#man i could talk about a bunch of stuff from the game ITS SO GOOD

[honeydudedraws]

Great God Gove doodles I've done in the past few days! if ya follow my main you know how insane (tm) I've been over this game, PLAY IT PLAY IT PLAY IT

also some stuff from something I'm writing (i want to finish it so bad but no promises)

[miralunawritez]

HxH main four + hisoka n illumi w a teenage daughter thats going through her first heartbreak

this came into my brain n i NEEDED to write it

(the main 4 r aged up to adults btw lol)

Gon-

Is absolutely heart broken for his little girl, wishing he could take her pain away

Hugs her tightly while she cries, not letting go until shes ready

Takes her out to dinner for a dad n daughter date to distract her from her break up

Buys her anything she wants on the menu, he doesnt care how much it costs

Does face masks and watches movies with a bunch of snacks when they get home, any movies of her choice

Paints her nails, does her hair, does absolutely anything for her to make her happy

Kurapika-

Is calm about it on the outside but furious on the inside, who in their right mind would hurt his baby?

Sits her down on the couch to talk about it, letting her vent and cry into his shoulder

Lets her help him cook dinner while playing her favorite music, goofing off the whole time (its ooc but he wants to make her happy)

Gives her some good moving on advice (no contact, distractions, etc)

Stays up with her as late as she wants him to, even though he is an extremely busy man he would always put his child first, especially with what shes going through

Pays super close attention to her, checking up on her frequently, asking if she needs anything, etc

Killua-

He's mad and he shows it, saying stuff along the lines of he knew her ex was bad news, he never liked them, etc

He eventually feels bad about the stuff hes saying and asks what happened, watching and listening as she cries and vents

Buys her a bunch of chocolate, new clothes, jewelry, anything she wants

He already didnt want her dating for this reason because it hurts him to see his little girl upset just as much as it hurts her

Plays video games with her if thats what she wants to do, he will do absolutely anything for her

Makes sure she has no way of contacting her ex so they dont come back into the picture

Leorio-

Oh he is PISSED. its an understatement tbh he is absolutely LIVID.

"Give me their phone number" "Dad I-" "Give it to me"

Goes OFF on her ex, saying how they are missing out on such a wonderful, beautiful, caring girl and how they are going to regret it when shes more successful than them

It's embarrassing but she cant help but love every second of it, cherishing how much her dad loves her

Gives her a pep talk, saying shes too good for them and way too pretty for them

Makes her favorite dinner for her after renting/buying her favorite movie and bringing her a million pillows and blankets to make sure shes comfortable

Hisoka-

Is angered by the fact someone broke his daughters heart, but he knows there is other people out there for her

Tells her theres plenty of fish in the sea and that she will find someone else

More protective over her, not like she dates a lot of people anyway, people are terrified of hisoka and dont wanna be around him

Plays cards with her to keep her distracted and focused on something else, occasionally letting her win to make her happy

Does her makeup for her since she ruined it by crying, being slightly gentle with her

He genuinely loves her so so much..deep down, he just doesn't really know how to show it

Illumi-

Kills her ex

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

wrote this bc me n my bf js broke up n i dont have a present father so this is kind of projection of what i wish my dad would do for me (all except hisokas n illumis)

[junpei-iori-ace-defective]

Thoughts about Hades 2 as a tech test player

Everything is under a read more bc. 1. Long post. 2. Spoilers for Hades 2.

1. The game is fucking s m o o t h. Loads quicker and everything feels more stream lined.

2. It’s somewhat harder than Hades 1. Idk if it’s bc of not having a super buffed character but I am definitely finding it a little more challenging. Not a bad thing though!

3. Melinoë plays a little different from Zag which is to be expected! We now have a sprint, spells, and new weapons. Already loving how regular casts and specials don’t have a cast limit. Also love the twin blades. Fast weapon go brrrrrrr.

4. I’m definitely interested in seeing what they do with gathering, farming, ect. Great way to add more stuff to do in and after runs.

5. This ties into 4 but, I love how there’s a bunch of stuff to do in Crossroads! In Hades 1, I never spent too much time in the house. I was always dashing through to do another run when not stopping to talk to people. The Crossroads is definitely a nice cool down area for after runs!

6. THE ART. Man everyone looks so good!!!! I can tell some of the sprites are still being worked on but everything still looks so damn clean. I love how everyone has backgrounds in their portraits!

7. APOLLO, HEPHAESTUS, HESTIA, SELENE. All of them look and sound so cool. Really looking forward to seeing their full boon lists and how they play with different weapons ect.

8. I’m really happy to see some of the OG gods returning. All of them look so sick and every time I see a boon from the first game I go “YOOOOOO”. Also Artemis physically appearing is sick as hell.

