#lugg

[lemondrop2]

Mr. Luggs is so hungry

[clipzicle]

been thinking of ghosts lately

[boomkitty86]

[brineffxiv]

Understanding hurts. He was just a little guy, and was doing his best to save his people, even though he could barely remember them.

Is that enough? I don't know that it's enough...

That does seem the most likely explanation. I've thought about it quite a bit, why would Emet-Selch make a plan to assist me in taking down Elidibus? And the best answer I can come up with, was that it was an act of compassion for his friend. He knew how fraught and lonely their struggle was, and he knew both who and what Elidibus was now and who he used to be. And he would have known how impossible that struggle would have been for Elidibus on his own. Emet-Selch was the ancients' last true hope for restoration; without him the fight would be an exercise in cruelty, for both sides. And so, knowing there was a legitimate chance I could kill him, he put contingencies into place for the constellation crystals to make their way into my hands.

The big outstanding question I have is, was that really him, or was it a shade he had constructed of himself? I lean towards it being a shade, just on the gut-feeling that it would be easier to attach a synthetic entity to the crystal than it would be to summon his soul from the aetherial sea. Also, if his soul could be called so easily, one would think it would be prudent to plan to restore himself to life. But then, there's quite a lot I don't yet understand about life, death, and rebirth in the world of this game... so perhaps there is still a chance it was actually him.

Oh, hi Beq Lugg. Sorry if I don't seem too excited: I've just been through the emotional wringer.

You don't know how big a relief that is to hear.

That is significantly less of a relief. I'd thank you all to stop talking before you give me an ulcer from the stress.

...I will not cry again... I will not cry....

My friends all have business to tie up and goodbyes to say before I take them back to the Source, so off they go. Alisaie invites the Exarch and I to accompany her to see Halric one last time. From there I travel to Eulmore to see Alphinaud and the Chais and continue the Exarch's tour of the realm.

Next stop is Il Mheg, and Urianger, who has found Ardbert's soul crystal, and bids me deliver it to Seto...

Where this beautiful interaction takes place. When he closes his eyes, Seto can sense Ardbert within me. And somehow, Ardbert is able to speak to him, one last time.

And I cry. Again. The crying just won't stop.

In Slitherbough, Runar begs Y'shtola to stay, which isn't possible. But he thanks her for everything, and Y'shtola swears that she will find a way to travel between the worlds and come back again. Because there are too many mysteries here yet unsolved.

On to Amh Areng, where I catch up with Ryne and Thancred on their way back from saying their goodbyes. And hey, a mention of Gaia outside of the Eden raids!

Finally we head back to the Crystarium, where Ryne gives us a truly touching goodbye. And Thancred finally tells her just how proud of her he is. Good man, Thancred.

And then the whole of the Crystarium is there to see us off!

And to give me a final message for the Exarch. They have learned what happened to him, and what is about to be attempted, and they are sending all their love and confidence that he will be fine. I promise to give it to him when he wakes.

And then we are off... to the Source!

.

.

.

Ah. This is probably a good place to stop this post.

.

.

.

Okay maybe not just yet.

Yes. That is the perfect image. It will live in my heart as a beautiful memory of Shadowbringers.

*cries some more*

[wonderman630]

Mr Luggs, And King Boo

[quillpendraws]

Note: When you don't know what to draw, just redraw the Wikihow portrait ghosts images

[sezja]

Cradling Beq Lugg gently in my hands,

[vidreview]

VIDEO ESSAY ROUNDUP #5

[originally posted march 30th 2024]

it's been a minute since i've done one of these, for a whole host of reasons. the biggest one is that i just haven't been watching very much youtube lately, on account of spending my time making youtube instead. in February i released a scripted essay about the German time travel murder mystery show DARK, while in March i posted an unscripted conversation piece about all the movies i own but haven't watched. i've got a lot more planned for this year, but we're here to talk about other people's essays, not mine. so let's do that!

"Yellow Paint" by Caleb Gamman.

i've talked about Caleb Gamman on this blog before, and no doubt i will continue to do so. he's a fantastic and criminally underrated essayist whose materialist approach to media analysis is a model for the kind of thing anyone making video essays ought to aspire to. nominally about the discourse over yellow paint signposting interactible objects in modern AAA video games, this essay is a disgusted and exhausted act of passive aggression (which turns into regular aggression by the end) against the ways social media and corporate greed have engendered an atmosphere of deliberate ignorance and illiteracy towards games, traditional media, news, politics, everything. it's an entertaining and vindicating watch, full of great points argued with genuine conviction.

