#if you want to use generative AI to do dumb shit that's your problem but defending it in THIS WAY is just making you look stupid

[nothlits]

I've said it before and I'll say it again. If your response to the multibillion dollar generative AI industry doubling global energy demand projections (demand which WILL be met by oil and gas, especially with the new US administration being anti energy transition) is "corporations do worse things for the environment than someone using chatgpt ever will", I'm just going to assume that you also litter and throw plastic directly onto the street because you think recycling and responsibly disposing of garbage isn't your job since corporations are the ones who made the waste in the first place.

[northwest-cryptid]

I need people to understand that I also hate tumblr's two-faced way of treating trans nsfw media (or even just treating all trans media like it's inherently NSFW) it's gross and it's awful that they do that shit.

But we're not going to change tumblr, you gotta accept that.

We're not going to actually do anything with our words, the more you post about it the more you generate activity on this site; the more money they make.

They literally DO NOT CARE.

The thing is that I'm not trying to say their behavior is okay, nor do I think they should "get away with it" but the truth is, we're not going to make any progress complaining about it no matter how right we are.

If you ACTUALLY want to do something, you need to find alternatives, raise awareness for those alternatives; and move to a better site.

The unfortunate reality is that this is their site, and they CAN run it in their stupid bigoted way. If I or anyone else gets deactivated that's their choice, they actually do not need to give us a reason as dumb as that is.

I need you to understand you don't even own anything here, when you upload it; it's tumblrs now. That's why they can sell it to AI companies and shit.

I would ALSO love the world to be this perfect ideal place where we can yell at the bad guys until justice happens, but that's unfortunately not the reality of it.

I'm not telling you that you can't do something about it. I'm saying the thing you're doing about it isn't going to work, it's not a logical solution; it's an idealistic solution.

I wouldn't watch 12 other trans people walk into a bar, get the shit beat out of them; and then walk in as an openly trans person and say "I demand you all start accepting me and not beat the shit out of me" and then get surprised when they in fact, do beat the shit out of me.

There are pretty clear signs that say "we're gonna beat the shit out of you for being trans" and like trust me I get it, you've been coming to this place for a long time; it's only recently gotten bad (to you.)

That doesn't mean you have any power here though, it doesn't mean you can actually bring any real change.

Speaking up is great but it makes you a target and it makes tumblr money.

Listen the problem isn't "tumblr is transphobic to women" it's "trans-women on this site are not safe, and don't feel safe." You need to focus on the problem, the real problem; because you can fight tumblr staff all day until they deactivate you and all it's doing is putting money in their pocket. All the while, trans-women are still not safe and still don't feel safe on this site.

If you instead, target the actual problem and figure out how to protect trans women, give them alternatives; find places for us to exist as trans individuals, places that aren't empty wastelands of websites. Then we can mass migrate there; we can actually feel and be safe, and guess what; it will hit tumblr's activity numbers, they'll become less attractive to advertisers, and with a lot of their trans and LGBT community moving elsewhere, they won't really get anywhere marketing to that demographic.

Suddenly staff will need to make a real choice, either stop being so damn transphobic so a large portion of your userbase returns to your site, generating activity and bringing in money. Or remain just as fucking bigoted, and lose out on a large amount of activity, ads, and revenue.

They don't care about you, they care about money.

When you complain and speak up and generate a big post that gets a ton of notes; you add to their activity and make their site look profitable to investors and advertisers.

That isn't going to make them listen to you, it's going to make them do nothing because it's going to make them money.

YOU are their product.

They want to claim that the LGBT community here isn't really that big, I remember the post that pointed out some shit like "less than 25% of users on tumblr are actually LGBT" or whatever. Great, you know how you fight that?

Make a poll? No.

Make a big post that generates a ton of interaction and activity? God no that's exactly what they wa- oh fuck we did both of those things didn't we?

Yea no, you move sites; you stop generating activity, you prove it through the site going cold, silence on the front where there was once a bustling marketplace of activity.

Hit them where it hurts, make it noticeable; it's not going to be easy I never said it would be easy. However, if you actually care and want to make change; then our next step should be to figure out where we can mass migrate.

If we all migrate to various places, those websites lack the community we have here; and they're counting on that. You'll always come back to tumblr because it's where your community is, it's where everything is.

If we move as a unit, not only will it be more impactful on their numbers, but it will allow us to move AS a community; everything in one place, just not here. Somewhere else, somewhere better.

[baronvontribble]

are people really using the lying hallucinating machine to: -weigh in on decisions about what is and isn't humanly edible -give coherent and true summaries of literally anything -GIVE YOU ANSWERS TO ANY SERIOUS QUESTIONS?? -FOLLOW BASIC MATHEMATICAL PRINCIPLES OF REALITY EFFECTIVELY???

take it from the person who loves writing about robots: chatGPT is fucking dumb. it works based on repetition, SEO, memetics, and feedback, none of which promote accuracy. it is the worst way to search any info you could possibly want. not only does it lie and just make shit up to make you happy, it bases those lies on aggregate sources that are boosted not by any method of actual verification, but by SEO.

what's SEO? well that's Search Engine Optimization, baby. strap in we're gonna do an example.

think about tumblr bots, alright? now, why do we block a tumblr bot? because they're annoying? no, we block them because they use their like-spamming to add search engine legitimacy to their scammy links in their bios. essentially, because of the way tumblr links to every user that ever likes or reblogs or interacts with a post on every post's individual linked page, every single one of those links is telling google's search engine that THIS scammer's page is totally legit. this boosts its algorithmic potential and makes it so that it appears higher up on search results than its scammy competitors.

but andy, you think, why are you going into a description of tumblr bots? well, reader, it's because this same principle also applies to viral posts. and what goes viral on tumblr? really funny trolling, lies, and people being generally obtuse and digging their own graves. tumblr is the town square and our algorithm is each other's interest; we delight in pointing at the latest pair of squeaky clown shoes being worn, and will drag the wearer out for everyone to see.

this. is bad. when you are an AI 'search' tool based on repetition, memetics, and SEO. because you were never taught to separate 'viral' from 'real'.

a search tool based on virality will tell you to eat a tide pod because they're a secret kind of candy. a search tool based on virality will tell you poinsettias and lilies are great to keep around your cats, and that you should put garlic in their food. a search tool based on virality will tell you that the best way to figure out whether bread is done is to stick your dick in it.

(it should go without saying but i'm going to say it anyway: DO NOT DO THESE THINGS BY THE WAY. YOU WILL DIE AND BE IN HORRIBLE PAIN AND SO WILL YOUR CAT.)

remember this rule, kids, and remember it well: a lie will go around the world twice while the truth is still getting its pants on. while it's fun to dunk and debunk, dunking and debunking doesn't reach the same eyeballs as the original thought, and by the time you're done you have five new ones to dunk on and debunk. and AI 'search' tools will never be able to distinguish the truth from the lie by design.

because here's the nastiest part of all: AI 'search' tools' results are then fed by the way people engage with the results. If the insane result goes viral, it doesn't get corrected, it gets reinforced. engagement, ragebait, corrections, all of these don't bring attention to a problem, they tell the AI it's done a good job making something that people engage with, and it will keep right on lying.

you can't if-then your way out of every lie it spits out because it's like trying to keep a lawnmower from making grass cuttings one blade of grass at a time. it's what it's designed to do. it's baked into the concept because people didn't think that their fun new toy needed to be able to tell the truth, and didn't realize what that would mean when it was asked serious questions. they just wanted it to earn more clicks, more eyes, more engagement, so that they could use that to farm more data that they can sell.

when you can't see what product being sold is, you are the product.

AI 'search' tools are genuinely dangerous, genuinely harmful to discourse, and genuinely something you should be critical of. even beyond their environmental impacts, intellectual property violations, worker's rights violations, this shit is bad, and its cousins in image and longer form text generation are worse.

we cannot allow our critical thinking skills to be eroded by these things. fight them. fight them at every turn. do not allow them into your spaces and do not allow them into your life. complacency is how they get their foot in the door to normalization, and normalization of this kind of shit is another nail in the world's coffin. i'm not kidding. it should be enough for you people that it's a theft-based hallucinatory lie machine but apparently it's not so here we are.

thank you for reading. now if you'll all excuse me, i'm going to go chug something caffeinated and deep-clean the microwave

[therandomavenger]

Everything I Really Need to Know in Life, I Learned from Playing Dungeons and Dragons

I’ve been playing D&D Regularly since 2021, after a lifetime of wanting to and never finding a group. It is, hands down, some of the most fun I’ve ever had. I play an overpowered half-elf Oath of Devotion himbo Paladin. I’m one of the group tanks. This is a character very much unlike me in real life, and that is a feature not a bug. He’s also just recently graduated to having an intelligence modifier of ), up from -1. If you understood all of that, good for you! We should be friends! If not, now you know how I feel when certain people start to gush about fantasy football.

But D&D can also teach you about life. And that’s what I want to talk about today.

1. It matters how you build your character

The way you build your character in D&D (at least the way you do at our table) is you roll a certain number of dice, which generates 6 scores. You take these scores and assign them to six different categories: Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma. Depending on what class you want to play, you assign those six scores to the right categories. You are in charge of how you do this. If you want to play a Paladin, you will assign your highest scores to strength and charisma. If you want to play a thief you will assign your highest score to dexterity, Wizards need high intelligence, etc.

This is applicable to real life because you get a certain number of natural skills and talents you can choose to develop. You also usually get a choice about what kind of education/training you will pursue. It’s like you’re building the character you will roleplay in your everyday life. Some people naturally have a lot of high scores. Some people don’t. It’s just the way it is. The thing is, though, you’re not stuck. As the game goes along, you’re given opportunities to invest more points in different areas, so you can bring up some of your low scores, which explains why my Paladin is no longer dumb as a box of hair. You also gain new abilities in your class as you gain XP (experience points), in the same way you develop skills through experience and further education in your real life. But when you start, you must make some decisions about what you want to do in the game, just as you must decide what kind of things you want to do in life.

2. You Get by With a Little Help from Your Friends

Tabletop Role-Playing games are not meant to be played on your own. Yes, there are solo modules you can play through, but in doing so you miss most of the experience, which is to fit yourself in a party of adventurers, usings your various skills to solve challenges. And also interact with really cool people. It’s the interaction between the six of us at the table that really makes it fun. I’ve met some of the funniest people I’ve ever met in my life in this group (Jeff, I’m looking at you). Also, through collaboration you can come up with interesting ways to solve problems, much to the consternation of your game master.

It’s been suggested that AI can provide a more interactive solo experience, and to me, this completely misses the point. Yes, doing it with a group makes scheduling difficult sometimes, but if you really want to play by yourself there are several video games that will provide that experience. And I say this as an introvert, the camaraderie at the table is the best part of the game. My Paladin would have been dead several times over without the help of the other part members, and vice versa. And the entire point of the game is to participate in an adventure together, both by role-playing your characters and talking shit on the sides.

3. There are Various Ways to Solve Problems

This is related to the last element, but usually there are multiple ways to come at a problem. There might be a puzzle to solve. You might be able to use high charisma scores to talk your way out of a conflict. And then, you, sometimes you have to send the Paladin and the other Tanks to Smite something. In real life, which is seldom the answer, and sometimes the most interesting twists and turns come when you use your collective intelligence to think your way around or through a problem. But if not, your wizard can always cast ‘Fireball.’

4. No Challenge is Unbeatable

Yeah, occasionally you run into a threat you can’t defeat and there is a TPK (Total Party Kill), but a good GM will always make sure there is a way you can defeat whatever challenge they throw at you. It may be difficult. You may have to hope for some lucky dice rolls, but if a monster has stats, it can be killed. It’s the same way in everyday life. There is a way to overcome almost every challenge whether it is professional or personal. I mean sometimes you are overwhelmed, but victory is usually at least possible. Which leads me to the final lesson …

5. Sometimes you are at the Mercy of the Dice

Occasionally, you really need a high roll, and you roll a 1. Other times you crit the monster and do double damage. You adjust your scores based on your stats, but the dice rule in the game in several ways. Meaning, some things are up to luck. You can weight your luck by properly using your skills and advantages, but if the dice don’t go your way, they just don’t. There are occasional opportunities to re-roll, but really, shit happens. You don’t always get the roll you need, and then you need to adapt to the failure, just the way you have to adapt in real life when bad things happen. You must take the hit or find some way to avoid it.

Like I said before, Dungeons and Dragon has provided some of the best experiences of my life, but it’s also helpful in teaching you how to adjust to life in this world, which doesn’t always play fair. I think everyone would be better adjusted if they could find a regular game.

[dianight]

This is why you shouldn't write plot summaries analysis if you refuse to read the story.

Sorry but I refuse to engage with this shit directly. You literally could not be more wrong about what the story was building Aqua to be. You have imagined or perhaps hallucinated what the story was saying and the weight of reality has made you upset because your head was in the clouds the entire time but you humans do not deserve the skies.

2 out of 10 for correctly identifying "the shortcomings of the Japanese (sic) idol industry" as a theme, which is generous because the story also delves into the anime/manga/movie industries (among others) so it'd be more correct to call it (as I do) the entertainment industry.

Out of nowhere is so funny. He literally planned it, pushing away those close to him so the consequences wouldn't spiral out of control. Which was ambitious sure, but it was premeditated and the reply previously mentions "how far the main character was willing to go to remove "problems"" so it's not like this user is oblivious to Aqua's unhinged methods. One character (Akane) who was shown to be extremely smart and understand Aqua really well was able to piece it together Edogawa Conan style, mentioning how she was ready to be his accomplice if he wanted to murder someone and the story shows yet again how he intentionally pushed her away so her life would not be ruined.

"None of the aforementioned problems get resolved" because this is a tragedy about how dark the entertainment industry is, which is a surface level theme that the Ulysses reading ogre would point out immediately and you have failed to do so with whatever imagined version of Oshi no Ko you think you read. "Everyone reverts to being idols" only Ruby and Memcho (on top of being a famous youtuber) keep being idols, Kana is sidelined, Akane probably still an actress (the last chapter shows her getting pranked, maybe for some tv show?), Miyako still works with the man who abandoned her, presumably making series/movies; and hold that thought, literally only Ruby and Memcho out of all named characters work as idols even. This is what happens when you don't engage with what the story is saying and instead look at pages and just make up your own.

Ruby is in a sad situation indeed, but as oppossed to Ai she's still got people who truly care about her. I'd give points for correctly pointing out the parallels but it's so "in your face" that I better not. It is literally the message of the story that so many refuse to look at: the entertainment industry (not just idols) is fucked up and being a light for everyone means sacrificing a lot along the way. At no point was it about "tearing the industry apart and building it anew" you must have been reading a different manga because you can't be that fucking stupid to make such a claim about Oshi no Ko.

"Ordinary life" you are so dumb actually. Aka has an interview (that I've linked before) where he talks about his plans for the ending. If you refuse to take his word but then you show us how out of touch you are regarding the actual contents of the manga your opinion is worthless. Losing someone is not easy, but everyone does move on with their lifes and achieves/tries to achieve their dreams.

---

It's easy to post the "this shit is so ass" panel and type a couple paragraphs of how the manga was bad because it was different that whatever fanfiction you made up in your head. It takes effort to engage with the themes of a story beyond skimming the pages and looking at Mengo's gorgeous art.

Funny thing is that I don't even consider Oshi no Ko that good of a series. It shows what it wants to show (Aka confirmed this) but I'm not particularly interested in that industry, it was more interest on whatever Aka did after Kaguya-sama and once again Mengo's gorgeous art.

It's surreal to see this reaction where everyone is complaining about some series titled Oshi no Ko that has nothing to do with what I've read. Then again, anglospeakers. What can you expect.

