#just what we got in the game but how all of it cumulates into what we have in the game from beginning to end

[goldentigerfestival]

boy does Fluri make me feel things. a lot of things. i love. them.

[greenerteacups]

oooh please someday tell us what you think of GOT

oh, no, it's my fatal weakness! it's [checks notes] literally just the bare modicum of temptation! okay you got me.

SO. in order to tell what's wrong with game of thrones you kind of have to have read the books, because the books are the reason the show goes off the rails. i actually blame the showrunners relatively little in proportion to GRRM for how bad the show was (which I'm not gonna rehash here because if you're interested in GOT in any capacity you've already seen that horse flogged to death). people debate when GOT "got bad" in terms of writing, but regardless of when you think it dropped off, everyone agrees the quality declined sharply in season 8, and to a certain extent, season 7. these are the seasons that are more or less entirely spun from whole cloth, because season 7 marks the beginning of what will, if we ever see it, be the Winds of Winter storyline. it's the first part that isn't based on a book by George R.R. Martin. it's said that he gave the showrunners plot outlines, but we don't know how detailed they were, or how much the writers diverged from the blueprint — and honestly, considering the cumulative changes made to the story by that point, some stark divergence would have been required. (there's a reason for this. i'll get there in a sec.)

so far, i'm not saying anything all that original. a lot of people recognized how bad the show got as soon as they ran out of Book to adapt. (I think it's kind of weird that they agreed to make a show about an unfinished series in the first place — did GRRM figure that this was his one shot at a really good HBO adaptation, and forego misgivings about his ability to write two full books in however many years it took to adapt? did he think they would wait for him? did he not care that the series would eventually spoil his magnum opus, which he's spent the last three decades of his life writing? perplexing.) but the more interesting question is why the show got bad once it ran out of Book, because in my mind, that's not a given. a lot of great shows depart from the books they were based on. fanfiction does exactly that, all the time! if you have good writers who understand the characters they're working with, departure means a different story, not a worse one. now, the natural reply would be to say that the writers of GOT just aren't good, or at least aren't good at the things that make for great television, and that's why they needed the books as a structure, but I don't think that's true or fair, either. books and television are very different things. the pacing of a book is totally different from the pacing of a television show, and even an episodic book like ASOIAF is going to need a lot of work before it's remotely watchable as a series. bad writers cannot make great series of television, regardless of how good their source material is. sure, they didn't invent the characters of tyrion lannister and daenerys targaryen, but they sure as hell understood story structure well enough to write a damn compelling season of TV about them!

so but then: what gives? i actually do think it's a problem with the books! the show starts out as very faithful to the early books (namely, A Game of Thrones and A Clash of Kings) to the point that most plotlines are copied beat-for-beat. the story is constructed a little differently, and it's definitely condensed, but the meat is still there. and not surprisingly, the early books in ASOIAF are very tightly written. for how long they are, you wouldn't expect it, but on every page of those books, the plot is racing. you can practically watch george trying to beat the fucking clock. and he does! useful context here is that he originally thought GOT was going to be a trilogy, and so the scope of most threads in the first book or two would have been much smaller. it also helps that the first three books are in some respects self-contained stories. the first book is a mystery, the second and third are espionage and war dramas — and they're kept tight in order to serve those respective plots.

the trouble begins with A Feast for Crows, and arguably A Storm of Swords, because GRRM starts multiplying plotlines and treating the series as a story, rather than each individual book. he also massively underestimated the number of pages it would take him to get through certain plot beats — an assumption whose foundation is unclear, because from a reader's standpoint, there is a fucke tonne of shit in Feast and Dance that's spurious. I'm not talking about Brienne's Riverlands storyline (which I adore thematically but speaking honestly should have been its own novella, not a part of Feast proper). I'm talking about whole chapters where Tyrion is sitting on his ass in the river, just talking to people. (will I eat crow about this if these pay off in hugely satisfying ways in Winds or Dream? oh, totally. my brothers, i will gorge myself on sweet sweet corvid. i will wear a dunce cap in the square, and gleefully, if these turn out to not have been wastes of time. the fact that i am writing this means i am willing to stake a non-negligible amount of pride on the prediction that that will not happen). I'm talking about scenes where the characters stare at each other and talk idly about things that have already happened while the author describes things we already have seen in excruciating detail. i'm talking about threads that, while forgivable in a different novel, are unforgivable in this one, because you are neglecting your main characters and their story. and don't tell me you think that a day-by-day account tyrion's river cruise is necessary to telling his story, because in the count of monte cristo, the main guy disappears for nine years and comes hurtling back into the story as a vengeful aristocrat! and while time jumps like that don't work for everything, they certainly do work if what you're talking about isn't a major story thread!

now put aside whether or not all these meandering, unconcluded threads are enjoyable to read (as, in fairness, they often are!). think about them as if you're a tv showrunner. these bad boys are your worst nightmare. because while you know the author put them in for a reason, you haven't read the conclusion to the arc, so you don't know what that reason is. and even if the author tells you in broad strokes how things are going to end for any particular character (and this is a big "if," because GRRM's whole style is that he lets plots "develop as he goes," so I'm not actually convinced that he does have endings written out for most major characters), that still doesn't help you get them from point A (meandering storyline) to point B (actual conclusion). oh, and by the way, you have under a year to write this full season of television, while GRRM has been thinking about how to end the books for at least 10. all of this means you have to basically call an audible on whether or not certain arcs are going to pay off, and, if they are, whether they make for good television, and hence are worth writing. and you have to do that for every. single. unfinished. story. in the books.

here's an example: in the books, Quentin Martell goes on a quest to marry Daenerys and gain a dragon. many chapters are spent detailing this quest. spoiler alert: he fails, and he gets charbroiled by dragons. GRRM includes this plot to set up the actions of House Martell in Winds, but the problem is that we don't know what House Martell does in Winds, because (see above) the book DNE. So, although we can reliably bet that the showrunners understand (1) Daenerys is coming to Westeros with her 3 fantasy nukes, and (2) at some point they're gonna have to deal with the invasion of frozombies from Canada, that DOESN'T mean they necessarily know exactly what's going to happen to Dorne, or House Martell. i mean, fuck! we don't even know if Martin knows what's going to happen to Dorne or House Martell, because he's said he's the kind of writer who doesn't set shit out beforehand! so for every "Cersei defaults on millions of dragons in loans from the notorious Bank of Nobody Fucks With Us, assumes this will have no repercussions for her reign or Westerosi politics in general" plotline — which might as well have a big glaring THIS WILL BE IMPORTANT stamp on top of the chapter heading — you have Arianne Martell trying to do a coup/parent trap switcheroo with Myrcella, or Euron the Goffick Antichrist, or Faegon Targaryen and JonCon preparing a Blackfyre restoration, or anything else that might pan out — but might not! And while that uncertainty about what's important to the "overall story" might be a realistic way of depicting human beings in a world ruled by chance and not Destiny, it makes for much better reading than viewing, because Game of Thrones as a fantasy television series was based on the first three books, which are much more traditional "there is a plot and main characters and you can generally tell who they are" kind of book. I see Feast and Dance as a kind of soft reboot for the series in this respect, because they recenter the story around a much larger cast and cast a much broader net in terms of which characters "deserve" narrative attention.

but if you're making a season of television, you can't do that, because you've already set up the basic premise and pacing of your story, and you can't suddenly pivot into a long-form tone poem about the horrors of war. so you have to cut something. but what are you gonna cut? bear in mind that you can't just Forget About Dorne, or the Iron Islands, or the Vale, or the North, or pretty much any region of the story, because it's all interconnected, but to fit in everything from the books would require pacing of the sort that no reasonable audience would ever tolerate. and bear in mind that the later books sprout a lot more of these baby-plots that could go somewhere, but also might end up being secondary or tertiary to the "main story," which, at the end of the day, is about dragons and ice zombies and the rot at the heart of the feudal power system glorified in classical fantasy. that's the story that you as the showrunner absolutely must give them an end to, and that's the story that should be your priority 1.

so you do a hack and slash job, and you mortar over whatever you cut out with storylines that you cook up yourself, but you can't go too far afield, because you still need all the characters more or less in place for the final showdown. so you pinch here and push credulity there, and you do your best to put the characters in more or less the same place they would have been if you kept the original, but on a shorter timeframe. and is it as good as the first seasons? of course not! because the material that you have is not suited to TV like the first seasons are. and not only that, but you are now working with source material that is actively fighting your attempt to constrain a linear and well-paced narrative on it. the text that you're working with changed structure when you weren't looking, and now you have to find some way to shanghai this new sprawling behemoth of a Thing into a television show. oh, and by the way, don't think that the (living) author of the source material will be any help with this, because even though he's got years of experience working in television writing, he doesn't actually know how all of these threads will tie together, which is possibly the reason that the next book has taken over 8 years (now 13 and counting) to write. oh and also, your showrunners are sick of this (in fairness, very difficult) job and they want to go write for star wars instead, so they've refused the extra time the studio offered them for pre-production and pushed through a bunch of first-draft scripts, creating a crunch culture of the type that spawns entirely avoidable mistakes, like, say, some poor set designer leaving a starbucks cup in frame.

anyway, that's what I think went wrong with game of thrones.

[stereax]

Waivers: The Basics

Having noticed that many of my mutuals, as well as hockeyblr at large, are unsure of what exactly the NHL's waiver system means and how it works, I've endeavored to write up a little bit of a primer on waivers to make it easier to understand. Meet me under the cut to learn more!

What are waivers?

Put most simply, waivers are a process that occurs when a team says to a player, "We don't want you in the NHL anymore, we're sending you to the AHL". Because of the CBA's (Collective Bargaining Agreement) Article 13, before they can do this, they have to put the player on the waiver wire, which is essentially a 24-hour-long period where any other team that wants that player to play for them in the NHL can claim them. The purpose of the waiver wire is to ensure that teams don't unfairly stash NHL-caliber players in the AHL, thereby paying them lesser salaries (this is the most important part - AHL salaries are generally about a tenth of NHL salaries) and not allowing them to play NHL games. Players that may not be getting a fair shot on one team can move to another, where they can be used more effectively - for instance, Eeli Tolvanen was waived by Nashville, picked up by Seattle, and now plays a key role on Seattle's third line. In fact, he scored Seattle's first-ever goal in the playoffs!