"PS1 STORIES - 3D SHOOTING MAKER" by Blue Bidya Game.

this one i found through a friend posting about it. we're looking at a review of a very specific PS1 "RPG Maker" spinoff dedicated to 3D rail shooters a la Star Fox --which is an instant sell for me, a long-suffering Star Fox enjoyer. but it's just as much an in-depth history of the Maker franchise as a whole, which is a lot deeper and more interesting than i ever could've imagined. a lot of research went into this, a task i can only imagine was made incredibly difficult by the language barrier. it's a great little video that packs a lot of charm into its 31 minute runtime, but what i find even more remarkable is Blue Bidya Game's mission statement: "I do sentimental videos on every game in the PS1 library alphanumerically and region-free until I die. Let's get weird and look through low graphical detail windows together. What do you think is out there? What could be just past those blocky hills?" at time of writing, there are 36 videos on Blue Bidya Game's channel, the vast majority of which are below 2000 views. if the quality of this single essay is even remotely indicative of the rest of his catalogue, then this might qualify as one of the most exciting & slept-on works of historical games journalism out there. if you were a fan of Tim Rogers' "Let's Mosey: A Slow Translation Of Final Fantasy VII" series, i think you may have found your new favorite youtube channel. you're welcome

"VR's Greatest Hope, We Thought - Half Life: Alyx Four Years Later" by Brother Burn.

there was a time when i believed wholeheartedly that VR was my beat. i futzed around with the Oculus DK2 at the University of Oklahoma tech lab in, what, 2014? and had my mind blown by the experience of riding a virtual roller coaster. in 2016 my roommate and i went halfsies on an HTC Vive, which arrived on our doorstep the very day that Donald Trump won the presidential election. more on-the-nose symbolism you couldn't possibly ask for-- that is, assuming VR software development & investment kept up its then-rapid pace long enough to support total quadrennial escapism, which it absolutely did not. don't get me wrong, i found a number of titles to love; i made a video about perennial VR classic Beat Saber in 2018, but was plenty charmed by the likes of Arizona Sunshine, The Gallery, Vanishing Realms, Zombie Training Simulator, and especially the fast-paced climbing game To The Top, whose only weakness for me was the limited number of tracks in its (admittedly good) OST with no ability to easily import your own tracks instead. yet for as much as i liked these games, vanishingly little about them was so far beyond what was offered by the tech demos present in Valve's VR pack-in The Lab that you couldn't get an approximately similar experience by just playing that instead. alas, the horizon of possibility for VR games hit something of a ceiling once all the most obvious ludic experiences had been more or less perfected.

anyway, this video by Brother Burn is at least in part about that. i never played Half Life: Alyx, but it certainly seemed positioned to be "VR's Greatest Hope" at the time and so i was naturally drawn in by this essay's title. what it confirmed for me is that i'm glad Alyx exists, but don't feel an especial need to play it. he talks at length about the stealth level "Jeff", which sounds cool as hell and is something i could never under any circumstances subject myself to. i cannot handle horror in VR. there's a section of Arizona Sunshine set in an abandoned mine that i had to psych myself up to finish for three weeks. so it's good, in that respect, to get a breezey overview of Alyx from someone who isn't a Half Life superfan (like me), who gets motion sick in VR easily (also like me), and who clearly came up during a very specific era of youtube (ditto). Brother Burn's style is a time-capsule from 2017 in all the best ways. post-Game Grumps, pre-Breadtube, high effort editing with a lightly self-aggrandizing sense of humor, lives maybe two or three doors down from Errant Signal; i dunno what to say except i find his work charming. that he has less than 2000 subscribers at time of writing is as unfortunate as it is unsurprising.

"remember fingerboards?" by Jeffiot.

this may quietly turn out to be one of my favorite video essays of the year. a history of skateboarding with a history of finger-skateboarding along with a personal history of both into a genuine loveletter to what is objectively a very silly activity? oh yes, thank you very much, i'll take two. the section where he first tries fingerboarding is so surprising and charming, and everything that follows is like… i dunno, freeing? there's something about this video that feels like a substantially relieved exhale, as it's the first really niche thing Jeffiot's done since the astronomical success of his Skull Trumpet essay. the scariest part of being Suddenly Popular after such a long time being totally invisible is the looming specter of What Next. the temptation must've been there to just keep on doing videos investigating the origins of Weird Internet Ephemera forever, since that clearly resonated with a lot of people. instead, here he is doing something totally unrelated, in a realm that none of his new subscribers are likely to be interested in --a supposition at least momentarily supported by the fact that this video only has 14,000 views after a single day (compared to the 100k+ views his last few hit). that number will surely go up, but for the moment i think it's illustrative of the fact that every channel's subscriber count actually contains at least two, probably more, discrete pools of audience. 155,000 subscribers is impressive and substantial, but how many of those people are there for Jeffiot, and how many are there for More Skull Trumpet? all things being equal (which they very much are not), i see that 14k viewership number as a soft indication of Jeffiot's dependable long-term viewers, the people who'll follow him down whatever blind alley he wanders through.