[thatclockworkdoll]

A post about unhelpful vagueness, and why blanket generalization hurts far more than ut helps

99% of the time it’s just Teh Juice At It Again, but also a non-zero amount of this is groups that aren’t just a nebulous they, but some group that is extremely easy to dehumanize for [shuffles notes] being more entangled with capital/imperialism than me.

You know what, I think I’m just gonna fan the hammer on examples, just because we *did* just talk about unhelpful vagueness:

- Most people who bought into NFTs, GameStop, and similar hype bubbles are some mixture of gambling addict and scam victim. They are hard to love at the best of times, but that is what keeps them locked in the cycle.

- It is very easy to believe dumb shit about AI. I wasn’t even immune, and had to get schooled on why AI drawings aren’t even good for rough drafts or inspiration. Most people are one or two missing pieces of the problem away from understanding why AI is not as good as they hoped. Speaking of which:

- “Is AI art even art” is a secondary battleground to problems about how they were built and what they’re built of, both in a user data sense and in a material sense. It’s the software equivalent of trying to mandate paper straws; you’re doing a slightly good thing, but the problem is a lot larger than just consumer usage.

- Cops are humans with the potential for noble ideals, can make morally driven judgements, and deserve basic human rights. They are your shithead cousin who votes for republicans but is otherwise a decent guy, but with legal authority and military hardware.

- People in the military aren’t categorically awful either. This is especially true in countries with mandatory service. This is also more true than not when America spends a lot of money advertising it and promises higher education and money for enlisting.

- People do not deserve to die for being in red states. People do not deserve to die for being in red states. People do not deserve to die for being in red states undergoing a natural disaster while the system does nothing for them, can you tell I’m still not over how people reacted to that big freeze in 2021

- If your politics do not support “white trash” the same way it supports other kinds of minority or forms of being unemployed, start over and try again.

- It’s not cute when you are being verbally racist to white people. You’re not funny. Yes I do know we’re talking about systemic issues at the moment, and what we actually mean by racism, but what you’re doing isn’t contributing to anything useful *or* comedic.

- It’s also not cute when you blame actions on being part of a majority (“straight people when”, “are the allos okay”, this general beat). Stop that.

- The best reaction to weird subcommunities on TikTok or whatever is to ignore the cringe stuff. Maybe if you’re lucky it’ll be the narcissism-to-Christian-fundamentalist pipeline, but that is not the majority of the time. People be weird.

- Kinks that are illegal in real life are fine as fiction.

- Kinks are fine in general, provided you actually know how to practice it ethically. RACK is an example of a guideline for doing so ethically.

- Furries are not all about zoophilia. The handful that are only want that as fiction. The fingerful of that handful are near-certainly joking, or are more in need of help than bullying.

- Treat the abuser with dignity too. Most of the time, abuse is perpetrated unwittingly.

- “Who’s the abuser here” is not a conversation you get to have about people you don’t know.

- The possibility of a victim lying isn’t zero. Fortunately this often comes to light very quickly.

- Pineapple on pizza slaps, y’all are just mean

[meowsticmarvels]

whats on your mind rn in terms of Games ?

OOH FUN.... assuming you probably asked this bc most of my interests are games LOL but i jhave some Thoughts on games in General and the industry as a whole. buckle up!

- currently im playing. a lot of them obviously but my most recents are persona 5 tactica and the sims 4 :] - fav fav games EXCLUDING THE SPECIAL INTERESTS . - ghost trick, UT/DR, NITW, TS4 ( i havent played any other sims except the sims 2 pets for the 3ds im sorry.), super mario galaxy, goodbye volcano high - the special interest ones include pokemon (fav out of main series is sun/moon, black/white, and scarlet/violet, but i do like many spin offs like mystery dungeon), mii/wii games (i.e. wii sports), minecraft story mode, and the persona games (never finished one but i've reached various distances in P2IS-P5 excluding some spin offs and stuff like i havent started P5S or P2EP. favs r 3 + 4 + tactica) ^ ask me about any of those (or other ones i like i.e. gvh) i WILL ANSWER even if its something thatd be faster with google im better - underrated gems i'd say goodbye volcano high, death road to canada, chicory a colorful tale, signs of the sojourner, aviary attorney, tails noir, blanc. ghost trick to a lesser extent ig but the others are indie - current main wishlist (inc. ones i Will emulate): shin megami tensei V, devil survivor overclocked, fire emblem 3 houses, professor layton, pokemon black 2, persona q2, persona 3 reload ( I Want. Now. its on gamepass but i literally need everything related to it you dont get it.), wii play motion, twewy, and okami. OH also in stars and time and oneshot. also disco elysium and hylics look cool too. AND CASSETTE BEASTS. fuck i hate when every game looks good. need to play murder of sonic the hedgehog also. and looking forward to billy bust up. OH AND I NEED TO PLAY THE STANLEY PARABLE. AND BALDURS GATE 3 - i think the only game i really truly regret buying is 1-2 switch. im sorry it was good for like 2-3 weeks when the switch was new now i just do not care - i love you indie games i love you games that in general are not afraid to be weird and deviate from stuff. get crazy with it - video games r kind of an art form. if you think about it - industry kind of shit !!! stop laying off your devs!!!!!!!!!! what the fuck!!!!!! its been bad lately even my dad (a QA tester) got laid off a game he was working rly well on because they abruptly cancelled it. ok - i don't care for most FPS games. not my thing. too stressful. not enjoyable for me that much. im more of an RPG guy but i'm open to new things i played like food maker apps when i was a kid - speaking of industry stuff crunch is another thing severely a major problem. and the thing with sag aftra approving ai voices in games. Stop!!!!!!! - i miss e3 :( was a fun thing to look forward to each year - game preservation is also a real issue. like ig i get saving money by killing the servers on old consoles but in nintendos case people still actively use them theyre not that old. kind of dumb. xbox i get it the 360's been out since 2005 but 3ds/wiiu things are younger than me chill out - HATE when good fun mobile games are cash grabby. like STFU its more annoying than anything when they make resources impossible to get without paying. whats the fucking fun in that. i'd rather it be an easy way out last resort than oh i can get like 1 gem every month by doing this BUT if i pay i can get 10 of them for like 10 dolar. like ok die - waiter! waiter! more transgender as hell games please! (i.e. goodbye volcano high. that game changed lives) - also we need more autistic as hell games and i mean canonically. and not fucking Creepy Autism Simulator - more and better accessibility settings!!! i personally dont need many myself but it's important to me that others are able to play a game without severe issues due to disability. indie games doing great abt this based on feedback though ive seen a lot of good ones - any streetpassers in the chat thats all sorry it was long but i have a lot of thoughts abt Games in general. if theres any in particular u wanna hear abt shoot me an ask!!! can be one not on here i'm open to reccomendations or just things ive gathered from people who have :]

[ninja-go-to-therapy]

Whumptober 5: Where Do You Think You’re Going?

On the Run

I finally got around to writing something for my own damn AU, and it’s not even canon! I’m great at this.

Summary: Months after escaping from Prime Empire, Scott finds himself in Paris with none other than Unagami. It doesn’t go well. (This is of course part of the Miraculous crossover that I talk about sometimes on @blursed-ninjago-ideas)

Trigger Warnings: death threats, violence, panic attacks

4517 words

The years of his life Scott had lost to Prime Empire were hard to come to terms with. Every day he had been in there, he was well aware of the passage of time, but it was still the hardest thing he’d ever gone through.

Every day he had convinced himself that he would get out soon.

That first day, he was certain he’d be out by the end of the week. By the end of the week, he thought it couldn’t possibly be longer than a month.

It had gone on for years. Thirty, specifically.

Everyone he had ever known and loved had grieved and moved on. He had missed decades with them. His friends. His family. Everyone.

And it was all Unagami’s fault — right. Unagami was actually just a stupid little child who hadn’t really known what he was doing. He was supposed to be trying to get along with him, because he needed to be a role model or some shit.

Honestly, now that the kid wasn’t actively keeping him trapped inside a game for decades, he wasn’t all that bad. Sure, he could be a bit of a brat at times, but that was a phase that all children went through.

And apparently, he lowkey — that was the word Jay liked to use, right? He was so behind on the current slang — idolized Scott. Yeah, the child who’d been trying to turn him into a lifeless, numb, empty little energy cube for years and years and years, thought he was cool. That was… something, he supposed.

He was mostly doing this because Jay had all but begged him to. Said it made him a good person and he needed to let go of his anger.

Scott didn’t know if he would call it anger. He couldn’t bring himself to hate Unagami, but that didn’t mean that he wasn’t a little… well… uncomfortable around him. Yeah, that was definitely the right word.

But that was dumb. That debacle was finally over, and even if the nightmares and trauma didn’t go away, it wasn’t like Unagami acted malicious anymore. He wasn’t trying to kill anyone anymore.

So what if every time Unagami did much of anything, Scott’s grip on whatever it may have been that he was holding tightened enough to break a bone? That wasn’t that concerning. Everybody did that. Probably.

And hey, he could have had worse problems than scratching up his hands when he was nervous or anxious or really freaked out or really scared or flashing back to that cramped dark horrible nothingness when he was just lines of code trapped in a little energy cube with no way to get in or out or anything — and, uh, everyone had a random bad dream once in awhile. Or every night.

But he could put that aside, because he was a mature adult.

So here he was, babysitting an arcade-game-turned-boy, who was surprisingly energetic and very bright-eyed. 

“When are the ninja coming back?” Unagami asked, popping up from behind the couch.

Scott barely suppressed a surprised curse. This kid was way too light on his feet. “I don’t know,” he said, taking a deep breath to calm himself.

Unagami, unlike most kids would, actually accepted that as an answer and went back to his BorgPad, tapping away at the screen.

The thing was, nobody had seen the ninja in a few weeks, now. Scott was beginning to get concerned. After Lloyd had disappeared — which had been information divulged to Scott privately by Jay, because they didn’t want the general public to know — the next few days had been spent in a raw panic. And then, total radio silence.

He hadn’t heard from the ninja since.

He hoped they were okay. He was a little too familiar with people disappearing only to never be heard from again. Well, not until thirty years after the fact.

He wasn’t bitter, not at all.

“What are you doing, anyway?” Scott asked, trying to get his mind off the subject. He was supposed to be taking care of the kid for the day, he might as well have been trying to make some sort of connection.

“Hacking the Hexagon!” Unagami said, looking up from his screen with a big smile.

Oh, that was nice — wait, what?

“Excuse me?” Scott asked, jumping over the back of the couch and crouching on the floor, where Unagami was sitting criss-cross-apple-sauce. Scott peered over his shoulder at the screen.

“If they didn’t want it hacked they shouldn’t have made it so easy,” Unagami shrugged.

Was it… was it normal for a child to be hacking into government facilities from a BorgPad?

Scott was going to go out on a limb and say no. …It was probably just an AI thing? Yeah, it was probably fine.

He watched for a moment as Unagami’s fingers flew across the screen, lines in a language Scott didn’t understand everywhere. He’d never had the ambition to learn how to code.

But damn, back before Prime Empire, people had hardly even dreamed of tech like this. 

It was kind of crazy.

Scott was going to be honest with himself. The BorgPad was cool. It had tons of features that were all put together onto one little device — texting and pictures and games and social media and more. It had everything.

But at the end of the day, it was just another reminder that Scott had missed out on so much while he’d been trapped inside the game. 

Back in his day, people had been perfectly content with “low quality” arcade games and flip phones. But now… well, people like Cyrus Borg were completely changing the world.

It was cool. But it stung.

“As long as you don’t get like, in trouble with the law or something. I don’t want Dyer buggin’.”

Unagami gave him a weird look, but slowly lowered his gaze back to the screen.

Right. People didn’t say that anymore, did they? His vocabulary was really outdated. He was really outdated.

He sighed, standing up and heading to the kitchen so he could make some tea. Jay had given him some, claiming it was really calming.

Scott could use a little of that right now.

The label was faded enough that it was basically unreadable. Scratch that, it was completely unreadable. Did tea expire…? Nah, Jay wouldn’t have given it to him if it was bad.

As the tea was brewing, Scott leaned against the counter, fiddling with his phone. It had been brand new technology at the time, and had been pretty expensive.

Now, according to Jay, it was “mega-outdated”. 

That hurt more than it should have. He remembered being so excited about this thing, but now it was nothing compared to the technology of today.

“You want some tea?” Scott asked when it was done, going for a mug.

“What does it taste like?” Unagami asked, setting aside his tablet and coming over to observe the tea with interest. 

“Uhh… I dunno, haven’t tried it yet,” he shrugged.

“I think I would like some, please.”

“Yeah, sure.”

Scott went to pour it, but as he was doing so, he found his mind wandering to wondering where the ninja had disappeared to again. It was strange that they had just —

“Is that supposed to be happening?” Unagami asked.

Scott looked down at the tea, concerned to see a bright glow spilling from the kettle. “Uh…” before he could come up with a rational answer, it brightened, all but blinding the two as it took over the room.

When it faded, there was nothing left but a broken mug on the floor.

———

What the fuck?

What had just happened?

The last thing Scott remembered had been sitting in the kitchen making tea, but now… now he was outside, near some giant metal tower, in a place he absolutely did not recognize.

He didn’t recognize the place, but he did recognize the feeling.

He was in a new realm.

The first thing he could feel was the panic.

Not again. Fuck! Not again. He couldn’t go through this another time, he couldn’t lose more of his life to a monster, he couldn’t — he couldn’t — he couldn’t breathe. He gripped the grass he was sitting on, practically hyperventilating.

“Scott? Are you alright?”

Oh first master, Unagami was here too.

“Get away from me!” he yelled, though he made no move to put distance between them. Instead, the little brat only came closer.

“You need to breathe.”

“I said get away—” Scott’s words died in his throat. Something was different. Something was wrong.

“Captain Clockwork,” a voice said, booming throughout his head.

“What’s going on?” Scott demanded.

“I am Hawk Moth. I can feel your distress. The anger, the grief, all of it. You just want things to go back to the way they used to be, don’t you?”

“Yes…” he found himself agreeing, nodding along.

“I can help you with that. I can give you the power to take back your life. All I need in return is for you to retrieve two pieces of jewelry for me, called the Miraculous. Do we have a deal?”

Scott didn’t even have to think twice. “Yes, Hawk Moth.”

——— 

Unagami was concerned.

Scott was freaking out, clearly on the verge of a panic attack, and nothing he was doing seemed to help. And then, out of nowhere, it just stopped.

And then Scott started talking to nobody, and then his body, for the briefest of moments, was enveloped in a purple so dark it may as well have been black.

When it was gone, Scott looked different. He was wearing an outfit that could only be described as old-timey-steampunk. 

It wasn’t that strange, considering that sort of stuff was perfectly normal in Prime Empire. Still, Unagami should probably make sure that Scott was okay.

“Scott?” he asked, stepping a little closer.

Scott glared at him dark enough to kill.

Wide-eyed, Unagami took a small step back. “Scott, what’s wrong? Who were you talking to? Is this a video game, like Prime Empire?”

“You would just love that, wouldn’t you?” Scott yelled. “You would just love to ruin even more people’s lives!”

“What?”

A ball of light burst into existence in Scott’s hand, which was closed tightly in a fist. He threw the light off to the side, launching at a huge television screen on the side of a building. Almost immediately, it turned into a box-style TV.

Scott smiled wickedly. “Oh, would you look at that? The power to downgrade tech. If I can do that to a TV, I wonder what will happen to a stupid. Little. Arcade game.”

Unagami narrowly dodged a blast from Scott following those words. “Scott, stop! You’re — you’re not in your right mind!”

“Oh, I’m in my right mind!” he screamed. “I’m finally free, and what am I met with but a world that moved on without me? You took away my life!”

