was about 8am GMT, to firmly bat away my futile suggestions, and I hope get what they wanted. The items are now in the post back home, except for one loose cotton shirt I got made, and should make it home in about 3 weeks.

I explored the old town a bit before embarking on a street food tour organised by the hostel, spending my time primarily with 2 woman from Finland and New York. Janelle from NY was so staggered at my age, she then made it her mission for the evening to prove that her guess of 26 was not crazy. To be fair to her the exhaustive surveying gave an outcome of 25.1, which I didn’t really know what to think of.

My second day in Hoi An involved a cycle to the beach which was nice, followed by picking up the clothes, 22 hours after order. They did fit incredibly well, but by the time I’d reviewed each item, tried on mine, and negotiated the postage cost, it was worth returning to the hostel where they were doing a 'free beer’ night. I went out that evening with 3 girls and one guy from California. Hoi An has an odd nightlife scene. There are a multitude of almost identical bars where you can drink fairly cheaply if you go at the right time, befriend the Kiwi rep that walks around shouting their name, and negotiate a bit. Then at 1230 they all close, and everyone moves to the one bar in town that’s open till 5, and inevitably is the most expensive. It was regardless good fun but something I realised I was quite tired off by the next evening (Wednesday).

Nothing however was going to take away from Wednesday being one of the best days so far, due to my final attempt at riding the Hai Van Pass, most famously featured on Top Gear’s Vietnam special, and described by Clarkson as 'One of the greatest coast roads in the world’. Once again the clearly confused Hoi An weather forecasters predicted torrential rains and it was dry all day. It took about an hour to get to the start of the pass, and then began dozens of hairpins, chicanes, and 6km of wide, open, and practically empty sea view. I was in awe, and it was one of those moments that for me helped to justify the entire venture. After taking a sufficient number of photos (many) and falling in love with my bike, which with its Arsenal sticker was christened 'Thierry’, I drove back extremely pleased with the endeavour. I also got some pretty good footage of the ride by attaching a GoPro to my helmet and chest at different times.

I went out with a solely English crew that night. I’d like to say that although I obviously have no issue with English company, it did feel kind of boring discussing bits of London and A Levels. I have just found it much more fun discussing the drinking laws / politics / nightlife / education system of Finland, America, Azerbaijan or Australia over the past few days. I spent most of my time with Calum, who had recently graduated from a school in North Carolina, and whom I felt was equally bored by my harmless compatriots.

Today was a very relaxing day where I only ventured out for Pho (Vietnamese noodle broth), and otherwise caught up on some stuff, knowing that my hostel in Ho Chi Minh is quite lively. I’m actually now standing at the luggage carousel which is taking an age. I’m quite confused as to how it’s reached 1045pm, and I left my hostel at 6pm for a 1 hour 10 domestic flight. I’m sorry again this is quite a long one, but splitting it up felt like more effort. I may have landed in Sydney next time.

#travel #vietnam

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davidbaker1095-blog · 8 years ago

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Event Review: Game Development Brisbane: Taking ‘Think of the Children’ from 48 Hour Jam to Full Production

In line with the themes of review and reflection that this blog is regularly turning to, I decided that it would probably be a good idea to write some reviews on select events I attend. This won't be for the super social events like bar socials but certainly workshops, presentations speeches etc are fair game. Hopefully these retrospectives would be helpful to anyone who didn't manage to attend the event and those that are just interested in the contents! These 'reviews' won't include ratings or anything like that but will include some commentary on the areas I found to be of interest.

Onto the review, this presentation was given by Adric Polkinghorne, A Master's Student of Interactive and Visual Design, Tutor of Narrative and Visual Design and Producer/Designer of the upcoming game Think of the Children.

That last role was the focus of this presentation as Adric shared his experiences of bringing Think of the Children from 48 hour game jam people's choice award recipient to full commercial product. I thought this was a particularly interesting topic, not only because I'm keen to hear new ways to break into the industry but also because of the increasing amount of successful games that have entered the market this way. Goat Simulator, Surgeon Simulator and Superhot are all examples of well-known games that originally came out of game jams in recent years as well.

I'll split my discussion of the presentation around the topics of business, conferences and development.

As a business and games double degree graduate, it was of great interest to me to hear Adric cover so much content in regards to the business side of his journey. As his team's producer, Adric has taken the lead in these matters. I was particularly interested in Adric's explanation of his team's interaction with publishers throughout the process. My personal experience with trying to publish games has mostly been of the indie variety where I would personally submit the game to the platform and undertake the tasks necessary for getting it out there. It hadn't occurred to me that publishers were actually viable for the Brisbane development scene (outside of larger companies of course). Adric's team on the other had approached publishers very early on after the game jam. Initially there were some hiccups where publishers couldn't see the end product or focused on its flaws but the team found a publisher pretty quickly.

Adric put the initial problems down to the fact that the team had potentially thrown the game out to the world too early and without adequate polish. This was another case I have come across in which a developer's experience has been against the suggestions of startup methodologies such as the Lean Startup methodology. In that methodology, the developing team would first put out a minimum viable product, without polish and not necessarily even in a full featured state, which presumably the end product of the game jam would comply with, and then the team would continue building from there using market feedback. This is the approach Adric's team took but they believe it hurt them. In my experience generally, this methodology has seen a lot of resistance from the game development industry and game developers. I'm not sure if it is a general case from creatives and publishers of "Oh my/this product isn't perfect so I can't possibly publish it of show it to the world. It was ruin me!" or if it is something else. Who knows? The Lean Startup methodology is very popular in general software development but not yet for game development. Could it be because audiences expect their entertainment software to be more complete and polished at launch than their utilitarian software? I'm sure it would make for a good research topic.

