#if the timeline of fallout can be split off from the real timeline then so can things within the fallout timeline

[druidgroves]

the best thing about games designed with multiple endings is that there isn't a canon storyline & it's whatever the player makes of it. you control the canon.

[twosides--samecoin]

Yo @stoat-party hear me out on this one! I had some thoughts & wanted to expand on your "objectively evil" take. If you're reading the dialogue page/wiki page for his reactions, I can see where they come off "evil" at face value, but I feel I can further interpret where some of those actions/words may come from.

The first problem with a few of the situations listed (Danse, Desdemona), is the Sole Survivor (his employer) has to put him in those situations, ones he would not otherwise find himself in. RJ MacCready's perspective is that he has to keep his employment and do what he has to do to survive above all else. Going along with what the SoSu is doing - to an extent, we'll get there - is his meal ticket.

Contrast, say, the Brotherhood's explicit mandate for ethnic cleansing as explained by Maxson. There's a difference between what's explicit in the text, and the text that only happens when the player is doing the choose-your-own-adventure aspects of playing an RPG. There are save games/timelines where MacCready can be cruel. There's also save games/timelines where he's not shown being cruel at all. By contrast, Maxson/the Brotherhood's MO is cruel each time.

Thought experiment: Do I catch a theft charge for having the potential to steal a loaf of bread? Or am I charged when I actually do steal the loaf of bread? Is MacCready "objectively evil" for having the potential to be cruel to Desdemona, or is he given the chance to be cruel when the player character involves him in evil actions? If the player character doesn't put him in situations where he shows those sides of him, did the evil at hand happen?

Are some of these things "evil" or are they examples of survival and moral gray that is understandable given the shifted moral compass of the Fallout IP? I think it bears mentioning Hannah Arendt's idea of the banality of evil. You can put someone in a situation that asks of them to be cruel or commit crimes in order for them to survive, or for fear of retribution if they don't go along with it. A real world example is gang initiations in which you might be forced to commit a crime or are otherwise implicated, lest you face punishment. If you're put in a situation where you have to be cruel so that you can see the next day, there's a good chance you're going to be cruel to get through it.

MacCready is capable of being cunning in order to survive, but objective evil? I'm inclined to think otherwise.

As for Austin? Maybe it's hope that the cure could be Duncan's. Maybe it's developer oversight that instead of the empathy that should come with the general MacCready guaranteed "Like" of helping kids, he dislikes giving/splitting the cure instead approves of keeping it. I've spoken with other people who write MacCready fic and many of us find it a weird moment that doesn't make sense, beyond the typical "Beth Esda got it wrong". For me that's always felt like an inconsistency, and isn't well explained given his normal behaviour that comes with favouring when the SoSu helps parents/kids. The only plausible explanation I've read is "well, he's a merc, he dislikes selfless acts, he's going to put himself first", but I don't really buy it as empathy should kick in, given his own child dying of fatal disease.

Look at the war-torn world MacCready came from. Look at the demands of mercenary work, that he engaged in because he knew it would be a path to survival (Yes, he's okay killing innocents for profit. That's mercenary work). Look at the Gunners (who for lack of a better explanation, are Raiders Whom Do Wear Green), who MacCready only joined for money, and then left when he disagreed with their cruelty. And if the SoSu kills innocents for no reason? He knows there's a difference. I wonder if he refuses some contracts based on the people targeted by the hit, because if he was objectively evil and blood hungry, I don't think you'd get the following -

This is someone who learned you have to shift with the situation to get by, and sticking out like a sore thumb doesn't help you. That's cunning, sure, but it's ultimately survival. You don't make it to adulthood in the Wasteland without finding ways to survive - it's not "objectively evil", it's morally gray at best.

MacCready winds up at Little Lamplight, probably a baby, but at most young enough not to remember his parents. Maybe he grows up with a secret belief that they loved him, because they left him with three names whereas a lot of his peers didn’t get any. But they were grown-ups, so who needs them anyway.

He grows up eating fungus that thrives on human flesh. He starts drinking at six. He learns to shoot at ten — starting with monsters who used to be human, but undoubtedly graduating to humans long before he should have. Also at ten, he wins a fight against another child and takes power as mayor. Part of the job is to exile kids when they turn sixteen. Maybe some of them are the kids who helped raise him. He knows Bigtown isn’t as safe as it’s made it out to be, how could he not? A lot of those teenagers are headed out there just to die. MacCready knows he won’t be one of them, because he’s tougher.

When we meet him at twelve, he’s ruthless. He admits that the out-at-sixteen rule is based on lies, and that it’s really to keep the population low enough to survive. He’s a social Darwinist who protects the kids as a population, but can’t afford the luxury of caring about them as individuals. He’s learned death is cheap, you can’t afford to help strangers, and if you don’t take what you want, someone else will.

“Around” sixteen he graduated (which makes me think he left before they could kick him out), and we know the rest of the story. The person we meet in Boston has internalized these lessons. He’s friendly and has a conscience, but the only people he cares about enough to prioritize are Duncan, a maxed-affinity Sole Survivor, and probably a few others like Daisy. And boy, does he care about that tiny group of individuals. But everyone else? Make it worth his while or go kick rocks.

Having a crazy childhood doesn’t fully explain his choices - encouraging the Survivor to kill Danse, cruelly flirting with Desdemona as the Survivor betrays and murders her, outright stating he’s willing to kill innocents if there’s a way to profit from it, and disliking giving the cure to Austin even though his son is in the exact same situation. He’s just objectively evil sometimes. But I think his history goes a long way toward explaining his motivations and making him likable, if not exactly justifiable.

[briarlovesclara]

Dream SMP Actor/Show AU

Initial idea from Instagram post by ameramerillo / some of the makeup hcs from comment on post (beanpole_orange)

This is LONG! It has the headcanons, my split-up for Seasons in the time frame of how Seasons are now, and an adapted version from Reddit user (will be credited at bottom). 

(When I say a character name I just mean their actors)

-There’s a whole backup prop room because they’re broken so often

-Cat and Mellohi don’t actually play in a record player (the versions that are tossed around most often, that is), and so someone will spin it on their finger backstage while someone blasts from Spotify (probably WAP)

-They paid So Much Money to make the WAP jokes

-Techno went on wires for Doomsday 

-Speaking of Doomsday, the choreography for the fight scenes took weeks to -perfect, as a long of the shots were continuous

-Dream’s mask is heavy for close-up shots, so he has to have a physical therapist check in to make sure his neck doesn’t get cramped too bad

-Ranboo has to get there so early every day to make sure his makeup goes smoothly-- Techno comes in an hour or so later to get his tusks done. 

-Tubbo actually needs a couple of hours for his makeup after his second canon death by Techno (blast marks)

-Ranboo makes such realistic Enderman sounds that when he panics they just actually used his voice

-When Ranboo’s Dream side would talk, Dream would stand off-set and say his lines; then, in the recording studio for the voiceover, Ranboo would stand in another studio and say the lines so that Dream could react realistically.

-The main prison’s lava was CGI, but the other walls were real.

-They had a montage of George breaking the obsidian block, which they made canonically take hours. Poor George was filming for quite some time (that’s all they did that day)

-L’manberg blowing up the second time was filmed and then the close-ups were; all the actors were on wires and were yanked to their respective spots.

-Shots above the L’Crater (on a pillar or little hill) were filmed with green screen, but times that they walked through it were filmed in an actual hole. 

-They found a separate crater to film the nuke hole in, and no shots were CGI there.

-Philza held a funeral in Wilbur’s changing room for his wings, which only got to be used for the five minutes pre-explosion before they ruined them and then used ripped models after. 

-Puffy bought Dream a rubber ducky!

-Tales From the SMP is a spin-off show that runs parallel to the main one (think Torchwood if you’re a Doctor Who fan)

-Eret had to wear white contacts after the betrayal-- the idea was that his regular eyes were contacts in character to conceal a part of himself from L’manberg (symbolism)

-Dream XD is barely there, but is in pure neon green when he appears. He emits just like. Pure light. He doesn’t wear a mask because no one can see his face anyways (the light)

-Ghostbur isn’t see-through, but he has to go to the make-up stations early as well every morning. He and Ranboo, who still gets there first, bond over being early

-Friend is a real sheep!

-Schlatt had to take lessons to learn how to balance the horns on his head

-Foolish spends some time in the makeup van, but many of his big add-ons are things that slip on and off (vs. Ranboo, whose makeup is made every day, or Techno, whose tusks gets fitted).

-Music motifs are a big deal; one of the most infamous is the Never Meant To Be theme, which is used in many different variations to give subtle foreshadowing to key moments in development of Wilbur and Niki. 

-When Ghostbur’s memory book is read, dim flashes of the memories are shown.

-Wilbur, Dream, BadBoyHalo, Sapnap, Callahan, Awesamdude, and George are the creative producers, though the main ones are Wilbur and Dream. 

-They have a full writing team but the head writers are similar to how the actual SMP runs.

-Seasons are split the same way that they are canonically now, but there are pauses in the way they are released (Season 1A, 1B, etc) in the way that Doctor Who is split at times, with mid-series finales

How the Seasons would be split up (look at the wiki to see what each Era means):

S1A: Before Tommy, After Tommy, War for L’manberg Independence

S1B: After L’manberg War, The L’manbergian Election

S1C: Election Fallout, A New Era, The Manberg Festival

S1D: Festival Aftermath, Manberg-Pogtopia War Era

S2A: Reconstruction Era, Post-Banishment Era

S2B: Vengeance Era, Disunion Era

S3A: Imprisonment Era 

Alternative TV timeline, not based on the current canonical seasons, by Reddit user u/username6702: 

“Season 1

1A - The Beginnings (Community house built, Joffery’s murder trial)

Members: Dream, George, Sapnap, Callahan, Awesamdude, BBH, Alyssa

1B - Server Expansion (Ponk + Punz’s Towers Built, Purpled’s UFO Built

New members: Ponk, Punz, Purpled, Skeppy

Season 2

2A - Tommy Joins And Finds The Discs (Tommy’s House Built)

2B - The Disc War (Socialising Club Built, Fundy’s Secret Base Built, Tubbo’s Base Built)

New members: Fundy, Tubbo

Season 3

3A - The Drug Van (Wilbur’s Ball Built, Drug Van Built, Eret’s Castle Built)

New members: Wilbur, Eret

3B - L’Manberg Forms (Walls Put Up)

Season 4

4A - War Begins (Trees Burnt Around L’Manberg, Cobblestone Walls And TNT Cannons Set Up Around L’Manberg, Tubbo’s House Is Burnt Down)

4B - All Out War (Bow Warfare At The Towers, TNT Set Off At Tommy’s Base And L’Manberg, Eret’s Betrayal, Season Ends With Tommy Giving Up The Discs)

Season 5

5A - Tommy’s Business Ventures (The Park, Brighton Tower, Macbeth, L’Manberg Docks And Subs Built, Dream’s Deal Or No Deal, Church Prime Established)

New members: Jack, Niki, Quackity

5B - Mellohi (Dream Gets Hit By A Train, Tommy Attempts To Scam Dream And Eventually Trades To Get Mellohi Back, One Of The Discs Is Given To Skeppy In Return For Spirit's Remains)

Season 6

6A - The Pet War (Sapnap Kills Fungi, Sapnap & Fundy’s Duel)

New members: Karl

6B - The Election (The Parties Are Formed, The Debate, Season Ends With Schlatt Tearing Down The Walls And Pogtopia Getting Formed)

New members: Hbomb, Schlatt, Techno

Season 7

7A - Schlatt’s Rule (we are going into this season now)”

 I have added how I believe the rest would go using this model.

 7A- Schlatt Administration (Fallout of the Election, Pogtopia is formed, the Manberg Festival, Tubbo’s Execution)

New Members: Antfrost, Drista (guest)

7B- Pogtopian Uprising (Quackity Turns, The TNT Room, Quackity Tries to Grab Power, Fundy Turns, Recruitment for Manberg, Badlands Forms, The Final Pet War, The 16th)

New Members: Philza, Connor 

 Season 8

8A- Reconstruction/ Tubbo Administration (Schlatt’s Funeral, Tommy’s Exile, George’s Dethronement, Tommy Begins Exile)

New Members: Ranboo, Captain Puffy, Lazar, Vikkstar

8B- Post-Banishment (Mexican L’manberg, Blood Vines Appear, Squeeks and Estate Conflicts, Technoblade’s Execution, Quackity vs. Technoblade Duel*) 

*Dream now supports Tubbo’s L’manberg

 Season 9

9A- Vengeance Era (Mr. Beast Events, The Green Festival, Doomsday War)

9B- Disunion Era (Ghostbur’s “Resurrection”, Glatt’s Return, Eggpire, The Disc Confrontation)

New Members: Foolish G, Hannah

 Season 10 (Current)

10A- Imprisonment Era (Pandora’s Vault, Anarchy Rises)

New Members: Charlie/Slimecicle

DREAM SMP WIKI

[umbrellasource]

my thoughts on season 2

or rather, a list of things i didn’t like about it and a few things i did. spoiler warning, of course :~)

hello friends, thank you for joining me on my journey to convince the world to hate season 2 - I’M KIDDING LOL i liked season 2, but there are quite a few things i wasn’t that happy with and i’m going to cry about them like a baby now.

1. my second biggest disappoint with this season... NO HAZEL!!! i’m devastated!!!! i absolutely love hazel’s character and the depth cameron britton brought to the role.. i can’t believe they killed him so quickly :( maybe cameron had other work commitments but man i’m so sad. i seriously felt the lack of his presence this season and it was a dynamic that was sorely missed imo. the swedes could never.

2. the plot moved slower than i’d like. season 1 was very well paced, it felt non-stop, and like they were always working towards a goal, moving somewhere. some parts of season 2 felt slow or like things had come to a standstill and we were just watching them live rather than seeing them work towards something. which is fine if that’s what you’re into, but for me i think TUA works best when it’s GOGOGO like in season 1, and when it wasn’t, we had really intimate character moments, which i felt season 2 lacked.

3. the music didn’t hit as hard :( when i think of season 1 i can immediatley name a multitude of iconic scenes with the soundtrack - five murdering everyone in the doughnut shop, the bowling alley fight, i think we’re alone now OF COURSE, the slowmo montage to all die young, hazel and chacha burning the prosthetics building, gerard’s cover of happy together, five walking through the apocalypse to noel gallagher, run boy run, etcetcetc. those all just came off the top of my head. when thinking about season 2 i can only name two scenes off the top of my head (frank sinatra and backstreet boys). which is pretty sad.

4. the characterisation felt weaker overall. it didn’t feel as complex or deep whereas i felt season 1 really delved into each character and explored them a lot more. they all felt slightly watered down, especially luther, oh my god!! they turned him into a characeture whose only purpose is to eat a lot of food and pull silly faces. that was really disappointing. i’d hoped we’d get some scenes with him where he’d discuss all the pressure put on him by their dad, the guilt he feels for screwing up, insecurity etc. the scene with him and five in the club only scratched the surface. plus, allison only mentioned her daughter two times? it was really bizarre to me, it literally seemed like she’d forgotten about her. and speaking of forgetting family members... 

5. why does nobody give a shit about ben. i’m fuMING. they all saw ben in the season 1 finale and then they didn’t even care to mention him other than five asking if ben was there once, only once the family were all back together mind you, and when klaus said no, none of them even questioned it. despite the fact that klaus very clearly is talking/bickering with a spirit in front of them several times. none of the are like ‘uuhh klaus are you talking to ben or like...’ and that is really goddamn sad. ben deserved so much better.

6. ben’s arc in general! this is my biggest disappointment with this season. personally i’d really hoped they’d go the route that klaus would learn to control his powers and manifest ben in the real world for limited periods of time, like when ben punched him in the face or when ben pulled klaus and diego out from under the falling roof of the academy. and then eventually, when the show ended, ben could ~move on~ and go to the afterlife after being able to spend time with his family. but nooo. he’s back to being invisible, uncared about, forgotten and miserable. i like that they let him possess klaus for a bit and experience the world again, that was nice. though when it turned out klaus had already slept with his crush and she called him d*ddy i did my bigget sigh ever. and he’s just gone now. he doesn’t even get to go to heaven. he’s just. nothing. and vanya is the only one who even acknowledged it (other than klaus obviously). i swear to god, if season 3 doesn’t do a scene where klaus ~dies~ for a bit and goes to the afterlife again and sees ben there, i will RIOT. 

7. didn’t much like klaus’ storyline this season either. the cult thing was a bit weird and wasn’t done in the way i’d expected them to do it at all. i thought klaus would be a lot more sombre and serious this season too without the drugs to distract him, but he still acted high and Quirky the whole time, which is a shame, i’d love to have seen some more depth added to his character. plus, i thought he took the drugs because the ghosts were always bothering him.. we literally didn’t see any other than ben. also the stuff with dave was... Not Good. the kid they cast as dave had zero chemistry with klaus/robert, and he looked super young so it was.. kind of weird to see klaus be all like I AM IN LOVE WITH YOU. and i don’t think it even went anywhere. it just seemed pointless to me.