What happens once a player is put on the waiver wire?

If another team claims the player, they are claimed on waivers and are transferred to the other team. Notably, the other team must have the appropriate cap and roster space necessary to claim the player. An example here is Kasperi Kapanen, who was placed on waivers by Pittsburgh and was claimed by St Louis. His cap hit of $3.2m may have been prohibitive for other teams who could have wanted to claim him.

If multiple teams try to claim the player, the player goes to the team that submitted a claim which is the worst in the standings - if it's before November 1st of a new season year, it goes to the team that finished worst in the standings the year before, but if it's after November 1st, it goes to the team that is currently worst in the standings. Take Lassi Thomson, who was placed on waivers by Ottawa and claimed by Anaheim. If, for example, Toronto also submitted a claim, they would not have been awarded Thomson, as Anaheim has the worse standing.

If no other team claims the player, they clear waivers. When they do so, they can be reassigned to the NHL team's affiliate AHL team. Notably, not everyone who clears waivers is immediately reassigned - a player who clears waivers can stay with the NHL team instead (for example, if another player just got injured). They can be sent down to the AHL at a later time - they do not have to go through the waivers process again if they have played less than 10 NHL games (cumulative) or been on the roster for less than 30 days (cumulative) from the last time they cleared waivers. This can be used to a savvy GM's advantage to avoid putting players on the waiver wire.

Why is everyone getting waived right now?

At the beginning of the preseason, every player with an NHL contract, whether it be one-way (NHL only) or two-way (NHL and AHL), is invited to that team's training camp. This places them on the NHL preseason roster for that team. As training camp goes on and players get cut, they then must pass through waivers to go to the AHL. Unless, of course, they're waiver exempt.

What is waiver exemption and why is it important?

So you might already have noticed an issue with the waiver system - it's terrible for younger players. If solely the waiver rules we've discussed above existed, every player being sent to the AHL would have to go through waivers. This would include prospects who are signed to an NHL ELC (entry-level contract) but didn't make the cut for the season. Obviously, this is bad for teams - imagine drafting players who you know will be good for you in 2 or 3 years and then losing them all to the waiver wire. This is why waiver exemption exists.

Waiver exemption, to keep it simple, is a protection that certain players have that means they do not have to go through the waivers process to be reassigned to the AHL. The specific details of waiver exemption are a little complicated - let's take a look at the table to make it make more sense.

This table is either/or and is defined by the age when their NHL ELC was signed. A skater who signed their ELC as an 18-year-old is waiver exempt for either 5 years or 160 games played (including playoff games) at the NHL level. A skater who signed at 21 is exempt for either 3 years or 80 NHL games. Goalies have different requirements than skaters because they generally take longer to develop and don't play as many games.

There is a fairly common misconception that all players on their ELCs are automatically waiver exempt. This is false. The second a player hits the amount of games played for their age, they are immediately no longer waiver exempt. Usually, this doesn't occur until after the ELC is over, as most ELC players deal with injuries and healthy scratches, as well as not generally being given the reins to play on the NHL roster for the entire season. One notable example that disproves the "ELC means waiver exempt" conception is Dawson Mercer from New Jersey. Mercer signed his ELC as a 19-year-old in December of 2020. He has played all 82 games in the past 2 seasons (2021-22 & 2022-23) plus 12 playoff games for a total of 176 NHL games played. Under the games requirements, he is now no longer exempt from waivers, despite having one whole year left on his ELC.

For the 25+ category, upon playing a single NHL game, the player is waiver exempt for that entire season and that entire season only. Andrei Kuzmenko from Vancouver is a good example of that - last season, he signed his one-year ELC with Vancouver as a 27-year-old and could have been sent to the AHL at any time without going through waivers. (He was not, needless to say.)

There is one very important exception to the table: if an 18- or 19-year-old player plays 11 or more games with an NHL team in a single season, their waiver exemption is automatically cropped. For that season, and the next two, the player is waiver exempt, but after that, they are no longer exempt. This extends to the next three if the player in question is a goalie and not a skater. (To make it easier to understand, it's as if they jumped into the 20-year-old category.) However, 18- and 19-year-old prospects generally only play 9 games maximum at the NHL level in order to allow for the entry-level slide, allowing the contract to "slide" forward a year, letting teams keep the player on the ELC for an extra year and thus save money.

Are there any other ways a player can play in the AHL without going through waivers or being waiver exempt?

Yes, actually! There are two main exceptions - they're for conditioning loans.

First, what is a conditioning loan? A conditioning loan is a short-term reassignment to the AHL. There are two types of conditioning loans: the standard conditioning loan and the LTIR conditioning loan.

A standard conditioning loan, specified under the CBA 13.8, occurs when a player agrees to head down to the AHL for a few games to "wipe off the dust" on their game, so to speak. They're often used by players who have ended up as perennial healthy scratches on their NHL teams, so that they're able to jump in if there's an injury or other issue. Standard conditioning loans can last up to 14 days. One example of a standard conditioning loan is Shane Wright, who was sent to the AHL by Seattle very early in the season for conditioning, partially to bypass the requirement that the NHL has with the major junior CHL that would have required him to go back to the CHL were he officially reassigned from Seattle. Another is Nathan Beaulieu, who was sent to the AHL by Anaheim in January for a four-game stint.

An LTIR conditioning loan, specified under the CBA 13.9, occurs when a player coming off of LTIR agrees to head down to the AHL for a few games to "wipe off the dust" on their game, so to speak. These loans can only last 6 days or 3 games, whichever comes later, and the idea is to be able to figure out whether a player is able to return to form or requires more time to heal properly. For example, Travis Dermott was sent to the AHL by Vancouver in December to evaluate whether he was back to form after a concussion sustained in the preseason. He played one game in the AHL, then drew back into Vancouver's lineup for eleven games before going back on IR for the rest of the season due to the concussion repercussions. Notably, a team can only use one LTIR conditioning loan for each time a player is on LTIR.

What is emergency recall and why does it make a player waiver exempt?

Emergency recall occurs when a player on a team's NHL lineup is injured and the team can no longer ice a full squad because of it. (As a reminder, each team must carry 12 forwards, 6 defensemen, and 2 goalies. Usually, teams keep an extra forward and defenseman around as a healthy scratch in case of injuries, but some teams are pressed against the cap and cannot carry extra players.) In this case, they can call an AHL player (or multiple, at times) up on an "emergency" basis to fill in during the time that the NHL player is out. Once the NHL player is healthy again, the AHL player can either be transferred to a regular recall or gets sent down to their AHL team again. One example here is Akira Schmid, who was bouncing back and forth between Utica and New Jersey on emergency recalls every few weeks because Mackenzie Blackwood, one of New Jersey's two goaltenders, was constantly getting hurt.

It makes sense, then, why emergency recall would grant a player temporary waiver exemption status - it would be awful to have to recall a player from the AHL, have them in the NHL for a little bit, and then have to send them through waivers and get claimed when your roster player is healthy. However, if an emergency recall player plays in at least 10 NHL games, he loses his waiver exempt status under emergency recall (other forms of waiver exemption still apply).

What are unconditional waivers?

Unconditional waivers are different from regular waivers in what they do. Passing through unconditional waivers does not send you to the AHL. Instead, they are used by teams that want to buy out or terminate players' contracts, completely giving up their rights to the players. Players placed on unconditional waivers are almost never claimed because of this - only two players have ever been claimed off unconditional waivers.

Okay, hold on - what's the difference between a buyout and a termination?

A termination occurs when a player's contract is terminated. The player severs all ties to a team and does not continue to be paid by the team. The team does not incur any cap penalties from termination. There are two main types of termination.

The first type of termination is mutually-agreed-upon termination. In the case of Filip Zadina, who was recently terminated by Detroit, he made it clear that he would refuse to report to the AHL after being sent down on regular waivers. The team and Zadina then proceeded to terminate the contract so that Zadina would be free to negotiate a contract with another NHL team instead of playing for Detroit's AHL team, and so that Detroit would not incur any cap penalties from buying out Zadina. Another example is Lukas Sedlak, whose contract was terminated by Philadelphia when he made it clear to the team that he wanted to return to Europe to play. Philadelphia put Sedlak on unconditional waivers, terminated the contract, and Sedlak soon returned to his native Czechia to play for Pardubice.

The other, rarer type of termination is for material breach. Material breach termination is exemplified by Alex Galchenyuk, whose contract was terminated by Arizona after they became aware of the intoxicated driving incident involving Galchenyuk. Essentially, material breach is used when players are acting illegally, either against the law of the United States/Canada, or against the terms of their contract. The reason these terminations are so rare is twofold: Not only are hockey players generally going to try to avoid breaking the law, when they do, the player's association is usually going to investigate and file appeals and the like to try to secure their players the highest possible settlement despite the termination (and set a precedent so other teams are not encouraged to terminate contracts for material breach).

On the other hand, a buyout occurs when a player is released by a team, but the player continues to be paid by the team as per their contract. The team incurs cap penalties from buyouts - 1/3 of the contract value if the player is younger than 26 at the time of the buy-out, 2/3 of the value if the player is 26 or order. This penalty is spread across double the years left on the contract.

An aside - this is also where the idea of a "buyout-proof" contract comes in. A buyout-proof contract contains most of the salary being paid in the form of signing bonuses, which are paid in full even if the contract is bought out. (These contracts are also considered "lockout-proof", as, again, the signing bonus must be paid even if there is a lockout and no hockey is being played.) As an example of this, take a look at Auston Matthews's extension:

If the Leafs try to buy this contract out, they'd have to pay Matthews the entirety of the signing bonuses as well as 2/3 of the base salary, making the cap savings incredibly marginal and just not worth it to buy out. Thus, it's buyout-proof.

Is that everything I need to know about waivers?

I think so! If you have any other questions, please drop me a line in my inbox or via DMs - I'll be happy to explain more to you! :D

[brf-rumortrackinganon]

Crunching some numbers for Spare

An article today in the Washington Post included some talk about how publishing contracts, sales, and advances work. Here are some excerpts:

A book can end up on a bestseller list by selling 5,000 or more books in a week.