i plugged Jeffiot in the previous roundup, with a lot of time spent analyzing the phenomenon of running a small channel that suddenly gets huge because of a single viral hit. when i wrote that post in january of this year, he'd just exceeded 50,000 subscribers after having only 5,000 a few weeks prior. now, two months later, he's got over 155,000 subscribers. this makes Jeffiot's channel a really useful case study in how one translates good luck into good fortune. the most notable development in my opinion is that quite a lot of Jeffiot's back catalogue has seen an immense increase in viewership as well, something that simply does not happen unless there's a palpable and immediate and consistent qualitative energy shared between the old stuff and The Thing That Went Viral. when i say that the job of a video essayist toiling in sub-5k-views obscurity is to lay the groundwork for getting lucky, this is exactly what i mean. Jeffiot's stuff is high-effort, surprising, and thoroughly entertaining across the board, unique in subject matter yet somehow broadly approachable (that he's clearly very influenced by the work of Tim Rogers over at Action Button is, i'm sure, just a coincidence). i really hope that Jeffiot doesn't take the relatively low viewership of this fingerboard essay as a Failure and vow to stay away from such seemingly off-brand subject matter in the future. it's not a failure (i mean, god, i'd kill for a video of mine to even break 5k in a single day at this point), but rather an indication of confidence and direction. the best artists and creators will walk their path whether you follow them or not. there's no being true to what compels you which also permits universal success, and any attempt to the contrary is a great way to strangle your soul to death. the successes float you on from the sinkers. views and subscribers don't have a linear relationship with monetary success on youtube (unless you rely exclusively on ad revenue, at which point you're already fucked and should probably check a calendar to see if it's still 2015), yet it's so easy to get spooked by them because youtube wants us to be obsessed with analytics. somehow, i think Jeffiot's smart enough to avoid such pitfalls.

"The Mass Extinction Debates: A Science Communication Odyssey" by Oliver Lugg.

this one was suggested to me through my askbox. what strikes me most about this video is how it spends 45 minutes building up the context leading up to the debates about what actually caused the extinction of the dinosaurs, so that you understand what they really represented beyond a simple who's right/who's wrong. i had no idea this was such a recent thing-- 1996, man. that's so in my lifetime. i've always thought the asteroid theory was just uncontroversially true, it never occurred to me that there would have been a combative dogma against it in the scientific community. this is just a good, fun, enjoyable and educational video essay.

"Everyone But Me Is Wrong About The Cornetto Trilogy" by Innuendo Studios.

this is an essay refuting the semi-popular assertion that the Cornetto Trilogy (Edgar Wright's Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and The World's End) are about stunted manchildren being forced by circumstance to finally grow up. instead, Ian Danskin argues, these films are about stunted manchildren who refuse to change until circumstances beyond their control forceably change the entire rest of the world in a way that allows them to never have to grow up. this is one of those essays that's clearly been on the backburner for a long time, delivered with a real sense of frustration and desire to correct the record on something that seems, to Danskin, transparently obvious.

i liked this essay a lot because (to get a bit inside baseball) i'm dedicated to finally producing my extremely-long-in-the-works essay titled Everyone Is Wrong About LOST, about how everyone is wrong about the tv show LOST, by the end of this year. a big question for me in writing that essay has been what tone to strike, how much indignance i should show, where the line between funny and annoying lies. this essay did a lot to clarify that question for me, which is only that much more edifying because Ian Danskin has been at this since 2014. his original essay, This Is Phil Fish, was a big inspiration for me when i first started thinking i might want to try my hand at this gig, and his work ever since has remained some of the most consistently good and clear argumentative writing on the platform. any time he posts a new essay is a moment of quiet celebration for me, especially on the rare occasion he does traditional media analysis like this instead of the equally excellent but generally dry rhetorical analysis he's been doing with the Alt-Right Playbook for the last 6 years. it feels somehow poetic to once again have the path forward in my work clarified by a creator who inspired me an entire gender ago, like somehow despite all that's changed i'm still being true to my WAIT HOLD ON WHAT

well i guess i'd better hurry up and make this fucking LOST video, huh?