“Scott, please, you are not thinking clearly!” Unagami said, desperate.

“Save it, you little brat! Now hold still so I can kill you!”

Unagami tripped, falling back into the grass. He scrambled back, doing his best to get to his feet, but regardless, Scott had the upper hand. He was done for.

He squeezed his eyes shut, accepting the inevitable.

Suddenly, he was being lifted, and then he was in the air. What?

He opened his eyes.

“I’ve got you!” a girl dressed in red spandex with black polka dots all over it said.

“What’s going on?” Unagami asked.

The girl looked confused. “Uh…” they came to a stop on a rooftop. It was then that a boy dressed in what looked like a leather catsuit joined them, vaulting up with an infinitely long pole.

“How do you do, M’lady?” he asked, smiling at the girl.

“Not now, Chat. I just saved this kid from the latest akuma, but I don’t think he’s speaking French.”

“Language barrier powers?” Chat asked. “That’s a new one.”

“I don’t know, from what I could tell, the akuma was speaking in the same language as him.”

“What’s going on?” Unagami demanded. “What happened to Scott?”

Chat frowned. “It sounds kind of like Japanese. But like, not quite? It sounds like Japanese on drugs.”

The girl sighed. “Wonderful description, Chat.”

“Thanks! I try.”

“Wait, I’ve heard this before! It sounds like that language the ninja speak!” The girl said.

“Oh yeah! Maybe they’re from the same place?”

Unagami tuned out their rambling, glancing over the edge of the roof to see if he could still see Scott. Luckily, he couldn’t.

Or was that unlucky?

Scott was the only person he knew here, but at the same time, he’d lost his mind out of nowhere. And now he was on some sort of evil… violent rampage… manhunt… chasing after him… well, that was uncomfortably familiar.

 “Okay, well, our miraculous allows him to understand us, I wonder why it doesn’t work the other way?” Chat glanced at Unagami. “You can understand us, right?”

Unagami gave a frustrated nod.

“Okay, well, do you know why that guy got akumatized?”

Unagami had absolutely no idea what that was, but it was clearly in reference to what had happened to Scott.

“I don’t think he does. We have to get back to fighting before this guy destroys half of Paris,” Chat said, tapping his wrist as if there was a watch there.

“Come out, come out, wherever you are!” Scott yelled from the streets below.

“Oh, hey, that was French!” Chat said. “Akuma powers are awesome.”

The girl gave him an unimpressed frown.

Various balls of light were transforming technology into older versions of themselves left and right as Scott rampaged.

“Shit, okay, Chat, can you drop him somewhere away from the akuma?”

“Sure thing Bugaboo!” Chat said with a wide grin. He held out a hand to Unagami. “Hold on tight, kid.”

———

Ladybug landed in front of the akuma gracefully, her yo-yo at her side.

“Ladybug, I presume,” the akuma said.

“That would be right.”

The akuma glared at her. “Look, I don’t particularly want to hurt you. Just hand over the earrings and the kid, and I’ll be on my way.”

“What do you want with him?” Ladybug asked, eyes narrowed. “What could he possibly have done?”

The akuma laughed, and it started low, but it quickly gained a touch of psycho, edging on hysteria. “What didn’t he do?” He yelled, his arms widely gesturing — though his right hand stayed tightly closed. That could be important. “He kept me trapped in a video game for decades. He made me live every day in fear that it would be my last! He ruined my life! He took everything from me!”

Well… fuck.

That was actually a pretty valid reason to be upset with somebody. But how on earth had that happened in the first place? Well, the details didn’t matter. She had an akuma to fight.

Against all reason, Ladybug decided to try getting through to the poor guy. “You don’t have to do this! Hawk Moth is manipulating you!”

“I don’t care!” He screamed. “He made me into Captain Clockwork! He gave me the power to take back my life!”

He threw a blast of energy at Ladybug, which she only barely managed to deflect with her yo-yo. It bounced back to what looked like a brand new car, which immediately turned into a station wagon.

Oh boy.

“Time has moved forward without me. I don’t fit into this world, so I’m gonna make this world fit me!”

She needed to figure out what to break. Whatever he was holding, that could be it.

Unceremoniously, Chat dropped from the sky, landing in a heap next to her.

“I did not get that right…” he muttered, getting to his feet with some difficulty. “What’s the plan, M’lady?”

“I don’t know, but I think the akuma is in whatever he’s holding. We need to get him to drop it.”

“May I offer a distraction in these trying times?”

Ladybug smiled.

“Hey, the future isn’t all that bad!” Chat exclaimed, dramatically vaulting himself to be behind the akuma so that he had to turn around and his attention was off of Ladybug, while she quietly summoned her lucky charm.

“We’ve got video games! And bullet trains, and iPhones, and — ooh, we’ve got anime! It still baffles me that people ever managed to live without anime. A tragedy, really.”

Captain Clockwork glared at him. “We had video games and anime back in my day. It was good enough, it didn’t have to change!”

“That’s sort of the way of life, buddy,” Chat shrugged, batting away a blast with his baton.

“It shouldn’t be! I shouldn’t have gotten left behind!” he screamed, sending blasts of energy one after the other at Chat.

“Left behind?” Chat asked, lowering his guard slightly when the akuma, breathing heavily, stopped firing.

“That boy you stole away just a few minutes ago,” Captain Clockwork said, laughing hysterically. “He kept me trapped inside a video game, for thirty years. Thirty years! It’s not fair! It’s not fair! I’ll kill him!”

“How did a little boy trap you in a video game?” Chat asked, legitimately curious.

“He is the game! He ruled Prime Empire! He ruined my life!” 

Chat was regretting asking, because now the akuma was backing him into a corner, his fist glowing. He wasn’t sure he’d ever battled an akuma so full of pure rage before.

Chat extended his baton, sweeping it under the akuma’s feet and knocking him to the ground.

“This is so cool!” Alya shouted from across the street, filming with her iPhone.

“Alya,” Nino all but begged. “We gotta get to safety!”

“But I’m getting some great footage on this thing!”

Captain Clockwork growled, blasting violently at the pair. Alya’s brand new, expensive phone immediately reverted to a flip phone.

The way Alya screamed would have suggested someone had been murdered. “No!” she shrieked, being dragged away by Nino.

“Phones don’t need to be able to record! Just use a fucking video camera! They didn’t have to change it!” Captain Clockwork yelled, running after Alya.

That got the couple’s attention enough to start running.

Chat put himself between them, crying out when he intercepted a blast.

“Chat!” Ladybug yelled.

Chat grunted, rolling with great difficulty away from the akuma.

His baton immediately grew in length, turning into what looked like a perfectly regular, non-magical, old-fashioned baton.

“Oh fuck.”

“Hand over the ring and I won’t hurt you,” Captain Clockwork demanded.

“Sorry, I’ve got a contract,” Chat replied, using the baton as a sort of cane to help him get to his feet again.

He didn’t manage to dodge the next blast, which turned his magical very technologically advanced leather suit into a hoodie and a cheap pair of sweatpants. 

Panic gripped him, and he quickly went to feel for his mask. Oh, thank god, it was still there.

Captain Clockwork charged up another blast, but before he could use it, Ladybug grabbed Chat and swung her yo-yo, getting them both away and into a back alley.

“Are you okay, Kitty?” she asked, setting him down gently.

“I’m alright,” he affirmed. “I need to detransform, make sure Plagg is alright. Maybe when I retransform it’ll go back to normal?”

Ladybug purposefully turned around.

“Claws in,” he said.

Immediately, Ladybug could hear a low groan from her partner’s kwami.

“Here,” Chat muttered, presumably offering him some food.

“Thanks. God that really hurt…” Plagg muttered.

“It did?” Chat cried, worry seeping into his voice. “Are you okay? How can I help?”

“I’ll be fine, Kitten,” Plagg said, laughing somewhat through the now very obvious pain. “Just defeat this guy and you can buy me some extra nice cheese to make up for it.”

Chat laughed. “Sure thing Plagg. Claws out!”

Ladybug waited a moment, then turned back around. Luckily, Chat had been right, and his suit was back to normal. “Okay, so we’ve got my lucky charm, but I still don’t know how to use it. Did you learn anything about the akuma?”

“Well, apparently the kid he was trying to obliterate trapped him in a game for thirty years,” Chat shrugged. “I dunno if that’s important though.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard. He keeps screaming about it every chance he gets. But as long as we free the akuma, he’ll be fine. Did you happen to see what he was holding?”

“It looked kind of like a phone, but like, one of those really old flippy ones. Like the ones they used in High School Musical!”

Ladybug sighed. “Well, that’s something. Actually, my lucky charm is a flip phone.”

“That’s weird… think he’d like that?”

“Wait! I have a plan.”

———

Meanwhile, Unagami was hiding behind a trashcan as Scott got closer and closer to his whereabouts. His heart was pounding loudly in his ears.

“Unagami,” Scott called out, his voice sickly sweet and too high in pitch. “Come out, come out wherever you are…”

Unagami held his breath, praying Scott didn’t find him.

“Isn’t it ironic?” Scott asked, something out of Unagmai’s sight crashing loudly. “The hunter becomes the prey. Bet you never thought you’d get retribution, huh?”

He hadn’t meant to ruin Scott’s life. He’d just been following his father’s instructions. He’d apologized. He thought Scott had forgiven him. He’d acted like he had.

Had he felt like this the whole time?

Angry and hurt and wanting to kill him?

And… was this how Scott had felt while trapped in Prime Empire?

Scared for his life, fearing every second that it could be his last? Keeping himself hidden away for years with the constant terror that he would be found?

The trashcan was thrown, and there was Scott.

“Found you.”

“I’m sorry—” Unagami said.

“Save it! Sorry doesn’t make up for the lost time! Sorry doesn’t make up for the fear I lived in! Sorry doesn’t fix things!”

He charged a blast.

Out of nowhere, a bright blue tornado threw Scott across the street.

It slowed to a stop, revealing none other than the blue ninja. “Unagami?” he said, bewildered. “How are you here?”

“Why are you defending him?” Scott screamed. “He trapped you too! He took all of your friends! He hunted you down like a wild animal! Aren’t you angry?”

“Scott? Jay cried, even more bewildered than before. “What the… wait, but Unagami is just a kid! Sure, he caused a lot of pain, but it wasn’t his fault! And he’s done all he can to make it right!” “That’s not good enough!”

“Ice to see you!” Zane yelled, dropping down from the rooftop.

Scott growled, charging a blast of energy. “Just let me kill the little brat! He’s not human! He’s not a person! What difference does it make?”

Unagami froze.

Scott… didn’t see him as a person? All this time?

He thought they had been bonding. He had thought… well, he hadn’t thought they were friends, exactly, but he had at least thought… 

It was true that he wasn’t human, but Unagami had likened himself to Zane. They weren't human, but they were still people. But that wasn’t how Scott saw it at all. And he had never known.

Zane screamed out as he was hit with a blast. The light encompassed him, and suddenly he was left with rusty copper skin.

Unagami’s eyes widened in horror.

“I — I — I — do not feel — Jay — I cannot — what is happening?” Zane stammered, his voice box glitching heavily.

“I can downgrade tech,” Scott said, laughing darkly. “You’re tech.”

“Scott, this isn’t you!” Jay attempted. “You’re better than this!”

“I don’t want to be better than this!” he yelled. He threw Jay to the side, completely knocking the boy unconscious.

With Zane unable to even move, Unagami was about to die.

“I never meant to hurt you,” he said.

“Hurt doesn’t care about intention.”

In what was either the best or the worst timing ever, the boy from before — Chat — waltzed over to them casually. “You were right, Captain Clockwork!” he exclaimed loudly. “Old technology is better! I’m just surprised that you didn’t notice I took your phone!” he said, waving around an old flip phone.

“What?” Scott — Captain Clockwork? — gasped, opening his fist. “No you didn’t, it’s right here?”

But then it wasn’t. Ladybug’s yo-yo string wrapped around it, and yanked it hard.

“No!”

Ladybug snapped the phone in half easily. “No more evil-doing for you, little akuma. Time to de-evilize!” she declared, catching the butterfly — Unagami wasn’t even going to ask why a butterfly had come out of Scott’s phone — easily. “Gotcha!” she set the butterfly free, and in a stark contrast to the previous shade of sickly purple it had been, it was now a pure white. “Bye bye, little butterfly.”

Scott fell to the ground, his new avatar — or whatever it was — dropping.

“Miraculous ladybug!” Ladybug shouted, throwing the fake phone into the air. A swarm of butterflies took over, somehow undoing all the damages that Scott had caused.

Honestly, it was far from the strangest thing Unagami had experienced recently.

———

Scott came to on the sidewalk. Hadn’t he just been near some big metal tower thing? And how had he blacked out in the first place? What the hell?

“What… what happened?” he groaned, unable to get to his feet. 

Zane — when had Zane gotten here? — said something in what sounded like another language.

“Everything’s alright now, sir!” a girl dressed as what looked something like a superhero said, smiling gently at him. “You don’t know what an akuma is, do you?”

Again, Zane repeated her question, this time looking at him. Ah, he was the translator.

“No…?”

Her and a boy in a leather catsuit shared a look.

“A bad man called Hawk Moth took advantage of you,” the boy explained, reaching out a hand and helping Scott to his feet. “You were feeling some kind of negative emotion, and he used that to turn you into a supervillain.”

A supervillain? What kind of negative emotion could he have been — 

He spotted Unagami, who was staring at him in nothing short of terror from against the brick wall of a building. Oh yeah.

“What did I do?” 

“Nothing that couldn’t be undone,” the girl assured. “All property damages have been magically repaired, so you don’t have to worry!”

“It’s not the property damages I’m worried about,” Scott muttered, looking at Unagami, guilty all but stabbing him through the heart. The kid looked traumatized.

Before anyone could say anything else, Unagami ran. Jay immediately went after him, but the others stayed behind.

Scott knew that if he went, he would only make things worse. “Please, just… what did I actually do?”

By the end of the recap, Scott had sunk back to the ground. 

There wasn’t really a way to fix this, was there?

[risingsouls]

Recruited: Chapter 14

[Alright! We’ve officially made it to the boys heading off to Earth! I took some creative liberties with the scene in which they find out about Raditz’s death and the dragonballs, as well as making better sense of how they can just...fuck off for a year without permission basically? IDK it’s bothered me for a long time and I found a fun way to work around and fix that, among making better sense of a few other minor weird inconsistencies in canon!

That said, the chapters from here on out MAY look a little different. Canon shit will be glossed over more, as I’m not here to just completely re-write out canon scenes. Obviously some are going to be done, but not all. Additionally, we will probably be in Nabooru’s perspective more often than not, but I haven’t fully decided. It’s either mostly Nabs with a few Vegeta only chapters here and there OR I’ll do like I did with the Conversations project and write both of their perspectives at once. BUT this is just me speculating and giving fair warning :3.

As usual, you can read the rest of the fic and other things over here! Thanks to all of you who consistently like and read this and enable my dumb ass :’3]

Vegeta

The next few months sped by, fueled by near nonstop work assigned to the pair of Saiyans. They finished one purge and moved to the next before they could catch their breath, and for it, Vegeta was glad. Through all his effort to maintain normalcy and pretend nothing had changed proved difficult in any stretch of downtime. The upset of Nabooru's promotion threw a hefty wrench into an already flimsy plan, robbing him of the only competent training partner who could begin to pose a challenge and that he could trust not to squeal when it came to his true motives. 

Trust. The very thought of the word made him want to scream. Dismantle his pod piece by piece with him inside it. Until she stepped to Frieza's side that day and reprimanded him for sending Raditz off to Earth like he was some child, he didn't realize that he had developed a modicum of trust in her. Further than that moment they shared behind closed doors, the playful, silent agreement that he did trust her. Despite his denial of it and little thought given the moment after. The situation had him questioning even Nappa's loyalty. When would the general and the man who all but raised him turn on him? Would he ever hear from Raditz again, or had the coward used his supposed brother as an excuse to make an escape?