Under most contracts with major publishing companies, an author earns a royalty of 15 percent of the cover price of a hardcover book. A book priced at $30 would earn the author $4.50 per sale.

Publishers will generally offer an author an advance payment. Once enough books are sold to cover the advance, the author begins to earn additional income. In other words, a person receiving a $1 million advance would need to sell more than 222,000 books at $30 each to earn back the advance.

(source)

What does this mean for Spare? It means...it's bad.

First off, $30 is the average cost for a hardcover book here in the US. However we know Spare isn't actually selling at $30 because it's been heavily discounted since its release. US Amazon is selling it at $19 a copy so let's go with that. At $19 a copy, if Harry's contract has him seeing royalties at 15%, he makes $2.85 a copy.

The publishers are claiming that Harry sold 3.5 million copies of Spare in the first week of publication. That number is definitely inflated; it includes audiobooks (which are free for a lot of people through Audible and other audiobook subscription services) and it probably includes some projected figures. So let's deduct 15% for those ghost copies, which leaves us with 2.9 million and at $2.85 per copy, he made $8.2 million just from royalties.

So per the Washington Post, Harry has to sell enough copies of Spare to cover the advance before he can make money on the memoir. If Harry doesn't cover the advance, he doesn't earn royalties. Which is the juicy bit: the Daily Mail has claimed that Harry received a $20 million advance from Penguin to write Spare. Based on these projections (2.9 million copies sold that first week at $2.85 a copy), Harry hasn't paid off his advance yet. He's still got $12 million to give back.

Now take into consideration that sales for Spare steadily declined since publication. Spare might've sold 3.5 million in the first week, but it's not selling 3.5 million the next week. In fact, Forbes Magazine reported that as of July 1, 2023, Spare sold 1,174,137 copies here in the US. That's 33% of the 3.5 million from the first week of sales - in other words, sales really dropped off. Maybe even flatlined.

So getting very hypothetical here, let's add 33% to 3.5 million, and assume that's how many copies of Spare Harry has sold as of July 1. That's 4.6 million. 4.6 million times $2.85 = $13.3 million. Harry still hasn't paid back his alleged advance. Even if we give him 20% of royalties ($3.80 per copy for a profit of $17.4 million), he still hasn't paid back the alleged advance.

So while all these numbers are most likely made up, what probably isn't made up is that Harry hasn't earned back his advance and isn't making any kind of profit. And we know this because a) real cumulative data on Spare isn't easily available and b) there's been no talk of Harry's next book - either the second memoir alleged to be part of the deal or the book on Invictus Games confirmed to be part of the deal. If Spare performed well, or even beyond expectations, the sales would constantly be in the news as new updates are issues and Harry's second book would have been announced immediately to piggyback on Spare's success. But that hasn't happened. It'll be very interesting to see how it all tallies up at the end of the year.

I don't think we'll see any more books from Harry. Or if we do, they'll be updated/reissued versions of Spare that count towards his 4-book deal so Penguin can move on.

(I'm also side-eyeing the Daily Mail's claim that his advance was $20 million. Bruce Springsteen received a $10 million advance and Keith Richards only $1 million. And these guys have legitimate and proven track records that they can sell content. Harry has no record of even writing his own speeches.)

[loveletterworm]

An addendum to my post about how I think it is unlikely deltarune will actively require replaying large portions of the game which I just thought about (I'm making it separately because the post was already long) is that I brought up how in Undertale going from a pacifist neutral ending to the true pacifist ending doesn't actually require replaying the entire game and going back to do the true pacifist requirements will only set you back just before the final boss, I just realized that in both chapters thus far Deltarune ALSO is made with this sort of logic, you can only access the secret bosses once you reach the final area of each chapter, which I have no metadiegeticwhatever thing to point out here, this is just a Actually Considerate Game Design Decision, so that people who missed the secret boss but kept a save before the chapter boss will easily be able to go back and do those without having to replay an extremely large portion of the game. The only way you'd be locked out of the secret boss for a chapter to the point where you'd have to start over to fight it is if you overwrote your save in the castle town at the end of chapter 2.

Again there's not really anything to point out here if you don't care about humane game design. I just found it a little bit interesting to see that it was consistent between both chapters and to some extent Undertale (Undertale has the difference of you DO get locked out of true pacifist if you killed anything at any point, so it is more likely to make you start over, but honestly starting Undertale over is just an intended part of the gameplay experience that its designed around more than I'd say Deltarune currently is)

I also saw someone in the comments of the video that made the minor observation that I had that weirdly longwinded reaction to (I don't think this was in the video itself but maybe I forgot, there was some speculation about hypothetical save-slot-based puzzles in the video at least) say something like "What if there's a trick where you'll be locked out of or otherwise unable to complete the chapter 3 secret boss until you complete the chapter 4 secret boss and go back to get the chapter 4 items", and I feel with what I described previously in mind we can all be reasonably confident that this is Not The Sort Of Thing The Game Will Do In The Future, not only because it would probably be really unclear and difficult to signpost that you're supposed to do that, but because this would mean that the player's progress would effectively have to be set back TWO ENTIRE CHAPTERS (2 chapters which we currently know to be cumulatively longer than the 2 chapters preceding them put together!) and again, sure that could be a cool meta trick, but this game has to be played by human beings who will have spent real money on it, and again if they feel like their time was unduly wasted they might leave a bad review on steam. What the hell was that entire last paragraph just one long sentence. I have got to figure out how to break these up more

[lotus-tower]

covid has really made me realize that most people don't have very good risk assessment or sense of scope, especially when it comes to statistics. part of it is definitely a knee-jerk aggressive response to the word even being said, but a lot of the arguments i hear seem predicated on some kind of belief that Low Percentage equals safe, because that's how people talk about things generally.

putting aside for one moment that the percentages are most likely a lot higher than they think, and that the risk of long-term complications after catching the virus is cumulative--i think people have sort of lost sight of how unprecedented covid actually is, because it's so easy to go back to normal life. covid is the first pandemic in the age of super fast and easy plane travel. covid is the first pandemic in the age of humanity's numbers being over 8 billion.

no one is claiming that your risk of catching covid after going out unmasked just once is high (with the exception of peak season during the holidays). in periods where transmission is low, that risk could in fact be negligible. but you aren't rolling that dice once. you're rolling it several times a day, every day. have you ever played a gacha game where the odds of pulling a SSR were 0.5%? did you ever pull one, or did you know anyone who did? how surprised would you be if you were able to pull one after pulling for 10 hours a day nonstop every day? would you really be particularly surprised?

despite all this, you may not catch covid more than once a year, or maybe even every two years. if you're looking at a time-frame of 5 years, that's pretty good, isn't it? the odds of developing severe, permanent complications from one or two covid infections isn't That high. except... why would we look at time-frames of 5 years? we're in the fifth year of the pandemic and this virus has evolved fast, so the research is obviously laser-focused on year to year changes and working with the timeline that it's got. but i don't know about you guys, i anticipate living about 60 more years. do you think, knowing what we know about cumulative damage, that catching covid 60 times will be completely fine for our bodies? hell, what do you think catching influenza 60 times would do? post-viral syndromes have existed long before covid.

vaccines will never be able to catch up to the rate of the virus' mutations if they keep being tailored to specific variants, and it complicates things for developing effective treatments too. this is because this is a virus that circulates every day among essentially 8 billion people. statistically, it's inevitable that a random mutation somewhere will be successful and then begin to circulate. the fact is that 0.5% (a completely arbitrary number) of the global population is a massive number of people. it's 40 million people, more than the population of many countries. but it can be that amount again and again, because there's nothing preventing continuous reinfection.

no other statistics deals with this kind of situation. you can't use that ordinary benchmark or logic to think about covid. because this is in fact an unprecedented situation. and when new situations arise, people have to adapt and change their behaviour. but that's something that humans really hate doing, unfortunately

[ganymedesclock]

What is your favorite incarnation of Princess Zelda in the whole franchise?

This is a little tricky to say, because I'll be honest; one thing I tend to do is take characters like Link and Zelda as kind of cumulative? Every version of Zelda has relevance and every version of Link has relevance to each other.

(this is why I can never get my brain around Linked Universe, though absolutely no ill will to those who create and enjoy it)

But all that said I'll stop waffling and point to Tetra from Wind Waker, and Breath of the Wild's Zelda, for very different reasons. I think this is in no small amount because for me, they are the First and Last Zeldas- at least, as of this writing. Wind Waker was the very first Zelda title I ever played, which makes it more formative for me than the deservedly iconic Ocarina of Time- I encountered OoT as an adult after having grown up with hours and hours of Wind Waker.

Tetra is, IMO, one of the most proactive Zeldas we get in the series. Even if she's a child, she seems more worldly and mature than even some of the young adult Zeldas. I love that cheeky wink that she has and I'd adore it to come back as a character quirk for Zelda, though I understand why not; ever since Twilight Princess we've had a run of Zeldas who pretty clearly haven't felt much like winking.

Tetra manages to be a spitfire without hitting too many "stereotypical girlboss" type qualities; she doesn't feel like she's proving anything about how a girl can fight or whatever. She's a powerful, authoritative leader; we watch her quickly and decisively make plans, and I feel like she sort of sets the prototype for the canny, calculating ally we get in Twilight Princess in Midna (who is, to this day, my all-time favorite Buddy Character)

The scene in the bomb shop where Tetra spots Link but pretends she didn't is a standout favorite, as is the conversation she has with him right before Helmaroc drops in- specifically, when she says, "don't you have something else to worry about?" and points upward. Tetra's casual relationship with danger, and her obvious astuteness and intensity is great. I like that she doesn't really feel like our friend until we've earned it- the same qualities that make her a good leader also make her kind of scary and aloof. Again, she feels like the prototype for Midna in a lot of ways and Midna's the only helper who has an unapologetically selfish agenda.

I don't think it's a good thing to just, bully Link (because he takes a lot of crap from his co-stars) but it's nice to feel like someone is actively setting standards with Link that he has to live up to.