8. i felt like the fallout from the previous season was really glossed over. like vanya just forgot everything and everyone else is kinda like *shrugs* ah well. idk man i feel like there would’ve been a much bigger emotional cost and internal turmoil than there was. 

9. i hated the ending. sorry. it felt really ~generic superhero story~, as did the siblings vs commission thing in the last episode, which TUA isn’t supposed to be. and emo ‘ben’ made me cringe gfhjskkdfj. plus the oopsy we did a timeline fucky thing is getting a lil old now but whatever. plus the sparrow academy means a bunch of new characters which means screentime will get even more split from the main siblings, which i don’t want. 

so yeah.. i have some gripes with season 2. that said....

i did like some things!! i loved vanya having a female love interest, hell yeah. i loved five meeting old five, their dynamic was really fun and the dude who played old five was great, i feel like he really delivered his lines the same way aidan does. lila was cool too, i really liked the actress, she did great. seeing the siblings get closer was really nice too. 

overall, i’d give the season a 6.5/10, so yeah, i did still enjoy it!!! i just don’t think it was as good as season 1, by quite a long way, and i have some things i didn’t like. feel free to disagree with me tho, i’m just a big dumb idiot. and thanks for reading :~)

[twistedsweetdreamer]

A deeper look in The Library, Alice Route.

You have come here, stranger. Welcome to the world where there is blood and shadows and hopeless shattered dreams. Come watch these children act out their futile desires like puppets and cry themselves to sleep. 

This is the world of SINoALICE and I will be making guesses as we dive deep into each chapter. I must say this again each chapter is split into 10 verses and each verse is start with a prologue, which is the story. You can skip it but for us we are looking at the story through this. There is also some verses have some more story after the battle and little conversations in the middle of it. They are distracting if you just want to fight but if you want to understand what is going on we have to look it. And we will do this verse by verse. Beginning by Alice’s route and going outward.

We must begin with the fact that Alice concept is “Bondage / Restriction” Most of her class images has a chain somewhere on her, circling and connecting her and her weapon in some way. There is also the clock/ gear on her body. Just her image pulls the idea that she is bound to her task, consuming her time to get somewhere or something done. The fact that her main color is black, for us in the western world, can be a color of mourning or death. The fact that she is from the world of Alice in Wonderland makes it very very odd... why would a character that was so colorful (Main colors connected to Alice is White/ Light Blue/ Yellow) is mostly washed out? What exactly happened? 

Book 1: Act of Impulse

Chapter 1-1

“Alice woke. She could hear faint noises in the darkness around her. She smelled blood. This world was not her own. But she understood the task at hand. She had to revive her author, Lewis Carroll. And she knew that in order to make her wish come true, she would have to kill many, many others.”

We are started off after being told in the start of loading the game that Alice just woke up here. We do not know the timeline but we must assume that this is when she came to the world of the Library. Coming to this world she understands three things that if we think about it, is very odd.

1. That she has an author, knowing that he is called Lewis Carroll, and that he is dead.

2. The by product is that she is a character in a story and that she is not bothered by this.

3. That this place, where-ever this is, can possibly fulfill her wish to revive L.C. but she must kill to do this, and she is again not bothered by this.

This is something that is very jarring with her nonchalance is waking up in an odd bloody world. You might say that as Alice from Alice in Wonderland, she is use to falling into strange worlds. Okay, that is true. But that does not explain her casual behavior of discovering that she is a character in a book, and that she has to kill is she wants to have her wish. Remember in ‘Alice in the Looking-Glass’ when Alice and Tweedle Dee and Dum are on the chessboard they stumble across the Red King, a chess piece that is sleeping and what we are told is always asleep. Alice is kind of frightened by the Red King anyways and she gets very upset when the Tweedles suggest that she is something that the Red King dreamed up, which will vanish when he wakes. The Tweedles are not saying that she is not a real person to them or to wonderland, but that she is not a true person but a physical dream. She freaks thinking about this. 

So why would she, coming to a world and finding out that she is a character proof that she is not a real person, not have a deep mental breakdown but act as if someone told her that the sky is blue? Along with her being okay with murder? Killing not one or two things, but many? This is automatically a departure of the character we know in the story of ‘Alice in Wonderland’ and how we get to know her in ‘SINoALICE.’ Something has happened since then and we are watching the fallout of it in this world. Something that has made Alice into ‘Alice the Bonded.’

She even admits this herself in the fight.

Alice: I know this fight is wrong. But I must for my wish...

Parrah: Good! Good! Kill ‘em all!

Noya: You’re gonna kill ‘em all, right?

What makes me worried is that there is something that we and Alice do not know of this world and that she was pulled in for another reason than her wish to revive her author. 

[clunelover]

I’m going to attempt a cut because this may be my longest ever post

Okay here is the long post I’ve been writing and rewriting and adding to in my head:

I love my BFF. She’s wonderful and giving and insightful and funny and we’ve been through some Real Shit together, such as me getting evicted from our college apartment and dropping out of school due to my then-blossoming mental illness. Her realizing she is bisexual and trying to figure out what that meant for her life going forward, and then finding her now husband and planning a wedding while he had a mental health crisis and had to go to treatment (same as what I did but like up a level in intensity). At times she and I have been possibly too enmeshed. Okay. So, current challenges are based on a lot of backstory, some of which I’ve posted about on here before but not all:

Her now husband has been in treatment for mental health twice. Once around Thanksgiving before last, and he is there again now. Last week he stepped down after like four weeks inpatient, and now is onto the day program like I did, only currently it’s all from home on video.

When this was all going down the first time, their wedding was 6 months away. I struggled a lot over how much to say, and ultimately told her I thought she should at least postpone, maybe cancel. And when he came out of treatment that first time, he even said he wanted to postpone! She declined, citing social pressure and embarrassment and save the dates having gone out. I think an unspoken part of it was that she wants a baby real bad, so she thought they should just push through, get to baby making, deal with whatever fallout later?

But in between finishing treatment and the wedding, he continued to mess up - he does a lot of avoiding (including of work) and when he’s ashamed, his first instinct is to lie. So she kept having incident after incident of “discovering” that he’d been lying about going to work. Or hiding some additional debt (and also not paying on it). At this point I think I told her, just financially speaking, you should not tie yourself to this person. She did not like me saying that, and eventually I said I could not hear any more about his fuckups. Because she kept giving him ultimatums, but never followed through on them, and I just could not go on that roller coaster. That was a tough moment in our friendship. Conversation became very strained because so much was happening that I had opted out of hearing about. I still don’t know if that was the right thing to do. I tried to support her emotionally but that was difficult under that boundary I set.

Then they got married last May. After lots of talk with my therapist I decided that I should still go to the wedding and be matron of honor and stuff, because I was doing it out of love for her. And I do actually like him a lot too! Just had and have a lot of concerns.

After the wedding things seemed pretty good, he got a job at a dog daycare and seemed to really love that (or maybe before wedding, who can recall).

BFF was officially game on, full court press for baby. I’m 34 which means I think she’s 35 and turning 36 soon.

Sometime in fall he got fired from dog daycare for badmouthing the owner and then getting into a shouting match (!) with them. In January he got a new job, as an assistant manager at a grocery store. I did not say this to BFF but my initial thought was “if he can’t hack dog daycare how can he assistant manage a busy grocery store?”

I think he lasted a month at grocery store. Then he started punking out and calling in because his “feet hurt.” BFF freaked out because she assumed he was going to lose another job. She apparently had some very firm conversation with him about how she wasn’t happy and almost none of her needs were being met. A couple days later he told her he’d been feeling suicidal and needs to go back to treatment. OH and somewhere in there things also went off the rails with trying for baby. I think he has performance issues in addition to low libido, AND the thought of becoming a dad was triggering. For instance, he was supposed to give a semen sample for analysis but freaked out just being in the clinic for it and left. When BFF told me all this she kept asking “is this okay” and “is this too triggering for you to hear” and at first I thought she meant because of how I also was having a flare up in mental health symptoms due to stressful job, but then later I realized it was because of my previous “can’t hear this stuff anymore” edict. But honestly, I feel totally different about that now! They’re married. The disaster (in my view at least) that I was trying to prevent did happen. So nothing feels urgent or painful to me now, other than sadness for her.

While he was inpatient, BFF had been driving his car because it’s nicer than hers, and then it got reposssed so like she came out one morning and it just wasn’t in the driveway. She knew he’d been very behind on payments, like to the point he had a small claim against him, but she thought he’d finally dealt with that and set up a payment plan. When she called him to say what was going on his inclination was to drop out of treatment and come home early to “deal with it,” which he was eventually talked out of.

So THAT is just to get caught up on past events! Sheesh, this is so long. So my current agitations (some of which are serious and some petty) are:

I’m worried that when his back is against the wall he claims mental breakdown to evade responsibility. This feels very mean of me to think, and also he’s been assessed by experts who presumably can tell when someone is making it up, so...I know he really must not be! But this still feels like the pattern.

Another petty thought is that I too have some heavy duty diagnoses and childhood trauma, but I’ve got it together and manage my mental health very avidly to stay as healthy as possible, so why can’t he. ALSO NOT FAIR! I know that. But it keeps popping into my head. It’s shitty that I can relate to him so well and yet it almost makes me LESS sympathetic. Something for me to work on.

I also worry that the instinct to lie is something that’s hard to get rid of. I know because I have it! I think I have stopped listening to it but it still comes up. And how can you have a good marriage with someone who regularly lies about important things. I don’t think you can.

BFF’s current line is that she’s going to wait til he finishes treatment but then she wants to go back to intense trying for baby. And that if he doesn’t want to, or says he needs to wait, she might want to get divorced. She says she’s put a lot on hold for him and can’t wait anymore. So, yes, she has. And there is the matter of age that is also a consideration. But this feels so mixed up to me! Like, the time for strict ultimatums and maybe splitting up was a couple years ago! Now he is working on some serious mental health stuff and it seems unfair, and possibly undermining of his progress, to say “well I’ve waited long enough so impregnate me now or else”...but also I do think it seems likely and possibly for the best that they’d end up divorced, so what do I care if she rushes that process along?

Big picture though, I don’t think he’s ready to be a dad or maybe doesn’t even want to be. I feel so sad for BFF because he was her first real boyfriend and she was kind of desperate for this to work, so she has just always grilled him about his desire for marriage and kids or what his timeline is, and has taken any vague affirmative response as total agreement. Like they were at the mall and Gymboree was going out of business so he suggested going in and buying a onesie. So, you know, proof positive that he really wants a baby ASAP too!! 😞 ...so, again, even though it feels somehow unfair to me that she’d start pushing on him now, I suppose it’s better that it come out sooner rather than later if that is the case

She also just totally steamrolls him, see getting married even though he asked to postpone, so I really hope she doesn’t steamroll him into having a baby if he doesn’t want one...

She’d never say it, but I get the sense that deep down she thinks let’s just have the baby and if he’s in a bad way I’ll just do all the work. She’s kind of a control freak so she may feel like she’d prefer that! But I think she overestimates how much harder it would be to have a baby while the other adult in the house can’t help you, won’t get a job, etc. than to just DO it alone for real.

I think she is also glossing over how having a baby and the attendant sleep deprivation can make mental health issues get much worse. Like when I was pregnant with Edie, my psychiatrist strongly recommended I just not even try to breastfeed, so that Jeremy could take night feedings because of how crazy I could go without enough sleep. I did not listen but she may have been right! I did go pretty fucking crazy, with both kids.

Oh! And she also has this big plan that he’s going to get on disability. I have all kinds of feelings and opinions about this. Like, rightly or wrongly, I don’t think he’d meet the criteria for this. Also she keeps saying “well he lost his last three jobs due to mental illness” but...does getting fired for screaming at your boss and telling them “you’re terrible” count as losing job due to mental illness?? But she’s so sure this will work and I have trouble engaging with it and being supportive because it feels delusional to me. It’s also making her view all issues of disability through this lens. Like, my stepmom is anxious and as a result very scatterbrained and inarticulate, and she’s also not worked in a few years partly due to health concerns (but like, complications from gastric bypass...not a disability) and BFF keeps saying “why doesn’t stepmom get on disability?” And I’m like “UMMMM because she’s not disabled??” I did finally tell her to stop saying that to me. But yeah, it’s just hard because again, it feels delusional, but she’s going ahead with it so what’s the point of me being harsh about how much I don’t think it’ll work?

Okay last one - she likes to source opinions and experiences from other people to help her think things through. She’s always been close to my stepmom, who had to divorce my dad because of how bad his drinking got, and my dad is also disabled (for real!) so she spent a lot of time as a caregiver. So BFF has had a lot of long phone conversations with stepmom about all that. I also have another friend whose husband is too mentally ill to work (but not on disability! Which BFF also keeps bringing up). He’s been out of work for years and they have two kids and to be fair, their life does seem crazy to me from the outside, but that friend seems to have her eyes open about everything and feels it’s working for her for now. Anyway, that husband has ALSO done the program that BFF’s husband and I have done, so when he first went in BFF wanted to have a chat with this friend about her experience, so we all met up to chat. She was very up front and blunt - “if we didn’t have kids we’d be divorced” and “we haven’t had sex in years”...but now, BFF basically uses this friend and my stepmom’s relationship with my dad as sort of justifications in her mind - “well I’m not THAT bad!” which I hate. Especially wrt to friend whose husband doesn’t work - “I’d never let it get that bad. I’d have left before now. I’d say he had to get a job or get on disability” etc etc. This drives me craaaaazy. Like, remind me not to introduce you to people to have a heart-to-heart if you’re just going to use them as your mental worst case scenario. Also, bitch, you wouldn’t “let it get that bad?” YOU ARE ON THE ROAD TO “THAT BAD” RIGHT NOW! Your husband lost three jobs in as many years. You also don’t currently have sex. How do you get to years? You start with weeks and months.

Okay, that’s it. It’s just been building and rolling around in my head. If you read it all, um, congrats? Also, this maybe makes our friendship sound bad, but other than most aspects of her marriage I have no issues with her and we get along great!! It’s been hard because prior to me telling her not to get married we’ve seen eye to eye, or close to, on everything important.

[nonsenseandstuff]

Dark Phoenix, spoiler review.

Things I liked:

This film gets that Charles is a privileged, manipulative person. This has always been clear in the comics, but the films have barely touched on it (except the one where he was a drug addict)

The effects (most of them, excluding Mystique’s make up, what the fuck happened there? it was better in the 90′s)

The fact that the anti mutant forces are from the MCU, which I found mildly hilarious. 

 Kurt

X dad is mad at Jean, so she goes to Dadneto

Things I didn’t like:

So much of the character work and backstory came off as clumsy, especially for Jean herself. We should h ave had that in previous films (how good would it have been as a side plot in an earlier film to have Charles take in Jean and go into her mind, with it being presented as a good and right and protective decision, and then have the fallout hit later?)

And this goes for other parts of the plot too, the alien invasion side of things felt barely sketched out, with no meat to it. 

The villains were kind of skrull like and Jean out of nowhere being like “my emotions make me strong” felt very Captain Marvel derivative (the emotions make me weak/strong thing would have made sense if we had seen flashbacks to Charles conditioning her to repress everything, but as it is it’s a really weak moment)

Speaking of derivative, I need to watch the original trilogy again, because I am not sure if there’s some scenes that are supposed to be referencing how things went down in the original timeline with Jean.

 Several characters were under-utilised, especially Peter and Ororo. They got a couple of lines each, but they both could have been cut without altering the plot and that’s dumb. Kurt got a bit of an arc, I guess, but they all deserved more. (Again if some of the backstory had been done in a previous movie then there would have been more space for all the characters to interact) (or if this film had been split in two, the first film having more  backstory, lots of emotional scenes of Jean growing up and Charles teaching her to be repressed and going into her mind, but also playing games with her and putting her pictures on the x fridge, then ending with Jean killing Raven and going on the run, and the second film focusing on the alien threat and the idea of the greater good and how one terrible thing (Jean) has to be used to face off a greater threat (Aliens) and how awful that is for everyone involved (giving some real depth to Charle’s emotions and retirement as he was literally doing the same thing to Jean that the government are now, he treated her badly because he felt it was the only way to protect her from the world who would treat her worse) 

Things I’m not sure about:

It’s weird having an x men film without wolverine. I was kind of expecting at least a cameo.

Jean/Scott felt forced to me, but it always feels forced to me so ymmv

I would have liked to see what was happening to other mutants as the government came after Jean and the high profile mutants. We hear ‘internment camps’ mentioned on the tv, but it would have been nice to see what was happening away from the core cast, especially as a foil to Charles’ attitude. As he is calling the president for example, and gets hung up on, we could have faded to shots of violence against innocent mutants in their homes etc. 