A lesson learned the hard way, as all of them seemed to be for him: trust no one, no matter what. Only power and strength mattered in the end. Both things he needed more of to realize his plans.

The pod's AI system clocked their arrival at their destination at ten minutes, jolting him from his perturbed thoughts for just a moment. He ignored whatever comment Nappa made about finally getting to stretch his legs and informing Nabooru of their arrival on Arglin. Another ridiculous stipulation put in place by Frieza after their meeting: check in when you land and check out when you leave along with at least one daily report if the job lasted more than a single day. All of which he left to Nappa because he couldn't guarantee how his temper would fare just hearing the Gerudo's voice. Because he couldn’t stand to be out of the loop, he still listened in on their conversation, silently seething and left in a worse mood when they ended the call. The times Zarbon had to step in for her due to her healing from her injuries sustained in training were almost a blessing, the amount of irritation in hearing the pompous general’s voice at normal levels that didn’t have him ready to delete an entire solar system. At least he could take solace in her getting her ass soundly handed to her once in a while; as expected, Zarbon and Dodoria didn’t seem to be holding back on her.

Time and space had given some room to reason when it came to her, however. With perhaps a smidgen of prodding from Nappa, he did realize his claims of her ratting him out to achieve her new position were unfounded, if for no other reason than he still lived. Frieza would have killed them on the spot, even Nabooru for not telling him sooner. But it did little to soften the blow and he viewed it as a betrayal for he could only surmise she was doing some dealing behind his back to get there, Frieza's ridiculous reason be damned. Or perhaps he more accurately would only allow himself to surmise as much. It was easier to be angry with her and view her as a sleazy, spineless worm who wanted to climb the ranks at any cost rather than the more personal betrayal that dredged up a murky swamp of emotions he didn't want to feel let alone combat.

The pair of pods touched down on the planet's surface amidst what appeared to be jungle terrain. Vegeta climbed out and pressed the button on his scouter to begin a full scan of the planet's inhabitants. As the reports suggested, the highest power levels would barely pose a threat to Nappa, let alone him, even when it came to its army. Another quick mission and onto the next.

An incoming message interrupted his train of thought, and Raditz's name flashed across the red glass. He pressed the button, watching as Nappa grumbled and did the same. "What is it, Raditz?"

"Months away and this is the greeting I get?" Vegeta growled and Raditz clicked his tongue. Bold with so much distance between them. "Whatever. I've landed on Earth. I have yet to detect a single power level worth noting. One of them tried to shoot me with some archaic weaponry, though."

"So your weakling brother is dead?"

"I gue--hang on. There's one. Still not much, but I'll check it out."

Vegeta rolled his eyes. "Keep the line open for us. We have work to do and I'm not in the mood for your pointless interruptions."

He supposed that at least put to rest his suspicions of Raditz deserting.

"Least the runt made it," Nappa commented with a yawn and stretch. "So, half the planet each like we've been doing?"

"Fine." Vegeta's boots lifted from the ground. "No stopping off for a damn drink this time. If I have to pick up any slack for you, I'll finish the job myself, destroy your pod, and leave you here. Got it?"

"How did you even--?"

"Smell, Nappa."

"Shit…" He rubbed the back of his neck. "Alright, all work, no play. I'll meet you back here."

Vegeta nodded. Blue-white aura surrounded him and he took off, heading toward the first large cluster of power levels.

--------------

Cities razed and reduced to rubble. He met the resistance of the armies and, instead of dealing with them with a large-scale blast, he decided to bring the fight to them. He crushed bones and punched holes through anyone stupid enough to engage him head on. Obliterated whole squadrons at point blank range. Laughed in the faces of those who begged him for mercy or claimed him a monster. An outlet for his pent up rage, the aggression spilling out of him on the weaklings unlucky enough to live on a planet set for purging and, worse yet, assigned to him. In the moment, he forgot all about Frieza and Nabooru, his quest for vengeance. He was a warrior, a hunter on the prowl. The prince of all Saiyans who answered to no master but himself.

The last soldier's head crushed beneath his boot, he flicked blood from his gloves and wiped it from his face. All the while he had been tuning in and out to the feed from Raditz and his mission on Earth, occasionally chuckling at his stupid jokes or misplaced bravado. He had located his brother after all, a failure in his mission with the planet still fully populated and at peace. Vegeta surmised Raditz ran into trouble with him and another fighter. He took a moment to listen to Raditz beg for Kakarot to release his tail and snorted at the idiot's misfortune and lack of foresight to train his tail so it no longer posed such a weakness. 

He tapped the button on his scouter. It beeped throughout the scan but ultimately only picked up a handful of signatures across the planet on Nappa's portion. His work complete, he tore through the sky and back to their pods.

By the time Nappa returned, Vegeta had stoked a small fire with the trees their pods felled upon landing. He snapped a couple of limbs off a few corpses and jammed a spit through them, leaving them to roast over the fire when hunger gnawed at his belly. When Nappa reached out for one of the spits, Vegeta slapped his hand away and ordered him to get his own.

The sounds of combat over the scouter halted. He could hear the sound of Raditz struggling against some sort of restraint. A voice he didn't recognize ordering a "Piccolo" to attack. His cohort pointing out that the owner of the previous voice couldn't possibly dodge some attack while holding him and soon trying to talk his way out of what appeared to be certain doom. His cohorts agonized screams followed by a bout of silence.

Vegeta's expression fell, tightened. He tore into the arm he plucked from the fire, ignoring the excessive heat in his mouth. They didn't lose. Even Raditz found ways to beat the odds. Earth was meant to be filled with weaklinga and for Raditz to find his end to such lowlifes...the stick snapped in his grip, his meal dropping to the ground with a thud. It was embarrassing. To Raditz. To him.

He snatched up another roasted limb. Pained and rasping, Raditz's voice sounded in his ear again. Answered by another that he vaguely remembered from the preceding fight and announcing the final attack. Raditz's killer, then. The Saiyan claimed they would all perish when his comrades came to avenge him (had he not been in such a sour mood, Vegeta would have laughed), to which the other replied that this Goku would have the last laugh. His friends would wish him back soon using something called the dragonballs.

And then it clicked. These dragonballs granted a wish as impossible as bringing the dead back to life. Could they grant any wish? Could this be the answer he was looking for to his Frieza problem? His pulse quickened and his mind raced with possibilities.

“Shit...can’t believe Raditz is dead,” Nappa mumbled at last.

Vegeta scoffed. “The only reason it’s shocking is because that planet was supposed to be full of weaklings. Otherwise, with how weak he was himself, it was only a matter of time.” He ripped another chunk of meat with his teeth and wiped his mouth with the back of his glove. “I’m far more interested in those dragonballs they mentioned.”

“Huh? Oh yeah, that’s right.” He rubbed his chin in thought. “Said you could make a wish with them.”

“Precisely. We’ll force Kakarot and his friends to hand them over and make a wish of our own.”

Nappa perked up. “Hey, and we can bring Raditz back.”

“Don’t be stupid,” the prince snapped, frown deepening at his cohort’s shock. “Raditz was weak and I won’t waste a wish on a weakling like that.”

Vegeta fought the urge to roll his eyes with how Nappa blinked, his good mood and a dim light of potential hope holding his annoyance at bay. If they could pull this off, Frieza and anyone else who stood in his way would become nonissues. “How does immortality sound to you, Nappa?”

“Eh, immortality?” Realization slowly dawned over the former general’s features, smirk resurfacing at last. “Yeah, that doesn’t sound too bad at all. We’d be unstoppable.”

“Now you’re getting it.” Vegeta stood. “Immortality doesn’t suit the weak, anyway. Raditz would only get in our way in the long run.”

Nappa followed his lead. “Guess you got this all figured out, huh?” He paused and folded his arms over his chest. His confident grin faded once more. “You think we’d get clearance for that trip? We’re further out now than when Raditz took off.”

In his mounting excitement, the thought slipped his mind. The snap decision to go without reporting to his betters or awaiting permission, while more tempting on the precipice of immortality, could prove detrimental in the long run. He had no doubt that, if Frieza caught wind of the dragonballs, he would seek them out for himself. But by the same token, if Frieza hadn't heard the transmission already, keeping quiet about a flight to Earth without word cast suspicion on the entire trip regardless. He needed a way to get permission to go to Earth while keeping his true intentions secret until it was too late for Frieza or his cronies to do a thing about it.

A growl rumbled in his chest, and he flipped through the options until he found the proper contact number. He had one option for it, and whether she would work with him considering their last encounter was a shot in the dark at best. He could see her refusing out of pure spite or to cover her own ass and keep him as leashed as the emperor wanted him. Naturally, he refused to tell her the entire plan. He just needed enough to convince her it was worthwhile. Specific but vague to ward off suspicion and keep anyone potentially listening in off their trail.

With Nappa keeping better rapport with their new commander, Vegeta reconsidered forcing Nappa to speak with her since, from what he could tell in their conversations, she held no ill will toward the large Saiyan. He himself seemed to have let go of the ordeal entirely, a fact that irritated Vegeta for reasons he couldn't quite place. He watched Nappa tap into the line and he felt his tongue form the order but quelled it as the familiar voice spoke in his ear:

"You're already done? That must be a record for you two."

Rage flooded him the same way it always did when he listened in on Nappa relaying his report to her or holding small, inane conversations. It seized his lungs and clamped his mouth shut. He waved a hand for Nappa to continue while he paced the length of their makeshift camp, his tail lashing behind him.

"Sure are. Just trying to keep the higher ups happy." He could feel Nappa's gaze on him but ignored it. "Planet's been purged without issue and is ready for whatever venture Frieza has planned for it."

Nabooru sighed in relief. "You make this job easy for me. I'll get to rub it in Zarbon's and Dodoria's faces. They said this one would take you at least three days."

"Bastards," Nappa huffed. "Give ‘em a good punch from me next time you train with them."

"I'll try my best."

Vegeta glared over at Nappa, urging him to get to the damn point. "Right, uh….so how's the training going? We haven't had to report to Zarbon the last few times. Thank fuck for that."

"It's going great. I'm getting stronger by the day. I can feel it."

Good. She was alone and their conversation was likely not being monitored. Nabooru and Nappa concocted a code between them to ensure the slightest amount of security for their conversations. The Saiyan requested how her training was going and, depending how she answered, would decide if they could speak freely or not. A casual and conversational check that wouldn't raise red flags. The positive response bode well.

"Heh, at what cost, though? You have to deal with Zarbon and Dodoria everyday." Nappa rubbed the back of his neck, once more eying the prince for guidance on what he was meant to say. "But uh...don't know if you heard yet but--"

"Raditz is dead."

Nappa blinked and silence fell on the other end of the scouter. He wondered what stunned her into silence more, hearing his voice for the first time in months due to a refusal to speak with her he made clear or the news he imparted with the barest amount of hesitation or emotion.

Finally, "Is that so?" Her voice softened and lacked its usual energy. "How? I thought--"

"Yes, we all thought. Someone down there obviously got the better of him." He returned to his seat on the log, arms folded over his chest and one leg crossed over the other. "He was caught off guard because the warriors there can lower their power levels to next to nothing. He underestimated his opponents because of it."

"I can't believe it," she breathed. He imagined her tangling her fingers in her crimson tresses, a habit of hers he observed on multiple occasions.

Vegeta tsked. "It's his own damn fault. But it could mean the planet has more potential soldiers on it than we knew. It could be worth checking out after all." He paused and inwardly rolled his eyes at the ridiculous lie he was about to spew to sweeten the deal: "Besides, Nappa and I want to avenge Raditz. No one kills a Saiyan without consequence."

The woman hummed, and the prince tapped his foot in the air impatiently. His tail thumped the log next to him in rhythm. "Fair enough. I'll see what I can do with fitting it into your work queue. Rearrange things to put you two in that neck of the universe." Vegeta smirked. "It may be a while before you can make that stop as I'll have to keep you both busy on the trip out that way."

"All the better. Frieza wouldn't understand our mission." Not the fake one, anyway. 

"He wouldn't." Another silence, save for a squeak followed by the sound of running water, droplets hitting tile. His eye twitched when his mind betrayed him with an accompanying image. "In fact, if you can keep it down to a day, two at most, I could probably get you out that way and put it in the schedule as your off days. Then, if you happen to come back with any useful data about Earth, it could just be a bonus of your time off."

Clever, though he refused to praise her for it. "They barely bested Raditz it sounded like, so taking them out shouldn't be an issue for us."

"Then I'll see what I can do. I'll send your updated queue to you once I figure it out."

"Fine." 

A press of the button and he cut the line, Nappa saying his farewell and following suit. Vegeta stood once more and strode to his pod and opened it. After every setback and years of enraging torment, his fate seemed to be turning around. With immortality on the horizon, Frieza's demise and his freedom were just around the corner. He would take back what was his and more, all that was promised him. He would take vengeance on those who wronged him and his race and said he couldn't do it. He would rise and take his place in Saiyan legend as a Super Saiyan at last.

He nodded to Nappa before sinking down into his pod, hatch closing behind him. He keyed in the coordinates of their next destination and, once his comrade confirmed he was ready, jetted off into the cosmos once more. Though his destiny excited him, he knew he would still need to exercise patience. He couldn't afford to screw up this close. At least his time under Frieza had offered him that, his entire life spent awaiting the perfect moment to strike. What was a little bit longer?

[jacscorner]

Pokemon All-Stars: A Fan Region/Game/Alternate Universe Idea

I like watching and rewatching Original Pokemon Game/Region videos. Like Mr. Buddy's "What if X was a Pokemon Region" and stuff like that. I wanna make-or, I guess, write-my own. Since Regions are kind of a character all their own and I'm a Wannabe Character Artist, I wanted to try and make one my own.

I've got no skills in coding, pixel arts, or anything, so this will forever be just some kind of dumb fanfic that sometimes incorporates Game Mechanics to justify things if it were able, for some Godforsaken reason, 'stolen' for a game. Cause, in 2021, no idea feels too big or too dumb. And, uh, trust me, this'll be a dumb fanfic of an idea. So be aware for the subpar writing talents of some wannabe writer who doesn't know shit.

Small disclaimer though:

>This region is being made with the intention that every extra feature will be available in it. Z-Moves, Regional Variants, Gygantamax, Mega Evolutions, and maybe some things I've forgotten. This probably won't matter cause it's just a dumb fanfic plot bible with mechanics peppered in. Competitive balancing be damn! Pokemon Fans can create their own balance! That's what the Battle Simulator is for! In fact, if this was a real game, then it'd have a Battle Simulator like Showdown built into it.

>This is an open source Fanfic Bible. You can take this idea and run with it if you want. You can omit all my bad ideas even!

>I won't be making my own Fakemon. I don't like a lot of Fakemon that exists out there and, trust me when I say this: I am no better than them. In fact, I'm fucking worse.

>If this WERE a game, it probably WOULD still have to cut some Pokemon. I doubt that kinda, and I won't get into why I think dexit was dumb personally, cause it doesn't really matter. But, like, my fan game/fanfic will have a lot of shit going on in it. So, like, realistically, there would probably need to be a cut, if not for data, than just cause there's a lot of work to do as is. But, like, again, under the context of a fic, this wouldn't be an issue.

>With THAT said, I'd want this game to have a Gen 2 Sprite aesthetic. My fangame, don't care if ya'll don't like that.

>I'm probably gonna copy a LOT of stuff from other Fangames I've played. My shit memory probably won't allow me to remember what I'm biting from what, so be free to call me out whenever. Cause if I stole the mechanic, I probably liked it the game. And if not, well, I'd like the recommendation.