9. Really excited to get to know the new crew better! They’re all really compelling already!

10. The areas seem to be shorter. Like, I’m going through less rooms to hit the boss room. Idk if it’s bc it’s a tech test or if it’s intentional.

Speculation and questions

1. WHAT DID CHRONOS DO. ARE THEY DEAD? WHERE ARE THEY? Istg if Zag is dead I am going to c r y.

2. WHERE IS THAN, MEG, ACHILLES, NYX, EVERYONE FROM THE FIRST GAME? WHERE ARE THEY?

3. Hecate said something about Hermes trying to find a way to get from the underworld to Olympus. There was also some stairs going blocked by a ward in the weapon/training room. I wonder if there’s gonna be more areas to go through. Like. Erebus, Elysium, Asphodel, Tartarus, House, then Olympus? Maybe Olympus is gonna have its own areas completely. This would make sense for why the areas are shorter. Really interested to see what they do.

4. If the game looks like this already in its tech test stage….. this might be my game of the year if it gets a full release this year. (I love you P3RE but holy shit Hades 2).

There’s a lot more I could talk about, but I am tired and this is a long post lmao.

[zarla-s]

Man it's been a long time since I've done an ask cluster! Let's see if I can get some down...

He's an extremely fun character to write for and play with! So in that sense I'm fond of him, haha. He's such a huge disaster of a person, there's always something fun to do with him. Well "fun" in a relative sense.

I don't have anything to forgive him for, he didn't hurt me. |D He hurt the brothers!

I do have an idea for a cute feature inspired by Six-Eared Macaque! I should really sit down and do that already... and finish the one I half started but never finished...

I don't think my opinion on any of them changed! I love them all, haha. Which ones I drew comics about just depends on which ones I get ideas for really. Sometimes I get Alphys ideas and sometimes I get Goatparents ideas! Inspiration is fickle!

I don't have any solid plans or anything. :B Just gonna keep chugging along with silly comics and art! Work on Defrag and such. I'd like to finish a Ladyverse comic I've had lying around forever, and I had vague plans for doing a doujin for them too I could work on... and also seeing if I could format Handplates into a book format... I've always got a bunch of projects, haha.

It works on that level! It wasn't intentional though. |D

I do enjoy speculation! I don't really have much of my own though, I didn't predict anything in chapter 2 so now I'm assuming I can't predict anything in the future chapters either, haha.

Emesis Blue is great! Some really beautiful visuals in there, very striking! Love the mood of it too and a lot of the surreal imagery. I think it helped spur me back into TF2 again, haha. Medic and Scout's relationship was so cute.

I have thought about this! It has its share of challenges though... I outlined them more in this post. A pdf would be more doable though... could even include some extra stuff as well! Hmm...

I can see that! He'd probably spend as much time out in the rain as he could just doing whatever to stay outside.

It was pretty much always going to end like that. I always wanted it to end on a hopeful note! Which might seem weird with how dark it is at the beginning. I DID for a brief period at the very beginning of Handplates think about stopping with the Pacifist run, but that was only because I thought going where I wanted to go would take too long and already the project seemed so dauntingly huge at the time, haha. But it was always going to end in a positive way!

Gaster talks about what he originally intended to create here, and he explains a bit about the physical experiments he runs on the brothers here. They aren't really a solution in and of themselves so much as tools to try and find a way to break the barrier. Really though, Gaster got stuck in the sunk-cost fallacy lol.

I don't really have opinions about what canon Gaster would be like. |D Handplates Gaster is his own thing really. Canon Gaster, who knows! Deltarune Gaster, who knows! I will say I hope Gaster stays a mystery in Deltarune and never actually shows up but I think the odds of that are really low at this point.

I thought about doing a script along those lines! I did a few rough drafts of one, but it never really went anywhere... it'd end up dead-ending or kind of meandering off. I might see if I can get an actual script down for a side-comic or something in the future... it might be better suited for a fic.

I was just thinking about this lately! I was picturing Gaster totally forgetting about that until he sees Papyrus squinting and is like OH GOD YOUR EYES THAT'S RIGHT D: and goes to get him looked at lol.

I couldn't come up with a good idea for Flowey which is a shame, I do like him, haha. If one comes to me though I might make a little side comic about it!

Gaster's LV is complicated... his stats in-game are ludicrous if I recall correctly. Did he carry the damage from his murders into the void, even if those murders weren't his in the new timeline? Deep thoughts.

He fed them anything he could find, haha. Which is why sometimes they just ended up with chocolate bars (which he intended as dinner for himself). He probably fed them more often than he fed himself lol. He did feed them fairly regularly though.