Tetra feels like she's using that aspect of Wisdom for her own designs, and until Link earns her trust, it'll actually work against him. Even if their goals are similar enough they don't really compete, if not for the curse Tetra would absolutely have made good on her word and blasted the back off Outset Island and demanded Nayru's Pearl for herself.

Which makes it brutal when Tetra absolutely gets the knees kicked out from under her by the revelation of- almost literally- the one piece of wisdom she couldn't have. The smart, seafaring tough girl is completely laid low by the revelation she "is Zelda" and has to be "as Zelda" and it takes the entire second act of the game and a kidnapping for her to rebuild that confidence.

It's why I always felt deeply disturbed by Spirit Tracks Zelda and how she's scared of rats and so obviously sheltered, has been led to believe that it's "a family tradition" for Zelda to wait passively for the hero as if her own grandmother only waited because she was forced to, and regretted it the second she got her feet back under her. It feels like Cole's manipulations, or, worse, that Tetra's children betrayed what she stood for and things only even worked out as well as they could because despite everything, Cole couldn't completely crush Zelda's spirit.

And speaking of crushed spirits...

BotW Zelda is just about the opposite in every way. While she's no less intelligent than Tetra, she's running in survival mode. And that, I think, is the kicker- I don't think any version of Zelda is stupid. I think many of them are just doing the best they can with a horrible situation.

BotW Zelda lived most of her life in futility. The brilliance that makes Tetra a shrewd, calculating person is reflected here in the most destructive way possible. I'm endlessly haunted by the cutscene of her standing at one of the shrines, musing in frustration that there has to be some kind of backdoor, there always is- a cutscene we only see after we know that Ganondorf was able to level Hyrule in this game because of the existence of that exact backdoor.

Zelda reached out and knocked on the walls of Ganon's prison long before he ever moved to attack, and thought nothing of it, because she is just a stupid girl who can't do anything right.

Where Skyward Sword Zelda is broken by the memory of Hylia, and how Hylia does not appear to have perceived any meaningful distinction in where she ended and Zelda began, BotW Zelda yearns for that cruelty. She begs the statue of Hylia to at least "tell [her] what's wrong with [her]", while being brutally cut down by her father at every single turn.

(Sorry, Rhoam. Whatever your intentions or fears, what you did to your daughter was abuse, flat-out)

If Tetra knows exactly who she is until the floor is dropped out from underneath her, BotW Zelda is the opposite; she spends so long mired in doubts and misery that the ultimate culmination of her power is the saddest possible epiphany- it's just being in so much of a crisis that nothing she does matters anymore. It's the soul equivalent of hysteric strength and I cannot begin to imagine the muscles she tore within herself to maintain that for a hundred years.

And even then, it's clear in her telepathic communications to Link she is still so sorry, still feeling so pathetic and helpless. Swimming in the Malaise, seemingly largely without lucidity, she might as well still be kneeling in a shrine begging a stone to talk to her; just instead of a statue, she's across from a screaming, wrathful, self-ascended god not speaking any language she understands.

But when I say "I think Zelda is cumulative" it's with the fact of, no matter how different Tetra and Zelda seem from each other... Tetra would make so much sense to BotW's Zelda. Everything Zelda wishes she was- such a badass you don't even take a lack of power for granted. There IS a backdoor, and it's called having a fuck-off galleon with big old fuck-off guns and a bunch of burly men who will heed your word. Despite being "a nobody" who forgot her royal lineage entirely to survive, Tetra rules like a queen on the high seas- besides the ghost ship and a few sunken wrecks we don't see a boat anywhere near the size of Tetra's pirate vessel and a portrait in Hyrule Castle unsubtly paints her crew as directly analogous to the retainers and court that her ancient ancestor commanded. She fearlessly requisitions one of the most expensive shops on Windfall Island and faces no consequences.

If Ganondorf pities her, it's that she's the queen of such a small, empty world- subtextually threaded into his comments to Link, how much he sees himself in both of them at that point, as he was also once the highly-skilled sovereign of a wasteland that hampered his ambitions like a tiger in a cage.

BotW and Wind Waker are both apocalypses, but they seem to reflect different forms of apocalypse. Wind Waker is an apocalypse of clarity, arguably; Tetra is nearly a fully-actualized Wisdom Bearer and one of the most bold and powerful Zeldas despite a lack of holy magic- she quite frankly doesn't need it, and uses the light arrows Link himself acquired elsewhere. The sacred regalia is just another treasure to plunder from a blind ocean. More than in any other game, Ganondorf speaks to Link and Tetra, and explains who he is- and wonders who they are, even in anger. Before the final fight, he even expresses a willingness to leave them alone if he's able to restore Hyrule- a pretty strong statement considering his curse voiced in OoT and echoed (preempted?) by Demise in Skyward Sword. There was so much clarity at the antediluvian end that the cycle very nearly stopped there, with the end of Ganondorf's anger.

BotW, despite being a fuller, more 'flourishing' world in all ways- the bounty of Hyrule's landscape even in decline is a direct contrast to the fishless Great Sea- is an apocalypse of amnesia. Zelda doesn't know who she is. She has no foundation to operate with confidence on. It's not a lack of intelligence, and it's not a lack of skill, and it's not a lack of craftsmanship. It's some intangible thing that she grapples furiously with and even at the end of the game she tiredly communicates that she has no control over it, and calling it once in a blind panic that somehow lasted a century without aging her means nothing- that power vanished and left her just where she started.

She remains a flower that can't be saved, such that the only thing that can be done for it is abandon it and hope, which is exactly what happened during the calamity. And yes, that flower was strong enough... but at what cost? It came with no understanding. Ganondorf is absent for BotW, acting by proxy from somewhere deep underground. We are faced with distorted, faceless echoes of Ganondorf, the Calamity and Blights, shadows in the water, and his thinking and his motives are completely ambiguous. With the name of the triforce being seemingly forgotten entirely in BotW, all of its bearers are lost in different ways:

The identity, autonomy, personality, of the bearer of Power has been buried and subsumed such that his blood boils out of cracks in the rock screaming that it will not be subjugated but the contents of his words are lost.

The bearer of Courage fatally overtaxes himself, because in a do-or-die moment he dies anyway, and cannot accept it, surviving at the cost of almost everything else that matters. At the end of it all, the person he spent everything to save timidly asks him if he even remembers who she is.

And the bearer of Wisdom, thwarted by an inability to put the pieces together, not because she's any stupider or weaker than her predecessors but because so much of the puzzle has been destroyed she can't know what's missing. Who knows, Zelda! Maybe, like Tetra, you have only half of the triforce of wisdom and should be tearing all over creation looking for small golden triangles! You can't know that, because you don't seem to know what the triforce is anymore or what that light in your hand means!

[tamapalace]

Bandai Provides More Details on Tama Arena Tama Racing Event!

The details are here, and we’re so excited. Bandai recently announced the upcoming Tama Racing event at the Tama Arena in the Tamaverse, but left much to our imagination. Well more details are here, and you could say it’s about to get competitive!

As a reminder, the event will run from Monday, July 31st, 2023 from 14:00 JST to Monday, August 7th, 13:59 JST. The winning team will be calculated in early August, and then rewards will be distributed between August 9th, 2023, to August 25th, 2023!

Bandai outlines an overview of the event. Tamagotchi characters from all over the world are divided into two teams, which are pink and purple. For those of you who are like us, you’ve already registered your team at the Tama Arena (go team purple!). You can contribute to your team by participating every day and getting a high score. At the event, you’ll be able to join game and start racing, listen, to hear what is going on at the event, and just look, which will allow you to look at the Tama Racing. Are we going to cheer everyone on? Yes.

Then you’ll have access to play, which you can do just once per day during the event period, and your score will be reflected in your team’s performance, we’re assuming its cumulative. Practice, which is what you can do with Shirotamas, and you can practice before you get ready to play!

Then you’ve got directions, to learn how to play the game, and back to get back to the previous menu.

So how do you play? During the countdown, repeatedly press the ��A” button to get a boost at the start, then hold down the “B” button to change your speed. Be careful, you don’t want to hold it for too long, or you will go over the speed limit and return to 0.

If there are hurdles and stars appear, shake your device to jump over them (omg, we love how they are using the gyroscope). Jump to dodge these items! Jump to catch this stars!

When there is a cut-in animation, repeatedly tap the ‘A” button to dash.

The results are in! Your score will be announced as 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place. What are the prizes? During the event period, you can claim your prize by going to the Tama Arena from August 9th, 2023 14:00 JST to August 25th, 13:59 JST.

What are the prizes? You can get one of three prizes depending on the number of days you play!

There is the Race Trophy for playing every day for 7 days, Race Helmet for playing 5-6 days, Tamaverse water for playing 1-4 days, and there is a grand prize for the winning team that you’ll get 5,000 Gotchi Points!

Good luck, and may the best team win!

[peterlorres21stcentury]

unpopular opinion: mods should enhance a game, not make it suck less

also sprach Lorrethustra, the endlessly reincarnated

And yet here I am, making some desperately needed improvements to a game that, while fun at first, needed some serious thought and maybe another year in development.

So far I have made the following changes to Starfield with the help of the amazing Bethesda modding community, because I don't have a fucking clue how to create my own mods so I offer naught in return. Notice how entirely simple these problems are:

-Doubled the experience gained from any action (thanks to a second mod, having the well-rested perk from sleeping will quadruple it!)

-Multiplied the amount of credits for each vendor by 10. Because enormous, interplanetary juggernaut corporations of the future only trust their vendors with 5k in virtual monies in a 48 hour period. 🙄 Seriously, it should be 100x that, but I'm trying to be reasonable here.

-Made it so that random quests are not shoved into my mission log just because some guard made a passing comment while I was near. I always hated this method of quest-giving. It felt invasive and annoying even in Skyrim, as it assumes that every character would be willing to delve in that cave or join the Thieves' Guild or make deals with a daedric prince or whatever, but in Starfield it is an absolute plague. If I want your quest I'll ask around for it!! Stop force-feeding your players this bullshit!!