Fuck, this was long already. The rest is under the cut, so, like, if you're already turned off, you can stop reading. I understand. I'm kind of a windbag.

Okay, so how many of you guys have seen this picture on the internet? It's a picture of a ton of Pokemon regions all...basically stitched together, since not only could this never be canon, but this goes beyond the size of even most open world games today. But this was the inspiration for this project. The map probably wouldn't, and probably couldn't, look like this, but it perfectly sums up what I'd want out of this game. Thus, it'll be our placeholder.

Our hometown of Capricorn Town is home to Professor Chestnut, and you, her faithful assistant, are about to set off on a Pokemon adventure of your own! The Professor is encouraging you to see the region of Sidus for yourself and is even willing to give you a Starting Pokemon!

Starting Pokemon

Now, if I'm not making new Pokemon, which Starter will it be? Well, the game will have the data for all the starters and will randomly select a Grass, Fire, and Water Type for you to choose from. Those will be your starters, with the option of also choosing Pikachu, Eevee, and Riolu, the two mascot mons...and Riolu, who is kind of a mascot mon, but a lesser one.

Let's say for this example, your options are Torchic, Piplup, Rowlet, Pikachu, Eevee, and Riolu. And, uh, get used to the words 'random' and 'generator', those are our keywords.

Anyway, once you get your pick, there'll be some kind of tutorial mission the Professor will send you on. This will introduce you to two very important things;

1. One of your Rival.

2. An Evil Team Grunt.

Rivals?!

Now to start getting into why this game might still be pretty big still be big despite the sprites on modern consoles.

Each of your Rivals would be one kid from each region of the 8 Mainline Games from Kanto to Kalos. How this'll be decided is that each pair of kids will be plugging into a generator and will pick between either the boy or girl version.

Ex. Brendan and May both cannot be in the game. Instead, they'll be plugged into this generator. Let's say the generator fell onto May. She'll be one of your Rival. Repeat this process 7 more times until you have 8 Rivals sprinkled throughout the world, each one given a defined personality and better AI to make them harder trainers to fight.

May will have one of the Hoenn Starters, sans Torchic. Regardless of whether or not Protagonist-San picked Torchic, May will either have a Treecko or Mudkip, again, chosen at random per kid. Whichever Starter you picked, your first rival will have a starter that beats yours. So, let's say moving forward, May has a Mudkip and you a Torchic. The other kids will have random starters of the various regions they originally hail from.

Anyway, your rivals will wander the overworld. If they see you, they'll battle you on sight. If they lose, they'll be gone after the next time you turn the game off. They won't battle you again until they respawn, but you can hang out with them. In fact, you can even recruit them to be in your party for a few days and they'll follow you around and just generally be your friend. It'll make every battle a double battle, but they'll battle you again before their timer runs out, so be prepared!

BANG! BANG! ENTER! Team Wild!

The two of you will have to face off against Team Wild! They have a Cowboy theme to them, using a mix of Ground and Steel-Types, with a few Pokemon being added in for good measure like the Ponyta Lines, Cacnea Line, and Remoraid. Cause...it's a gun.

They're an outlaw gang, they're rough and tough (or, at least, a mild threat) and will always throw down when they spot ya. Something I'm just sniping from JelloApocalypse is that they'll appear sporadically and act as Timed Events across the map.

You and your new Rival beat them and send you packing. I'd imagine May and the other Rivals would mostly be friendly, but I'm sure there's one or two that'll just be jerks to you. Regardless of personality, they'll be pretty tough and programmed to skill with you. Your strongest mon you have on hand when you fight them will be the level their entire team.

With your tutorial done, the world is opened up! Your mom gives you your running shoes, some Pokeballs, and your...I don't know, PokeCelular or something, just the regional gadget that does a bunch of stuff. From holding your map to holding your VS Seeker.

The PokeCelular will also give you notifications on where Team Wild are! You can choose to ignore the events, but if you do, then they'll start to appear in the overworld know and will get progressively stronger.

A Balancing Act

This game will be an open world, 8-Bit Sprite Game for you to explore after you leave Capricorn!

So how do we balance that?

Well, we got our Rival out of the way already, so let's move on. Gym Leaders will have a pretty linear progression. However, regardless of which Gym you tackle first, they'll all be at the same level.

It doesn't matter if you decide to go across the map and battle the Bug Gym, he'll stay at Level 10, just like the Normal Gym. Whe you get the second badge, they'll all jump to Level 15. NPC Trainers will follow the same progression; the higher your badge number, the stronger the number of Pokemon they'll be.

Wild Pokemon will also get stronger. The more badges you get, it'll attract stronger wild Pokemon because they'll see you're stronger and will come out more.

The overworld will also have various dungeons in them that'll be Level Locked. Say, you go through a forest and you're just trying to reach the end of a maze. The Trainers and Pokemon will function the same as I've mentioned before. But, you can decide to go deeper into the dungeon. These Pokemon will be level locked, usually something of a high level, because this is a more dangerous part of the dungeon. But, there'll be some goodies down there, like rarer Pokemon and some kind of really rare and good item like a TM or something.

How will you traverse? Well, first of all, HMs? They're semi-back. BUT, instead of having to deal with teaching Cut to a Pokemon, you just need the move Cut and a Pokemon that can use the move and you'll be able to use Cut. A few other Pokemon that are reasonable candidates, but don't get cut, will be allowed to do this too. Like, Gallade can use Cut. It can't learn the move, but just holding the HM will get the job done.

Controversial opinion, but I think I've always liked the idea of HMs. On paper, they give you a reason to explore the world and go back to areas you couldn't before for goodies and make for a good way to get off dungeons until you get the needed item. Even something like Cut can be used to open up new areas for exploration for your squad of mons.

BUT, well, HMs suck. As moves, they suck save for, like, 2...MAYBE and they're only for, like, a handful of areas. You either hand them out as evenly as possible, forcing mons to take moves you don't wanna use, or you just get an HM Slave or two to use 'em all. But like they, they serve their function and all you need is the Pokemon in question and NOT teach them the move. If you need a Move Deleter just so people aren't stuck having to use Rock Smash for three towns, then there's a problem with your RPG. Imagine playing Final Fantasy and you had to give your Fighter the Bronze Axe to get through a forest and still had to fight with it, even though you got a +12 Silver Sword! It's no wonder people hated these things! But I don't think getting rid of them and introducing Rental Pokemon was a good solution either and adds a different, albeit less intrusive problem.

Gym Leaders

So, how do Gym Leaders work?

Much like your rivals, they'll be randomly generated. Let's say, hypothetically, there's a pool of 60 Gym Leaders and Elite Four members. The game will randomly generate 16 to be Gym Leaders. The generator will have some kind of complicated math (at least, too complicated for me) so that you don't have more than 2 gyms of the same type. (Example: Misty and Nessa might be Active Gyms, Siebold can't be selected for a Gym cause the Water Slots are taken).

As a trade off, some Gyms might have special conditions before you can challenge them. Like, if you got stuck with Koga as a Gym Leader, than he'll only let you in if you complete a nearby dungeon and help his daughter out cause he doesn't trust her to make it back on her own. Or, like, Claire's a Gym Leader, but she won't battle you unless you've collected 7 Gym Badges prior at least.

The Gym Leaders, as mentioned before, will get progressively stronger with each badge obtained. After the 8th badge, you can go and climb Victory Road, face the E4 and confront the Champion! You can keep hunting Gym Leaders, but just remember that the E4 will always be 10 Levels above the strongest gym you beat. And they'll just get stronger with every one you beat until all 16 are slain.

Another handful, let's say 8, Gym Leaders/E4 Members will be wondering around as NPC Trainers. The justification is that this big super region is in some Alternate Universe Pokemon Game that has all the Pokemon and other important trainers in it, hence why we can have a game where Roxanne and Lenora are hanging out at a coffee shop. They're not Rivals, more like stronger NPCs you can rematch and wonder the map. They're not here to be the very best like no one ever was.

I mean, I'd like, like, 10-20 instead of 8 extras, but let's not get TOO greedy...yet...

Elite Four

And now, it's time to flip the script. Cause if E4 members can be Gym Leaders, then who are the Elite Four?

Easy. The Rivals.

All the Rival characters will be put in a random generator as well. The four that are chosen. You can have an Elite Four made up of Wally, Marnie, Hau, and Barry and you gotta deal with it.

This is excluding Brendan and May, Blue, and Calem and Serena. Anyone else is fair game.

Champion

So, the Champion. Who would it be in this? There was a funny idea I had, but this is a Pokemon Game. So there would be two versions. We'll call them Pokemon Dawn & Dusk. The difference between these games is the game Champion!

Benga would be the Champion of Pokemon Dusk, the grandson of Alder! His final Team will include Volcarona, Garchomp, and Dragonite, Pokemon he used in Black and White. I'd also include Scrafty, Rampardos, and Golurk, Pokemon used against you in White Treehollow and Black Tower areas.

Meanwhile, the Champion of Pokemon Dusk will be Zinnia, the Lorekeeper! Her team would include the Goodra, Tyrantrum, Altaria, Noivern, and Salamence she used in her original team, with her plucky Whismur sidekick becoming an Exploud and her ace.

You would've met them in the beginning of the game and would've showed off a bit by helping you with Team Wild before. They'll pop in and out throughout the game, at first amused by your tenacity, but not wanting a rookie like you to get hurt. But if you keep bonking Team Wild, they'll be impressed with how strong you are.

The show up to chat again when you beat 8 Gym Leaders, and will pop in if you White Out to give you some advice. White Out three times and they'll feel bad for you and give you an egg. Benga will give you a Larvesta Egg and Zinnia a Bagon Egg.

EXTRAS

So I don't got a lot of ideas for the Post Game, but there is one idea I thought would be cool if, if after you defeat the champion, they give you a call. They'll tell you that there are strong trainers wondering the Overworld and to be careful.

Because dotting the overworld will be Champions passed and proper! Cynthia, Blue, Lance; all of them are rocking Lv 100 Teams and are out for blood. They won't challenge you, but if you talk to them, there will be no backing out of the battle! You come with your A-Game!

sI'm not exactly in love with the idea of Team Wild. Maybe the Evil Team should go full fanservice and just be Team Rainbow Rocket. Or maybe go half-and-half; having past Evil Team members and leaders walk around in cowboy gear and acting as Team Wild executives.

I'd also would love Tournaments. Like, maybe that could be a weekly event in some town, they'll how tournaments and the characters that aren't designated as Gym Leaders and such will attend. Maybe there's a cash prize, maybe you'll win Pokemon Eggs of rare, guaranteed shines, or maybe you'll get some kind of important quest items.

Yeah, I want quests! All sorts of side quests! And can't forget what I'd do with Legendairs;

If you know Bengal's team, you'll know he's got the Lati Twins. I don't like that personally and would prefer Legendaries to be Super Bosses. Like, you gotta do a lot to find them. And when you do, their stats are boosted and they become an Uber Boss! You catch them in a cutscene after you beat them!

There's also just a ton of characters I didn't get around to or really have a place for. Emma, Looker, N, and the Stat Trainers all come to mind. Overall, I'd want them to pepper the world as well, but don't have anything to say except this: Pokemon has made a lot of memorable characters. Both good and bad. And this is probably my dream Pokemon Game; one where you can hang out with your favorites

[loser-brain]

Hey, I refuse to read all of this. It's dumb. Like, please for fuck sake learn to type right. This type of style of writing is nauseating plus takes up so much space to make it look like an essay. It is scattered and hard to follow. So, stop with the aggressive spacing and type normally. You don't have to click enter three times to separate your points. Just make good points instead of confusing the readers.

You make this argument into a debate. The way I'm typing is not a debate kind of deal. I'm shutting it down by saying "No, fuck you, our right is protected whether you like it or not." End of story.

When I said "SLAUGHTER ANOTHER BIGOTED IDIOT IN THE CREATIVE FIELD" I'm talking about my post about the 10% vs 80% which you can read the post here.

You are all over the place with your argument. Bringing up Nazis?? Excuses me?? You are comparing me to fuckin' Nazis. Are you serious. No, you can't defend that, because you read this so many times and thought "A yes, this person is definitely a nazi because of how they mistreated this person." EXCUSE ME. Did I call the commenter a terrorist?? A dictator because they decided to say dumb shit in allowing our work to be taken if not updated within a year.

"The problem is, saying "getting an Ai generated ending for your long lost love Fanfic X, Y or Z" doesn't immediately ring as evil."

No, it does ring evil. And no, I don't care if you decided to use the argument "Well you took out the words "doesn't immediately..." therefore it doesn't immediately seem bad at first." That is our right, our copyright, our fanwork in which we took the time out of our day to write. To make a story. It does matter because I care about my story and my work. I don't give a damn if it's just a fanfic because I wrote that. I wrote that story and I'm not about to let it become Ai food.

Use your damn imagination. Stop being lazy in coming up with ideas instead of feeding our hard work that we do in our free time to a machine.

"...Insults, however charming, satisfactory or otherwise entertaining on the moment, are not helpful (and will subsequently not receive any thank you)..."

I don't want a thank you from you.

I can already see what you are. You only see us creatives as food for the Ai. To let them take our work, our free time, OUR LABOR. You don't get the right to speak for us all and say shit like "Yeah! I feel so flattered that you SHOVE my work in an Ai, I feel so charmed at the fact that YOU DON'T WANT TO GUSH ABOUT MY WORK BUT FORCE MY WORK DOWN AN AI THOART ONLY FOR IT TO MINIC MY WORDS AND MY STORYTELLING STYLE."

At least, that person, the commentator, learned what they said was wrong. And have learned, (hopefully) to care more about their work.

You, you are stupid. Thinking, that my post, was a debate post. We have talked about Ai and the art community has talked more about Ai. And you know what happened. in that community. You wanna know, why, so many people are against Ai.

Because the Ai tech bros, cyberbullied so many artists when they spoke out and told their fanbase "Hey, I don't want my art in an Ai machine." The Ai tech bros thought it would be funny and shove their Ai-generated images of the artist's work in their faces and say along the lines "I made it better for you."

There is no debate. I'm shutting it down. We have our rights and I'm not about to lose them again all because people can't imagine in their heads about the story they read.

If you have not seen this post goin' around about not giving permission to allow people to take your work and put it into an ai against your wishes. There's the post.

Let's talk about this user's close-minded brain that they left in the replies.

The fact that they believed they are saying "Facts" is pathetic. They even answer a question from anon who believes they are saying facts.

Hey come here, have you ever heard of... plagiarism? It's a fancy word for theft. Especially in a creative field mostly used in writing.

My fellow lovelies, it's that time again.

THE TIME HAS COME FOR ME TO SLAUGHTER ANOTHER BIGOTED IDIOT IN THE CREATIVE FIELD >:D

Ai aka Artificial intelligence, what the hell is that? Glad you ask, I don't know, but in simpler terms, it's code that replicates and learns. The more you interact with it and correct its errors the more it will realize and perfect its code. IT'S NOT ALIVE. It's simply following a code that involves something along the line like us which is growth.

Using ChatGPT for fun is alright. Using ChatGPT or OpenAi to finish a story that is not yours... is not alright. That is where a line has been crossed. A line that violates Fair Use.

And since the majority of AO3 users are not putting their work behind a paywall, it still falls under fair use.

OH but it's a fanfic, we can do whatever we like with it!

WRONG. Fan-fictions falls under copyright laws. So in other words. Y'all are violating our rights by putting them into an Ai. get fuck.

BOOM! BANG! AND HERE'S ANOTHER THING! Ai, in the US, have to have the permission of the original author to have their work used in the testing to improve the Ai ability.