Not about skeletons, probably. |D

Man I know I had an explanation for this but it was so long ago... it's hard for me to remember. It could be that the Riverperson is just weird and has weird insight into elements of things, had a prophetic dream... I don't know! It bugs me now that I can't remember this, haha.

[dutchdread]

Hey Dutch what is your opinion on crises core reunion ? I had few ca tell me it didn’t do anything for zack and aerith relationship it just made things worse ? I don’t know we’re they get that belief from but it’s there opinion. Did you think the story was ok and gave good context on what they mean to each other?

People give too much flack to Crisis Core. I only played the original CC back on the PSP so I can't say anything about whether or not Reunion made it better or worse, but I enjoyed the original. But part of that is because I simply had lower expectations for portable games than I do for AAA pc or console titles. I won't deny that the game has a bunch of stuff that could have been done better (Cough, genesis, cough), but it had its strong points as well. I think some of the basic concepts of Crisis Core are good in principle, like theme of hopes and dreams, and watching how Zack through adversity unwillingly becomes the hero that he always wanted to be. But the execution was often lacking. I love the idea of watching a several friends slowly break, and I think there is potential in tying that story into them being "monsters" and exploring what it really means to be a monster vs being a hero. But again. The way it was handled made it rather ridiculous and overly obtuse. The constant quoting of Loveless, ESPECIALLY without it ever getting a clear meaning that allows the player to connect with it, Angeals random dramatic self-pity, and a bunch of other stuff just made it so that storywise a lot of the bad overshadowed the good. But I played CC for Zack and Aerith, and they were perfect in my opinion.I loved seeing Aerith like an actual 16 year old girl and how her time with Zack rubbed off on her and caused her to start living every day to the fullest. I still think that the scene with Aerith hugging Zack from behind is one of the most romantic scenes in FF, simply because of how viscerally real it is. Her trying to make small talk, him just being there, choosing to mourn in the presence of the woman he loves, not needing to be consoled, but just needing her presence. And then that hug "sometimes you don't need words to tell a person how you're feeling" indeed. This is also a part of the reason I am convinced Aerith was still projecting Zack onto Cloud at the end of Rebirth "our place", "the church", Yeah right. For Cloud and Aerith the church is just a place they happened to spend about 5 minutes at one point, not even the place they met. Meanwhile Zack went there to see her for I think about one and a half years. He goes there instantly in intergrade, he goes there in Rebirth, we see him waiting there for Aerith at the end of rebirth, the core visual for Crisis core was changed to TAKE PLACE IN THE CHURCH. But the Church is Cloud and Aeriths place.....yeah right. Either that is an intentional hint that Aerith is still projecting, or the writing has fallen off a cliff. Then we have the other character moments, Cloud and Tifa pining for each other, the parallels between Cloti and Zerith. Zack promising Aerith he'll come for her underneath the water tower. And my favorite Aeriths "23 tiny little wishes", all encompassed in the one with to "spend more time with Zack". Which is then ultimately fulfilled via Cloud in the OG/rebirth. And then of course there is the ending, my favorite ending of any game ever aside from Nier:Automata. Man I bawled my eyes out. So yeah, I like Crisis Core, it's messy, but it's messy with a lot of gold in it, and for a portable title I think that's not half bad.

[dailydemonspotlight]

Slime - Day 59

Race: Foul

Arcana: Chariot

Alignment: Dark-Chaos

June 20th, 2024

...What is there even to talk about here? It's- it's just a slime, man!

Vee-ho, come on! There's gotta be something there! Just look beneath the surface!

I'd rather not?! Look at this thing! It's disgusting!

cOme OooN mAn.. yoU doN'T gotTA Do mE liKe thaT...

Don't you dare insult my friend, ho! Look, even with all generic monsters, there's stuff to dig into, right? Besides, this skit is get-hee-ng annoying! Vee-ho, just go ah-hee-d and start!

...Jesus Christ, okay. How do I even begin with this? SMT has plenty of classical monster tropes that it has its own spins on- whether it be werewolves, vampires, or, well... slimes. Especially in the earlier games in the series, when the concepts of demons were far less well refined, fantasy monsters that some would call generic were dime-a-dozen, and slimes were no exception. In fact, they were everywhere! Sludge Slimes! Green Slimes! Blobs! However, as the series went on and the identity of a demon was given far more thought, most of these extra slime variants began to fade, leaving us only with the classic Slime and his big brother, Blob.

The thing is, nobody is really sure where the concept of Slimes came from, as there has been no single mythological mention that can definitively trace to the idea of a slime itself. This leaves us with a big issue, though! What the hell is this things deal?! I think I have an idea, but it's a bit strained. Slimes as we know them today originally appear all the way back in the first edition of D&D, back in 1974, but it's believed that the idea can be traced back even further, into the 1930's.