Anyway, Adric's team had access to funds, marketing expertise and publishing expertise. As Adric puts it, they ended up with a really good deal. They maintained control of the development side of things and their publisher was really helpful. Their motto was "Your First and Last Publisher" with the connotation being that they would teach you all of the tips and tricks of publishing, as well as getting your product selling well so you would not even need a publisher in the future because you would have all of the resources required. I wish I had got their name because in hindsight I would want a publisher like that in the future if I was looking for one.

Another business point that Adric stressed as a big positive was that his team decided that they would pay a third party to implement their online multiplayer for them. This was a big point because it represented a strong sense of what the team could handle and it was decided that it would be better for the product overall if the internal team didn't try to deliver multiplayer on top of the single player campaign and polishing work they were already doing. I was interested to hear more about how this arrangement worked. I'm guessing that, as Adric's team had development control, the third party developer would be simply adding online functionality to existing modes and content. That is just my assumptions though.

Onto conference related points, this presentation was a really great insight into the inner working of presenting at places like PAX. It covered topics like Australian vs US conferences, how to set up to maximise for press coverage and how to negotiate business card resources. In the case of Australian vs US conferences, it turns out that getting a booth at a US version of PAX is way cheaper than the Australian equivalent according to Adric (about $1000 in the US compared to $5000 in Australia) this has to be a demand to supply thing because, the way Adric put it, booth costs plus flights plus accommodation in the US is cheaper than getting an Australian booth. Adric also said that there was a much bigger publisher presence in the US conferences compared to Australian equivalents. Adric's team had received multiple offers from publishers all up at these conferences and it was interesting to hear that some of the offers were coming from the people that had turned the game down before.

Some of the cool tips Adric suggested in regards to maximising press interaction at these conferences included having a dedicated press play station at the team booth and contacting press ahead of time to organise play times or interviews with them. I thought both these tips were great and I would certainly try to utilise them if I went to conferences like this. My team, apart from myself, got to go showcase Bees Won't Exist at the Game Connect Asia Pacific Student Showcase in Melbourne last year. We were in a student booth rather than on a corporate booth, so it could be more to do with nature of the booth itself, but I don't think anything like this came up at the time.

As for the business cards, Adric's experience is essentially that, if you give your business cards to everyone, you won't have them for the people you want to give them to. Giving players separate content such as brochures with website URLs is a much better idea. You will then be able to give your personal contact details to people that will actually use them such as the aforementioned publishers.

Finally, in game development related points, Adric talked about a couple of interesting topics. In the context of a game jam, Adric explained that his team had gone in trying to win. They looked at previous prize winners and considered what brought those projects across the line. As we have seen, game jams are increasingly producing quite widely known projects so it is well worth building a game that will present well at the end and get some attention. The team also prepared to showcase their game effectively both by bringing a projector and by bringing a large TV. They understood that the crowds ability to see and enjoy the game at the end was very important which I certainly agree with.

In the context of post game jam production, Adric's focus was on the fact that his team had gone through a big learning curve. They had spent a lot of time working out what worked for them and trying to emulate what successful studios did to become successful. One example given was that the team, which initially used Adric himself as the design lead, attempted to move to a "everyone is the designer" approach as employed by Halfbrick. This had to be scaled back a bit eventually because some of the ideas being implemented didn't mesh together very well or with the product vision the team was trying to maintain. They also tried to look for tools that would help their development work rate such as the free MagicaVoxel which helped them cut the time it took to do some parts of the level building by 50% according to the team.

I'm not really sure what I think of the "everyone is the designer" mentality at the moment. On the one hand it lets everyone put ideas out there and have a fairer chance of starting momentum with them but on the other you risk losing a little focus on the design and no one person has oversight over whether or not the design is still consistent with the product vision as Adric's team found out. It might be that a pure version of the methodology is a little idealistic. I've also seen a team I was in try to implement it with one person in charge of the final say. In that case, the "lead designer" essentially became the only designer as some other team members didn't care about contributing to the design, there wasn't really opportunity given to contribute and any suggestions were often tossed aside by the design lead. So in that case the "everyone is a designer" rule was kind of superficial. I would be keen to try it out again in the future if the opportunity came up however because I feel like it is just a matter of setting it up the right way.

That's all I wanted to discuss about the presentation! It was certainly informative and I look forwards to hearing more about the progress of Think of the Children in the future. This talk came about through Game Development Brisbane, A group that usually holds presentations on the first Sunday of each month. You can follow them on Facebook and Twitter for news although they do their event sign ups through Meetup. They are also looking for presenters for the future. They would prefer you to email them if you think you have something worth presenting in relation to game development although I couldn't find their email in the aforementioned channels so I assume that they'll be fine with you contacting them through there.

#event review #gamedev

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demonicnoobie · 8 years ago

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#memes #kek #i hate myself #sans undertale #ho lee fuck #the quest for funnyman

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