SO GET FUCK AGAIN

Okay now that the facts are done. Like I'm serious, it's done, got any questions, shoot me an inbox. Now we dissect this person's close mind dumb reply.

FYI, everyone is like, destroying this person. I'm serious, oof I do not want to be this person. I still kinda remember the last person that spoke dumbness, but about art. Remember that person, damn, they really got my blood boiling at like... oh hey, it's 3 in the morning... This must be fate.

SO LET'S BEGIN!

"I mean alright but at the same time, Maybe it's a sign you should finish your fanfictions 🙃"

Damn, someone has a lot of time on their hand. And as someone who does has a lot of time on my own hands, I still can't fully finish a fic. Wanna know why, because I'm tired. Like there would be days where my brain goes somewhere and I'm left with trash. I'm feelin' trashy, I'm feelin' moody, I'm even feelin' lost. It's normal to feel empty and want to fill it but don't have the energy for it. So maybe instead of being an ass to people and forcing them to finish something they can't at the moment. How about, maybe, you should stop being an ass and let people take their time 🙃.

"Like, if a fic has been abandoned for at least over a year, I feel like it's ok"

Everyone, repeat after me, fan fiction is protected under the copyright laws.

"Cause like, you clearly aren’t gonna finish it, why should it be left unfinished?"

Who's gonna tell em'? Anyone? *sees you raising your hand in the back, ignores you* Alright, I will! So like, do you not have imagination? Like do you not just, lay there in the grass under a big tree, letting the wind touch upon your cheekbone, and just... dream about the story. Like, don't you just read a volume of a book and just, imagine what happens next. Once you are done reading that volume of the book, don't you just anticipate what happens next in the story? Don't you have those moments where you thought about whether a character was going to die or live? Whether they save the day or not? Cause if you don't then damn, that's sad. You're sad. Like shit man, I'm sad but oof, that's even sadder than me.

"Now I don't think anyone has the right to post that work anywhere cause it's not yours."

OMG, I'M SO PROUD-

"But getting an AI to finish a work that *you have no intention of finishing* isn't really wrong in my opinion."

I WAS SO PROUD OF YOU AND NOW LOOK AT YOU. YOU IDIOT. Once again, say it with me now, fan fiction is protected under the copyright laws. So in other words, THEY CANNOT PUT YOUR WORK INTO AI WITHOUT YOUR CONSENT/PERMISSION. god fuckin' damn it. So close, you were so fuckin' close.

"If you are gonna finish it, make that clear"

HOW!? No, tell me how. How the fuck is someone who is using their free time to write a fic is gonna make it clear for you to understand that is their work and they get to choose whether they can work on it or not. Huh? It's fanfic, it's one thing when a users ask the author to continue the story because that is a thing that writers do. There is a group of people that would take over the fic and finish it for the author if the author just does not have time to finish it.

It's another when a user just blatantly takes it and shoves it into an Ai because AHAHAHA IT'S A FANFIC IT'S NOT PROTECT UNDER ANYTHING. WRONG BITCH IT COUNTS AS A FANWORK. Therefore it falls under fair use and copyright.

Writing is more complex to tell whether plagiarism exists in it. But we're no longer talking about plagiarism if you are just shoving it into an ai machine. You see, that is a violation of OUR copyright. OUR fair use. OUR work.

Oh but what about intellectual property? Are y'all putting your work behind a paywall? no, then it's fine. You still have the power to protect your work. So instead of believing this person thinking they are spilling facts... do a simple Google search. Is fanfiction protected by copyright law?

It's fanwork. Therefore, yes. Yes, it is.

[regrettablemeasure]

THAT BEING SAID, heres my list of criticisms for CP2077 so far because i’m not just blindly praising it. under a readmore for a few spoilers, one major character spoiler so if you’re playing don’t read this until youre finished with act 1

this isnt bringing into the account of the criticisms console players are talking about bc im on PC, but i completely agree with frustrated console players about launch being a mess.

the fact that they cut you being able to take jackie with you to go meet with meredith is really frustrating. i wonder if they lost time and it broke something because it was in the gameplay demo from a while back.

on the same vein, t-bugs ‘death’ was so sudden and fast that i didn’t even register it as her supposedly dying until v brings it up later in the level. i thought she had just gotten hurt and booted from the program. if she’s actually dead i’m going to be incredibly disappointed and its going to be one of my few genuine sour notes on the game.

the romances are laughably inserted and shouldn’t have even been part of marketing in my opinion. from my understanding it looks like they’re all sidequests and there’s only like four of them total anyways. dont bother if your v isnt into one of the two options they have and just pretend youre kissin whoever you want lol

takemuras introduction was amazing but i feel like i missed a dialog somewhere that explained why he ended up getting chased by arasaka so fast after the events of act 1. i know his motivation but am a little confused about whats going on.

in the same vein, some optional dialog choices don’t actually feel optional if you don’t want to feel like you’re missing context for whats going on. i don’t mean this in a lore way, i mean this in a basic narrative way. 

i like that v clearly has their own personality that you kinda tweak and manipulate through your own actions, like with geralt in the witcher series. however i completely understand if people were lead to believe they’d be getting COMPLETE FREEDOM and are let down by the reality of V being a slightly less mailable character. as someone who likes witcher and the dragon age and mass effect series i’m okay with my oc having a pre-ordained personality but marketing could easily have misled people to believe otherwise and thats a totally valid complaint.

i love jackie to DEATH and hes one of the most likable videogame characters ever. however i do wonder sometimes if he suffers from ‘bilingual people don’t talk like that’ syndrome. it can get kinda muddy given how translators work in this universe.

in the same vein i think some of the calls for the game being transphobic or misogynist are overblown but i feel like part of it is the game might not be properly relaying that the overly sexual, violent, objectifying advertisements in 2077 is actually part of the lore and not CD trying to be cheeky ala Saints Row. Its a crit on consumerism and how desensitized the populace of the future gets to hatred, violence, and sex that it has to be overblown to the point of ludicracy. it might not translate for someone who hasn’t taken the time to look into the lore or familarize themselves with the vibe of the series before picking up the game. YES it is incredibly gritty and dark, but thats the point. However I think that fact needed to be communicated better because it just won’t be palatable for some people. Its stuff like this that makes me think we really need content warnings ALA fanfic for... all media, really. its a good idea. i could see the ‘fuckable piece of meat’ line being genuinely terrifying for some people and it comes out of nowhere. I like dark media and content but i don’t know if the game properly conveys beforehand that this is a BLEAK. world. BLEAK. 

i also think, unfortunately, its clear the team was crunched and ran out of time for a lot of things they wanted to add into the game. i feel like tying gender to v’s voice was the most elegant solution they had considering all of the voicelines in game. not saying it’s the best solution, but i’m glad they did that rather than tie it to body type or genetalia.

that being said i wish you could have a biotic pussy or dick in this game just bc that would be some cool transhumanism. same in general i wish you could replace limbs or eventually get more cyberware options that changed how you look.

I’m glad they’re gonna fix the epilepsy trigger but I’m also surprised and disappointed no one caught that might be a problem earlier on. I wonder what play testing was like.

Also glad the dev team isnt going to be treated like the new vegas team and they’re getting their bonus regardless of the game’s review score. that’s some stupid bullshit but every publisher does that shit unfortunately.

the fact you cant change your makeup, cybernetics, or hair after the start is dumb and i hope they fix that.

the c key being for crouching AND skipping dialogue is inelegant to say the least. you can fix it in settings for skipping dialogue to be ‘hold c’ but it shouldn’t have been an issue in the first place.

ai definitely wasnt finished and it shows. largely in how theres clearly no AI driving and how cops feel half-implimented.

managing stash is CONFUSING. so is the hacking minigame until you get used to it.

it is a LITTLE apparent that you’re going to go into Cutscene Time because characters tell you to sit somewhere specific. However once you’re in those locked scenes the game is still super immersive and beautiful so it’s not too bad.

i don’t understand why youd buy a car when you have one already and a motorcycle but i’ll still probably shop around for funsies

combat definitely feels floaty but ive played bethesda games and nothing can be as bad as those so its fine for me.

i know there’s more but thats what i have so far. I’m having a great time but those are my Thots.

[turqrambles]

The Five Worst Things About Digimon World

I did it.

It took 20 years but I did it.

I finally beat Digimon World for the Playstation 1, a game that has haunted me for most of my lifetime, and I did it with a Phoenixmon, the reason why I use “Turquoisephoenix” as a handle!

This is who I used to beat the game, named after an obscure Ratchet and Clank character because that’s just how I roll. The final boss battle involved a lot of Prominence Beam spamming and med recovery floppy spamming but I did it fair and square. 

Before I get into what I thought about this game as a whole - and I do have a lot of good things to say about this game since I obviously enjoyed it enough to get to the end - I gotta talk about my least favorite things about this game. In a concise, Buzzfeed-esque list because I like writing things in easy to digest chunks.

Because, like most charming yet difficult games of the late 90′s, this game is very flawed and the flaws are pretty annoying!

1. Care Mistakes

The three emojis - Smile, Cool, and Poop.

Okay. This one - my least favorite part in the game - is going to take a bit of explanation.

First off, I don’t actually hate care mistakes existing as a mechanic. I think it’s a cute, virtual pet-y way to add a different wrinkle to evolution requirements, even if I think it’s a bit counter-intuitive to have to suddenly abuse my little companion once they reach Champion just because I want them to evolve into a floating metallic ball with a chainsaw.

My problem with care mistakes is that there’s literally no way of telling many care mistakes you have on your given Digimon. 

Literally everything else in this game is concisely recorded and easily displayed on your Digimon’s stats screen. You can see how much your Digimon weighs. You can see their Happiness, their Discipline. How much Life they have left. Their Age. Even how many poops they need to make before they digivolve into a sentient pile of feces.

But Care Mistakes? Naaaaw, you just gotta remember every single thing that you did to your Digimon from the moment it evolves in your fallible human brain. What’s that? A good portion of this game involves grinding in the Green Gym and it’s really easy to make a Care Mistake there without knowing you did so because you mashed A too fast like the stat-grinding numskull that you are? Well, that’s just too fucking bad for you, then! Enjoy not getting some of the best evolutions, you piece of shit. You stooge. You moron!

This game, multiple times: You know who I hate? The player.

Care Mistakes are such an invisible mechanic that, to this day, there are many guides with misleading info about what counts as a Care Mistake and what doesn’t, which...really stinks for a game such as this where you will be using a guide pretty extensively to get the Digimon you deserve. And you know why that is? Because we don’t get any indication as to whether or not some random event counts against you when raising your Digimon.

And honestly, having one of your main mechanics of the game being entirely invisible to the player is a terrible idea. Just put a little number in my profile that says “Care Mistakes: 0″ in there. Let me know this information without guessing.

2. The Glitches

Pictured: Something that will CRASH YOUR GAME if you try it on a physical copy.

Let me start with a disclaimer that most of the glitches I’m going to complain about were added into the game when Digimon World was localized and therefore aren’t the original intent of the developers. There are certain versions of Digimon World that are more stable than others (The English PAL version is the best version to play because of this) and, if you play this game via “certain methods”, there are patches to circumvent some of the bigger problems.

That being said! Boy! Isn’t it ironic that a game where I’m exploring the digital world is plagued with so many annoying, game-ruining glitches? Especially if I’m playing this game on a physical 20-year old copy like a dunce?

“Ohhhh...so Agumon thinks that they can block the Digimon game with their big fat Digimon-blocking head, do they?!”

The NTSC version of this game has a jukebox that will crash the game if you try to use it, keeping you from ever using a bonus feature meant to be a fun little reward for completing a certain dungeon, but that’s not as heinous as the Spanish, French, German, and Italian PAL versions of this game locking a good portion of the game to players because they forgot to make the Agumon in front of Ogremon’s Fortress an object you can interact with.

So that means, if you happened to get this game in one of four lucky countries, you can’t complete the Ogremon mission, you can’t recruit Whamon, you can’t recruit Shellmon, you can’t recruit anything tied to Shellmon’s bulletin board (which means no Vademon or Skullgreymon), and you can’t go to Factorial Town and recruit Giromon, Andromon, or Numemon. Ogremon is a key part of the Digimon World storyline and causes so many different things in the game to change, meaning that it should’ve been imperative to make sure this part of the game works!

But no. Instead this one little bastard Agumon keeps most players from finishing the game, because it starves players of those PAL regions of a bunch of Prosperity points, the main source of progression in this game. That means that Mt. Infinity and the final boss is just that much harder to unlock. It’s doable, but it’s more grueling process.

This really is a problem with the translators and really highlights a lack of general care with testing this game. Why this game was allowed to be shipped with such glaring bugs is anyone’s guess, especially in an era where you couldn’t release any patches over the Internet to fix retail versions.

3. The Monochromon’s Shop Minigame

Ohhhh....this one was so close to getting the top spot. When I first wrote this draft, this was the top spot.

Monochromon was only spared of my true ire on account of the fact that it really only exists for one part of the game (rather than being a constant problem like the Care Mistakes and the Glitches are) and you can easily cheese it by sleeping in front of the store so that you can save scum your way to victory. Like a true Digital Champion!

At one point in the game, you gotta help a entrepreneur dinosaur rhino man make a profit, because he was stupid and put his convenience store in the middle of a giant canyon next to a gaping chasm. So you play a little game of haggling, where you try to ruthlessly oversell a bunch of random items to customers until you make enough of a profit that this talking dinosaur tells you that you passed his secret test of character, abandons his store, and moves into File City.

There’s just one problem with this minigame - everything is decided by RNG.

“Get the hell out of my shop”

This minigame hates you. It wants nothing but to see you fail and to waste your time. The difference in profit margins of the three items (Meat sells for 50g, Portable Potties sell for 300g, and Medicine sells for 1000g) are so stark that, if you get too many customers asking for Meat, you might as well just reset the game and start over because it will be literally impossible to meet the requirement even if you busted the customer’s proverbial balls and squeezed every last bit out of their cutesy penguin faces.

Oh! It’s also RNG as to whether or not your customers will take your asking price or storm out of the store without buying anything!

It’s all the fun of working at retail! In a video game!

4. Three on One Battles

What you see before you is a battle system that is really fun when it’s one vs. one, manageable at two vs. one, and downright unbearable at three vs. one.

The battle system works for the most part. You don’t have full control of your Digimon (and yes, you only have one Digimon with you at one time, so you can never stack the numbers in your favor) so you shout commands at it, commands that the Digimon’s AI are pretty good at following, and hope for the best as you chuck healing items at it.

It’s not the best battle system, but it’s fun. And it definitely reinforces the whole “this is a pet you’re taking care of with its own thoughts and feelings” atmosphere that this game is going for.

However, nothing can protect your Digimon from enemy fire concentrated on them, especially if you did the thing that most players do and equipped your Digimon with the most powerful attacks that also happen to have slower cast times than the faster, weaker attacks.

What then happens is your Digimon’s Health is slowly whittled away as you are powerless to stop it, watching as your digital friend is straight up bullied by enemy Digimon as they keep falling to the ground over and over and over and over again.

The one saving grace is that Friendly Fire exists in this game so that oftentimes the enemy Digimon will damage each other in their mad dash to ruin your day, but that seems more like a band-aid than an actual fix to this system.

5. Fishing Seadramon

“Hi, kid. Let me guess - you also thought you had to talk to the Tankmon in Factorial Town in order to unlock me, huh.”

This one is a lot less of a pain than the other four and it’s only a little annoying but boy...getting Seadramon kinda sucks in this game.

It took me almost a goddamn hour to catch Seadramon. One hour of gameplay devoted to catching one fish. Just like real fishing!

I will say, besides Seadramon, the fishing minigame in this game is pretty competent. It’s just that Seadramon is very elusive, showing up at only two hours in a 24 hour day, and is a very finicky fish that won’t take your bait even if you literally placed it in front of his dumb fish face.