-Furnished the Starborn ship with such extravagant luxuries as: a few chairs on the bridge, and one (1) bed. Because even though I don't use the ship that often, it's still part of my fleet, so I might as well make it a livable space instead of the iphone store-looking, sterile white void we got (seriously, the modder just added some decorative assets that were already present in the game files and intended to be used on the ship. Bethesda CHOSE NOT TO USE THEM WHYYYY

That's about all for now. I was thinking of finding something that increased the storage capacity for outpost containers from 600 units to... something a lot MORE THAN THAT. Why would you make outpost extraction rates so high if you can barely store it all? How can I realize my dreams of becoming an interstellar freight/resource tycoon if my base is nothing but walls of stupid shipping crates (which don't share inventory automatically and need to be connected through a mess of wires even when they, you know, snap together and ought to logically share inventory?? but that's a separate issue)? If the dev team understood their player base at all they'd understand that we are greedy rapacious loot goblins who need moooooooaaaaaaar, damn your hide 👿

I don't know if these decisions were intended as some kind of meta commentary on the nature of your character or what (the Starborn is reborn into new universes chasing their fruitless quest for some vaguely defined power, therefore the meaning of life is suffering and so the player gets diminishing returns on their repetitive journey? Is that what they meant?) but as *cough* deeeeeep and philosophical as that may be, good game design it ain't.

To think I wrote this much all because I wanted a way to level faster than the default pace of "not at all." Because despite the game having no level cap, the game literally does not offer you enough activities to grant the necessary ~500,000 cumulative xp points to reach level 100. Even going through a new game+ multiple times and repeating every single quest will not be enough unless you have literal days of free time. I never felt so starved for perks in Skyrim or Fallout 4, ever, despite the xp rewards being roughly similar. But you spend higher levels in Starfield so very hungry for xp because the curve of points earned per level is, as far as I can tell, near exponential. And the rewards do not scale with your level, nor with game difficulty. A level 90 enemy will always grant something like 120 xp, and you have tens of thousands of xp points to go.

Sorry, but this especially is truly boggling my tiny mind. Not to rant about something so trivial; I am only too keenly aware that this world is filled with actual pain and suffering, but I'd really love to know what they were thinking when they designed such an abominable leveling system. A grindy MMO this ain't, my friends. That next perk point should be a rewarding goal, not an impossible waste of time. It's like one team carried over the xp rewards that would be comparable to Fallout 4 (you get about the same per average enemy, anywhere from 50 to 200 points per kill, I think) and then a separate clueless team said "I mean, it's one level, Michael. What would it cost? A hundred thousand xp?"

I could go on, but I have other things to do today. I want to make it clear: I do not hate this game! A lot of it is incredibly absorbing, and I wish there was more to it (outpost building, crafting, surveying planets). But there should never be this many annoyances and pointless barriers to make these mods a necessity.

[tjemegames]

HSR: 2.5.1 AS, 2.5.1 PF, & 2.5.2 MoC Recaps

Hello there, the time for yapping is here once again! Since only the same eight or so people tend to read these, I don't think we need a wall of disclaimers this time around. Going forward you should really only expect to see them when I’ve implemented formatting changes or have something important to mention that pertains to the entirety of the recap post.

2.4 turned me into a slightly casual gamer: dedicated subsections for my casual gaming activities have been added to minimize some of the reintroduction redundancy that was happening in the last recap.

As always, apologies for the image distortion: long photos and Tumblr do not mix well.

You know the drill, lengthy rambling about my endgame experience is under the cut!

2.5.1 Apocalyptic Shadow

Gamer's Instigation is probably my favorite endgame title out of all the ones we've had so far (let's go, gamers!) I'm a big fan of AS, as we know, and this cycle's challenge did not disappoint. I got my twelve stars within a total of four challenge waves!

I tried my hardest to avoid resetting in my first run of stage IV, but even after doing stage III and rereading the enemy details I still needed to feel out Phantylia's mechanics to get a better grasp on the best way to defeat her efficiently. Aventurine's battle was rather cut and dry, so his side only took one attempt.

Aventurines battle was also quite fun. Imagine if his normal boss mechanics allowed for a cumulative dice score across your teammates (the energy buff would probably have to be RNG-based or default to the teammate that contributed the most points in order to counterbalance that), but it would make for a much more enjoyable time when fighting him. It’s been months and I'm still salty about the White Night Chronicles MoC XII—there simply was no reason for that to have been as difficult as it was for me back then. I just��

Anyway, here are the builds I used for IV-I:

Phantylia's battle wasn’t hard, it just required a bit more focus and planning to complete. I did my run with a sustain because I misunderstood the HP situation for defeating the flowers; I interpreted it as the flowers would restore Phantylia’s HP after popping, rather than restoring my team’s HP. In hindsight I shouldn’t have understood it that way because that’s not how the flowers work in her Echo of War, but for some reason that didn’t click at the time. Either way, I got it done with relative ease which is all I’m really asking for these days.

These are the builds I used in IV-II:

Pretend you didn't see Aventurine's sphere—there simply was no better choice. It is what it is, and I will not be addressing it further.

The first 800 jades down (whoop whoop!) I desperately needed them because Feixiao bankrupted me on her way to my roster. It’s my penance for betraying Danny boy.

AS Casual Gaming

AS is way too fun for me not to drop back into it over the course of the patch. I tend to get inspired by runs that I’ve seen on Discord and end up motivated enough to try for better clears and/or test out different teams. This is where I’ll be dropping my ramblings about those attempts. Unfortunately, due to image limitations, I won’t be able to include any build showcases in this section. I did consider making a secondary post specifically for this reason but ultimately decided that it wasn’t a big enough deal to be necessary (if I’m wrong about that, please do let me know. I’m down to yap for as long as y’all are down to listen.)

Chasing a better clear with my original team lineup:

Popped back into the game about four hours after my first round of attempts to start the process of trying for a better clear. The last time I was score chasing in AS I kept a close track of my reset count since it was over the course of a few days, and I kept switching back and forth between my phone and pc. This time I stuck to one day and one device so the detailing is a bit less extensive.

Even though I’ve used DHIL in basically every endgame cycle, I still manage to fumble his gameplay from time to time, my first round of tries being a prime example of that. With that in mind, I figured that taking on Phantylia’s side would be my best shot at increasing my overall score. I set my sights on a 100 point increase and went to town.

First three resets: +66 points, bringing me up to 7260

Next two resets: +4 more points, bringing me up to 7264

Final five resets: no points, DHIL managed to die twice—don’t ask me how that happened because I genuinely do not know

70 points of improvement on the second side. I don’t know if 100 overall points is within reach, but I’ll refocus my efforts on Aventurine’s battle and see what, if anything, can be done there.

First and only three resets: no points, I was hoping that there was a work around with the weakness-locked dice but there wasn’t

Barring making my entire team even faster to get more turns, which I don’t have the relics to do at the moment, this appears to be the end of the line for this clear.

Not a bad set of attempts overall. I was able to get my score up to a grand total of 7264 points within thirteen resets. That’s 138 more points than last AS—didn’t see that happening if I’m being completely honest, some of my builds have actually gotten worse since then. Either way, I’m happy enough with this score to forgo attempting a sustainless clear. Let’s be so for real, my account is not currently in the place to even humor sustainless clears. I’ll file that thought away for later down the line.

Getting Jingliu's Revenge:

Remember a little earlier when I said I was still salty about my experience with White Night Chronicles? Well, since I wasn't having the best of days, I decided to head back into AS so I could feel vindication in the form of beating up Aventurine.

Now, you may be thinking, "TJ, you've already gotten your revenge on Aventurine with Boothill like three times since then." To which I would say yes. However, pew-pew gaming him to death just isn't enough to quell the insatiable beast that is my pettiness for this situation. That being said, I called upon my slightly benched, 35% crit rate having Jingliu to finally enact my revenge; the fact that it's been over five months and I still haven't been able to get Jingliu to 50% crate is actually so painful. I had a whole arc where I was farming wind set Pela and did not manage to get a single replacement piece for Jingliu that entire time. I hate that I love this game.

Anyway, back to the topic at hand. I regeared Jingliu, rallied the troops (Bronya, RM, & Natasha), and set out for battle:

Victory is MINE! 3608 points is pretty damn solid—my Boothill team only managed to get 73 more points during their run. I feel like I can finally move on from this without any lingering resentment or regrets (yippee!)

Closing Thoughts

That just about wraps up AS for this patch. I was wrong with my guess of having to beat up Yanqing this cycle (a well-deserved break after the 2.5 continuance) but I do hope to see him in this mode sometime in the future. I’m looking forward to seeing what all they manage to incorporate into AS after this patch because the new boss mechanics were both refreshing and interesting. I’m someone who actively likes this mode, so I can only imagine how much of an impact the new features had on those who don’t typically care for it. I hope that they continue to mix up more battles like this in the future.

2.5.1 Pure Fiction

No video for Volubility since I couldn't get past eleven stars: I recorded one but it's not worth posting since I didn't even come close to a full clear. I don't want to waste my time editing and making a thumbnail for content I'm not proud of. Additionally, since I wasn't able to finish and I've since done MoC in between my myriad of PF attempts, I lost the ability to save my build showcases for the aforementioned recording, meaning that I would've been missing an entire section of my video. Truly unfortunate, but it is what it is.

I genuinely had such a bad time trying to do this. I spent far more time than I would've liked trying to twelve star and it sucked just about every bit of enjoyment that it could've out of me. I thought I would have a better chance at beating it after a couple weeks away and doing some character upgrades but apparently it just wasn't in the cards this patch. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Closing Thoughts

720/800 jades is painful but I have no choice other than to accept it and move on. If I somehow manage a miracle before the 2.6.1 reset, I'll be sure to pop in here to provide an update. Otherwise, that's all from me on PF.

2.5.2 Memory of Chaos

No video for Scalegorge Tidalflow either. I did manage to get all twelve stars, but my mental health is currently kicking my ass, so I just don't have it in me to bother with it (or this post really) before the patch ends.

Quick summary off the dome since I didn't write any notes when I did my run; Boothill continues to pay his dues. Feixiao is fun to play with—I might need to pull Robin or build Moze though because I don’t have a proper third slot for her team. I thought I could clear floor XII quicker than seven cycles, but a few rounds of casual gaming did not yield better results. No showcases because I forgot to make them before giving PF another try and I'm drained.