I think  they were afraid of being seen as having a ‘message’, so they pulled back from showing the sort of violence the government can cause for minorities (like you can pretty easily find parallels to current events  in America, even the fact that Jean wasn’t dangerous until she was forced to be by an outside force, and a perceived threat being treated as an excuse to harm anyone even remotely connected to her, but having baby mutants being taken from their parents because they are seen as dangerous might have been a little too on the nose)

Overall: an ok movie. It could have been a lot better, but it didn’t make me fall asleep or want to tear out my own eyeballs, so around a 4/10.

[mowseries]

Writer Journal Entry

{Saturday, September 29th TUMBLR 2018}

//Summary format for the Machines of War series! “Spoilers” below.

—0 (Mournful Blues): Cardinal is built in secret, and develops a strong sense of reckless devotion to saving others as well as a sense of self. He's closest to his C.O., though he adores his father. Things start to go wrong, and he ends up in a test chassis. When that fails too, they discover that the failure is software-based, and there is talk of erasing him. He runs away. 

Living in the streets eventually takes him to Kansas City, which—while safer than Monstropolis and Chicago—is still dangerous. He takes shelter with others in a homeless community, and becomes fascinated with jazz music. This all comes to a grinding halt when a building catches fire in a thunderstorm. He saves the people inside (including a family with a young girl), but goes Offline in the process. 

His injuries remind him of his approaching mortal end, and drive him to seek Dr. Light out of a misinterpretation that Light had found a way to fix him. It turns out instead that Light had developed the concepts for Rock and Roll, and was using his old core as a "brand new" technology. He is very upset, and runs off blindly after bumping into Mikhail. He meets Señor Gonzales shortly before he dies. 

Wily, for his part, moves out of the office, with plenty of foreshadowing for Broken Winter as he talks to Mikhail.

===================

—1 (Sons of Anarchy): Wily is brought on board to help build "the first" AI&As, due to old friendships and so on. Rock and Roll don't really like him, however, and he is lonely. There are also foreshadowing signs of envy, and he clashes with Light on philosophy perspective.

Development of the Industrials appeases him, and he's allowed to pull his own teams together. He chooses to recruit internationally (outside of Europe) from lesser-known and unknown individuals in the scientific community (not academics), which raises a big to-do. Mikhail is one of the ones recruited; he is second-in-command on the DLN-005 project.

Mikhail ends up taking over the DLN-005 project and writing his own coding for it after Wily has to drop the project due to health problems: Wily chose to retain his focus on the troublesome DLN-008 project. He eventually has some success by using the first fully written DWN_OS software, and he gives Tobias emotions.

Tobias comes Online initially in awe of Dr. Light, but is neglected in favor of his brother, Rock. He and Dr. Wily grow very close to one another, and he also becomes good friends with David (and meets Mikhail in the process). He grows to love radio and shares his father's fervor for ideas re: robot rights/roles in society, and starts looking forward to his testing being over.

Unfortunately, he is destined for an isolated existence. His protests at learning this lead Dr. Light to realize that Tobias is fully realized and has emotions. Dr. Light becomes furious and gets into a loud argument with Wily, which Tobias, Mikhail, and just about everyone else overhears. When he threatens to erase Tobias, the electric 'bot panics and runs away. He hides with Dr. Wily for a while, and asks for Wily to upgrade himself and the other Industrials. Wily agrees after learning about the projects for Timeman and Oilman.

The Industrials all agree to split up after they are fully realized, with Snow being his adorable self. They go their separate ways, except for Snow traveling with Fire.

Tobias ends up making broadcasts, fleeing from town to town, and eventually ends up in Monstropolis. His grand coup de grâce at his favorite radio tower gets him cornered and attacked, causing him to lash out in fear.

Not long after this, he gets news that his brothers have died. Surprised and worried, he contacts David and agrees to meet up with him. Unfortunately, they're too late: Snow and Fire get cornered, and Tobias ends up hearing his brother's final words.

This shatters his sanity, and he's catatonic for a while. He manages to encrypt a fair amount of data before the Blue Menace finally hunts him down as well. In the ensuing fight, he discovers it's actually his older brother, Rock. His attempts to reason with him are useless, and he's literally ripped to pieces.

This drives Wily utterly MAD, and he rants in a vow of revenge.

Mikhail, of course, is detained in questioning, which goes on for so long that he's unable to get there in time to stop Tobias from messing with the database. He does see that David is truly alive, however. He's sent back to Russia, but he's being watched…

===================

—1.5 (Moral Compass): Wily brings Cardinal back to life after discovering him. He hopes that Cardinal will be like a son to him, but Cardinal is furious when he learns about what happened to the First Gens.

He runs off, back to Kansas City. He's recognized via dogtags by the girl he saved, and she tells him about the Mad Hatter Café. He initially gets a job as a janitor there, and sleeps on the roof. He notices the secret trap door during a tornado warning, but says nothing.

After telling the truth to the girl, she introduces him to the REAL purpose of the café, passing him off (with technical truth) as a homeless soldier with memory problems.They gladly take him in, to his initial guilt.

He slowly adapts to his new life, and eventually learns of the hacking side to the Hatters. "They explain that most of the time, it’s to set up truly private interactions or transactions, in a setting not monitored by the people who would hunt them down. He feels sad (but not too surprised) to hear that humans live in hiding for their identity, too."

Once he gets word from Wily, he takes the risk of traveling back to see him despite the Hatters being more like a family than Wily was. He meets Metal for the first time, and feels a bit guilty when he notices Wily isn't completely sane.

Back with the Hatters, he works more on self-repairs and they assure him he's safe and welcome with them. He decides he wants a new name, and settles on "Cardinal" after consultation with the thesaurus. "When given a hard time for this, he grins because he knows he’s been fully accepted.

He contemplates what he wants to have on his birthday, with the Hatters getting him a fake ID as a present after having been with them for so long. He decides on March 8th, but isn’t sure why. Elsewhere, Enigma and Chorus are "…" at seeing this influence starting to rub off on the timeline

In the end, he purchases his motorcycle, and finally gets the chance to live out his literal dreams. He finds it exhilarating and freeing.

======================

—2 (Hora de Muerte): Carlos is built and spends time with his brothers in the lab, a bit in awe of the world around him (and fairly close to Pisces). His oldest brother's gory details about blood drive him to become a pacifist. Unable to stand being cooped up in a lab, he's eventually allowed to run loose. A run-in with Highway Patrol and the National Guard spooks him, but Cardinal gets him out of the jam and sends him down to Texas.

Once there, he meets Señor Gonzales, who takes him in and raises him like a son. He becomes a member of the community over time, and gets several other teenaged friends.

His struggles between his two families and his own identity continues over the course of several years, but inevitably, the Blue Menace sets out once again. Carlos's decision to stay with his new family and life is disrupted by the destruction of Lower Monstropolis, and the subsequent visit to the horrific wreckage.

He arrives too late to save either Pisces or Jaden, and nearly kills Rock in a berserk rage. He ends up trashing the lab he was built at, and returns home to Texas to spend out the rest of his days there.

In the end, he is found, and forced to fight to the death. Everyone in the community (other than Pops and Cruz) is shocked to see that he was a robot all along.

Due to certain hardware failures, his self-destruct fails to go off. His body is confiscated to be studied via reverse-engineering.

========================

—3 (Empire of Corruption): Wily and Light start working together again. Their intentions both start off good, and a lot of good comes from it; Nico is built and allowed to be Roll's companion, Siamini is built and works as a lab assistant, Rush is built with transformative abilities, etc. But Wily isn't fully over what happened, and becomes mad again when he discovers Carlos's old, forgotten, dismantled chassis in storage. When Spica falls to Earth in Korea, he sends Snakeman out to retrieve him.

He starts working on reprogramming both Spica and the Third Generation Industrials, but Carlos wakes up in the process. Carlos escapes into the Cloud, ending up forced to take shelter in the very database he'd trashed long before.

Meanwhile, Shadowman wakes up and escapes, killing Snakeman in the process. Nico and Siamini are forced to deal with the fallout, but they are all soon reprogrammed. Everyone manages to escape, but they handle the situation differently: Viper chooses to bully and spy on his brothers, Siamini frets but obeys in fear, and Nico is more focused on his secret meetups with Roll.

Shadow, for his part, travels down to Texas, running into Cardinal along the way. Cardinal decides to break away from Wily at last, and Shadow talks with Pops about Carlos.

While he focuses on getting an emotions program and getting Carlos a body, Cardinal focuses on saving what Third Gens he can. He gets some success with Siam (though Gemini still dies), and comes just in time to prevent Rock from destroying Nico.

Everyone ends up coming together at the old lab. Siam and Nico help repair Speedy, and Cardinal and Shadow fight the Menace to stall for time. Cardinal rages against his brother, and they all manage to escape.

Cardinal goes back, but fails to come in time to help with the Gamma incident. He does dig Rock out of the rubble, but doesn't check for Wily.

The Rebel Angels decide to live down in Texas. Meanwhile, Rock and Roll come into conflict over the truth about Nico, and Dr. Light sees Mikhail at a convention. (The Russian does not have flattering things to say.)

========================

—4 (Broken Winter): Cardinal grows suspicious when there's no news of Wily's death. His investigation takes him to the scene of the incident, and then to what's left of the old lab, where he meets Jazz in her Combat form. (He eventually puts her into a Civilian form, as Wily had been working on those in Empire of Corruption. ) He learns that an intern's codes were used to erase data on Gamma, and grows more suspicious. A fire breaks out before he can investigate further.

He eventually learns about Mikhail, and recognizes him from many, many years ago. He calls in some favors with the Mad Hatters to get a false identity to travel abroad with, deciding to go to Russia. Meanwhile, Tobias and David wake up in the Cloud after so long in an encrypted state.

Viper (who had been rebuilt) kidnaps Mikhail and Kalinka on Wily's behalf, and proceeds to physically and psychologically torture the Russian Doctor into submission for Wily's latest scheme.

(Meanwhile, Anubis discovers evidence of Jupiter in a massive and elaborate underground temple in Egypt. Before he can report his findings, however, he is forced to come back to Siberia. Once he realizes that he’s going to be reprogrammed, he locks his memories such that only Dr. Cossack can unlock them.)

Cardinal's adventures through Eurasia take him across Italy, Egypt, and Siberia, to name just a few places. He fools Wily into thinking he's on his side, and gets access to Kalinka that way. While he's unable to save Anubis, he does save Skull, Keltso, and Digger. Fights with various feds take place along the way.

He arrives just in time to prevent Rock from killing Mikhail, and he takes them to the hospital before blowing up the Siberian Citadel and leaving Rock to deal with Wily.

Mikhail's recovery in the hospital is overshadowed by the possibility he might be executed for his role in what happened, but Dr. Light steps in and "is a good" ( "for once" as Cardinal would say) by putting in a good word, getting Mikhail a good legal team, paying for medical bills, and eventually agreeing to pay for the resources to rebuild the DCNs. Mikhail himself becomes an American citizen and enters Witness Protection under the identity Michael Kodak and his daughter, Katrina Kodak.

Later, sorting out the nitty-gritty gets Mikhail rights to rebuild David via loophole. (Concept art for his new design is later used to build Chorus and Refrain….)  Tobias also eventually gets rebuilt. Cardinal gets much-needed repairs, but brushes off Mikhail's warnings that Wily is a dangerous man to make enemies with.

Eventually, Mikhail upgrades Rock's blaster cannon after patching his combat program. Rock asks him about the DCNs and Cardinal, to which Cossack remarks that Mega would know more than he would. Rock gives Mikhail the medals he got for saving the world, as he suspects that Cardinal would come into contact with Mikhail later. Rock uses careful wording to suggest to various authorities that Cardinal is dead, just in case…

========================

—AO (Allies Obstruct): The Rebel Angels befriend Xelbots outside of time, and are devastated when that world goes through an apocalyptic breakdown—

Okay, yeah, not actually part of the series's timeline canon, but this is roughly when it takes place in perspective.

========================

—5 (Prodigal Son): Cardinal gets publicly framed for the kidnapping of Dr. Light while he's out visiting the Hatters. He is now known by the feds to still exist, and outed to the public as a robot. The Hatters hide him for a little bit, with most of the members shocked to realize he's an AI&A; he tells them the full truth of the matter, and leaves the city for their sake, to confront the true guilty party.

Meanwhile, Mikhail has to deal with suddenly being tasked with taking care of Rock, even though he doesn't really believe Cardinal would be so violent. He has enough doubts/concerns that he cuts off RMDC access to the Rebel Angels, though.

In between the chaos of Gravity and Viper terrorizing Light and Cossack AND the Rebel Angels, Eugene (Starman) discovers an anomaly forming in the distant reaches of space, somewhere around Venus.

There's some internal conflict with the family on how to handle this, but Cardinal still goes to confront the Fifth Gens. It proves to be an incredibly dangerous task, and he manages to get Eugene more on their side. His confrontations with Gravity are only stopped by Rock's arrival, at which point Cardinal goes off to confront Dark Man. Viper interrupts him, and is defeated again for his troubles.

Rock and Cardinal fight, and it goes very badly until Darkman reveals himself at the last moment but doesn't manage to finish Rock off. Cardinal tosses Rock some supplies before warping off to nurse his own wounds.

Later, Mikhail apologizes for his reaction, offers again to fix Cardinal's core or for them to stay in Alaska. Cardinal declines and asks Mikhail to tell the press and the authorities that he is actually still dead; Dr. Light finally realizes that Cardinal is Blues and tells Mega and Roll of the existence of DLN-000.

Eugene is eventually repaired by Dr. Cossack, and offered a place at Light Labs. He declines fearfully, and runs off before the point can be argued. Cardinal notes that he suspects that Eugene needs some independence to decide things for himself, and will choose a “side” once he’s had some time to think.

========================

—6 (Tournament Trifecta): Wily repairs a number of robots for a tournament, including Isaac, Viper, Jaden, Pisces, and Metal.

As other people start building robots, the Beta Boys are faced with the possibility that they might be able to come out of hiding and stop living as fugitives. They are uneasy when there is a public invitation to join a combat tournament, suspecting it an excuse by various governments to gather data on top-notch combat robotics.

Things take an unexpected turn when they get a distress call from one of the contestants. They initially split up: Tobias and Carlos working to find information on the contestants (and the sponsors); David and Siam working with Dr. Cossack on schematics for armor upgrades that will be both more durable and possibly allow for a morph between hands and weapons for those who lack hands; Cardinal, Shadow, and Nico going to the arena to discern the source of the distress call.

While there, they come across the alarming news that Viper not only has returned, but he has entered the tournament and is fighting his way up the ranks. Shadow angrily tries to confront him, but is stopped when he is attacked by another contestant, who stops them from entering the main area of the arena (where Viper is about to fight Yamato Man). Before they can figure out who he is, he runs off. They try and chase him down when suddenly he gets pulled aside to participate in a fight of his own against Wind Man.

They split up again—Cardinal to monitor the stranger, and Nico and Shadow to confront Viper after the fight ends. Surprisingly, the stranger is revealed as Jaden and Viper loses rather terribly, about to be deactivated when Shadow steps in. Cardinal rescues Jaden and Shadow prevents Yamato from killing Viper so that they could learn why he was there. They learn the true purpose of the tournament when Mr. X comes on over the speakers and reveals the truth. Shadow is forced to leave Viper behind in order to rejoin his brothers and cover for their escape as the arena goes into panic.

As Cardinal, Jaden, Nico, and Shadow take refuge with the Hatters, Mikhail contacts Toby's group in order to share information. He urges them to get to safety, as he suspects Wily is behind this and that Wily may have ordered their termination. Tobias spurns the notion but accidentally fries the circuits of their console in the process. He is forced to repair them himself as Carlos has become rather distracted by some of the contestant designs, which seem familiar to him.

Due to increased security, Cardinal's group is forced to lay low in KC for a while. They work on repairing Jaden, who explains that he had been rebuilt for the contest and entered in in order to draw the Rebel Angels out. Cardinal decides to leave after hearing this to investigate if any others had been reactivated. He uses Jaden's access card (and an ID given to him by Cossack) to enter into the Arena (disguised in full armor). While there he comes across some useful equipment, so he takes it back with him to study, sending most of it off to Mikhail.

Dr. Cossack tests out some of the new equipment and armor with Snow as Kalinka and Keltso watch. They determine the use of the energy balancer, and Snow begs for Dr. Cossack to build his family a cat. They are interrupted by an attack on the fortress from Blizzardman. Keltso goes out to fight him and tells Snow to stay back, but Snow follows anyway and saves him from being shattered by ice. Snow and Blizzard get locked into an elemental domination battle, which ends with Snow being overpowered as he refuses to actually attack. The fight is interrupted by Mega, allowing Keltso and Snow to escape with Dr. Cossack and Kalinka.