Don’t be fooled by this screenshot. The heart just means you have the right bait. The heart means that you didn’t actually get within range of hooking him.

IT’S RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU!!!

Seadramon is also subject to almost as many gaming myths as the Care Mistakes are, due to how elusive he is, but that’s less to do with poor communication (the game does at least explain multiple times in multiple places how to find him) and more to do with the fact that catching him is just such a goddamn chore to do that players of this game always assume they’re doing something wrong.

When in reality, Seadramon is just a picky little bitch.

Next time I discuss Digimon World, I’ll talk about things I liked, don’t worry. I just had to get all of this negativity out before discussing the full game proper.

[light-of-being]

06.03.2020

Hey look, more of me being the furthest known thing from concise

I. On conformity

The question of conformity still comes up so often. Not like, the not-being-weird type, exactly, more the “you’re doing things wrong and will end up failing at life because of it” type. Because with that type the worst outcome isn’t ostracisation, it’s them being right -- you actually ending up as they say because you didn’t listen.

I don’t, in general, have the requisite overconfidence to be like, actually, everyone but me is wrong. And well, they’re not. Their methods seem to work for them. The next thought is, well, then maybe I’m sufficiently different from them that the premises behind their advice simply do not hold. Which...idk. Feels,,,suspect. Perhaps the effect of forcing humility(? idk what specifically the word for not considering oneself special is) but I don’t,,,trust such exceptionalism (see also). 

There is the very sensible option that I’m not specifically unusual, I’m just surrounded by ‘the wrong people’ so to say. But for practical purposes, that is indistinguishable from the ‘me, specifically’ option unless I have access to ‘the right people’ (which honestly just makes it ‘us, specifically’ and I’m not sure that’s any more meaningful other than as sources of evidence for the effectivenesss of differing approaches. great, we’re all wrong together.).

I don’t trust memories and reflections as sources because they [may] have been Tainted™ by my Thoughts and Biases™. But if they were reliable, they would suggest that my approach...works for me, and that others’...does not. Fairly consistently. But what do I know. Who am I to know better. What if I’m very, very wrong and disregarding others’ input will be disastrous. Ngl, “I know what’s good for me and nobody else does so I’m just not going to listen to them at all” is pretty Peak Arrogance™.

(I gotta say here, there are actually individuals whose input has been very valuable. The question really is, then, how to identify what advice is applicable to me...but that is constrained by what I already think of how I should be, and is thus...idk. Broken. Although...I currently select roughly on the basis of ‘i judge this person to be right and knowledgeable about many such things and/or i respect their thinking, so they may also be right about this’ and then trials. The problem really comes in when such people say things that conflict with “my things”. Or people who are where you’d want to be. Consistently. That’s when you start doubting yourself even though your experience suggests you’re doing okay. Or...questioning your metrics for deciding if you’re doing okay).

If I’m happy, not hurting anyone, sustaining life successfully, and making non-zero progression towards my career, that’s pretty good, right? But is it enough?

-----

II. On...definition, I guess.

(Somewhat related to (I) but not actually the core thing I’m talking about being criticised there.) 

I read a lot of things. I know about many things. Except...those things are all over the place. I don’t often read entire books on a topic. I don’t have notable expertise in anything (relative to others in my uhh position? basically talking about level of study. also i have since noted that there is actually one thing I could say I’m an expert in: mental illness).

There is nothing specific I can point to and be like, “I did that.” The things I do don’t build up to anything concrete. They’re just...stuff.

I specify concrete because I don’t actually believe they don’t build up to anything. I think reading all sorts of miscellaneous things does contribute to me in a significant way -- but it’s in the way Ancient Greek philosophers talk about education’s contribution. Does it help me understand many things a lot better in a way that I wouldn’t be able to otherwise? Yes. Do I have anything to show for that? No.

That’s old news though.

New, is that I soon may. New is that I’m no longer really studying shit all over the show -- rather, everything seems to be converging very strongly towards one, particular subject (AI). That I spend practically all of my time and energy on said studying, to the exclusion of anything else. Literally, Chrome’s stupid-ass fucking suggested articles are all about like, 1 thing. With minor variation.

And I hate that.

Don’t get me wrong -- the content is absolutely fascinating. I enjoy studying it. Moment-to-moment, it’s all great. But... perhaps it’s a little suffocating.

Turns out, the concrete things that I was hoping for stuff to build up towards, are...defined. Definitive. They’re this and not that and they will remain this (shocker). They hold me to a particular thing, a particular identity, goal set, scope of possible trajectories. They feel like a narrowing cone of possibilities.

Idk. It’s probably a good thing (this is the relation to the first part of this post: intelligent academics who I respect keep telling me I should be specialising more and trying to do everything is going to fuck me over). It’s probably also not necessarily implied, and when I’m less busy (presumably at some point), I could branch out again. There are obviously also things I can only access through drilling down rather than spreading out.

But it also turns out that when you’re doing a particular thing and what you’re bringing to the table is not your bizarre combination of knowledge and skills...you’re expected to be very good at the thing you’re doing. And everyone who has been focused on doing one thing all along...is already way ahead.

I mean, that bizarre combination has been good. It’s also been the thing that’s putting me on this very oddly pointed path whose origins and progression I genuinely don’t know or understand. That prof did say that it was my background that would make a strong case for me to do the winter school thingie despite me not actually being at the expected qualification level. It was me wanting to do courses from the maths department that got me into the reading module. How the hell they all ended up being about the same thing, I don’t know. But now it’s terrifying.

I guess I’ve just gotten a lot of value out of being all over the place, and I’m scared of being constrained into too small a space. I also think I made that sorta... idk multidisciplinarity(??) into a substantial aspect of my identity and it feels like I’m losing that and “what makes me valuable” (dumb. see also above re: bringing to the table).

I have, for a while, been primarily valuable by virtue of difference (think: “but have you considered ___” or “oh, actually i hung out with <opposite group> and this is what they actually think *proceeds to mirror this to the other group*” or “yeah!! sociology said this thing also, we should build on that one” etc). It used to be being analytical, taking things apart. But surprise, surprise, everyone here is like that. Bringing things together is much more beneficial.

Variety is...individuality, it’s creativity, it’s freedom, it’s...idk. important to me. Consistency is threatening. 

I feel like I should preserve that specific stuff which only I would be contributing, the other sides of me that gradually fade out as I zoom closer in (see: the me that used to draw and write, as a basic example)...

...but from what I’ve just written it sounds like a bunch of this is driven by insecurity, so idk if that’s a desire worth following.

[alchemist-shizun]

As expected, Dealing with intrusive thoughts is now one of my favorites

Here I come with almost all of my reactions on the episode, even though I tagged the spoiler warnings I put everything under the cut just in case. Enjoy the emotional rollercoaster while I'll probably go and rewatch it again.

Okay kinda expected one or two of the warnings but all of them together what is gonna happen???? (Though they make sense after reading the title)

HELLO FRESH BACK AGAIN

"I'm awesome and I can do this" there goes my boy. *said boy falls flat on the floor* ...come on

I felt that yawn bc I stayed up all night waiting for the video but it dropped at 8 am, I'm an idiot who should've gotten more sleep

"help me" why is he such a mood "everything is going wrong in my life" same but YOU SHOULDN'T SAY THAT LET ME HUG YOU

They're all sinking up so fast god I missed my bois. Also the general awkwardness of Virge and Pat, greeeeat something will go wrong

Virgil just ignoring everything and touching the railing, a mood

ALSO PLEASE LET ROMAN IN THE SITUATION

SECRET SECRETS ARE NO FUN TELL ME NOW OR ELSE WE'RE DONE

wait why does Ro want to be deeply troubled- man are you okay-

LOGAN'S HERE

"your most extreme reaction is an eyebrow raise" "FALSEHOOD" "I stand corrected" omfg

"what are you ta- what are you talking- what are you talking about?" I loved that whole take it made me feel complete

"Look I barely got any sleep" this can apply to a lot of us and I love just how we're all always like "TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF" but in the end this is where we all end up anyway

Okay I'm very curious about these troubling thoughts though

"so sushi" FUCCC I DIED RIGHT THERE

"Don't act like that was an accident" "everybody, Virgil. Let's give it up for the Purp Man" these speak for themselves. Also the purp man is my new fav nickname and I'm gonna use it.

4:17 Patton is adorable bye

"if you continue to push this we're going to end up in really dangerous territory" AND THAT'S WHERE THE TENSION STARTED TO BUILD UP

great flick

"am I delirious or is this the funniest video I've ever made" I felt that

YOU HIGH-JOCKED

okay but when Thomas starts disassociating I also feel really weird like as if there was something blocking my own hearing for real?? And not just the audio edited like that?? Maybe I'm just too tired

WHAT WHO WHHH first intrusive thought making its way what is gonna happen

OH MY GOD ROMAN WATCH OUT ALSO THAT'S DEFINITELY A NEW DARK SIDE OR SMTH LIKE THAT

W HO THE FUCKLKDSL IS THAT A MOUSTACHE IS THAT GLITTER WHAT IN THE WORLD IS HE WEARING WHAT IS HE DOING THERE PLEASE- okay but he looks crazy af I like that

"-evIL" "-SHOW UP"

First time I watched the scene where Ro gets knocked out I literally just screamed "ROMAN" in a high pitched sound I was shook wtf my bOY

Patton and Thomas's yells in unison plus "YOU KILLED HIM" I just I JUST

"Ah, he's the Duke" "....... boo" AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Okay but his voice is so on point with his character portrayal he's so weird it's awesome?

SONG SONG SONG and oh goodness the visuals I can't fathom how much editing work must have gone through this, they're all so talented.

"aunt patty naked" A G AI N??

"IM GONNA WHIP YOUR BUTT"

a snaKE IT'S DECEIT oh my these silouhettes are so great this is my favorite scene

this is gonna be stuck in my head all day

THE COOL MIRROR EDIT.

god i hate him so much already but i'm super intrigued he's so chaotic the whole team made a wonderful job i'll never stop saying this

"i'm really stupid right now" just how much out of context relatable content are we going to get on this fine day?

omg the dark version of creativity, which can be associated with intrusive thoughts, that's very clever

THE JUICY STUFF DANCE

"Repression can be very bad indeed" I mean he's right tbh it leads to never solving the problem at all

GO LOGAN GO HAVE YOUR TIME TO SHINE FINALLY i missed him

"i can't hear youuuuuu" much like "I don't understand what you're saying I don't know anything about words" THE DARK SIDES ARE ALL SASSY LITTLE BITCHES

pattonnnn did a real good job

THE BRAVE HANDSOME UNBEATABLE ROMAN and mashed potatoes

"scary" and Virgil just gives Thomas a look idk I live on the little details (Im ten minutes into the vid and look how long this post already is)

GEE Remus (already using his name bc it's shorter) looking so offended at the label and then pointing out it should be a Virgil problem whAT DOES THIS MEAN IM SHAKING

WHY WOULD HE BE DECEIT AGAIN IM DYING. "Idk if you guys can tell but I'm a little silly"

"then why are you lying" no everybody I don't need angst

THE BLACK AND THE WHITE THEORY I SAW GOING AROUND good job to whoever thought of that

JOAN

the forbidden dance

INTO A BUTTHOLE WHAT IS IT WITH HIM AND BUTTHOLES

there u go thomas said it too

haters gonna hate hate hate hate hate FHDSLAKLFD

irresponsible parenting, Logan completing the parental unit of the sides

"maybe there's hope for you after all!" me looking at all my wips

REMUS' LAUGH IS PERFECT. also "BITCH WHAT IS *YOUR* DEAL"

"you've never been one to soften the truth" OH BOI HERE WE GO

"do we have some case of brain swap???" I legitly said "maybe" in unison with Patton the first time

Vee pls stop putting Thommy boy down he's having a bad time

Logan trying to put some sense into the situation is my only spark of hope for this to turn back good

REMUS IS SO DRAMATIC

That lick was ....... let's pretend it never happened

"you know who can help us with that???" DECEIT'S SONG COMING UP that was great, imagine the chaos that the duo would create

"THATS WHAT REPRESSION IS?"

gasp Remus trying to make Virgil angry at Logan shall not stand DON'T PUT THEM AGAINST ONE ANOTHER HE'S JUST TRYING TO HELP

"you all are not listening to Thomas" this is the development I needed

"you're just para-" and he cuts himself. You all know what I'm talking about. Foreshadowing probably? This happened too back then when Roman was almost calling him the same. And then Virge looks so hurt I- "thank you for being on guard" that made me want to cry idk

the whole speech Logan gave? Pure gold. That was perfect.

HE SAID FIGURATIVELY *CLAP CLAP CLAP*

"UH RECORD SCRATCH?"

"does this make me cool?" djslagrkglhf also the teeth thing right after what the

... the deodorant eating ...

DUKEY

The first time I watched I thought his name was spelled Remis that's how dumb my Italian ass is

Still I love his name bc I'm a nerd for ancient culture, ESPECIALLY Roman (and ancient Greek but it isn't mentioned here) and I love the little thing they did with both Creativity names, super clever and very much liked on my part.

"I would never hide anything from you" and he looks at Virgil JUST ALL THIS FORESHADOWING

LOGAN SHOWING HIS TEETH BACK UP

"how about you shut up" Roman what the hecc man

THAT THING INTO LOGANS HEAD UNSETTLED ME A BIT

what are they doing to him today let him rest

double blow

"can we logic our way out of that?" everybody nodding was so pure

"shit"

THAT FUCKING JUMPSCARE I'M SORRY WHAT THE FU

"not all thoughts are meaningful"

He's go- no he's back again

THE CALLBACK MENTION AND PATTONS REACTION... probable foreshadowing to what Joan said about there being a part two of SvS?

"When are you actually gonna jump out of a moving car I've been bringing it up for years" so it's not just me..?

"it is okay if the thought happens to cross your mind"

"everything is okay" I'm going to cry I needed that

I love how Logan touches the topic that there is no problem in seeking help from therapists. There's a lot to say on this, but I was really glad that was pointed out since the are a lot of stereotypes on the matter

why did Virgil look like he was about to cry

Patton I love you

Thomas going to rest is what everyone wanted to see

Virgil confronting Remus I'm living you're doing amazing sweetie

"you tickle me emo"

"it was just like old times" then Pat and Lo's looks in this essay I will

ROMAAAAN

VIRGILS SMILE

"YOU'RE ALIVE"

"I LOVE YOU" ME TOO!! ME TOO ME TOO

"are you good?" "are you hurt at all?" I love when the sides look out for each other

"I'm sorry Logan" right through the heart. Another development.

I need y'all to look at Virgil in this exact second because. he.

that's my point.

All those smiles while Logan's talking are making me alive

"No seriously, you're ... really ... cool" I started tearing up right here. Twice. And then Logan sinks down cause he's not at all used to this and he's feeling t h i n g s please keep on being appreciated you deserve it

Also Patton always learning from his mistakes and understanding them when he does something wrong or he thinks in the wrong direction, that's something I think a lot of people need to learn, including myself. Like, it's okay to be wrong and make mistakes, just do your best to make sure you're improving yourself afterwards, instead of dwelling on it too much

"I don't like him" makes two of us

"Soooo you have a brother?" oh boy

The m i r r o r it's making me cry

"He's gone now and he's never coming back!" "I don't think that's-" "BYEE" what was all that talk about repression for if you contiNUE TO DO THIS ROMAN please I beg of you let us hELP YOU he's making me die inside

Oh boi the big moment. I already expected a bomb to drop since Virgil was the last one remaining.