In fact, I think I have an idea that has been attested to by... Reddit. Yeah. Slimes may be based originally off of a type of monster described in the Lovecraft book 'At the Mountains of Madness' called a Shoggoth, combined with ideas of slime mold, and a general need for a generic enemy type. Shoggoth are described as massive amoeba-like creatures that glow gently and have eyes blinking all over them, able to form any organs and limbs they need at will. To quote,

It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train—a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter.

This idea can be further traced back to the idea of the Demiurge in the Hyperborean cycle, a series of short stories written by Clark Ashton Smith, but... that's when the trail runs cold. Clark was good friends with Lovecraft at the age, and they took many cues from each other, and I couldn't even find a good date for the original story that Ubbo-Sathla, the deity I'm referring to, originates from. What makes this even more frustrating is that I can't find a good hook to go into with this! What do I focus on? What do I circle around?!

Just think! C'mon!

You're not helping... but okay.

Slimes could also be based on the classic movie 'The Blob,' and combining that idea with Shoggoths could have given rise to this classical idea, but the thing is, linking an actual origin is difficult. It's incredibly possible that slimes are just the brainchild of a bunch of nerds who wanted to come up with an enemy for their very first TTRPG, and it stuck around ever since, becoming a staple of the fantasy genre for years upon years to come. Shit, slimes are insanely popular everywhere you look! There are entire manga revolving around them, the Dragon Quest series's main mascot and icon is a slime, the first boss in Terraria is a slime, and it's the most popular enemy type- shit, Gelatinous Cubes are some of the first things most people think of when they think of D&D! I gotta respect the fact that, in spite of the frustrations in researching these things, they're both cute and incredibly popular.

OoOoooO, dO I haVe faAns?

I'm getting a headache... I'm gonna go lay down.

She-hee left her computer on... I guess I'll wrap this up.

Overall, in the see-hee-ries, Slimes actual-hee have a rather unique disposition, especially in the Devil Summoner games! I really do enjoy the fact that they don't look too fri-hee-ndly in a lot of the games- as opposed to the marketable mascots of several other series, slimes in Megaten can be downright gross looking. Sorr-hee for the BTS drama in this one, I promise we'll get right back to it soon! Slimes are just a bit hard to look into, y'know.

...dO I gEt My caNdY noW?

Yeah, gimme a sec.

[sunbunzie]

Hot Take: Hero would not forgive Sunny and Basil. (MAJOR SPOILERS!)

Last warning for spoilers :3 Also longevity warning. This thing is 1118 words total. lmao. Also if you’re expierencing thoughts about suicide, please reach out. (TRIGGER WARNING: Suicide, A POV of depression, Omori stuff man this game makes me want to sob) The truth about Mari is that Mari didn’t take her own life- Sunny pushed her down the stairs accidentally. Witnessing this, a panicked Basil decides to “help” Sunny by framing Mari’s death as suicide, hanging our dearest Mari on a tree bu a jumprope, making everyone believe she committed suicide. 

Little, innocent Aubrey thought she committed suicide. Our rau of sunshine Kel thought she committed suicide. And Mari’s dear lover, our Hero, thought she committed suicide. 

Lets talk about Hero’s grief for a bit.

-HEROS GRIEF-

As stated by KEL in the game, Hero refused to get out of bed, go to school, eat, and other important things because of Mari’s death. This lasted for about a year.

Kel then continues on to say that he tried to get Hero out of bed one day, saying how everyone misses him and such. Hero responds negatively to this, still stuck in a abyss of depression. The more Kel tried to encourage him, the more and more upset Hero gets, until the point where he snaps at his on brother. 

“He suddenly got up and started screaming and yelling at me about a bunch of stuff. Some of it eas pretty hurtful too..” 

-KEL

We all know, under any other circumstance, Hero would never say anything mean or hurtful to Kel. Even sibling-to-sibling “bullying” doesn’t apply to these two. They care for each other enough to never say anything mean.

But under this circumstance, Mari is gone. Hero loved Mari. And now she was gone. But Hero was still alive. (/ref lmao.) He became so overcome with grief and sadness that he just unpiled it onto young Kel, who was only trying to help. Luckily, after their parents be literal bitches and ignore Kel crying and comfort Hero, Hero comes to his senses and apologizes to Kel over and over. Hero seems to get better after this.

“Eventually, mom and mom ran to our room and rushed over to hug him to calm him down. 

-(cut part because this isnt a kel analysis post. sorry buddy you gotta wait your turn)

“I think that’s when HERO got his senses back, because he ran to me and hugged me right away. 

“Just kept apologizing over and over..