Cardinal's group joins up with Snow's group when they arrive in KC. After swapping stories, Cossack gives Cardinal an Energy Balancer. While the others are busy repairing Jaden, Cardinal goes off on his own to give the Balancer to Mega. While he is gone, the others discuss his mysterious past and behavior and go out to eat.

Cardinal travels and meets up with Mega before he fights Tomahawk. He tries to leave, but Mega stops him by saying he knows who he is now. He calls him "Blues" and asks him why he never told him the truth, why he had fought him instead. Cardinal listens as Rock begs him to go back to the labs and speak with Dr. Light. Cardinal calmly tells him to focus on defeating Wily, and then leaves before Mega can protest further.

He rejoins the others. With Cossack's help, they all travel to join up with the rest of the Beta boys in Texas. Speedy is overjoyed that Jaden is alive again, and the two share a happy reunion. After hearing news of Wily's defeat and arrest, everyone goes out to celebrate.

========================

—7 (Depths of Discord): Cardinal now has to deal with Beowulf, Wily's latest creation. This is a frustrating affair, as he is inexperienced and facing a foe he simply cannot defeat at his current stage in life. Keeping the two of them from killing one another and him is a taxing affair. Alucard kicks Beowulf to the curb, and Cardinal intervenes.

Eventually, Cardinal's intervention comes with the cost of his own Shield (which is one of the few things he's owned from the start) in order to stave off Rock's combat programming from finishing him off. In the end, he has to intervene to keep Rock from killing Wily, which he knows Rock would come to regret later on, and leaves while fairly exhausted.

While he does manage to get everything back, he also manages to get Beowulf to hand over the Super Adaptor.

Eugene also finally returns, this time with troubling news from space…

========================

—8 (Stellar Disaster): Cardinal is once again forced to get involved for Beowulf's sake, and also sees the reawakening of at least one Stardroid, probably several—which of course leads to other problems with Shadow.

Half of the actual conflict isn't even with the Robot Masters: it's with the Stardroids. They don't bother with the other RMs, letting Rock deal with that while they handle the big guys. Shadow plays a major role in taking them down, though he then goes missing.

Cardinal has to intervene repeatedly for the fish's sake, but ends up getting infected with Evil Energy just as much as Rock due to the both of them getting exposed at the same time. He survives and wakes up before Rock does, but he's horribly weakened by the experience.

========================

—8.5 (Royally Blindsided): "MoW!MM&B is…. … …just. || "It's only a scratch…" || Really, Cardinal? Why is nobody surprised? || After he's repaired from being CUT IN HALF, he goes back to fight King and ends up nearly one-shotting his core by using a highly charged shot from his plasma blaster. He nearly explodes and is teleported off by the man who nearly killed him not too long ago, and later—after "just good enough" repairs, before Mikhail's finished with them—infiltrates one of Wily's lairs and narrowly talks his way out of a fight with Forte as well."

In other words, Cardinal gets sliced in half, and the narrator becomes Beowulf as he is finally given the first chance to actually do something that matters all on his own.  Beowulf deals with the difficulty of confronting two enemies at the same time, especially with Rock being such a great and terrible enemy. Cardinal manages to get repaired enough to intervene anyway, twice.

========================

—9 (Scarred Reflection): Will be many cross-reference feels re: being erased, destroyed, decommissioned. Pisces has secretly been hanging out with Splash, keeping her safe (much to the chagrin of his brothers).

"One long nightmare, with a number of Industrials starting to lash out in despair. Cardinal has to deal with keeping the family together and out of trouble in the middle of what threatens to be a horrific disaster—the Industrials in question were only given free will, like with the First Gens, with Wily taking advantage after the fact due to being reminded of how things played out with Tobias. Cardinal has to fight his way through and try to save as many of the Industrials as he can, and then (yet again) is forced to save Rock's chass when he gets in over his head."

========================

—10 (Fevered Fugue): Robosickness madness grips the world. Bots are going berserk. Why does this sound and physically, painfully FEEL familiar to our heroes?

The COMBAT_DLN.EXE program gets loose and becomes fully viral, sending the whole world into the tizzy that the Mighty Numbers would face on a "merely" national scale. He outright teams up with Rock to try and find a cure: Rock working with Light and Cardinal working with Mikhail. Another violent argument between Light and Wily as it's revealed that the virus is the result of Light's work breaks out—leading to Wily to storm off with the cure and attempt to take advantage of the situation, much to Cardinal's chagrin. While on the way to confront him, however, Cardinal collapses from the effects of the virus; it's caused him to overheat in a way that he can no longer convert energy from his core into healing surge. Rock's prototype "cure" helps clear his mind, but the damage to his already fragile state is not so easily reversible. He manages to struggle on and eventually confronts Wily for the last time—and then leaves him to die, because he's learned from his mistake of MM3 when it comes to taking pity on the crazed Doctor.

========================

—11 (Grinding Gears): It turns out that Wily’s software was not the ONLY work of his from the old days that was stolen…

========================

—XOver (Temporal Echoes): Due to observation of dangerous anomalies in spacetime, and Rock Light’s inability to handle them, Dr. Light was called upon to create a new robot that was capable of resolving the threat. He worked hard on the blueprints for the hardware, but ultimately failed to produce a working copy of software.

Desperate, the powers that be (with Dr. Light included) begged the world’s best (sane) AI&A coder to join the project: one Dr. Mikhail Cossack.

Dr. Cossack agreed, but only under very strict conditions. Chief among them were the two main points regarding ownership and production: the unit would be considered a DCN, with Dr. Light acting as a subcontractor for the construction process. Therefore, it would be the legal property of Dr. Cossack’s privately owned LLC., subject to the legal ramifications of said ownership. Consequently, LightLabs, Inc. would NOT be allowed to mass-produce the unit under any circumstances, and any unapproved constructs produced using either the hardware or the software would be considered violations of patent and subject to seizure. Although these were not very well received, they were demanded and ultimately honored.

The project was a phenomenal success. Chorus transcended the confines of linear spacetime…

…and never returned.

None of the tracking measures seemed to indicate that Chorus got injured, destroyed, or captured, so the project leads were forced to conclude that he was either unable or unwilling to return. Since they still had a problem to deal with, Dr. Cossack agreed to make another construct—Refrain—using a slightly upgraded blueprint who would be tasked with the same defined purpose and the additional prerogative to search for and assist Chorus along the way…

========================

—T.

[orbemnews]

Cybercrime Hits the Pump Hackers take down a major fuel pipeline One of the U.S.’s biggest pipeline operators, Colonial Pipeline, disclosed late last week that it was forced to shut down after it was hit by ransomware. It’s a sobering reminder that cybercrime is one of the most serious threats that companies face. Colonial acknowledged that its corporate computer network had been hit, crippling the company that supplies 45 percent of the East Coast’s fuel. (A criminal gang known as DarkSide was identified as the perpetrator.) While the shutdown, now in its third day, hasn’t yet had a major impact on the markets for gasoline, diesel or jet fuel, analysts warned prolonged downtime could lead to higher gas prices as demand rises when the economy fully reopens. Colonial declined to say when it would restart operations. Cybercrime is on the rise. U.S. officials note that the frequency and sophistication of ransomware attacks has soared in recent months, targeting police departments, hospitals and manufacturers. Companies are often reluctant to reveal much information about these attacks, making the scope of hacks difficult to gauge; last year, a ransomware attack took an unnamed natural gas facility offline for two days, according to a vague statement from the government at the time. The attack on Colonial comes months after news of the hacking of the network services provider SolarWinds, which Russia has been accused of orchestrating. The Biden administration is weighing how to respond. The White House had already been planning an executive order to create new digital safety standards for federal agencies and contractors, as well as new disclosure rules. Government officials have conceded that the order as currently planned wouldn’t stop the most skilled hackers from infiltrating computer networks, though they say it might have helped prevent hacks like the Colonial incident. In the meantime, the Department of Transportation passed an emergency order yesterday relaxing rules on transporting fuel via road in some states. This latest attack highlights the vulnerability of infrastructure to cyber attacks. President Biden’s $2 trillion infrastructure spending plan doesn’t have a lot to say about cybersecurity specifically, so how to protect these projects from attacks could become yet another point of contention in the already heated debate over the bill. HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING New warnings about how the coronavirus spreads. U.S. officials acknowledged that the virus is airborne and can reach people more than six feet away, raising questions about how employers can redesign offices to reduce the spread. Still, Dr. Anthony Fauci said he was open to relaxing indoor mask mandates — so long as Americans continue to get vaccinated. 1MDB sues JPMorgan Chase and Deutsche Bank. The failed Malaysian sovereign fund sued 25 individuals and nine entities, a list that includes the two Western lenders, Bloomberg reports. It’s the latest fallout from a bribery scandal in which Goldman Sachs admitted last year to a role in abetting crimes. The fight over unemployment benefits heats up. Friday’s disappointing jobs report stoked debate over whether the Biden administration’s policies are working. Republicans (and some Democrats) argue that the $300 weekly supplement is discouraging people from finding work; others say any clogs in the labor market are temporary. Investors rebel against executive pay. Shareholder votes in favor of U.S. executives’ compensation have fallen to their lowest level — an average of 88 percent — since 2011, the year that “say on pay” votes became mandatory, The Financial Times reports. So far this year, six S&P 500 companies have failed to win a majority of support for pay packages. An online cheating scandal is roiling Dartmouth. The school accused 17 medical students of cheating on remote exams. The allegations have caused an uproar at the university — several students say the software was at fault — and highlighted issues around the tracking of students without their consent. Dogecoin: Who is the joke on? In this year of crypto craziness, the funniest money of all is Dogecoin. The token that started as a joke, riffing off a popular internet meme, has generated scarcely believable returns and distracted from more serious discussions about the future of cryptocurrency (see the separate item below for more on that). Is Elon Musk really taking Dogecoin to the moon? That’s what the Tesla C.E.O. has been pledging to do, literally and figuratively. Yesterday, he tweeted that one of his other companies, SpaceX, is “launching satellite Doge-1 to the moon next year — Mission paid for in Doge.” The announcement came the morning after he dropped a few Dogecoin references as host of “Saturday Night Live,” at one point calling the token “a hustle.” Dogecoin fell by nearly a third in price on the night of the show. It was such an eventful night for the cryptocurrency that the Robinhood trading app couldn’t keep up. SpaceX and Geometric Energy Corporation are indeed teaming up to carry a 90-pound satellite on a Falcon 9 moon mission, paid for with Dogecoin, according to a statement yesterday. “Having officially transacted with DOGE for a deal of this magnitude, Geometric Energy Corporation and SpaceX have solidified DOGE as a unit of account for lunar business,” said G.E.C.’s chief executive, Samuel Reid. Dogecoin is only disconcerting if you don’t get it? “It’s cheap, fun, viral and has a great potential for return,” Marcos Brakenridge, an undergraduate business student at the University of Kansas, told DealBook. Brakenridge, the treasurer of the student investment club, bet big on Dogecoin in February, when it was around a tenth of its current price, to make money for a down payment on real estate. Tens of thousands of dollars in returns later, he’s confident its value will keep going up because Musk — and the rest of us — keep making a fuss about it. Today in Business Updated  May 10, 2021, 7:48 a.m. ET “People just seemed shocked. They’re speechless. They’re really blindsided.” — A former executive of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation on the couple’s divorce. The split makes personal a shift that confidants say was underway in their philanthropic roles, The Times reports. Ms. French Gates had consulted with divorce lawyers in 2019, The Wall Street Journal reports. Crypto goes to K Street Away from the memes and manias, the cryptocurrency industry is maturing, as shown by its growing contingent of lobbyists in Washington and a recent hiring spree of former regulators. The burst in activity comes amid growing enthusiasm from mainstream investors and increased concern from regulators, The Times’s Eric Lipton reports. Clarity on how to regulate digital assets is likely years away, Eric told DealBook. This month, the House passed a bill backed by crypto lobbyists to create a working group to examine frameworks for regulating digital assets. “The bill the House passed is a sign of how far they are from doing anything substantive in Congress,” Eric said. “There is no consensus on how to go forward and there are serious rivalries in the industry.” Congress usually acts in response to disaster, said Stephen Lynch, Democrat of Massachusetts, at the House vote, noting that the F.D.I.C. was created after the Great Depression, and the C.F.P.B. came after the 2008 financial crisis. The bill, he noted, was a chance “to act proactively toward financial innovation rather than to address gaps in our regulatory framework after the fact.” The bill is now with the Senate Banking Committee. “Financial regulators have been slow when it comes to protecting consumers from private-sector digital assets that add more risks to our financial system,” Sherrod Brown of Ohio, the committee chair, told DealBook in a statement. He declined to provide a timeline for advancing the legislation. Until there are rules, it’s all about enforcement. In December, the S.E.C. sued Ripple Labs, creator of a popular crypto platform, saying its token, XRP, is an unregistered security. The company argues that XRP is a commodity, like Bitcoin, and has enlisted lobbyists, lawyers and other well-connected advocates to make its case. The lawsuit has persuaded other industry players to get more involved in crafting rules “because right now it is like the Wild, Wild West,” said John E. Deaton, a lawyer who moved to intervene in the enforcement action against Ripple. On work and vaccines On Friday, we wrote about one of the most vexing issues facing boardrooms: Should companies mandate that employees get vaccinated before returning to the workplace? We asked for your thoughts, and many of you shared opinions, personal experiences and suggestions for handling this complex issue. Here is a small selection, edited for clarity: “The way we’re doing it at our company is, if you submit a reason from your doctor or you have a religious belief or some other valid reason not to get the vaccination yet, you are required to be tested weekly and submit the results to H.R.” — Patricia Ripley, New York City “We don’t know the long-term dangers of these vaccines. They may be bad or good. No one knows. Our employers should not be able to simply ignore any of our worries and concerns.” — Brandon Atchison, Verbena, Ala. “I strongly support employer mandates. A few well-publicized firings will end the ‘hesitancy,’ but the firings must be backed up by classifying them as ‘for cause.’ That means no severance for executives and no unemployment for staff who refuse.” — Paul Levy, Carolina Beach, N.C. “Individual rights are the cornerstone of American democracy — trampling them for the vaccine rollout is a dangerous precedent. People seem to forget that these ‘temporary changes’ end up as permanent, with the result that your employer can now compel greater access to your personal decision-making.” — Anonymous “An unvaccinated person exposes everyone in the office, including visiting customers and clients, to the virus. Why should everyone else be jeopardized because of one person? Simply let unvaccinated people continue to work at home and suffer any consequences to their career paths that may result.” — Joseph Carlucci, White Plains, N.Y. THE SPEED READ Deals More than 30 tech start-ups received taxpayer-funded rescue loans — and then went public via SPACs less than a year later. (WSJ) Simon Property Group and Authentic Brands agreed to buy Eddie Bauer, adding to their stable of clothing brands. (Reuters) Politics and policy Norwegian Cruise Line threatened to keep its ships out of Florida ports after the state barred businesses from requiring proof of vaccination. (NYT) “Policymakers Used to Ignore Child Care. Then Came the Pandemic.” (NYT) Maya Angelou and Sally Ride will feature on a series of quarters to be issued by the U.S. Mint. (NYT) Tech Jeff Bezos sold $5 billion worth of Amazon stock days after the company disclosed stellar earnings. (Bloomberg) Clubhouse is finally available on Android, but the audio chat app’s popularity on iOS continues to decline. (Insider) Best of the rest U.S. and European banks are split on how quickly workers should be brought back to the office. (FT) Netflix said it won’t work with the group behind the Golden Globes until it improves diversity within its ranks. (Deadline) An internal Walmart memo bluntly laid out the challenges the retail giant faces to maintain its dominance. (Recode) We’d like your feedback! Please email thoughts and suggestions to dealbook@nytimes.com. Source link Orbem News #Cybercrime #hits #pump

[eloarei]

WIP Game

List the things you’re excited to work on this year in as little or as much detail as you like, and then tag some friends!

Tagged by @enchantedtalisman (and again it won’t tag you. Tch. Sorry. But thanks for the tag!)

(Behind a cut, because you don’t want to read all that. ...Or maybe you do?)

In no particular order, because my level of excitement changes at the drop of a hat: 6 BNHA fics, and one each FFXV and FO4. 1700 words of synopses and babbling.  (Friends who read my stuff: if you wanna skim through these and tell me which one(s) (if any) you’d most want to read, that’d be rad. =D Will it influence what I work on? Who knows? My inspiration is fickle as shit. But it couldn’t hurt.) 