Closing Thoughts

MoC was fine. The exo-toughness mechanic is interesting, and I hope I get a chance to explore it more when I'm feeling better. All 800 jades have been added to the savings for DHIL's cone.

Alrighty friends, that's it for this post. Sorry about the quality drop; my brain is being a nuisance and I'd prefer to put this out now while I have some motivation left to do it—there’s no guarantee that I would've finished it at all if I decided to delay it further. Not my best yap but it’ll do for archiving purposes.

I hope everyone enjoyed the 2.5 endgame cycle (to the best of their ability)! I'll be back in about six weeks when it's time for the next one of these.

[sol-falloutblog]

I've been sick, and bored... wish I had a friend who was bi and a fallout fan so I could go over my criticism/critique of bi rep in FNV & FO4 and how they are BASICALLY two sides of the same coin!

(Pile of thoughts down below)

Both games are just as bad when it comes to bi rep (and some might argue against FNV being considered this, and while I'm willing to admit I COULD be missing some details because it can be easy to miss stuff in FNV, HOWEVER based on what I've seen so far that's considered "bi rep" for NV I... I'm having a hard time believing that to be the case) but mostly in different ways.

FNV comes off more as an invisibility issue paired with stereotypical hypersexual depictions of bi characters. Despite the fact that the player character can be bisexual it comes off more as a contrived afterthought due to it not only being a perk BUT in order to be bi you have to pick up two different perks & perks are not unlimited so if you canonically want your character to be bi you have to sacrifice two perk slots (or whatever you would call it) to do so (this is a bit of nitpick though). An argument can be made too that the game possibly pushes the age old stereotype of bi people just being "part gay part straight" with how the perk works, that instead of its own thing its a cumulation of two different things, a rather binary thinking placed onto bisexuality. Paired with the fact that no bi characters outside of POSSIBLY your player character really exist, I mean... technically there are a few characters you can SLEEP with regardless of gender but this reads more as a playersexual mechanic then bi rep and if we DO dare to consider it bi rep we HAVE to acknowledge that the rep only takes place when SEX is involved/offered aka the hypersexual bisexual stereotype (which is not a good thing). The only other character that could be read as possibly Bi who we DON'T sleep with to confirm this with could also just as easily be read as a bisexual stereotype (Rose Sharon Cassidy) who also basically says she isn't queer! Cass is very much a character who is/was meant for the male gaze and makes all the stuff with her character make more sense especially considering how she was possibly going to be a character the specially MALE courier could sleep with. This... THIS is all the bi rep within FNV... considering all the above, while FNV gets praise for its LG rep I wish I heard SOMETHING about its piss poor rep of bisexuals and how we BASICALLY are nothing and barely an afterthought.

Then we have FO4 that has a playersexual dating mechanic and while I PERSONALLY dont think playsexual mechanics in general are outright a negative/bad (there are also not inherently rep either) thing unlike some people I DO believe FO4 handled it VERY lazily and could have definitely done it so much better. Due to the nature of playsexual romance mechanics they usually make everyone the character can have a relationship with "bi but not really" because sexualities are never confirmed or even given in these mechanics so it's kind of pointless to claim it as rep regardless of how you play the game and some will say it also plays into the "everyone is bi" stereotype as well. Where in FNV we get almost the message of "no one is REALLY Bi, and if they are it's just because they are drunks, freaks, or whores," FO4 goes the extreme opposite way and we get "everyone is Bi... but also not really REALLY!" Characters with stated previous relationships with a specific gender can be romanced regardless of gender still (which I don't think is necessarily a bad thing/wrong, sorry not sorry) the problem lies in the fact that it was VERY lazily tacked onto these characters so they end up feeling very two dimensional, flat, and unrealistic. And the few explicit things that do point to a character being bisexual and not just FOR the player character are, you guessed it, sexual (it's the hypersexual bisexual rep again)! We got Hancock and him being flirted with by both men and women and wanting to "show him a tour of the town" again & we got some threesome comments from Cait... there is possibly more but this is all I can remember at the moment. I would say at least we get a character that doesn't run away from their stated attraction towards another gender (or isn't just confirmed by having sex with them AND only if you've played as two different genders because otherwise how would u know?) unlike in FNV it however does still suffer from issues. And, while some might claim Piper as rep I went back to listen again to the line with Magnolia and I have to say it's just a little too ambiguous to count, it seems more like embarrassment for making a comment that could be read as a sexual innuendo than her simply displaying same gender attraction.

So yeah, at the root of both games is biphobic rep despite these games being pretty different overall, being done by different studious and having pretty differing opinions in fandom but in the end BOTH engage biphobia AND specifically hypersexualization stereotypes... it's... kind of sad when you stop to think about it, we really can't have anything but especially within video games.

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Also, forgot I wanted to add this up there somewhere but a point I wanted to make that I recently thought of was how if the perks themselves make a character a specific sexuality would it be off/wrong then to claim that a character that DOESN'T take these perks is asexual unless proven otherwise? If not then how come? My main reason for bringing this up is to specifically point out how flawed these perks are or rather how flawed it is to count them as rep for sexuality because of how simple and binary the thinking and implementation of them is. Could I be wrong? Sure and I'm willing to admit I might be and could be just biased, Ive never cared for these perks ever since I first saw them being claimed as rep and never really thought more on WHY exactly that was until recently and while FNV did do some good things and it would be wrong not to acknowledge that we also need to be willing to admit when it does wrong and we know it HAS (literally any of its Native/Indigenous rep).

It is hard for me as a Bi person to see rep in those perk cards, and I can't be the ONLY one, and honestly it's only really an issue BECAUSE we get no Bi rep outside it. If we did I wouldn't even bother with mentioning it here but it paired with the hypersexual rep it all adds up to paint a rather bleak picture of how FNV and the people who worked on its views of Bisexuals/non-monosexuals. I would even go as far to say it shows how a good chunk of fandom feels too considering how I've seen VERY little criticism around FNV when it comes to bi rep versus FO4. You would think FNV is the best queerest game out there and FO4 hates and wants to burn gays (& bi's) at the stake by how fandom talks about them when BOTH are flawed! Maybe I just haven't seen the right posts, maybe so, but regardless I wanted to take an honest wack at analyzing bi-ness and how we are represented in these two very different games and how both are big disappointments in this area.

[mystery-moose]

DEATH STRANDING (Feb 27th)

In my quest to write down thoughts about art this year, I recently completed Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding for the first time! I had started it twice already, but stalled out both times because I got distracted or moved onto other things.

Kojima has always been a problematic fave of mine, but Death Stranding might be my problematic favoritest of his work.

The raw gameplay loop is as perfectly calibrated, engaging, and compelling as it was when I first played it back in 2019. It is, as Tim Rogers put it, the Gran Turismo of walking simulators, though I would probably put it more accurately as “the world’s best hiking and logistics simulator.” Trekking across Icelandic wastelands and haunted volcanic plains and up and down mountains is alternately so meditative and so tense that even after a cumulative hundred hours in my save file I was still doing optional deliveries just because I enjoy traversing the world. It’s so singular and unique in the thing it’s attempting to do, and in particular with the atmosphere it’s trying to cultivate, that I can say honestly that I’ve never played anything like it. And that’s a wild thing to say about a game with a big budget these days!

But that’s what you get with Kojima. Especially with Kojima these days, unfettered by corporate oversight or monetary concerns. He wants to communicate something, and by god he’s going to do that whether you or anyone likes it or not. That’s a big reason he’s gotten the reputation he has today. And we can argue about auteurship and how it’s bullshit in collaborative mediums all day (and that’s a fine argument to have) but it’s not like Kojima didn’t put in the hours -- the dude’s been making games since 1986, and been a project lead since ‘87. We can say he got lucky once, maybe twice, but we gotta say he’s worked for his pedigree at this point.

I mean, the man made an entire game about nothing but fetch quests, and he made it fun! What the fuck, right?

That’s to say nothing about the use of music, which introduced me to some tunes that still live on my phone! Or the stark, utilitarian-but-inventive mechanical design of Yoji Shinkawa. Or its story, rooted in absurdist silliness, Tarkovsky-esque surrealism, and bizarre metaphysics, bluntly hammering its central message home even as it weaves numerous other threads (heh) into its narrative through its use of visual symbolism, textual analysis, and iconography.

Of course the pacing is a nightmare, though -- so much of the story is backloaded in the final few hours of the game, including numerous revelations that would be better served earlier in the story. And his treatment of female characters, while much better here than Metal Gear Solid V, is... well that bar is beneath the floor, frankly. I do like the women of Death Stranding, in particular Fragile (yes that’s her name, every character is named like that) but the way the camera treats Fragile in one scene that would otherwise be really powerful, and the way Mama’s subplot goes and what Kojima’s even trying to gesture towards, and then the whole deal with Bridget and Amelie... it’s all just kind of a mess.

Which is basically the story of the story of Death Stranding, really! It’s a mess! A frequently fascinating, rarely insightful, occasionally quite powerful mess, but a mess all the same. Whether or not you can look past the stuff that doesn’t work to examine the stuff that does, or are equally interested in failures and fuckups as successes, determines whether you’ll enjoy the story here. That’s how Kojima rolls, though, has been since Metal Gear Solid 2, though that game probably remains his high point for thematic fascination, if not dialogue or character writing. (Including women! Seriously, he’s only been good at it like one time!)

I’ll say, too, that if you care little for story and want to run purely on vibes, then Death Stranding might very well be for you! The vibes here are totally unique and absolutely immaculate, particularly in the audio-visual department. There is nothing quite like when one of those Low Roar songs kicks in while you’re descending a mountain toward a new city, or Silent Poets coming in as you march across a blasted plain. And again, it all feels so personal; you are listening to Kojima’s personal mixtape, a set of bands he heard that he loved and which he associated with this game he was making, and getting that kind of truly personal touch from a big-budget experience is almost impossible to find in games.