”But.. at least HERO got a lot better after that. He started taking care of himself again..”

BUT OF COURSE we know he really didn’t get better. When Hero joins your party, at first he doesn’t want to go to Mari’s grave. Whenever Sunny tried to go there, Hero stops him by saying he isn’t ready yet.

When we do get there however, its then revealed that Hero never realky visited Mari’s grave. Probably because it hurt to think about her. Every day, every waking moment he was reminded of her, and he couldn’t stop her from leaving him. Four yeare, four years he blamed himself for Mari’s suicide, thinking and forcing himself to believe that it was all his fault because he didn’t see the signs to stop her from leaving…

Except there were no signs.

Mari never chose to leave them.

She never chose to take her life.

She didnt take her own life.

Instead, the one who took her life..

Was her brother, Sunny.

-THE TRUTH-

While we have absolutely no idea what happens after the good ending/any of the endings (well we know Sunny moved and left Basil to pick up the scraps 💀 we’ll save that for another post), since this fandom is so goddamn immersed we do have enough to make a theory about each friend. 

A lot of people say they would all forgive Sunny and Basil eventually, but I think the case is different with Hero. Which is probably what you’re here for actually, so let’s just set the claim:

Hero will NOT be able to forgive Sunny and Basil, and he might never be able to forgive them.

This is because of Hero’s Grief.

Imagine that you loved someone dearly (could be platonic for all you aromantic besties) and they committed suicide. 

Imagine you spent four years blaming yourself, grieving, asking yourself “why” every single day, because there was nothinf you could do to stop them, you didnt see the signs, you thought everything was fine with them, but you were wrong, and you failed them. You’d call yourself the worst lover/best friend to ever exist, beating yourself into a mindset that they never loved you, or if they did, they didnt love you enough to stick around, and that impacted your life so badly that you almost starved yourself and starting saying mean things to your family/those who are trying to help.

Now imagine that..

And then crumple it up and throw it away.

Everything was a lie. You thought they killed themselves, but in the end someone else was responsible for their death. Someone else took their life. Someone else made you believe that they hung themselves and that you failed and that you’re a failure and that you don’t deserve to live while they’re gone.

Sure, the whole thing was an acccident, but either way that grief was all for NOTHING. Ever bad thought, every remark, every meal skipped, every day spent in bed was a waste. You never had anything to blame yourself for. It was never your fault. And the two people reponsible had hidden it for four years.

Hell, screw what I said before about it beibg an accident. The pushing was accidental, but the hanging wasnt. Of course, Basil was a scared kid, but why wasnt the ambulance the first thing in mind? Why did they frame her? Why did Sunny let him do it?

Some people argue that Hero forgave Aubrey for pushing Basil in the lake, but that was different. Yes, they were both impulses of anger, but Basil had time to survive. People were there. You can get water out of people’s lungs. You can’t fix a broken neck. 

And also, Aubrey had more witnesses. She wouldn’t have been able to frame it as anything, because the whole town would probably know about it within a few days (Gossiptown fr💀). If Basil died in the lake, there wouldn’t have been a hidden truth. There wouldnt have been lies. No four years of thinking Basil drowned himself. Because they already knew.

Now I’d suspect if Basil did actually die, the forgiveness wouldnt be so quick. (Someone better make a fanfic of that scenario /nf)

AND SO THE TL;DR IS: Hero would not forgive Sunny and Basil, because what it did to him was too mentally draining, and the lies were too much. No matter how much he would think about how it affected them, he would only ever be able to think about his grief and the consequences.

Again, this is my personal theory, but feel free to peacefully argue with me! Or give more details :0

Thanks for reading all of this, if you did! If y’all want to suggest things for me to analyze just use the asks thingy :3 or get me to talk about headcannons. I love headcannons.

[salora-rainriver]

We're talking about Ads Again

Context for those followers of mine who weren't there: I made a post about tumblr ads being weird back in 2016 and it's literally still getting notes to this day. People responded GREAT to it. honestly, despite being like. ass old at this point and written by a literal high schooler, it's still pretty good! I thank my dad being in advertising helped significantly. I had an expert witness.

Tonight, I'm writing the sequel to that post. the sequel is this post.

let's just fucking dive into it or whatever.

why am I doing this?

okay for starters I made that post in goddamn 2016 and I refuse to believe my insights into the marketing world have not improved since then.

Also, the marketing world has CHANGED. Huge swaths of my old post are no longer relevant. What we saw with tumblr ads in 2016 was in some parts a passing fad, and in other parts the harbinger of a new wave of influencer marketing and corporate parasociality (I coined that term just now).

Honestly I've been thinking for a while that I should make an update post, but what with, yanno, adulthood, that's been kinda hard!