1. “Touch2” -- current WIP, 10k + notes. BNHA. Dekumight. Estimated total: 20k?      Picking up right where “Touch” left off, this fic is a slightly more detailed/slow/slice-of-life story than its predecessor. The 10k I’ve written so far takes place over the course of only 2 days, and it’s mostly Toshi and Izuku getting to know each other, and Toshi being yelled at by his manager (an OC called Suzuki). The general plot of the story doesn’t deviate very far from canon, as far as I’ve planned. “Touch2” will probably cover at least up to the entrance exam, but I’m not entirely sure. Given that leisurely pace, there’ll probably have to be a Touch3 and 4 as well, if not even more.       I’ve been slowly hacking away at this one since the start of December, just in between whatever else I might be working on. Kind of got to a point where I need to actually think about what happens next? ^^; Also, it’s gotten too long to be a one-shot, I think, but I’m going to have to be careful how I split it up. It’s not written for splitting… Well, I’ll figure it out. Just gotta keep writing first.

2. “Make the Most sequel, and side stories” -- only notes. BNHA. Dekumight. Estimated total: lots???      I’m lumping these all together, but this includes quite a few stories, some of which I have plans/notes for, some only ideas. One of the first is a fic that might be, at most, half the length of MtM, which is the events of MtM from Toshi’s POV. This was actually requested by a friend, but it was something I kind of already wanted to do, which is cool. Other side stories include perspectives from other characters, some things like dates and vacations, Izuku learning to use his powers, and some extra NSFW scenes, because why not? After all of those, I intend for there to be an ‘official sequel’, taking place towards the end of Izuku’s college run, which might function as more of an epilogue than a sequel, due to the potential lack of actual plot.      Geez there is just so much potential for this series to go on in side-stories and extras and etc. I actually get a little mad at myself whenever I neglect to continue it, because it’s sort of my main, well, IP, I guess you’d say. It’s my kudos breadwinner. XD I should just do it!

3. “Loveless epilogue” -- only notes. BNHA. Dekumight. Estimated total: 7k?      A short...er sequel/epilogue, taking place roughly a year (I might change that) after the main story, revolving (spoiler alert) around Toshi figuring out if/when/how to propose to Izuku, and summing up how things have gone in the past year. Mushy because I love marriage, okay guys, I just love it so much, and also a little bit morbid because of an in-universe tradition that could be considered either romantic or creepy, depending on your views. =D      I actually ought to write this one like… immediately, while the main fic is still fresh in my mind. It’s extremely self-indulgent, maybe more than just, y’know, my normal writing. But I think at least some of the people who read LOVELESS will like it. ^^ And I will, I think. And that’s all that really matters, right?! *shakes head ‘no’*

4. “Waste” -- current WIP, 1k + notes. BNHA. Dekumight(-ish?), and Deku+friends. Estimated total: 15k???? No. Probably more.      A Fallout fusion. Vault 211 (21-1 or twenty-one one) has been carefully breeding superpowers into its population for the past 200 years, but if yours doesn’t show up by your 18th birthday, prepare to be kicked out on your ass into the unforgiving wasteland. Guess who’s the newest resident of the wastes? Lucky for Izuku, he meets a frightening creature who takes to looking out for him. ‘Human’ under some description, he’s sure, this guy has radiation levels through the roof. Burly super-mutant by day, gangly rotting ghoul by night, he doesn’t exactly have a lot of friends, but boy is he good at surviving in the hellscape that the world has become.      I freaking love Fallout a whole lot, and look, Toshi/All Might is so very much a ghoul/super mutant, and vaults just give you so much free reign to give people powers and etc etc, look, it just seemed like something that would work. Not sure really how it’s going to go, but we’ll see. =]

5. “Nana/Toshi darkfic” -- only notes. BNHA. Nana/Toshi (probably NSFW) and Dekumight. Estimated total: 20k???       His mentor was beautiful, kind, strong-- perfect. He didn’t realize she was being eaten away by a dark pit in her heart. He didn’t know if leaving her alone would help it. He just wanted to be with her so badly, to please her, to make that smile real, and she lacked the fortitude to refuse him anything that would make him happy. A fic about Nana and Toshi becoming perhaps too close, and Nana struggling with depression. Following the canon timeline moderately closely, it shouldn’t be a surprise that it will include a major character death, and the fallout surrounding it.      Hoo boy did the desire to write this fic just hit me like a ton of bricks a few weeks ago. This is going to be a dark, sad, uncomfortable story, most likely. And although it will end with Dekumight, the large part of the plot will still revolve around Nana/Toshi, so I’m not sure most of my normal readers will want to touch it. XD;;; I think the inspiration to write this came somewhat from the feeling that the ending to LOVELESS was not nearly as dark as it could have been, haha. Every so often I just want to challenge myself and see how many boundaries I can push. ^^;

6. “Feed” -- only notes. BNHA. Dekumight. Estimated total: 15k?      In a world ruled by a vampiric shadow known as All for One, Izuku’s group has been trying to find ways to fight him. Nearly everyone is of this man’s blood now, since he started handing out powers to gain followers. But it’s said that an artifact of some sort exists still which can give the power to defeat him. Izuku, with the purest blood of his group, is chosen to seek it out. But the artifact is a vampire, the last of AfO’s first ‘children’, frozen and starving after failing to defeat his ‘father’, and Izuku almost doesn’t survive the encounter.      I want to write this fic, and I think I should do it while it’s still cold and gloomy, because that’s the feel of the setting, but if I get distracted and don’t get around to it, I probably won’t be too upset.

7. “Parents AU” -- current WIP, 6k + notes. FFXV. Gladnis + Ignis&Noctis. Estimated total: 40k?       Teenage Ignis and Gladio happen to be babysitting the toddler prince when the Empire attacks, and in the chaos they manage to get safely mixed into the crowd of civilians fleeing the city. They decide to treat him as their own until they can be sure it’s safe to return him to someone with more seniority. But will it ever be safe? Fifteen years in hiding says no, and even when Noct is old  enough to be asked to save the world, there’s no way in hell his parents are going to let him go it alone.       I tried to continue writing this the other day and it was terrible. Painful. I almost cried. Literally every word of the 30 or so I managed before I gave up were the hardest things I’ve ever written. I think if I go back and play the game again (which I’d like to, since there’ve been updates and DLC), I think it will be easier. Honestly though, this is one of my favorite things I’ve yet written, so if I don’t see it to fruition, I will be moderately pissed.

8. “Same Heart” -- current WIP, 30k + notes. FO4. Estimated total: 90k (35k for act 1)      The great synth detective Nick Valentine is recaptured by the Institute, remade and reset. He awakes to his new life underground, unaware that he ever roamed the wasteland-- except for the rare moments when they plug in his old memories so they can grill him for info. Though the memories are gone again after every session, they leave an aftertaste of distrust for the people he’s working with, until it’s too much to ignore. Meanwhile, he finds himself as the only person who seems to truly care about the little boy they’re all calling their savior, doing his best to help him grow up with some modicum of love in this sterile environment. When Nick finally decides to break out of their fancy little prison, it’s not a question whether he’ll take Shaun with him, and it’s obvious where they’ll go: to find the parents the Institute stole him from.      This one haunts me, because I spent like 3 months doing practically nothing but writing this last year. I got almost, almost all the way through the first act (out of 3), and then… stopped. Now I know it’s going to be impossible to get back into. And this is already a very different story for me, because it’s essentially a gen fic. The intention is for acts 2 and 3 to focus on Nick and the ‘sole survivor’ Nora, but the whole first act is about him half-raising her son, Shaun. I really want to finish this, or geez, at least the first act! Because it is painful having 30k sitting around that nobody has ever seen. And it’s pretty decent! But even though I have 6 chapters done, I don’t want to start posting it until it has a halfway decent ‘conclusion’, so I need to finish the act. I have to.

And I’ll tag… uh… @oldseablues, @braincoins, @thenightisdarkandfullofbooty, @orionskingdom, @animeuzumaki7, @blessedblooduniverse, @rangrids, and anyone else who’s reading this and is also a writer. =] Tag me back so I can see it, please! ^^

[zydrateacademy]

Review: Destiny 2 - Curse of Osiris

You can find my full review of Destiny 2 itself here, but this review will be largely story based, with some tidbits of new armor, weapons, and facts that are introduced. While there’s certainly content to be had, I gotta say; I didn’t really like the story. There will be spoilers. The Curse of Osiris’ campaign is about three hours long depending on how killhappy you are, and if you’re grouped with people for even faster boss murder. I myself am equipped with reportedly, one of the best rocket launchers in the game that spawn cluster grenades on impact, so in my single player run through, my warlock ate through bosses like it was going out of style. Still, I found myself underwhelmed with the story as a whole. It’s true that in a game like this, the story is mostly just the framework for an otherwise enjoyable game. I am reminded by Fallout 4 which also had a pretty boring story that I didn’t care about but the setpieces themselves were fun, and that sentiment can be repeated here. You’re tasked with finding one of the first guardians named Osiris, accompanied by his unique female ghost named Sagira. So far, so simple. He’s lost in a Vex think tank type virtual zone where they have the power to split timelines around for vague goals that will ultimately lead to the death of everything. At some point it says “No light, no dark...”  However playing through all of this very quickly becomes “so far, so RPG” in the sense that objectives A through E are all filler nonsense before getting to your real goal. Y’see, it’s not as simple as just finding Osiris. Nay, he’s off doing important things that’s far to important to meet unimportant you face to important face. You never actually meet the guy until the end of the story itself, but that won’t stop Sagira or Ikora from constantly gushing about his legendary status as the guy who knows everything and is the best are Warlock-ing. In his stead are a bunch of “reflections” that pop out to help you and even speak about Osiris by name as if they are not a part of him. The idea is that he’s exploring hundreds of timelines at the same time to keep the Vex at bay while you, the hero, piddle around to try and find the boss monster that will cause all of this. But first you need to find where this boss is, because Osiris can’t for some reason. So objective A; Find Osiris. Failed, he’s out and about. You’re tasked with navigating the ever-changing “Infinite Forest”, which basically just feels like that Pyramidion strike, same architecture and aesthetics. This also fails because you need a proper “map” to navigate his proverbial forest.  So Objective B, failed again. You’re tasked with heading to the Pyramidion for a map. Surprise surprise, the map is not there, but you do get a “spot” in the Forest that your NPC allies can help you get to. Objective C, go to Infinite Forest to nab the map. Failed! It’s too big! Go kill some Vex on Nessus because that’ll help you... I don’t know, narrow your search results or something. Done! Now your AI companions can, for some reason, locate the big boss creature that has been ruining Osiris’ day for who knows how long at this point because time travel is wacky! At this point we finally get to fight the big bad boss baddie, whose name I don’t even care to google right now. It’s vaguely Greek. Starts with a P. Anyway, the encounter is actually a lot of fun as it tends to spam you with a lot more enemies than you may usually be used to but I play a Stormcaller warlock which I consider the “fuck this entire room” of character ultimates so I blew through it without too much trouble. Osiris himself shows up... sort of, in the form of more reflections (though I think he was personally there at the end) but overall he was just a mechanic to the fight rather than an active helper. He would occasionally stop the boss from basically de-syncing you (text speak for MURDER) from the simulation so that you can get some good hits in, ultimately defeating the boss. Boss defeated, Vex generic doomsday plan foiled, onward to generic planetary adventures, reaching the new level cap of 25 (which is kind of pointless by the way as there are no new abilities in skilltrees and mostly just functions as a new tier to get the new “illuminated” engrams which could have been done a different way), and the gear grind begins anew on the road to your 330′s and 335′s. Before all of that, I just found navigating this “Infinite Forest” incredibly boring. Every mission was just recycled architecture that got to the point where I could easily predict certain enemy spawns. When unlocking doors there would always be three basic enemies of a certain enemy faction waiting to greet you, and this happened several times, like some designer had some line of code of “spawn 3 basics here” and they kept copy/pasting the first module after every door you entered. Pre-fucked Mercury was nice to see with nice, wheat filled meadows with slick “Precursor” Vex wandering around in shinier outfits than you might have been used to. After that the game just throws some “do these adventures” on Mercury, new engrams to acquire and a whole set of Vex-themed gear to acquire. There’s a Mercury faction you can throw even more tokens at. Presumably there’s some new strikes but I’ve yet to queue in them for a while in fear of being forced to go through Savathûn's Song one more goddamn fucking time. (I don’t hate the strike, it’s just the only one I ever see). So, y’know. More content, if you can stomach burning through a generic story with generic people in it.

[bakagamieru]

Azoff Rumors

I’m terrible like this and don’t have the source, but I saw that there was some sketchy anon who apparently is claiming that Irving Azoff convinced Louis to do babygate in order to screw him over, ditch “difficult” fans like Larries, and promote solo Harry with a het!Harry image.

The OP was clear that this is not to be taken as fact, so don’t get me wrong; this is not a condemnation of the OP.

I did, however, find that theory to be implausible and because it’s such a dramatic yet somewhat plausible idea, I wanted to make a post about the things that don’t make sense.

Screwing Louis over entails that Louis and Harry and the whole band would find out that he’d been screwed over (if this were real and the fandom were hearing about it, you’ve got to assume the boys would already know)

This pretty much eliminates any chance they have of signing the more lucrative 1D band (their last album sold more than 2 times Harry’s album did in the 1st week), or if there’s somehow a binding deal in place, of having them cooperate and re-sign later

Yes, Harry’s popularity could grow, but 1D is a sure thing, Harry’s future popularity is not, so from a business perspective, 1D is still very valuable as a band, and if you have both solo Harry and 1D that’s ideal

This also pretty much means losing Harry’s good will and cooperation

In this vein, Harry seems relatively happy with his promo so far, accepting that happiness is a nebulous measure

Also, Harry has seemed relatively unstrained with Jeff Azoff who surely would be hit with some of the fallout if this were true

We’ve seen the boys show strain with people on their teams that they’re supposed to love before, so it’s not unlikely that we would see it now if there was strain

Harry doesn’t want het!Harry

Harry was perfectly happy to send a barrage of signs that he’s not straight and that Larry is a real thing, he did this over the course of several years and there’s nothing to indicate he would happily stop

The fact that Harry’s band is wearing rainbow shoes, Harry wore a rainbow pin and jacket, that rainbows were in Harry’s album booklet, and that Harry’s support of the LGBT+ community was a talking point in his promo indicate his continuing desire to not be seen as straight

If Azoff plans on marketing Harry as straight, again, I can’t see Harry jumping on board with that, especially when it’s a step back from the FOUR promo season and Harry and Louis slowly being allowed to be seen near each other again

We’re back to the point that pushing het!Harry, especially by throwing Louis under the bus, would lose them Harry’s good will and cooperation and any chances of re-signing him

If they were using het!Harry to get rid of Larries and build a more expansive and diverse fanbase, you would assume they would want to stick around in years to come to reap the long-term benefits

Harry’s promo so far has included the regressive 1D vs. Zayn narrative that is fake and serves no one but the old team

Alienating Zayn, again, means eliminating Azoff’s chance at signing the most lucrative part of 1D, the 5-person band

Solo Harry gains little to nothing from furthering this narrative

Solo Harry’s dissing Zayn conveniently comes in sync with Solo Liam’s dissing Zayn (after having been the most pro-Zayn narrative-wise for a long, long time)

Again, bringing up Zayn at this juncture is pretty much unnecessary for both Solo Harry and Solo Liam

The fact that it was brought up again for both and that the spin was the same means that there was coordination between teams which there shouldn’t be since Liam and Harry have completely different teams

This isn’t necessarily negative or tied to Syco, but we’re still seeing other coordination with the boys- we’ve seen new brand deals spanning across all the boys, notably Gucci, and again, this shouldn’t be happening since their teams are supposed to all be different

The only people who really gain from making Zayn look bad and making the band look fractured and the hiatus like it’s not going to end are Syco and Modest

Across the board, Syco seems to still have their fingers involved in all of 1D’s stuff somehow

Seeing that several boys are still at least partially controlled by Syco somehow, it only makes sense that all of them are, it makes more sense to think that continuing link is responsible for narrative delays and regressions rather than Azoff

Liam’s babygate 2.0 and solo promo (that basically revolves around babygate 2.0) that heavily promotes Cheryl

the subtle yet noticeable push to make it seem like the hiatus isn’t going to ever end and will just end up being a break up that came from both Liam and Harry

the negative Zayn stuff that came from both Liam and Harry

Niall’s validation / involvement of the narrative for babygate, babygate 2.0, and Liam’s bearding with Cheryl

Louis’ continuing link to Syco as his label which has done nothing but sabotage him

The continued “Simon is great!” BS spread in Dan Wootton’s interviews (Harry and Niall at least) and other interviews the boys do

Oh yeah, just the fact that Dan frickin’ Wootton is still getting interviews, even podcasts, with the boys, Niall is still connected to Modest, but discounting him, you’ve still got Liam and Harry who have no reason to be giving The Sun or Dan priority

Have they really acted like they wanted to get rid of Larries?