"You okay buddy?" "Huh?" op somehow was already found crying

"I'm a little disappointed in myself" istg all that foreshadowing mixed with me wanting to hug him

The music picking up tension, this is poetic cinema let me tell you

I noticed how he calls them "the others", all these tiny details is what I'm living for

"I should know better" I couldn't beLIEVE IT, also how he seemed to be so frustrated made something inside me break

the pause and then "Because I was one of them", the music stops for a second, a little second in which you can hear my distant screaming "GOSH HE SAID IT IT WAS TRUE"

Thomas is speechless and just stares at him while the music picks up again and then Virgil's sigh and expression sinking down like "there you have it. that's the truth. and you can't do anything about it" he looks so defeated I'm breaking down.

Did I already mention poetic cinema? I just love angst and this scene was perfect

First time watching I, too, barely understood anything I was listening to in the last parte because all of that was really a lot to take in.

"Those thoughts that you may have thought do not define you"

"[the thought] may simply be that we are really okay"

"Go to bed!" me

no im not in the mood for food because for some unfathomable reason I had anxiety before the video dropped yay me

WHY ARE U DRINKING RED WINE WITH THAT DISH

GAVIN BEST BOY EVER

and last but not least: are you fucking serious Remus

THERE'S A SNAKE IN MY BUTT FANDFKJL

I didn't expect this topic at all and I am so glad it was talked about, thankfully my intrusive thoughts do not bother me as much as I realized other people's do. And I never saw anyone talking about this before, which is why it makes this video so important. I saw a tweet recently about someone saying that it is okay if you think about weird things, the important is that you never act on them, that's what makes you a good person. But I think this video really explains it far better and I never realized how common something like this was? So yeah another time in which I've been educated and couldn't be happier about it. These people really are bringing light to the world gah I LOVE THEM.

oKAY guess I'm done this was a wild ride and yeah I tend to point out EVERYTHING, so here you have it, as I already mentioned if you feel the need to geek out too, I'm here for ANYBODY! (pls I have no friends)

[pixelgrotto]

The horrific Resident Evil playthrough, interlude three

I just finished watching all of the Resident Evil movies I could get my hands on. When I told people I was doing this as the last part of my great year-long playthrough, they all let out groans and said something along the lines of, “Ugh, don’t you wanna end on a good note?” Undaunted by these words and fueled by my ability to tolerate crappy cinema, I moved forward, courageously making it through nine of these suckers...which, to be fair, ranged from surprisingly enjoyable to just as terrible as everyone warned me about. 

Before I begin, it’s important to note that we’re dealing with two separate film series here. There’s director Paul W.S. Anderson’s Resident Evil Hollywood films, which are the ones that most people know about. Then there are three Japanese-made CG movies that are canon and co-exist alongside the stories of the games. The Anderson movies are...mostly ass. The Japanese ones are okay. 

Let us start with the ass first. 

Resident Evil - The first RE film came out in 2002, which means that what little CG it has is laughably dated and it’s refreshingly small-scale when compared to its sequels. The movie’s a fan fiction remix of some themes from Resident Evil 1, except with none of the characters from the games present. Instead, we have Paul W.S. Anderson’s wife Milla Jovovich taking center stage as Alice, the former head of Umbrella security in a secret base called the Hive that goes to hell when some dude tries to steal viruses. The entirety of the action takes place in the Hive, and we get a surprisingly tiny number of monsters, with just your garden variety zombies, a few Cerberus and a single Licker showing up. Even though she does run up a wall and kick a Cerberus in the face, Alice is at her most realistic here (she turns into a dual wielding mutant with the ability to make the camera go into slow-motion whenever she wants in all the other films), there’s a nifty laser grid scene that all the sequels keep referencing when they want you to feel nostalgic, and the Hive’s sentient AI, the Red Queen, is compelling enough that Capcom eventually stuck her in Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles. Aside from this movie being full of British actors who do REALLY awful American accents, sounding like they all have mouths full of sausages, Paul W.S. Anderson’s first take on Resident Evil is probably the most watchable one he made. 

Resident Evil: Apocalypse - Okay, this one is watchable too, but in more of a popcorn-munching “lol, this shit is dumb” way. It steals the general plot of Resident Evils 2 and 3, with Raccoon City getting infected, but ups the cheese by a hundred. Alice is now a thirteen-year-old boy’s version of a BADAZZ woman, with lots of guns and a bare midriff, and she teams up with Jill Valentine, who resembles her game self in looks but not exactly in personality. Together, they’ve gotta escape Raccoon City along with Carlos Oliveira, who is possibly the only character from the games who is done a great service in these Anderson movies, which make him much more likable even if they couldn’t find an actual Hispanic actor to portray him and had to settle for an Israeli instead. Oh, and Nemesis shows up, because one of the dudes from the first movie who accompanied Alice into the Hive gets experimented on and turned into what honestly looks like someone’s Halloween costume. The writers commit a cardinal sin at the end of the flick by humanizing him, having him suddenly remember his TRUE SELF and help the good guys, but aside from that screw-up I admit that I had a goofy grin on my face throughout several parts of this movie. After Nemesis blows up the Raccoon City station and murmurs his one line of dialogue- “STARRRRRSSSS” - I even kinda felt like clapping. So yeah, Apocalpyse is idiotic fun.

Resident Evil: Extinction - Here’s where the movies stop being mildly entertaining and become varying degrees of either “meh” or just plain bad. Extinction’s biggest problem is that it makes the weird decision of having the entire PLANET be wiped nearly completely clean by Umbrella’s virus, giving the franchise the most generic setting imaginable for a zombie flick - a post-apocalyptic world. And even though this film features Claire Redfield and actually has Alice fight a Tyrant that looks the part, I feel that by turning the environment into Mad Max the filmmakers missed the entire point of the franchise. Resident Evil isn’t really about a “what if” scenario with mankind dying and zombies taking over the world. Instead, it’s about how humanity manages to cope in a time where zombies are used by corporations for terrorism purposes - hence the franchise’s “bio-organic weapon” catch-phrase for its creatures. It’s about how brave people live on in an era that just happens to feature biopunk monsters as a deadly fact of life. It’s about the evil that resides within a world that is pretty shitty, but hasn’t completely gone to shit. By turning the whole planet into the same ol’ zombie playground that we see in most popular fiction starring these workman-like horror tropes, Extinction - which probably thought it was upping the stakes - instead just feels sorta dull, and anyone who views the film today is probably going to see it as a weaker version of The Walking Dead. Oh, and it ends with Alice discovering clones of herself, which will only serve to screw with the loose continuity of these movies as they go on. 

Resident Evil: Afterlife - This one starts with Alice’s clones raiding the Umbrella facility in Tokyo, and the whole sequence - which feels like it should be the finale - is reduced to a few minutes of special effects in the beginning. (This is foreshadowing for the next two films, which both end with hints of giant, climatic battles that mostly happen off-screen, if at all.) The first thing that I noticed when watching this was how slow-mo kicked in every five minutes and how the camera seemed to linger on bullets, and I eventually remembered that this film was released during Hollywood’s obsession with 3D during the early 2010s. This explains Afterlife’s IN-YOUR-FACE-IN-THREE-DIMENSIONS action scenes, which are initially pretty in a music video sort of way but become overdone and tiresome as the movie goes on, kinda like a Zack Snyder film. (I place Paul W.S. Anderson in the same “style over substance” category of director as both Zack Snyder and Michael Bay, by the way.) Anyway, Afterlife deals with Alice teaming up with more survivors to try to find a secret ship haven free of zombies. Along the way she runs into Chris Redfield, who looks more like a janitor than the jacked BSAA agent that he is in the games, and Chris and Claire Redfield have a quick sibling reunion and fight Wesker in a scene with choreography shamelessly stolen from Resident Evil 5. It’s pandering fan service and sort of diverting, but ultimately none of it matters. Chris disappears after this movie and is never seen again, and Afterlife is more interesting as a specimen of 2010 3D excess than it is as an actual narrative.

Resident Evil: Retribution - Retribution amps the pandering fan service that Afterlife dabbled in to new levels. Ada Wong is here, played by Li Bingbing but dubbed by her original voice actress, Sally Cahill, probably because Li’s English isn’t that great. Leon Kennedy and Barry frickin’ Burton show up, both looking pretty much like their in-game counterparts. Even Michelle Rodriguez and a few other faces from Paul W.S. Anderson’s first Resident Evil flick make an appearance, thanks to the fact that this movie has clones up the wazoo and uses them to handwave away any series inconsistencies you could think of. So you’re got fan service for the people who like the games and fan service for the folks who liked the first movie, and on top of it all the film has the extreme 3D that its predecessor possessed and a buttload of battles because it all takes place in a giant Umbrella simulation facility full of stuff that can easily be wrecked. By now the plot to these things has gotten more scrambled than my eggs in the morning, but I will say that thanks to its inclusion of classic characters, Retribution is more or less tolerable. There’s even a bit of characterization this time around, thanks to a little hearing-impaired clone girl who Alice takes under her wing and begins to care for, and the movie ends on an okay cliffhanger in a Washington DC under siege, promising epic things to come in the next movie. Unfortunately... Resident Evil: The Final Chapter - I really did not enjoy The Final Chapter for a myriad of reasons. First of all, the Washington battle promised at the end of Retribution never happens. Instead, we fast forward to several months later, when Alice is (big surprise) the only survivor, and EVERYONE she was with in the last flick - Ada, Leon, the little deaf girl - is gone and never mentioned ever again. Wesker, who Alice was working with in Retribution, is back to being a bad guy for poorly explained reasons. Another bad scientist dude that Alice killed in Extinction also returns for even worse reasons, because supposedly Alice only offed his clone three movies ago. But wait, this “real” bad scientist dude is also revealed to be a clone as the TRUE bad scientist dude shows up in the movie’s last act! AND THE ULTIMATE TWIST (look away now if you actually care about spoilers) is that Alice is HERSELF a clone of the original daughter of the Umbrella corporation’s founder who died of a degenerative disease and served as the basis for the Red Queen AI. The idiotic thing is that this daughter was said to be the progeny of Dr. Charles Ashford in Resident Evil: Apocalypse, but this movie retcons her to be the spawn of Dr. James Marcus. The Final Chapter, in fact, screws with continuity to a degree I have rarely seen before in a long-running film franchise. Yeah, the framework tying this series together got weird as soon as clones were introduced, but previously it seemed that Paul W.S. Anderson at least cared about his own messy fan fiction. Here? It’s like he forgot what he’d spent the last 15 years building up to and ended on one sloppy fart. If this weren’t bad enough, The Final Chapter is edited in that god awful “shaky cam, lots of fast cuts” way that I hate. In fact, I counted something like twenty cuts in a scene of a few seconds when Alice is attacked by a creature, which means that this film won’t just baffle you with its disregard for continuity - it’ll give you a headache too. 

Resident Evil: Degeneration - After watching an array of live-action flicks that took random Resident Evil threads and mashed them together with the elegance of a splattered turd, it did feel good to switch things up and move to the CG movies that were actually put out by Capcom. This 2008 offering takes place in between Resident Evils 4 and 5, stars Claire Redfield and Leon Kennedy, and deals with a virus breakout in an airport and some of the pharmaceutical company backstabbing that occurred in the aftermath of Umbrella’s destruction. It’s all stuff that feels like it could have come from a lesser gaiden game - perhaps in the same vein as the first Revelations title - and it kinda gives off that “so-so anime movie” vibe, especially because the dubbing always sounds a tad off. Nevertheless, Degeneration’s still a breath of fresh air compared to the Anderson series, and there’s a nice gag where Claire’s searching for a weapon in the airport, someone hands her a physical umbrella, and she looks at it and is like, “Hm, didn’t see this coming.” (Lollerskates.) The main issue I have with Degeneration is how “plasticky” everyone looks - it’s hard to realize how far computer animation has advanced in the last decade until you look at Degeneration’s stiff visuals and compare them to the other CG films. Also, Leon’s characterization is terrible. He’s meant to be a super serious badass, I guess, but he mostly just looks like someone rammed a Samurai Edge up his sphincter. I prefer my Leon Kennedy to be the “Don’t worry Ashley, I’m comin’ for ya!” version from Resident Evil 4, or at least a dude with a little sass to him. The guy in Degeneration is about as interesting as a board.  Resident Evil: Damnation - Damnation is a noticeable step above Degeneration, both in computer animation, which really got better from 2008 to 2012, and in all-around presentation. The dubbing’s still somewhat wonky with that same anime movie vibe, but the characterization is on point, and Leon, who’s taking center stage once more, is just like his RE6 self. Speaking of RE6, this movie channels that game’s themes of international terrorism with a plot that involves rebels in a made-up Eastern European country using Lickers and Las Plagas in an effort to fight for their freedom, only to learn that lo and behold, the nefarious female president who’s seized control of their nation has her own B.O.W.s - in the form of Tyrants - at her disposal. Leon’s caught in the middle of this mess and ends up befriending some of the rebels, and Ada Wong’s also infiltrated the country to manipulate the president. Ada and Leon’s interactions are as insubstantial as they’ve been in pretty much every game that isn’t the recent RE2make, but we do get a cool fight between Ada and the president, who for some reason knows substantial knife fu. There’s an even better battle between Tyrants and Lickers in a city hall square, and Leon gets throw against pillars, regularly takes hits that would kill a normal person and pilots a tank alongside one of the rebels who looks a lot like Chris Redfield but isn’t Chris Redfield. This dude serves as the film’s sympathetic character - a guy torn from his peaceful existence thanks to political wrangling and is tricked into using B.O.W.s to try to achieve a brighter future. It ends with the fella severely injured but learning how to live and move forward in a world infected with nefarious bioweapons, which is the very theme that the Anderson flicks ditched around movie number three. So good work for side-stepping previous failures and recognizing what Resident Evil is all about, Damnation. 

Resident Evil: Vendetta - If Degeneration’s a so-so anime movie, and Damnation a good anime movie, then Vendetta is just a good movie in general, with no “anime” distinction needed. The dubbing’s finally pretty decent, for one, and the story takes place in between RE6 and RE7, teaming Leon and Chris Redfield up with - HOLY CRAP - Rebecca Chambers, who’s been AWOL since Resident Evil Zero. They’ve gotta stop an arms dealer from bio-nuking New York and doing nasty things to Rebecca, who resembles his dead wife, and along the way Leon pilots a motorcycle on the freeway with his feet while shooting at Cerebrus with his hands. Nearly all of the movie’s considerable action segments are punctuated with rapid fire John Wick-style gunplay, and it works. It’s like the folks who made this film realized that the coolest part of Resident Evil 6 was the point where Leon and Chris point their guns at each other for a few seconds before deciding that they need to put their differences aside and cooperate, and even though you could conceivably fault Vendetta for leaning heavily towards the “action” side of Resident Evil rather than the “horror” side, it’s a well-paced film that finally gives us a substantial interaction between two series mainstays beyond the one minute they shared with each other in RE6. Also, people are still posting GIFs from Vendetta’s action sequences all across Tumblr and forums whenever arguments break out over whether Chris or Leon is TEH COoLER Resident Evil protagonist, so Capcom obviously did something right. If we get another computer animated film, I imagine it’ll lean more heavily towards horror since that’s where the series has gone recently...but hopefully the path of improvement that we’ve seen from Degeneration to Damnation to Vendetta won’t be broken. 

And with that, whew, I’m done with RE movies, at least until the rumored Hollywood reboot that’s supposedly drawing inspiration from Resident Evil 7 comes out. (It can’t be worse than The Final Chapter, I suppose.) I can’t say that my friends were wrong when they warned me that half of these would be shite, but I also can’t say that I ended on a bad note, because Vendetta was pretty good.

After all this, my grand playthrough and consumption of all Resident Evil media is about to finish Next post I make will be a last look at the franchise as a whole...and what a year’s worth of zombie headshots taught me.  All screencaps taken by me.