Well, I've missed a train, and it's Christmas, so I've finally found the time to do that.

What has Changed?

in my personal life... dad got fired! yeah it fucking sucks. the good news is he and his wife are working towards their retirement now, shifting away from the industry overall. Good news as far as life is concerned, but it does mean I no longer have as clean a connection to the Industry as I used to.

but more importantly, why he got fired. The fact is, dad's old! I know, shocker. More than just being old, though, his field (and my stepmom's field - they both did the same work) represents an older paradigm of advertisement. he did TV spots and posters, not ad reads for Raid Shadow Legends. He was great at his work, but we're in an era of data-driven, maximalist, google adsense, low-barrier-to-entry, super-fast and super-cheap digital advertisement.

Well, more specifically,

We're on the cusp of an extinction event poised to bring said era crashing to the ground.

Pictured: the current vibes in the ad world

Siberia is on Fire and Everything is Dying

So given that my typical source on stuff like this is currently unemployed, I decided to hit good ol google (well, google and duckduckgo. fitting given what we're talking about) to see if I could get any insights into what the current state of advertising is.

and the short of it is that everyone says the end is nigh. check this out:

Digital is dead, and so is TV. God fucking damn. BY THE WAY, I loved these two articles. Chris Gadek, a man I only learned about today, is clearly an excellent writer and his professional insights are probably gonna be way better than my amateur synthesis of the half-dozen different articles I read today, including his.

blatant shilling for random article writers aside, let's get on to my half-baked synthesis, starting with:

What Set Siberia on Fire

In small part, it's the same issues facing most major companies and industries in our late capitalist world: Hubris.

As this New York Times article points out, we've got a low barrier of entry into a gargantuan industry that's increasingly pumping out slop to follow a strategy of 'more is more'. And we've all seen the bizarre mobile game ads and shady scams that have resulted from THAT.

On top of that, we've also got the fucking digital privacy issue shaking up the entire world as consumers increasingly don't like being spied on (imagine that), and the EU starts rolling out heavy restrictions on the data harvesting that was fueling a bunch of this advertisement bubble.

There's also the ad fraud. Oh, you didn't hear about that? Well, it's nothing much, just that lots of bots are clicking ads to falsify click metrics, artificially inflating the effectiveness of said ads. look, it even has a wikipedia article

oh and Facebook did it. Facebook did ad fraud. :)

and I'm not even getting into everything that works to shake up or demolish basically every advertisement channel out there - the decline of cable tv and print newspapers, the increasing use of ad blockers, the crisis of consumer trust, etc etc.

In short we are looking at a multitude of micro-crises all working together to make the environment unlivable for most current forms of advertisement.

in other words: an extinction event!

Who's Gonna Survive

And just like in a real extinction event, whether or not you survive depends on how good you can adapt to the brave new world you've found yourself in. Old school advertising needs to drastically rethink their everything if they're gonna stay afloat, and every field of the industry needs to recreate itself. As my new favorite writer Chris Gadek says,

"These crises show that there are no safe havens. You can’t substitute one advertising medium for another. Rather than pivot, the advertising industry must adapt and learn to effectively use the channels at their disposal (TV included), factoring in the seismic societal and technological changes that have occurred over the past decade and beyond."

and what is that going to look like? what's going to be the new face of advertising?

The field seems torn, at first... but also aligned, at least when it comes to the core principles:

privacy is a big issue. Seems like a lot of advertisers are seeing an end to wanton consumer surveillance, and looking into less invasive ways to gather important and meaningful data

companies that rely on selling ad space and propping up their engagement metrics are going to be relied on less, probably, because the metrics themselves are being seen as less reliable (for good freaking reason)

regaining consumer trust is going to be a massive priority in the future.

overall, we're probably going to look at a massive downturn in ads, as people turn to a quality-over-quantity strategy in an attempt to stop flooding the attention marketplace.

that's the gist I'm getting from reading oh so many different articles of varying quality from so many different sources.

So, yanno, there may be some hope out there. If smart people start leading this industry (lol), we may get to actually enjoy ads.

Yeah. Enjoy ads.

Unironically.

I know, it's crazy.

PS: if you start seeing affiliate links on mainstream TV ads, thank our lord of excellent business analysis Chris Gadek for calling it early. God, that's such a crazy left-field idea and I really want it to actually happen.

[pkmnirlevents]

Heyo. Not sure if I should ask this here or if there's a better blog to ask but, do you have any tips for beginner Rotomblr blogs? I have two I'm just starting out and I have no experience with this kind of thing. Thank you.