There was definitely a struggle during FOUR promo and OTRA between the old team’s closeting tactics and a new push for Harry and Louis to be able to publicly interact again

presumably some powerful force was working in the boys’ favor against the old team, and that would be their new team, believed to be Azoff

There has definitely been a split between how the US press spins stories relating to all the boys vs how the UK press does

it’s long been speculated that someone powerful is trying to protect the boys in the US, probably Azoff

Larries are most visible when they’re reacting to something bad, so all they had to do to keep Larries while not scaring off new fans, is not give Larries anything major to push back against

Harry’s current image minus some of the het stuff basically ensures no push back as long as they don’t touch Larry to start with (don’t poke the beehive with a stick and you won’t get stung)

If they want a more varied fan base, those fans are going to be casual and aren’t going to be in the fandom spaces of the current, more hardcore fans, so it doesn’t really matter if Larries are figuring out things that are supposed to be secret

Is het!Harry really essential to gaining new fans?

They’re already sending mixed messages with the het!Harry in the promo and yet the rainbows and LGBT+ talking points in interviews, so they can’t be too worried about some gay rumors scaring people off

TV shows, movies, and comic books have already accepted that the LGBT+ community is valuable / profitable to market to

Possible Azoff Smear Campaign / Fandom Demoralization Campaign

To be honest, I’ve seen a lot of rumors and discussions about Azoff not being as friendly to the boys as the fandom previously thought in the last few months, and it makes me feel like there’s a campaign to make the fandom distrust Azoff more than it makes me feel like Azoff is actually the bad guy here.

There are people who pay attention to when and how fandom chatter changes to various BTS people involved with the boys.  I’ve seen theories before about how Syco is trying to deflect negative attention from some of their people elsewhere, so I see no reason that the negativity towards Azoff couldn’t be just another way to deflect attention.  

Also, making the analysis fandom believe the boys are trapped yet again with an unsavory team for an unknown amount of time, and making Larries believe that New Team doesn’t want them anymore than the old one did, is sure to be demoralizing.  Who has been trying to get rid of these sectors of the fandom for a long time?  Old Team.  Who benefits from demoralizing fans so that they leave the 1D fandom?  The same people who pushed so hard for fans to think the hiatus was a break up- Old Team.

The Disappointment Factor

Anons are always sketchy sources since anons can be so easily used for spreading narratives and gaslighting.  At the same time, I think a lot of the fandom is just disappointed that things haven’t gotten better as quickly in the timeframe that we’d hoped for.  Because of that, I think people are taking it out on Azoff who was viewed as a “savior”, now that the saving hasn’t happened as of yet.

Fandom analysis has always been guesswork because we don’t know what’s going on BTS, so fandom expectations of Azoff were never based on any concrete promise or timeline.  That means that there’s no reason to blame Azoff over anyone else that fandom expectations haven’t been met. 

Conclusion: Don’t Think of Things That Are Uncertain As Certain

Obviously I fall in the camp that believes that Syco’s continued involvement is to blame for the negative things we’re seeing, but I’m not demanding everyone else necessarily believe it.  

What I’m doing is saying to take speculation about Azoff screwing the boys over with a dump truck full of salt and consider the reasons I give above for why this particular rumor doesn’t seem to add up to me.

We tend to think we know more than we do about what’s going on BTS.  We just don’t.  We don’t have enough information and we don’t have reliable sources.  The more we think we know for sure, the less we’ll consider all the angles of what’s going on, and therein lies the potential to severely misinterpret things.  

I just want to urge everyone not to get caught up too much in the trends of opinion in the fandom, and especially not the negative ones which are always more likely to cause damage.

[willidleaway]

Doctor Who, series 12, mid-series thoughts

In short: series 12 right now is looking like a real mess, but I’m honestly not sure if in a good way or a bad way. Chibnall has been bringing back a big chunk of RTD-era elements (and seemingly destroying a few Moffat-era ones), after the decidedly continuity-nod-averse series 11. It was fun at first but is now starting to look like Chibnall could end up amplifying the worst excesses of RTD and Moffat’s tenures.

In the span of a single episode, we have gone from ‘god I hope Chibnall doesn’t mess up the space rhino police’ to ‘god I hope Chibnall doesn’t mess up the entire show forever and ever’, because the arcs that he’s set up ... well ...

Moffat may have implicitly threatened to reveal the name of the Doctor in The Name of the Doctor, but to his credit he knew not to actually show that card. Chibnall, I suspect, feels too clever to show such restraint. What he’s getting up to may well permanently ruin the character of the Doctor for me, and I don’t think I’d be alone.

Spoiler-filled further thoughts behind the Read More break.

Overall thoughts on where series 12 is going: Boy do I not know where it’s going, but I know where it needs to not go.

OK, so thinking about where series 12 is going basically requires thinking about Fugitive of the Judoon. We get two major mystery points set up:

Captain Jack (who I am not entirely sure I’m glad to see back) has this warning about the Lone Cyberman.

Jo Martin plays an incarnation of the Doctor that cannot possibly exist.

I say I’m not entirely sure I’m glad to see Captain Jack back not because I don’t think his character is delightful or because John Barrowman is older, but because of the way he seems to solely exist to pull the companions out of the interesting story and set up this mystery point.

One of my problems with Moffat-era Who was all of the Doctor worship—and perhaps in retrospect it’s really unfair when it was RTD with his series 3 finale (a key example of RTD’s mixed legacy in terms of the direction RTD took new!Who in his later years, and the ways in which I genuinely think it encouraged a lot of trait that Moffat gets so much flack for in the fandom) and all the Oncoming Storm-type stuff that really started the show on that train. But in my defence, Moffat treated Clara as a living MacGuffin for much of her tenure—with a central plot point being innumerable split existences that revolve entirely around the Doctor—in a way that RTD never treated any of his era’s companions.

With Chibnall at the helm, I had hope that perhaps we’d return to compelling, active companions—especially after Moffat gave us series 10 with Bill and Nardole—and the series 11 premiere looked quite promising in this respect. But series 11 ultimately had at best mixed success on this front, partly because Bradley Walsh is in such a different class from the other two that it doesn’t even make sense. And series 12 so far has simply reverted to a group dynamic where the Doctor has all the answers, Graham has all the quips, Ryan has none of the dyspraxia, and Yas (Yaz? never sure about that one) has nothing.

And when it feels like the companions are doing nothing or even getting in the way of the narrative rather than actively driving it—to the point where you have Captain Jack literally scooping them away from the main thrust of the story—then something’s not right with this show. Why even have a companion, then, let alone three?

All that aside, let’s talk about Ruth!Doctor, who I’m going to assume is actually an incarnation of the Doctor, rather than the Master or the Rani or the Meddling Monk or some other Time Lord simply disguised as the Doctor. Having ‘Introducing Jo Martin as the Doctor’ in the closing credits sure seems to dispel that alternate notion—but certain past show runners have definitely taken part in circulating falsities!

First off, no matter what happens: Ruth!Doctor needs her own EU material. Books. Radio plays. Overpriced cheaply-made replica props. Yes. All of it. We’ve only gotten a couple dozen minutes of this Doctor so far and yet I am already utterly convinced.

Second: has post-RTD Who just completely forgotten about parallel universes? I mean, pocket universes, sure—Gallifrey was in one for a good while. But the Turn Left-style parallel worlds? The kind of parallel world seen in Rise of the Cybermen? Sure, the latter ep sets up the fact that the Time War fallout made it impossible to travel freely between parallel worlds, but with Gallifrey returned (well, before Chibnall burned it all down again), you’d think that would have changed. It doesn’t even seem to occur to 13 that Ruth!Doctor might be a parallel existence, which strikes me as astonishingly odd.

Third: if Ruth!Doctor is an actual incarnation of the Doctor in the prime timeline, then where does she fit? Pre-1 is the actual worst idea, because the TARDIS is already shaped like a police box and only like a police box, and Moffat already showed the TARDIS being stolen by 1 in capsule form. Granted, maybe the Doctor was captured by the Time Lords at some point, regenerated into 1, and stole another TARDIS that also had its chameleon circuit fried, but it seems needlessly complex.

I like the Season 6B idea a little better—the 2/3 interregnum—and maybe Ruth!Doctor is an extra regeneration granted by the Time Lords as reward for 2′s services to the CIA or whatever. One other possibility is simply that Ruth!Doctor had her memory altered—but this is possibly the least interesting idea and thus the least likely, because Chibnall clearly wants to provoke rather than catch a breath and be actually thoughtful with all of his twists this series.

Whether Ruth!Doctor fits in before Hartnell or after Troughton, it will represent a major shift in lore. Moffat was competent enough to make 8.5 work, arguably making better use of RTD’s Time War than even RTD ever did. But we are on shakier territory where Chibnall isn’t really building on anything. And if Ruth!Doctor is the Zeroth Doctor, and Chibnall really wants to provoke, well ...

Part of the fun of the Doctor, at least for me, is that at the end of the day, the Doctor really is a mad man in a box, an idiot that wants to be kind and help out along the way. They’re a Time Lord, sure, but amongst Time Lords they don’t have some overriding power that does not arise from their own initiative. For all of Moffat’s faults, I think he knew this to be at the core of the character. If he didn’t always show it, he at least always tried to tell it, even alongside all of the most egregious Doctor-worship.

And the Doctor’s origins are vague, even mysterious, but only because the Time Lords as a whole are rather mysterious. Their social psychology is eccentric, to be sure. Their control of time and space is unparalleled. But we’re not sure whence they arose and that’s fine. It’s not necessary, because the show was never about the Doctor, but about how the Doctor affects those around him. Much of Moffat-era Who had maybe a more Doctor-centric tilt to this, but nonetheless it was never quite all about the Doctor!

Meanwhile, in the Chibnall era, now we’ve got the Master talking about the Timeless Child and lies about the history of the Time Lords, and Captain Jack scooping the companions out of the way so that we can get all this new Doctor lore set up. And, well ... forget RTD’s Oncoming Storm. Forget Moffat’s literal origin of the word ‘doctor’. I think we’re about to see Chibnall elevate the Doctor to being literally the Genesis of the Time Lords, and it makes me very, very uncomfortable.

Hmm, I do wonder if we will get an episode actually titled Genesis of the Time Lords, only I want it to be about Gallifreyan prog pop-rock.

Additional thoughts, episode by episode:

OK, so I already said my bit on Spyfall and the latest ep. So that leaves two.

—Orphan 55: I think everyone’s had their curb-stomp on this one. I’d just like to say that it was particularly disappointing because Ed Hime’s previous contribution to Doctor Who was ‘It Takes You Away’, by far one of the most brilliant episodes of Series 11. It was ambitious and witty, and the characters were interesting and compelling, and basically it succeeded so well at everything that Orphan 55 fails at so badly.

Orphan 55 is like Midnight except the villain all along was man. It just feels like Ed Hime was playing a bunch of Metro games and then Chibnall told him to write a Very Special Episode about climate change, and everything suddenly clicked together. At least someone thought it did.

Was it really that bad? I’d say it was no less messier than Fugitive of the Judoon, honestly. I think with time, people will either look more kindly on it or completely forget about it, because frankly its reputation can’t get worse. The fact that Orphan 55 did not have the blockbuster Who-lore reveals and twists of Fugitive of the Judoon will be either the reason it becomes forgotten or the reason it becomes more favourably looked upon.

—Nikola Tesla’s Night of Terror: My main qualm with this story is the over-romanticisation of Tesla. The show acts as if Wardenclyffe was this amazing proto-Wi-Fi apparatus that would have worked if only JP Morgan hadn’t pulled his funding, when in fact it was the epitome of this big wireless tech bubble and a folly in the most literal sense of that word. They mention the Gilded Age right near the start of the episode and somehow view Tesla as this pure-minded inventor and almost a human Doctor for the 20th century, rather than someone who basically lived off of Gilded Age capitalist money, and a shrewd man knew how to game the press and public opinion in his time.

Don’t get me wrong. Tesla was legitimately wronged very badly, both by Edison and by Marconi, and he seems to have had a real intuition for electrical engineering in ways that few in his time did. But intuition is not the same as scientific enquiry, and that seems to me to be no small part of why Tesla after Wardenclyffe never enjoyed the success and admiration that he did before, and why he was rather badly forgotten for so long.

And then Edison seemed a bit too softened??? Caring for his workers at some level, sure, but surely he would absolutely never be the sort of person to offer Tesla a job with him ... ?

That said, you’d be hard-pressed to find a better actor to cast in the role of Tesla, and generally I found the episode pretty good. I believe others have sufficiently pointed out the mild hypocrisy of the Doctor’s criticising the scorpion!Racnoss for stealing technology (still can’t be bothered to remember what they actually were, sorry), but I generally found it more amusing than problematic.

[thisdaynews]

Emails show Stephen Miller pressed hard to limit green cards

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/emails-show-stephen-miller-pressed-hard-to-limit-green-cards/

Emails show Stephen Miller pressed hard to limit green cards

White House senior adviser Stephen Miller’s previously undisclosed emails could raise legal questions about whether the public charge rule was rushed to completion. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

immigration

One former Trump official said White House senior adviser Stephen Miller has maintained a “singular obsession” with the public charge rule.

White House senior adviser Stephen Miller wasn’t getting an immigration regulation he wanted. So he sent a series of scorching emails to top immigration officials, calling the department an “embarrassment” for not acting faster, according to emails obtained by POLITICO.

The regulation in question would allow the Department of Homeland Security to bar legal immigrants from obtaining green cards if they receive certain government benefits. The rule will likely be released in the coming days, according to a pair of current and formerTrump officials briefed on the timeline.

Story Continued Below

The emails, which POLITICO obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, shed new light on how aggressively Miller has pressured the Department of Homeland Security to move faster on regulations to limit immigration. Critics say the new rule will be used to shore up Trump’s political base in the coming election year, and that it’s an illegitimate tool to reduce legal immigration.

One former Trump official said Miller has maintained a “singular obsession” with the public charge rule, which he’s argued would bring about a transformative change to U.S. immigration.

At the receiving end of Miller’s pressure campaign was U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service Director Francis Cissna, an immigration hawk with strong support from restrictionist groups who resigned in May amid a broader Homeland Security Department shakeup that also saw the exit of former Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and other top officials.

In an email sent on June 8, 2018, Miller lambasted Cissna for the pace of his efforts to implement the public charge rule. “Francis — The timeline on public charge is unacceptable,” Miller wrote. “The public charge reg has been in the works for a year and a half. This is time we don’t have. I don’t care what you need to do to finish it on time. You run an agency of 20,000 people.”

In the message, Miller derided Cissna’s overall performance at USCIS, the agency charged with screening visa applicants and processing immigration paperwork. Cissna was known for his deliberate approach to the regulatory process.

“It’s an embarrassment that we’ve been here for 18 months and USCIS hasn’t published a single major reg,” Miller barked.

According to a version of the ruleproposedin October 2018, the regulation would allow federal immigration officials to deny green cards to legal immigrants who’ve received food stamps, welfare, Medicaid, prescription drug subsidies or Section 8 housing vouchers. It could also deny green cards to immigrants deemed likely to receive such government benefits in the future.

With Trump poised to make immigration a centerpiece of his 2020 reelection campaign, a new crackdown on legal immigrants who receive government assistance could energize voters who view immigration — even when done legally — as a fiscal drain and cultural danger.

“This is something that will play well going into the next election, especially considering the prevailing view among the Democratic candidates who are talking about admitting more immigrants and offering more benefits,” said Jessica Vaughan, a director with the Center for Immigration Studies, which pushes for lower levels of both legal and illegal immigration.

But Miller’s previously undisclosed emails could raise legal questions about whether the public charge rule was rushed to completion. The regulatory process will almost certainly be challenged in court, according to opponents bracing for the change.

In addition, the emails could reinvigorate Democratic efforts to compel Miller to testify before Congress. The White House in April denied a voluntary invitation to testify before the House Oversight Committee, which is chaired by Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.). The committee chairman had pressed Miller to explain his role in the development of what he called “troubling” immigration policies.

Acting USCIS Director Ken Cuccinelli — Cissna’s replacement at the agency and another immigration hawk — said the public charge regulation will demonstrate that Trump remains committed to his immigration agenda.

“People assign value to leaders who keep their promises,” Cuccinelli said during an interview with POLITICO. “And that’s what the president is doing here.”

The acting director said that Miller was involved with the rulemaking process, but that Trump is “the driving force” behind the public charge effort.

The regulation received more than 266,000 public comments and the final version, which will incorporate feedback from those comments, may differ from the earlier draft rule.

Pro-migrant advocates fear the chilling effect of the regulation will cause migrant families to forgo essential services, even if the benefits aren’t barred under the measure.

“The real fear and danger is that so many families that have an immigrant family member are going to be afraid to go to the doctor, are going to be afraid to go to school,” said Sonya Schwartz, a senior policy attorney with the Los Angeles-based National Immigration Law Center.

Cuccinelli said his agency will work to ensure that legal immigrants understand what benefit use could trigger a possible pubic charge determination.