Everything in Death Stranding, for better or for worse, is the product of one man’s mind, a snapshot of the things that move him, scare him, fascinate him, make him think and feel and wonder. And they’re all things he wants YOU to think about and feel and wonder. Some of them are stupid, for sure! Others are obvious or shallow. But more than anything, they’re all honest. Death Stranding is one of the most earnest, sincere artistic expressions I’ve seen in any big-budget media, and if that interests you at all (or you’re really into traversal mechanics in games) I’d absolutely recommend it.

Or if you like to point and laugh at the man who put a guy named “Die-Hardman” into his story. Rest assured that Kojima is absolutely laughing too.

[heretic-altias]

I’m taking this ramble to tumblr actually bc the group chat kinda changed course when I was only midway. I’ll use a cut for the zenos fans, but in my opinion EW Zenos was a huge letdown compared to what he could have been. So like, only read on if you can handle me complaining about him, you’ve been warned.

EW itself? Fantastic. Let’s get that out of the way. This is nothing against EW, just one character specifically. But I’ve lived with the stance since ShB that Zenos should’ve stayed dead in Stormblood and his EW role only cemented that.

Why?

Well, almost all of EW could’ve happened as is without him there. He wasn’t relevant in any way.

I went into EW thinking of him as a boring character. But then he had a super strong start with in from the cold. I genuinely thought he could grow on me after that questline if he kept it up. But then he didn’t. By level 83 he was back to roaming around like a lost violent child contributing nothing to the plot. He was boring again.

People tell me he’s a foil to the WoL but I just can’t see it. If anything Fandaniel was more of a WoL foil to me, the destruction for the sake of giving up vs our helping for the sake of hope. Zenos’s only happiness is fighting us sure, but a true foil to the WoL for me would be someone like Fandaniel who was actively trying to destroy what we built. Who wanted to end everything we protect. I’m no expert writer, so I could be off on the technicalities of a foil character but that’s how it feels in a story as grand as the WoL’s.

And then his ending battle was treated as some kind of epic culmination. I loved that fight, the vibes were great and the fight was fun. But why was it presented as more cumulative than Endsinger? Zenos had his finale battle with the Shinryu fight in SB. That was his epic full power battle. Man got greedy and wanted another and didn’t contribute anything to the EW plot to earn it. Literally if you take him out, you just have to modify Fandaniel to work alone and use some kind of epic dynamis thing to help the WoL in the end. The core story is basically untouched by him. The Epic Final Battle shouldn’t have been the guy who doesn’t have any direct impact on the plot we were following in my opinion. Endsinger was the threat the plot had us chase this expac, zenos just kinda dropped in and went “heyyy while we’re here let’s fight lol”

I guess I just don’t see his purpose. Man came back from the dead and contributed pretty much nothing concrete for two entire expansions. He could have shown more stuff like in from the cold, but instead he dropped off the radar 3 levels in.

Of course this is all my personal opinion. I know a lot of people who like zenos. But I’ve always found him kinda ‘meh’ for his lack of direct involvement so cutting out the little they tried to give him made his role in EW disappointing to me. It’s not that he never had potential. Just that every time he did it was dropped in favor of him wandering off to do. Whatever. The appeal of zenos in the game as is he is just isn’t there for me and probably never will be. His character arc could’ve been Ok if left in SB (I always found him a little boring compared to Nidhogg and Emet as an expac villain but still, it would’ve been Fine), but it feels overly drawn out being stretched to EW with almost no real plot involvement.

I’m sure some people like villains with such a disconnect, but for me if they’re not involved in the plot they’re not interesting or important, especially when the plot has its own villain that IS involved. This ramble is my personal take on his character that I just never get to talk about bc people are super defensive of him usually.

Anyway I guess my TDLR is that I feel like zenos being brought back post SB was pointless and boring bc he proceeded to have almost no main plot involvement ever. In from the cold showed his potential and then promptly dropped it, leaving it even more disappointing.

[waveridden]

@shootingst4rpress replied: how DO you think memories work in the life series… i wanna know

short answer: depends on what i think is most interesting

medium answer: as someone who's pretty new to mcyt and has trouble keeping back of the big servers, i tend to gravitate away from anything that's like "everyone remembers everything all the time," not to mention i just think that's less interesting than some fuckery going on

long answer:

first of all obligatory disclaimer i'm only up through double life second of all i've looked into hcs and fics and stuff and this is my thought but it's kind of blended with other things i've seen (and also in classic waveridden style some of it is in spite of other things i've seen)

specifically within the context of the life series, i think that there's some continuity, but it is absolutely not a normal "everyone remembers everything" kind of thing. like they all have some basic awareness (recognize each other, know that they're in this server voluntarily) but it's not, like, oh X and i were in hermitcraft together and we did these things and we are friends

so as a general rule people gravitate together because they've spent time together before, but they don't remember it - that's why you get people coming together in different seasons, like for example the cleo-scott dynamic coming up in last life and double life

BUT also i think that sometimes people do remember. it's not specific; sometimes it's little things (ren naming the double life group the "red army" after having the red army in 3rd life) and sometimes it's huge things, and that can lead to some conflict

my biggest thought regarding this: double life pearl remembers last life. which is why she keeps going "we're not a team this time? :( we're not gaslight gatekeep girlboss?? :(" and cleo and scott, who maybe vaguely know that they've teamed up before but don't remember the trio, keep going ......no??????

sort of similarly, if you go for a "people exist across multiple servers" thing (which like personally i have a difficult time with because i think it gets hard to do without getting into rpf-y territory but i digress) i tend to prefer people not perfectly remembering everything; i like the idea of the life games as a voluntary no-consequences zone where sometimes there are consequences anyways but they're never what anyone expects

THAT BEING SAID i would never want to dismiss the classic genre of "dudes working through trauma" and every now and again i think about this fic randomly dropping "yeah sometimes ren and martyn drop into the king/hand routine without meaning to and it takes work to get them to stop" and things like that

i just think that as someone who is not connected to the broader community, things like "people return to hermits/empires and have to deal with the death games" do not hit as hard for me because i do not know the hermits/empires as well. and i like the idea of deja vu that you can't completely place.

another touchstone for this is tender and fourteen from f@tt twilight mirage; if you're not familiar the tl;dr is that fourteen is an assassin with a degenerative memory condition who was sent to kill tender, but their memory decayed and the only thing they remember is "tender is important" and they became devoted to protecting her. that's the kind of energy i want to bring.

this post got so long so really quickly here are my last two thoughts:

i like the idea of memory being nonlinear in this series. not necessarily in the "remember things from future seasons" way, but in the way of like... sometimes you remember s1 and sometimes you don't. sometimes it's cumulative and sometimes it's not.

i have been kicking around the idea, with the knowledge that i will never be able to do it as well as i want to do it, of an "all stars" season where everyone is from their isolated seasons' continuity. like, throwing mean gills martyn and red king ren into an arena together. that kind of a thing.

thank you for asking. i hope you enjoyed this.

[kikipops117]

Book reports, anyone?

(I've gotta give some loopooong context first so skip this block of text if you wanna get to the action of my words or if you dont want your opinion of me to sour cuz im gonna be brutally honest and not mince words about what drove me to this point :.)

Because of my crusade to spend less time on the internet, I read more books in 2024 than I have cumulatively in years. And it altered my brain chemistry. In a good way. Maybe "healed" is a better word for it.

I know I am not alone in the camp of people who got out of high school and suddenly became starved for the drive to read. Devouring books as if I needed them to breathe was a hallmark of my childhood, and it was scary how easily I just fell into quitting and didn't even notice it. As a kid, I would finish a book and felt as if I'd lost a limb until I found another story to jump into. But I stepped out of my childhood bliss and into grown-up care, and it's like one day I woke up and didn't need to breathe anymore. I became an adult without holding on to what used to be a load-bearing facet of my life. Sure, I'd occasionally re-read the classics (LOTR and Hunger Games mostly), but I didn't pick up anything new, and I didn't want to. All the while, my screen time crept higher and higher.

The only thing that opened my eyes to what was, by all evidence, a phone addiction, was the sudden realization that I could no longer be content inside my head. I needed overstimulatuon to feel at ease. I needed tiktok on in the background while I ate, worked, exercised. I started writing again, and when I instinctually reached for my phone and told myself no, I got irritable and fussy like a smoker being cut off from their nicotine. I would watch movies on my phone and during slow moments I would literally swipe up on habit, trying to get a hit of dopamine from something shocking and fast, only to realize what I'd done and feel all kinds of shame and embarrassment. Something needed to change.

In 2023 I decided to try to read more. It went okay, I was able to finish 2 or 3 books, but I didn't cut off my internet addiction. I was living alone in a house with no wifi. My only connection to the internet, my friends, news, was social media. My screen time got worse and worse as I packed my reading ajd writing so tightly between my scrolling sessions that I had little time for anything else, and my brain was asphyxiating.

In 2024, Akane and I moved into a house together, and because she needs internet to function, we got wifi. A first for me in almost 4 years. Up until that point, all of my writing had to be done on my smartphone. I had a little Bluetooth keyboard I'd hook up to it, and I literally wrote two rough drafts for novels purely on my phone. So to be able to write from the comfort of my laptop with my phone on silent across the room felt liberating. As if I'd written the prior two novels under the oppressive thumb of an abusive overseer who so graciously allowed me just enough free time to think for myself so long as I paid my dues by scrolling for hours on end once I was put of steam. I was so codependent on short-form content and staring at my phone. My cell was like my only lifeline to my faraway friends (during the pandemic I was forced to move somewhere remote and at least 300 miles in any direction from any friends). It was also my only key to my greatest passion, which is writing. I couldn't just turn away from it! That would be like asking a fish never to breathe water again, but leaving him in the tank to tread with his gills above water.

Encouraged by my newfound freedom from my phone, I decided this year to do something drastic. I had a tiktok page (not the one you will find under my name now, btw,) that was like my video journal to all the hoopla that goes on in my life. I had a few thousand followers and a few million likes and views. It was doing really well and it was on the up. I decided to delete it. (I'm ashamed to admit that it was only this past month that I found the courage to remove Instagram from my phone as well once I found myself sneaking back into reels in order to get to short-form content. I'd kept Instagram because I told myself that I needed to keep up with the lives of my friends. Then I realized that I already spoke every day to my closest circle via text and I was kidding myself if i thought I needed insta to stay close to them.)