Yeah you can absolutely ask us! We've answered questions similar to this before and offer a link to flowerliker's starting guide along with a starting resources tag to keep track of it all! We'd recommend starting with the guide and then our tag, then asking specific questions from there, but we can give some general tips for now rather than sending you off with a bunch of reading. That said, we are putting this below a read more for the sake of being easy to scroll past!

Getting started is often times the hardest part because its when you are building momentum. It can often be a discouraging time, but its useful to learn what you want to do with your blog and find people you may want to collaborate with more often. Reblog ask games and importantly interact with others! No man is an island in this community, if you want interactions chances are other people do too and will appreciate it. Mind their rules and their canon though, and be mindful of yours too.

If you're comfortable joining Discords that's a great option to meet people and talk with them both ic and ooc, though it should be said this isn't a necessary step and you should not feel pressured to join any groups.

You are allowed to be selective if you choose to be. This applies as much to others as it does yourself. Being selective about who you interact with on blog isn't necessarily a personal judgement, there might be people you enjoy talking to ooc a lot that have canon aspects that conflict with yours. You don't have to stop talking to them and neither of you have to change your worldbuilding if you do not want to.

Rewrites big and small will happen and they aren't the end of the world, adjust as you need and communicate with your rp partners if its things that effect them. Characters and your writing will evolve naturally over time and that's a beautiful thing!

Know community tags and generally how to use them. If you're someone who benefits from a tagging system, try to start it early on so you don't have to retag a bunch of posts later. The use of the unreality tag is also a good one to familiarize yourself with, especially if you dabble in the multiverses aspect of Pokemon's canon. You're welcome to ask for details regarding this and we can answer any questions you may have.

In regards as to what we can do to help as well is we of course are known for postings of events the community can participate in but we actually do all kinds of other stuff! We can post calls for general roles for upcoming arcs or events (i.e. bystanders, food concessions, rocket grunts, etc.) or specific calls for canon characters (i.e. Professor Kukui, Rocket Admin Petrel, etc.). We have a tag for Discord groups that people are able to promote, though mind their rules and the fact that these Discords in most cases are not ours and we do not have control over if the links are dead or the group is deleted. We boost community made and outside ask games, particularly if they are submitted to us. All kinds of stuff! We are a community resource that strives to add whatever functions we can to help others!

We could add more but we don't want to get too lost in the weeds of details here, if you require any follow-ups please let us know!

[northwest-cryptid]

You know I wish less shit was so in your face about its core message. Even when I agree with the messages. Like it really feels as though the majority of games or shows have to leave you with some kind of moral message rather than just being a story these days.

I really miss when games were just a story you got to experience or a sequence of puzzles to solve or a bunch of fun mechanics to interact with.

That's not to say you can't have some kind of central moral message at the heart of it all. Most did and the key factor there was that it wasn't super in your face.

I recently watched a playthrough of Silent Hill, a short message or whatever it's called. The writing was awful, the gameplay was non-existent, the message was REALLY in your face; it felt nothing like silent hill. It was just bad. It was really disappointing and I didn't realize why I felt so strongly until I really thought about the last time I got to play a story driven game that wasn't some moral preaching of how I should be a good person and not kill myself or something.

And again, I agree! I can't overstate how much I agree with the idea that murder is generally bad and suicide isn't good. Yet I don't need a game to aggressively tell me this every two seconds while trying to make it seem like they pulled a fast one on me with a DRAMATIC TWIST I could see coming a mile away because they fucking announced it.

When it comes to games trying to deliver a message I really think there's a scale of like, absolutely not saying anything to saying way too much.

Silent Hill 2 is a great example of not saying anything but it's good because the people who care will dive deep enough to get the message out of it. Believe it or not there's people out there who played sh2 and think James is a good person which like... Did we play the same game?!

A little further down the scale we have xenoblade 1 which I feel absolutely states the message but does so well within it's lore to the point it feels natural and doesn't detract from the experience.

Even further still I feel Undertale fits the middle of the road. You get it's message clear as day, almost annoyingly so; however I can't complain too much because the game is an enjoyable experience regardless and the core message fits well. It makes sense. The characters are enjoyable. There's still a lot to love there even if it punches me in the face every 5 seconds with "MURDER IS BAD" it feels earned and justified.

The problem I have is that beyond this, there's almost no middle ground between "it's heavy handed but good!" And "please fucking shut up I get it I get it I get it!"

A Short Message is bad any way you slice it. We're talking bad animation, weird immersion breaking third person and then first person and then third person and then live action but only for this scene and then game engine again type shit. We're talking bad voice acting, bad gameplay where you really don't get any agency or choice. It's a whole mess of problems and the entire time they're really hamming up the core message they want to deliver, which doesn't even go anywhere. The characters don't grow, the plot "twists" are obvious and bad, and the characters kinda just don't make sense at all. This isn't exactly meant to be a review so much as it is to say

This is the unfortunate norm for a lot of games now.