“We’re going to try to make sure people have clear knowledge of the expectations, so they are not scared off of what they have the right to claim,” he said.

Miller has frequently checked on the status of the public charge regulation since the start of Trump’s tenure, according to a second former official. However, department attorneys were more concerned with crafting a regulation that would withstand legal challenges.

“They understand that for a reg to stick they need to be extremely careful and cross their T’s and dot their I’s,” the person said of the department staff.

“Stephen’s expectations for timelines were always in conflict with what the bureaucracy could do, or in some cases, wanted to,” said a third former Trump official. “[The public charge regulation] was a priority, nobody disputed that, including Cissna. It’s just [that] these things take time.”

The New York Times reported in April that Miller blasted top immigration officials about the lack of progress on public charge and other regulations during a meeting at the White House.

Miller sent his emails as the Trump administration was grappling with fallout over the president’s “zero tolerance” border strategy, which separated thousands of migrant families during a three-month period that began in April 2018. A federal judge ordered the separated families reunited in late June 2018, but a recent court filing by the American Civil Liberties Union contends more than 900 migrant children — including infants and toddlers — have been split apart from parents since then.

USCIS redacted Cissna’s response to Miller’s criticism, but Miller forwarded the reply to Craig Symons, the agency’s chief counsel at the time.

“Months! This needs to be days or weeks!!” Miller wrote to Symons, adding that Mick Mulvaney “promised the president” that it would happen quickly.

Symons responded that agency officials would attempt to get the regulation to the White House budget office before the end of that month. DHS ultimately published a draft version in October — four months later.

A senior administration official criticized the pace of the regulatory process in an April interview with POLITICO, citing concerns “that the career bureaucracy is just slowing things down or engaging in dilatory tactics that keeps things from moving quickly.”

The public charge rule and other measures related to asylum and detaining migrant children were chief concerns, the official said.

The senior official added that Cissna’s agency had “become a bottleneck” for top immigration priorities and that the administration would become more focused on results and “getting wins on the board“ in coming months.

The regulatory measure could allow Trump to demonstrate to voters how he’s been able to reshape the legal immigration system despite an inability to get his policies approved by Congress.

Trump endorsed a Senate bill in 2017, S. 354 (115), that would have cut legal immigration in half over a decade, but the measure — sponsored by Sens. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and David Perdue (R-Ga.) — failed to gain traction with Senate Republicans and received no support from Democrats.

More recently, another top adviser — Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner —has worked to developan immigration reform package that he hopes can unify Republicans. The still-unreleased measure reportedly would rework the legal immigration to value skills over family ties, but without cutting the overall number of immigrants allowed to enter the U.S. each year.

Some opponents of the public charge regulation argue it will lead to lower levels of legal immigration and enable federal officials to deny visas or green cards to an unnecessarily broad pool of immigrants — essentially accomplishing what couldn’t be done through legislation.

“It’s really a rule designed to reduce legal immigration to the United States,” said Stuart Anderson, executive director of the pro-migrant National Foundation for American Policy. “It’s clear this has been a Miller goal from the beginning.”

Federal law alreadybarsimmigrants likely to become a public charge, but the statute provides little detail and has been used infrequently as a basis for denial. Guidance issued in 1999 clarified that the designation should apply to immigrants who are “primarily dependent“ on cash assistance or the use of long-term, institutionalized care. The pending regulation, judging from its proposed form, would greatly expand the criteria to include non-cash assistance like food stamps and Medicaid.

Beyond the DHS rule, the Trump administration’s efforts to restrict visas to immigrants based on their likelihood to use public benefits is already underway.

The State Departmentchangedits foreign affairs manual in 2018 to toughen the public charge standard and saw denials on that basis skyrocket.

Consular officers rejected 13,450 visa applications based on public charge criteria in fiscal year 2018, according to department figures. They denied only 1,076 applicants in fiscal year 2016, the last full year under former President Barack Obama.

The Justice Department also plans to issue a companion regulation that will outline the grounds to deport someone in the U.S. based on their use of certain public benefits. A draft version of that measure remains under review at the White House budget office.

Nancy Cook and Gabby Orr contributed reporting.

Read More

[itbeatsbookmarks]

(Via: Hacker News)

This post represents the collective work of our Core Infrastructure team's investigation into our API and Dashboard outage on 10 October 2017.

As a payments company, we take reliability very seriously. We hope that the transparency in technical write-ups like this reflects that.

We have included a high-level summary of the incident, and a more detailed technical breakdown of what happened, our investigation, and changes we've made since.

Summary

On the afternoon of 10 October 2017, we experienced an outage of our API and Dashboard, lasting 1 hour and 50 minutes. Any requests made during that time failed, and returned an error.

The cause of the incident was a hardware failure on our primary database node, combined with unusual circumstances that prevented our database cluster automation from promoting one of the replica database nodes to act as the new primary.

This failure to promote a new primary database node extended an outage that would normally last 1 or 2 minutes to one that lasted almost 2 hours.

Our database setup

Before we start, it's helpful to have a high-level view of how we store data at GoCardless.

All of our most critical data1 is stored in Postgres.

We run Postgres in a cluster of 3 nodes, with a primary, 1 synchronous replica and 1 asynchronous replica. This means that we always have at least 2 copies of every piece of data by the time we respond successfully to an API request.

To manage the promotion of a new primary node in the event of machine failure, we run a piece of software called Pacemaker on each node in the cluster. Clients, such as our Ruby on Rails applications, connect to the primary node2 using a virtual IP address (VIP) that is also managed by Pacemaker.

Put together, it looks a little like this:

When the primary node fails, the cluster notices.

It promotes the synchronous replica, which is guaranteed to have a copy of every write (e.g. new payment) that the primary accepted. It also sets up the old asynchronous replica as the new synchronous replica.

Once the VIP is moved across, applications can carry on their work.

A Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) then adds a new replica back into the cluster.

Incident timeline

So, how did all this go wrong?

All times in this section are in British Summer Time (UTC+1).

15:09: Our monitoring detects the total outage of our API and Dashboard; engineers begin to investigate.

15:11: We see evidence of a disk array failure on the primary. We are unsure why the cluster hasn't already failed over to the synchronous replica.

15:17: We power off the broken primary Postgres node. This is done so that we don't have a machine in the cluster that is online, but with a broken disk array. We believe that with only the synchronous and asynchronous nodes online, the cluster software will promote a new primary. It quickly becomes clear that this is not the case.

15:18: We clear the error counts (crm resource cleanup) in Pacemaker to prompt it to rediscover the state of the Postgres instances. Doing so has no effect. The cluster will not promote the synchronous replica.

We spend the next hour trying a variety of approaches to promote a new primary.

Our last few attempts centre around editing the configuration on the synchronous replica to try to promote it ourselves. We put the Pacemaker cluster into maintenance mode (crm configure property maintenance-mode=true), remove the configuration flag that tells Postgres to be a replica from recovery.conf, and bring the cluster out of maintenance mode. Every time, it brings the replica back with its original recovery.conf, and we are left with no primary.

16:18: We decide that our attempts at this approach have run on for too long, and that we need to try something else. We set the cluster into maintenance mode one last time, configure the synchronous replica to be a primary, and start Postgres ourselves.

Since the cluster also manages the VIP, and we've set it into maintenance mode, we reconfigure our backend applications to connect to the actual IP address of the new primary.

16:46: Our manually promoted primary Postgres node is working, and the configuration changes are being rolled out to our applications.

16:59: Our monitoring systems confirm that our API and Dashboard are back up.

The immediate fallout

Having brought our systems back online, our next priority was to restore the database cluster to its usual level of redundancy. This meant bootstrapping a third node as an asynchronous replica.

Since Pacemaker was still in maintenance mode, there would be no automatic failover if a machine were to fail now. We believed we were likely to be running this manually-managed setup for a while3, and in the event of our primary failing, we wanted to be able to promote the synchronous replica as quickly as possible.

We decided to introduce another VIP, to be managed manually by the infrastructure team. In the event of our primary failing, we would promote the synchronous replica and move the VIP over ourselves.

As this was an incident triggered by a disk array failure, out of caution we spent some time verifying the integrity of our data. After running every test we could think of, we found no evidence of data corruption.

Once that was done and we felt safe with the GoCardless services running as they were, we started planning our next steps.

The following weeks

The day after the incident, the whole team sat down to discuss two issues:

Why did our Pacemaker cluster fail to elect a new primary database node?

How do we move back to having Pacemaker managing our cluster, now that we're in this manually-managed state?

During that discussion, we decided that we'd taken too much manual intervention on our existing database cluster to be confident in bringing back the Pacemaker automation there. We decided that we'd provision a new cluster, replicate data into it, and switch traffic over.

We split up into two subteams - one trying to reproduce the failure, and the other working out how we'd move over to a new database cluster with minimal disruption.

Reproducing the failure

To be confident in a new cluster, we needed to understand why the existing one didn't promote a new primary, and make changes to fix that issue.

For the most part, we did this by analysing the logs of the components involved in the failure. From that analysis, we pulled out several factors that looked like they could be relevant to reproducing the issue:

The RAID controller logged the simultaneous loss of 3 disks from the array. All subsequent read and write operations against it failed.

The Linux kernel set the filesystem backed by that controller into read-only mode. Given the state of the array, even reads weren't possible.

The Pacemaker cluster correctly observed that Postgres was unhealthy on the primary node. It repeatedly attempted to promote a new primary, but each time it couldn't decide where that primary should run.

On the synchronous replica - the one that should have become the new primary - one of Postgres's subprocesses crashed around the time of the disk array failure on the primary. When this happens, Postgres terminates the rest of its subprocesses and restarts.

After that restart, the synchronous replica kept trying to restore a Write-Ahead Log (WAL) file through the restore_command. On each attempt, it failed with a message stating that the file was invalid (more on this later).

A lot to unpick, right?

Given the complexity involved, it was clear that we'd only get to an answer in a reasonable amount of time if we could repeatedly break a cluster in slightly different ways and see if we could get it to break in the same way our production cluster did on 10 October.

Fortunately, as part of some unrelated work we'd done recently, we had a version of the cluster that we could run inside Docker containers. We used it to help us build a script that mimicked the failures we saw in production. Being able to rapidly turn clusters up and down let us iterate on that script quickly, until we found a combination of events that broke the cluster in just the right way.

A red herring: the invalid WAL file

One of the log entries that stood out, and was a real cause of concern for a while, was the synchronous replica failing to restore a WAL file through its restore_command.

A quick bit of background for those not familiar with Postgres: the Write-Ahead Log is how Postgres records everything you ask it to write (e.g. INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE queries). This log provides strong guarantees of those writes not being lost if Postgres crashes, and is also used to keep replicas in sync with the primary.

There are two ways the WAL can be used: through streaming replication, and through archive_command and restore_command.

In streaming replication, replicas establish an ongoing connection to the primary, which sends them any WAL it generates. If you specify that the replication should be synchronous, it waits for the replica to confirm that it's received the WAL before returning from the query that generated it.

With archive_command, Postgres lets you specify a shell command that will be executed every time a chunk of WAL is generated on the primary. It makes the file name available to the command you specify, so that you can choose what to do with the file. Similarly, restore_command runs on replicas, and passes you the name of the next WAL file the database expects to replay, so you can copy it from wherever you archived it to.

It's common to use both streaming replication and archive_command in combination. Streaming repication keeps your replicas in sync with the most recent changes, and archive_command/restore_command can be used to bootstrap nodes that are further behind by pulling in older WAL files from an archive external to the cluster (e.g. when you want to bootstrap a new node by restoring your last full backup then replaying WAL).

So, what happened during the incident? It turned out that as a final act, the server with the RAID controller issue archived an invalid WAL file to our backup server. When the Postgres subprocess crash caused a restart on the synchronous replica, that Postgres instance came back up and ran its restore_command, pulling in the invalid WAL.

Postgres's internal validation checks saw that the WAL file was invalid, and discarded it. In terms of the data, that didn't matter! That node already had a good copy of those writes, as it was doing streaming synchronous replication from the primary at the time of the failure.

We matched the log line from the validation failure against the Postgres source code, and spent a lot of time reproducing the exact same type of invalid WAL in our local container setup. Keep in mind that it's a binary format, and the contents are fairly dynamic - not the easiest thing to break in a repeatable way!

In the end, we figured out that it played no part in the Pacemaker cluster's inability to promote a new primary. At least we'd learned a little more about the internals of Postgres!

So then, what was it?

Through a process of elimination, we were able to remove steps from the script until we were left with three conditions that were necessary for the cluster to break:

Pacemaker setting: default-resource-stickiness

By default, Pacemaker doesn't assign a penalty to moving resources (such as a Postgres database process, or a VIP) to different machines. For services like Postgres, where moving a resource (e.g. the VIP that the clients are connected to) causes disruption, this isn't the behaviour we want. To combat this, we set the default-resource-stickiness parameter to a non-zero value, so that Pacemaker will consider other options before moving a resource that is already running.

Pacemaker resource: Backup VIP

As part of another piece of work to reduce load on the primary node, we'd added another VIP to the cluster. The idea was that this VIP would never be located on the primary, so the backup process would always connect to a replica, freeing up capacity for read operations on the primary. We set a constraint on this VIP so that it would never run on the same server as the Postgres primary. In Pacemaker terms, we set up a colocation rule with a -INF (negative infinity) preference to locate the Backup VIP and the Postgres primary on the same server.

At the time of the incident, the Backup VIP was running on the synchronous replica - the node that Pacemaker should have promoted to primary.

Failure condition: two processes crashing at once

Even with the configuration above, crashing the Postgres process on the primary wasn't enough to reproduce our production incident. The only way to get the cluster into a state where it would never elect a new primary was to crash one of Postgres' subprocesses on the synchronous replica, which we saw in the production logs from the incident.

All three of these conditions were necessary to reproduce the failure. Removing the default-resource-stickiness or the Backup VIP led to the cluster successfully promoting a new primary, even with the two processes crashing almost simultaneously. Similarly, crashing only the Postgres process on the primary led to the cluster successfully promoting the synchronous replica.

We spent some time testing different changes to our Pacemaker configuration, and ran into a surprising fix. Somehow, the -INF colocation rule between the Backup VIP and the Postgres primary was interfering with the promotion process, even though there was another node - the asynchronous replica - where the Backup VIP could run.

It turned out that specifying the colocation rule for the Backup VIP the opposite way round worked just fine. Instead of specifying a rule with a -INF preference between the Backup VIP and the Postgres primary, we could specify an INF preference between the Backup VIP and a replica. When specified that way round, the cluster promotes the synchronous replica just fine under the same failure conditions.

Moving to a new database cluster

Whilst this investigation was going on, the other half of the team were figuring out how to migrate from our manually managed cluster to a new cluster managed once again by Pacemaker.

Fortunately for us, we had some prior work we could turn to here. We've previously spoken about our approach to performing zero-downtime failover within a cluster. The script that coordinates that is publicly available in this GitHub repository.

The talk goes into more detail, but the relevant part isn't too hard to describe.

As well as Postgres and Pacemaker, we also run a copy of PgBouncer on each of the nodes in our database cluster. We introduce a second VIP as a layer of indirection. Clients (e.g. our Ruby on Rails applications) connect to this new PgBouncer VIP. PgBouncer, in turn, connects to the original Postgres VIP.

It's possible to pause all incoming queries at PgBouncer. When you do that, it puts them into a queue.

We can then promote a new primary and move the Postgres VIP to it. Note that the VIP the clients are connecting to - the PgBouncer VIP - doesn't need to move, so the clients experience no disruption.

Once the cluster has finished promoting the new node, we tell PgBouncer to resume traffic, and it sends the queued queries to the new primary.

We needed to adapt this procedure a little. The automation that performs it is designed to migrate between different nodes in the same cluster, not two separate clusters.

The subteam responsible for getting us into a new cluster spent the next couple of weeks making those adjustments and performing practice runs. Once they were totally comfortable, we put together a plan to do it in production.

Wrapping up the incident

With a plan in place, and the confidence that we'd understood and fixed the issue which stopped our cluster from failing over on 10 October, we were ready to go. Even with all the testing we'd done, we announced a maintenance window as a precaution.

Fortunately, everything went as planned on the night, and we migrated to our new database cluster without a hitch.

We decommissioned the old cluster, and closed the incident.

What's next?

There's no getting away from the size of this incident.

We feel an immense duty to everyone who trusts GoCardless as their payments provider. We took some time to think through what we'd learned from this incident, with a focus on how we could improve our reliability in the future. Some of the key items we came up with were:

Seemingly simple Pacemaker configuration can lead to extremely unusual behaviour

On the surface, defining a rule that says two resources must not run together seems like it would be the opposite of defining a rule that says two resources must run together. In reality, they cause the system to behave in entirely different ways in certain failure conditions. We can take this knowledge into any future work we do with Pacemaker.