With the section of my brain usually devoted to processing endless tiktoks suddenly freed up, I found myself pondering a new writing project. This was unlike anything I'd worked on before, and it was the first concept I'd had in years that sparked such intense excitement and passion. I began writing and found the process easier than ever. But as I went, I became acutely aware that I had ZERO comp-titles for this project that I wished to someday query. (For those who don't know, a comp title is a preexisting book or work that is comparable to your project. When you are looking for an agent or publisher for your book they want you to give them a list of comp titles so they know what your target audience is going to be and how best to market it.)

I didn't have any comp titles because I hadn't read anything in years. And years. How could I dream so much about entering the space of authors when I'd neglected that world for so long? That would be like Ariel wishing to walk on land all of her life but never exploring ship wreckage or breaking the surface to talk to Skuttle.

Additionally, I found myself writing in a way that felt repetitive. Why did everything sound the same? Why was I leaning on a handful of descriptors and metaphors? Because I couldn't remember how books were supposed to feel. I believe it was Stephen King who said that the best advice he can give to authors is to read? Well, I knew then that I needed to read.

But I felt intimidated.

I'm not into "spicy" reading, and the only exposure I'd had to the literary space for the past several years was what I occasionally brushed up against online on Booktok. It was hard not to feel like the entire culture around reading had turned into fairy porn while I was away, lol. Which is not bad! But that's not what I want to write about or read. So I was uncertain where I should start. I can't exactly remember what I did, but I an pretty sure I Google something stupid like "best fiction novels of the past 5 years" and decided to start there. I got my hands on Project Hail Mary, Tress of the Emerald Sea, and This Woven Kingdom.

People often use an analogy to express how easy it should be to pick up where you started on a hobby. "It's like riding a bike! You just don't forget!" Well, I've never related to that stupid analogy because it took me forever to learn how to ride a bike, me being an anxious amd clumsy kid, and after I finally figured it out when I was eight, two weeks later I shattered five bones in my foot while tripping over a dog and had to spend the summer in a hard foot cast. By the time I was finally free, I'd completely forgotten how to ride a bike and had to start the whole scary and traumatizing process all over again.

That's kinda how I felt this past year. In a fit of binging, I tore through Project Hail Mary and Tress, and went on to Yumi and The Nightmare Painter and it was so stinking hard! Even though I was obsessed with the story, I still had to put it down for long periods of time and it took me a while to finish it. It wasn't until this past summer when my sister came to visit and suggested I read, of all books, Twilight, that something finally clicked into place.

Okay. I know what you're thinking. Please don't judge. Hear me out.

I've never read Twilight. My sister was obsessed with them when we were girls but I was into other things. But the movies were a regular occurrence in my house and I went with my sister and mom to see all of the movies in theaters (except for Breaking Dawn part 1. I didn't see that one, so when I went with them to see part 2 I was MAD confused the whole time lol)

When my sister came to visit this summer, she wanted to do a Twilight movie marathon and I was all in. The movies remind me of simpler times, and we had a ball watching and laughing as adults with fully developed frontal lobes and a soft spot for nostalgia.

When she left, she told me I needed to read the books so we could better commiserate and I finally folded. I hopped on Thriftbooks (not a sponsor but I ADORE thriftbooks and would love for them to hmu someday lol) and I was able to get all 4 books for like, $20 with one of the sales they put on.

I read the first book and wow. I will withhold my opinion on it for now (you'll understand why later). I didn't want to jump right into the second book, I needed a pallet cleanser. But I was really loving the nostalgic feeling I got from Twilight. It kept me reading so avidly because the story was not intimidating and there was a sense of comfort and familiarity mixed with the newness. So I decided to pursue that line of thinking and read something that would give me the same feeling.

ENTER THE HALO BOOKS.

If you've found my trashy side blog, then you know by now how obsessed I am with the halo video games (CE, 2, 3, ODST, Reach, and Red vs Blue specifically). My sister read a few of the books when we were kids but I never did. I have dyslexia, and it was REALLY bad for me when I was little. It took me until 5th grade to start reading for fun, and I decided as a kid that I didn't want to deal with all of the science stuff in the Halo books when I could be reading about drsgons and wizards and junk.

So I'd never read the books despite my adoration of the games, and the series felt like it would be the perfect mix of nostalgia and intrigue to get me into it.

I was not anticipating the sorrows™️

I read the Fall of Reach and was devastated, of course. But I was obsessed and had to keep going. So I read The Flood next. Also heart wrenching. I needed a break from all the sadness and read New Moon (twilight 2) and once again, mixed with so much nostalgia and frustration with the characters lol.

This brings us up to the present day.

In search of something that wouldn't be so heavy as the Halo books and so infuriating as the Twilight books, I decided to read Interview with the Vampire this past week, with zero context about the content or tone of the book. I chose it simply because I love vampires and the book I'm writing is about a vampire and when researching the best works of fiction about vampires, Anne Rice's works are in the top list of contenders.

I cracked open my Thriftbooks copy of IWTV on Wednesday, and I finished it late last night. I couldn't put it down. I. Am. Obsessed. The prose. The story. The way that it made me uncomfortable at times, the way it totally should, and made me just swoon with how stinking pretty the writing is. I love the introspection, the exploration of morals and purpose. I am going to digress here because the purpose of this blog post is not to review IWTV but suffice it to say, I loved.

I finished reading late last night and felt the feverish need to share my feelings with SOMEONE. obviously I'm a little late in the game for this book though. It came out in the 70s. But I couldn't shake the feeling that I needed to put my thoughts on what I'm reading somewhere. I am an avid journaler, but I give her a play by play as I'm reading. The eloquence of IWTV felt almost like I was reading a book for a literature or philosophy class, it was so gorgeous and explored such themes. So naturally, my train of thought arrived at the conclusion that I needed to write a book report.

That is why I wrote this long blog post. Because I am here to tell you that I am going to start writing little baby book reports on what I read! Because I want to!

So, if you're interested to know what I'm reading these days and how i feel about it, then you're gonna be fed because I'm cooking. I have found more lasting dopamine and joy in reading books this past year than I ever did scrolling or posting on tiktok. I've felt a stronger connection with my sister, mom, and friends as we talk and gush about what I've been reading. I finish a reading session, and I feel like my mind is invigorated, not numb. I'm inspired to imagine and think and create, as opposed to the bitter addiction that scrolling trapped me in that kepy me hungry to consume. Never ending. I can chronical my entertainment with narrative start and finishe, which satisfies and inspired in a way that hours and hours online can never replicate.

If you're looking for a sign to do as I've done, then please consider this it. And consider me an ally along the way, because it was hard. But so so rewarding.

That's all! :) thanks for reading

[sdyuteiaok]

Ok, not too much of a slog, some relatively quick and easy wins in the Explorer Gold mines, but still gonna take a few more days at this rate since I only go to four wins per day for the most part. But I did change my deck and got rid of the more signature cards (Liliana Dreadhorde General, which was painful since it's such a neat card, but realistically, it rarely comes down, and when it can, it's usually not the best idea, so it had to go; the 2/1 that ETBs to wipe a graveyard, draw 1 lose 1, or create a Pest--this one was mainly as a get outta jail free card main deck against graveyard decks, but those haven't really been around lately, and we've got excellent options in the sideboard anyway, and the dream of cloning this for more options with Kiki-Jiki only ever comes up extremely rarely since you'd rather be cloning your Ravenous Rats to soft-lock the opponent out; and then I also cut my Nighthawk Lhurgoyf since it so rarely connected, particularly when it was at its beefiest, and like all these other cards, I notice, has such high potential but realistically never really lived up to it, and the allure of comboing off with Kiki-Jiki rarely ever pans out (I did bleed out when I kept drawing off of the dead clone when Liliana was out against an opposing Sheoldred, oddly enough). Anyway, the card I brought in to replace these are three Werewolf bleeder guys, since it kind of achieves the other functions all in one card: it snipes the grave, it changes the card supply--the ward discard is crucial to eat away at opposing resources rather than my prior focus on putting me up on cards, it might be more valuable just to deplete the opponent while my stuff continues to work and build the constriction (still kept Angrath, which is a great source of constant discard and can randomly swipe and kill a lowdrop, of course). And then of course, the Werewolf itself is a scary threat that can get even scarier, which the other cards are just too hoop-jumpy to be of a similar threat. Liliana is devastating when she comes down, but by that time, the game can be completely out of hand otherwise, so getting the threat down early and crushing down from that early phase makes a huge cumulative difference. And then of course, it combos well with Kiki-Jiki if you need to hit the gas or eat more of the graveyard. I guess the main thing that was keeping me off of this card that is otherwise up my alley (love bleeder effects, love Werewolves, love black creatures) was that this card is such a known factor. But I still have some good flavor in Angrath and my Ravenous Rats selection--I have a 2-2 split between the Snail one and the Detective one, and I routinely soft-lock people out with it, it is in no way a rarity. And one of the deciding factors in cutting the 2/1 Strixhaven guy was that more than once, when given the choice between cloning that or one of my Ravenous Rats, it was always the Rats which was the correct choice, to keep the opponent at bay from rallying back. So while it's hypothetically or conceptually strong to clone that Warlock every turn, and I've done it a couple times, it's usually not the best move. So it's a really cool card, but just isn't what we need here at this time. With that, I'm happy with how hard these Werewolves hit, and how much the progress the gameplan, and I hate to say, I don't miss the others much at all, though Liliana is certainly a shame to lose. But again, how many times have I ever even cast her? More often she rots in my hand. And when she comes down she either wins the game or was a lot of mana for not a whole lot before she's killed then the board's wiped. She really needed to cost a mana less at least in order to be in the ballpark, but at present it's just too much to swing. Quietly looking forward to playing out the deck some more, as this configuration seems to be doing pretty well. And then I thought MH3 was coming next week, but I guess it's actually in three weeks?! So still some time to go, might be able to squeeze in one more Thunder Junction draft, but I dunno.