<- ROUNDUP #4 | ROUNDUP #6 ->

[oldsardens]

Jack Lugg - Woman

[w0wls]

Beq Lugg meme format

[clipzicle]

had a dream about luggs earlier and started speedrunning this as soon as i woke up

[brineffxiv]

Tell them the truth about the Warriors of Light, they said.

It'll be best coming from you, they said.

...Is it too late to mention I get stage fright?

Ardbert, Brendan, Renda-Rae, Lamitt, and Nyelbert were true heroes possessed of uncommon compassion and virtue who didn't set out to save the world, but did anyway. They were used by sinister forces to trigger the flood and gave their lives to stop it happening, and when that didn't work they gave their souls as well. Ardbert additionally spent over a century trapped in a solitary hell for reasons he didn't understand (and believe me when I finally get a chance to speak with Hydaelyn we will be Having Words about that) before sacrificing himself to save me, personally, as well as the world in general, again. So stop treating them like villains, you hear?

Now there's an imposter running around and....

...He's here!

Faker! Imposter! Where's the blood on your axe you fraud! Too-perfect facsimile!

Poor Alphinaud and his phobia. It's a good thing he couldn't see the real Ardbert when he actually was a ghost.

Liar liar pants on fire.

Oh thank goodness I'm not falling for this shit.

Oh shit, well that cat's out of the bag.

Uh. Er. Well, he's not wrong about that?

...Honestly I cannot figure what this guy's motive is. It cannot be what it looks on his face. He's gotta be sinister in some way... but everything he's saying is... good stuff? Become the hero you want to see in the world and all.

Very good points Urianger. You are the expert on secrets, I trust your instincts.

Oh I forgot G'raha had no way of knowing what Ardbert looked like.

Okay, Ardbert is definitely still part of me. Good to know.

Right, it's like it's his corpse... walking... around...

I've seen this before. Someone showing up, acting close but not quite right, when I know they're dead.

That bastard.

That fucker.

Elidibus you get your ass OUT of Ardbert's corpse this instant!

I swear to Zodiark and Hydaelyn both, I will make you regret this.

I feel like such a dumbass, lol, I should have realized it was Elidibus. He even said he was going to have me killed off by a Warrior of Light. I just. Didn't expect him to mean it quite like this. Himself as Ardbert.

Is that what was going on there? It was the Echo that let us see him? I'd thought he could just be selectively visible if he wanted.

Hey wait, does that mean, at the end of the fight against Emet-Selch, when he asked me to remember, could none of the rest of my friends see him? Since he didn't have a body at the time?

Oh. Oh, I didn't even think of that! Interesting. You're right, I would make an ideal host for an Ascian, if they could actually use me in that way. I wonder why not?

Damn, too bad Emet's not here, I bet he'd tell us. ...I miss Emet.

Yeah, knowing who "Ardbert" really is doesn't clear up any of his plans at all. Presumably he is trying to kill me, but I don't see how recruiting new warriors of light would make that happen. None of these people want me dead, and after what I've done for them I can hardly imagine anything he could do to change that.

[wonderman630]

Mr Luggs, Louis The Alligator, Petey Piranha, King Boo, And The Pig Out Arcade Gamr

[lorefiendeli]

I am crawling out of a hole but for a good cause. Not to show my elezen, but to tell you why voting for Gaia in the survey for wanted side stories is a good idea. a) We already have an inner monologue style from her in game, expanding on it would be in my opinion interesting. b) EDEN. That's where she comes from, and filling potential gaps or expanding on it (and therefore on her relationship with Ryne) would be very hard to avoid doing, unless... c) ...her backstory comes into play. We've seen Eulmore from the perspective recently of Ran'jit as a general, of prospective and bonded citizens in 5.0, and partially through the eyes of free citizens through the Chais, but that last category is still worth going into.

If you are not convinced yet, may I interest you in a vote for Cyella, or potentially... Cylva? If you don't know why, do your role quests. All the Shadowbringers ones. It's worth it. And our best way to potentially learn more about the greatest villain of the First in the time before the flood...

[dragoon-mid-jump]

Liveblog react posts are a go! The following was made in real time with events:

Ryne! Baby environmentalist! I wanna give her a hug!

Oh god, Zero, no! Just give them some Scooby Snacks or something!

There's something more poetic about this scene happening in the rain. I feel like after Darkness overtook the 13th, weather just kinda...stopped happening. Like, Zero barely remembers rain and all.