Unrelatedly, but conveniently, we're about to move away from using VIPs to direct traffic to specific Postgres instances. Instead we'll be running proxies on the application servers that direct traffic to the right node based on the state of the cluster. This will drastically reduce the number of resources managed by Pacemaker, in turn reducing the potential for weird behaviour in the cluster.

Some bugs will only be surfaced through fault injection

A misconfiguration that only surfaces when two processes crash at almost the same time isn't one that you're going to find through basic tests or day-to-day operations. We've done some fault injection as part of our game day exercises, but there's always more you can do in that area. Harsher tests of the Postgres cluster, and automation like Chaos Monkey that continually injects failure are both ideas we're keen to pursue.

Automation erodes knowledge

It turns out that when your automation successfully handles failures for two years, your skills in manually controlling the infrastructure below it atrophy. There's no "one size fits all" here. It's easy to say "just write a runbook", but if multiple years go by before you next need it, it's almost guaranteed to be out-of-date.

There are definitely ways to combat this. One possibility we're thinking of is adding arbitrary restrictions to some of our game day exercises (e.g. "this cluster is down, the automation has failed, you can't diagnose the problem, and need to bring the service back another way").

The elephant in the room

We're sure some of you are asking why we even run our own Postgres instances when there are hosted options out there. We couldn't end this write-up without talking about that a little.

We do periodically consider the options out there for managed Postgres services. Until recently, they were somewhat lacking in a few areas we care about. Without turning this article into a provider comparison, it's only a recent development for any provider to offer zero-downtime patch upgrades of Postgres, which is something we've been doing for a while.

The other thing that's made us rule out managed Postgres services so far is that most of our our infrastructure is in a bare-metal hosting provider. The added latency between that provider's datacentres and a hosted Postgres service would cause some fairly drastic re-work for our application developers, who can currently assume a latency to Postgres of a millisecond or lower.

Of course, nothing is set in stone. Our hosting situation can change over time, and so can the offerings of the various hosting providers out there. We'll keep our eyes on it, and perhaps one day wave goodbye to running Postgres clusters ourselves.

Closing thoughts

We'd like to apologise one last time for this incident. We know how much trust people put in their payment providers, and we strive to run a reliable service that reinforces that trust.

At the same time, we strongly believe in learning from failure when it does happen. It's encouraging to see that blameless post-mortems are becoming increasingly common in operations disciplines (whether you happen to call that DevOps, SRE, or something else). We hope you've found this one interesting and useful.

You can find us at @GoCardlessEng on Twitter if you've got comments or questions. We'll try to answer them as best we can!

[mrgameandwrite]

E3 2017 Summary

By the time you’re reading this, E3 will have come and gone. The drought of game releases of the summer will have given way to the hope of games that are on the holiday horizon. And goddamn if it isn’t a beautiful horizon that we, as gamers, are flying towards. This year’s E3 did not disappoint as there were a myriad of big announcements, huge surprises, and oh so many games. In case you missed it, here are all the highlights of E3 2017.

EA

EA kicked things off with a relatively tame conference, but the crowd reactions did not help. Granted, there were few things that I’m actually excited about from this conference, so I can’t chastise the crowd too hard. Still, E3 has begun!

Announcements

New IP from Bioware called Anthem, a gorgeous sci-fi shooter with power suits.

A co-op prison break game called A Way Out

Need for Speed: Payback, because cars deserve revenge, too.

Battlefield DLC that adds night time maps and Russian expansion.

Madden 18 has a story mode, which I will only play if you can ruin your career through idiotic antics at the club.

Fifa 18 has Ronaldo all over it. Because it’s “fueled by Ronaldo”. Every drop of his sweat makes the game better.

NBA Live 18 will try to be relevant.

Star Wars Battlefront II will look to improve on Star Wars Battlefront, you know, like the OG Star Wars Battlefront II.

Biggest Highlight: Star Wars Battlefront II

Featuring new campaign, multiplayer from all eras with more customization, vehicles, and various improvements to gunplay. Still skeptical as the first one left a bad taste in my mouth, but it’s hard not to be excited about being part of Star Wars battles.

Biggest Surprise: A Way Out

Made by the same people who made Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons. Interesting idea that the game MUST be played co-op, either through split screen or online. Could be hit or miss, depending on how matchmaking would work. 

Microsoft

Microsoft started by addressing the elephant in the room: Project Scorpio. Now dubbed Xbox One X, this mid-generation upgrade is advertised as the most powerful console ever made that will play games the best. The price tag at $499, which gives players cost-effective options based on preference. Since specs were already released, Microsoft could address what it’s called, what it costs, when it will be out (November 7), then dive into games. They announced that the OG Xbox games will soon be backwards compatible on Xbox One, while some Xbox One games can be enhanced with the X’s new tech. After that, they dove into a shit ton of game trailers, so it would just be easier to borrow this list from Kotaku, which also notes their exclusivity:

Anthem (Non-exclusive)

The Artful Escape of Francis Vendetti (Console launch exclusive)

Ashen (Console launch exclusive)

Assassin’s Creed: Origins (Non-exclusive)

Black Desert (Console launch exclusive)

Code Vein (Non-exclusive)

Crackdown 3 (Xbox One and Windows 10 exclusive)

Cuphead (Xbox One and Windows 10 exclusive)

The Darwin Experiment (Console launch exclusive)

Deep Rock Galactic (Console launch exclusive)

Dragon Ball Fighter Z (Non-exclusive)

Forza Motorsport 7 (Xbox One and Windows 10 exclusive)

The Last Night (Console launch exclusive)

Life Is Strange (Non-exclusive)

Metro Exodus (Non-exclusive)

Middle-Earth: Shadow of War (Non-exclusive)

Minecraft (Non-exclusive)

Ori and the Will of the Wisps (Xbox One and Windows 10 exclusive)

PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (Console launch exclusive)

Sea of Thieves (Xbox One and Windows 10 exclusive)

State of Decay 2 (Xbox One and Windows 10 exclusive)

Super Lucky’s Tale (Xbox One and Windows 10 exclusive)

Tacoma (Console exclusive)

Biggest Highlight: Xbox One X

Despite a really bad name (especially considering another console in the Xbox family is called S, surely leading to some upset children come Christmas time), Xbox’s top-of-the-line console came in with a reasonable price point considering all the tech that’s going into it. They got the important info out of the way and turned their focus to the games, which will no doubt benefit from the beefed-up console.

Biggest Surprise: Sea of Thieves

Out of all the games on that expansive list, Sea of Thieves seems like the most promising to me. This open-world pirate game from Rare looks like it’ll require a lot of cooperation in order to do effectively, but will be fun even when everything goes horribly wrong. Hunting for treasure on the seven seas hasn’t looked this fun in a long time.

Bethesda

Welcome to BethesdaLand! If not for that odd theme park ode to themselves, Bethesda’s event probably would take home the award for most predictable conference. That’s not always a bad thing though, as some big things got announced.

Announcements

Fallout 4 will be getting the virtual reality treatment this fall, with Doom to follow sometime down the line.

Creation Club brings paid mods to Bethesda games. Boooo

Amiibos will allow you to dress as Link in the Nintendo Switch version of Skyrim, at least until you find some more powerful armor

Dishonored 2 is getting a standalone DLC called Death of the Outsider.

The Evil Within 2 is coming out on Friday, October 13th. Creepy things on creepy days.

Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus completely ignores the ending of its predecessor, The New Order, looks amazing enough that no one seems to care

Biggest Highlight: Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus

Who doesn’t love killing Nazis in a future where their power reigns supreme? Especially when it looks that gorgeous and the combat looks so fluid and brutal. Admittedly, I haven’t actually tried the Wolfenstein franchise, but this looks good enough to quickly change my mind. Because again, Nazi-killin’ and alternative timelines.

Biggest Surprise: Fallout 4 VR might actually make Fallout 4 interesting to dive back into.

It still may be a weak story, but if they can bring it’s gunplay to a VR setting, I’m sold.

Ubisoft

BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL 2 IS REAL, GUYS! I’M NOT CRYING, YOU’RE CRYING!

Announcements

BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL 2 IS A REAL THING MADE BY REAL PEOPLE WITH REAL FEELS

Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle is a goofy combo to have such a strategy-based focused, but I’m intrigued. Despite all the leaks about this game before E3, no one saw that coming.

The Crew 2, aka, The Crew 2: Planes, Trains and Automobiles

Transference is a cryptic, creepy VR experience that I will never, ever play, no matter how excited Elijah Wood is about it.

Skull & Bones is a game based on the naval combat of Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag, except without assassins, or creeds (though I assume there will still be black flags a-plenty).

South Park gets double treatment, in the forms of a new mobile game called South Park Phone Destroyer and a new trailer for the RPG South Park: The Fractured But Whole

Starlink: Battle of Atlas looks like No Man’s Sky meets Skylanders, just in the sense that it’s a space game with real-life toys to scan in.

Far Cry 5 showcased Boomer, aka, Fang for Hire, WHO HAD BETTER NOT FUCKING DIE, I SWEAR.

Biggest Highlight: Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle

Ok, so since I won’t allow myself to put Beyond Good and Evil 2 in both this and the biggest surprise section, Mario gets the treatment here for a few reasons. First, the game actually looks really good, even with those silly Rabbids. It’s a game a-la XCOM with turn-based, strategic combat and exploration. Plus, it gave beloved Nintendo designer Shigeru Miyamoto a chance to perform for the live crowd since Nintendo switched to pre-recorded showings at E3.

Biggest Surprise: Beyond Good and Evil 2

Arguably the biggest surprise of the whole damn show, Beyond Good and Evil has been rumored to be in development over the last 15 years. After the cyberpunk cinematic spectacle that was the trailer, designer Michel Ancel came out with a tear in his eye to a standing ovation as he got to show the fruit of over a decade’s labor. Who knows when this game will actually come out, but amongst all the suited presenters, it was fantastic to see some real emotion from someone who has poured almsot two decades into his passion.

Sony

Unlike Microsoft, Sony didn’t have a new console to unveil, so the focus of their conference was on the games. And goddamn, Sony had a lot of games to announce. Let’s dive right in.

Announcements

Uncharted: Lost Legacy looks like an Uncharted game alright. There’s plenty of guns pointed at people menacingly and people falling over cliffs and/or collapsing buildings. Still, I’m pretty excited to explore India with Claudia and Nadine.

Horizon: Zero Dawn is getting an expansion, which I’m sure I’ll be very into once I actually start playing Horizon: Zero Dawn (I’m holding out for a PS4 Pro and 4K TV to get the best experience possible, cause I’ve heard it’s pretty good).

Days Gone may be coming in towards the end of the zombie craze, but at least it’s doing some interesting things mechanically that should shake things up with that tired genre.

Monster Hunter World is the first time the franchise is coming to non-Nintendo consoles, which could be neat. Maybe through a more proven online infrastructure, more of my friends will actually join in.

Call of Duty: World War II is, well, Call of Duty. It’s cool that they’re going back to World War II, but that’s about it.

Shadow of the Colossus isn’t just getting an HD facelift, but the whole remake treatment. We already know it’s a fantastic game, but now it’s gonna have the looks to match. Let’s just hope the camera isn’t like The Last Guardian...

Quite a few VR games coming to PSVR, including Skyrim (holy shit!), a shooter called Bravo Team, a pretty game called Star Child, a thriller I won’t play called The Inpatient, a Final Fantasy XV fishing game called Monster of the Deep (da fuck?), and an actual interesting game called Moss, which puts you in control of a little mouse with a sword. If I ever get into PSVR, it’ll be for Skyrim and Moss.

God of War will attempt to tackle all of your daddy issues as Kratos and son are on some kind of quest through Norse mythology. It’s interesting to see a character like Kratos slow down from all the over-the-top bloodletting and take on the role of a concerned parent. I’m super excited for the shift in tone.

The people who made Until Dawn are making a mobile game called Hidden Agenda, if you’re into that sort of thing.

Undertale, one of the biggest indie darlings of 2015, is coming to PS4 and Vita, which I’m super stoked about.

Marvel vs Capcom Infinite was one of the few games to do the whole “you can play some of it right now!” treatment with a story demo. Looks a little odd, to be honest. I’m into the whole multiverse idea in general, but it usually makes for a weak way to connect fighting game characters.

Destiny 2 is continuing the trend of timed exclusive content for PS4, which continues to conflict me about which system to buy it on, even though I’ll probably eventually buy both PS4 and Xbox versions like I did before because I have a Destiny problem.

Spider-Man closed down Sony’s conference with a bang. Sure, there are a lot of quick-time events, but Spider-Man looks poised to become the new Batman. I’m hoping that what was shown was just that linear because it was a mission and that the game will have more of an open world, but even if not, this game looks very fun.

Biggest Highlight: Spider-Man

Man, this game looked good. Kingpin is a good choice for a villain, but I’m excited to see how these seemingly unknown characters are utilized. Also, nice little Miles Morales cameo at the end just when everyone thought it was wrapped up. It may not come out until 2018, but this has potential to usurp the Batman series as best superhero game.

Biggest Surprise: Shadow of the Colossus

Probably at third place for biggest surprise of E3, I don’t think anyone predicted that Shadow of the Colossus was going to get the remake treatment so soon, especially after the recent release of The Last Guardian. Not complaining, though.

Nintendo

Nintendo always goes to the beat of their own drum when it comes to E3 conferences. This year, the pre-recorded presentation lasted around half an hour.  However, they went for quality over quantity, and they may have already won E3 2018 with a couple huge announcements.

Announcements:

Xenoblade Chronicles 2 was one of the few JRPG’s shown at E3 this year, complete with cheesy dialogue. I always want to break into this series, but whenever I hear this kind of dialogue, I cringe.

Kirby is making his first appearance to a home console in a very long time in 2018. Hope it doesn’t....SUCK. I couldn’t help myself.

For the first time ever, the core series of Pokemon games is making its way to a home console with the Switch. We don’t know if it’ll be a brand new series or if it’ll be the long-rumored Pokemon Stars, but I scared the shit out of my girlfriend when this announcement hit. I’m still scaring her.

HOLY FUCKING SHIT, METROID PRIME 4 IS IN DEVELOPMENT. That’s all I needed to know. Nintendo is giving the people what they want. What is this world we live in? There’s also a side-scroller Metroid coming out called Metroid: Samus Returns for 3DS, BUT METROID PRIME 4, Y’ALL!

Yoshi looks wooly again and is getting a Switch game in 2018.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild outlined two pieces of DLC. The first, which is coming out on June 30th, is called The Master of Trials, which looks like a complex gauntlet of endurance and strategy. The second DLC, slated for holiday release, is called The Champions Ballad, and is coming with its own set of Amiibo, which I will probably have to get, goddamn it.

Rocket League is coming to Switch with Mario-themed extras and, most importantly, will feature cross network play. Maybe seeing how Nintendo handles it will convince Sony to try it, and then we’ll get to the beginning of the end of the console wars.

Fire Emblem Warriors is going to be a Dynasty Warriors clone with Fire Emblem paint, if you’re into that kinda thing.

And for the grand finale, Nintendo showed off a lot more of Super Mario Odyssey, including the fact that Mario, with his magic hat Cappy, has the ability to possess and become enemies, NPCs, and fucking dinosaurs. It looks quirky and cute and could be the runner-up for GOTY (Breath of the Wild has that on lock). It also is coming out October 27th.

Biggest Highlight: Super Mario Odyssey

For a short conference, Nintendo focused the back half of it on Mario, and for good reason. Post Breath of the Wild, my Switch has been itching for this game and it’s charming mechanics. On top of possessing enemies, Mario’s hat can also possess things like electric wires to travel from building to building. It’s the centerpiece for this game’s mechanics and I couldn’t be more excited to throw my hat at every fucking thing.

Biggest Surprise: Metroid Prime 4

Now, if this category were giddiest reaction by me, it would be Pokemon on Switch, but with all the leaked info on Game Freak’s specific job posting, the biggest surprise is Metroid Prime 4 actually being worked on. We’ve been clamoring for a new Metroid game and it seems like Nintendo believes the Switch is the system that’s ready to handle it. We probably won’t see anything more concrete on it for another year or so, but knowing that it’s in development should have people salivating until then.

Best Game of Show: Super Mario Odyssey

Despite some exciting trailers for long lost sequels and excellent gameplay demos, Nintendo takes the cake in 2017 with Super Mario Odyssey. After only seeing a small teaser when the Nintendo Switch was first announced, Nintendo delivered what eager fans have been waiting for with the Switch’s newest blockbuster. Nintendo focused in on Mario’s magic cap through most of the E3 presentation, making fans salivate at all the goofy ways to explore and solve New Donk City and beyond. Complete with a release date of October 27th (originally slated as Holiday 2017), fans won’t have to wait nearly as long as most of the exciting things that were revealed in this E3.