I don't want to sound like some "right winger" so no I'm not going to say that a game trying to align with younger leftist values is inherently bad. I'm all for games with gay characters or characters who are trans or whatever. I'm literally a disabled NB/Genderfluid/queer pansexual Native American and man does that feel like buzzwords at this point so obviously I don't mind that stuff showing up in games...

What I do mind is when games think they can skirt by because of all that. Gameplay? We don't need it our main character is gay, we gave him a boyfriend who's trans! Story? What do you mean what's the story? I just told you gay trans boyfriend!? What more do you want?!

Or just you know "hey you know what, what if you were the bad guy the whole time because killing is WRONG!"

Sure alright you wanna see that done really well? Unfortunately if I tell you the name of some games now it'll spoil them completely but I can think of 3 games so here's a list without names.

1. You literally spend the whole game fighting enemies who speak a language you don't understand and you view them as monsters to be killed because you don't know they're pleading with you to not kill their friends and loved ones. However on a second playthrough you CAN understand them and guess what? This doesn't change anything, have fun needing to kill innocent beings to progress the story all while finally understanding what they're desperately trying to tell you.

2. You're taking over for the last guy who had this job and my god he was a dick. As you go through the game you're going to learn a lot about him and why everyone has beef with the guy and doesn't really trust you as a result. Only they seem to take it really personally when you speak confidently that you'll do better than he did... That's because you literally are him and you're not aware because it's a time loop. This dude you spent like half the game seeing as a horrible person is literally you and suddenly everything makes sense when it comes to how these people treat you. Unfortunately you still have a job to do and it's a lot easier if you start thinking like he did.

3. You're an innocent victim of war and spend half the game attempting to make right the suffering inflicted upon you and your friends, only when you're finally face to face with the man responsible for the war itself you're let in on a secret that no one knew but him. Finally understanding the nature of not just the war but the world itself you can almost understand why he's doing what he is, and unfortunately for everyone your words aren't enough to talk him down with going through with his plans to literally end the lives of everyone from your entire continent. Now you're faced with the gut wrenching decision to kill him to protect the very people you've learned are actually even more at fault, as you figure out he's merely doing this since your people attacked his long before and he's trying to protect them from another genocide by making sure your people don't have the chance. You're both in the wrong, and it's just your luck that when you refuse to kill him a third party steps up to finish the job and take his place as the big bad of the story; but hey at least you're not the bad guy anymore.

There's more but these three games, which I unfortunately will not name because doing so now will spoil them; handled the concept really REALLY well. Proper twists in the story, waiting to say their piece till just the right moment; actually giving you information that makes sense for you to know instead of trying to infodump about how clearly you're in the wrong.

I miss stories that are worth telling instead of games just shouting at you about morals. It's like if metal gear revengance took itself seriously but somehow amped up the cheese factor at the same time.

Side note I know people who play mgr and think it's absolutely the deepest thing ever and took it like a stoic masterpiece and I genuinely have no idea how. Like so much of that game is silly random over the top bullshit you can't get mad at people for laughing at it. These people get mad if you jokingly say "MEMES JACK, THE DNA OF THE SOUL" like you're shitting on some sacred tomes or something.

Anyways I'm not saying every game sucks now or something, I play plenty of good shit. But few have good STORIES I really want something genuine, a story to be told that I get to experience and that I can go back through over again and enjoy maybe a little differently. This was never too much to ask even a couple years ago but I feel like if the game isn't trying to nudge me aggressively with "we're just like you cool trans gay teens!" It's aggressively in my face about "noooo don't be mean being mean is bad! We're gonna stop this problem by being nice uwu" and not even in the fun self aware Undertale way, just like in the really annoying in your face "I'm taking the moral high ground so I'm better than you" kinda way.

Anyways before anyone yells at me about how I totally said your favorite game is awful, feel free to ask my opinion of a game in an ask or something and then if I say it's bad you can absolutely get on me about it. Unless your favorite game is that new silent Hill a short message game thing in which case I'm sorry that you have awful taste in games because there are better games that deliver on the same message with better gameplay AND story AND graphics AND voice acting so like I don't get it.

[numetaljackdog]

what i'm listening to 4/10/2024

spot.//yt

Limp Bizkit - Clunk: clunk. clunk clunk. clunk. clunk

Limp Bizkit - N 2 Gether Now feat. Method Man: it's backkkk and arguably never left. this didn't begin as a favorite of mine from lb but there's just so many good lines and it's so fun. discretion is advised for the blood of virgin eyes; we're limping on the track with the method

Nirvana - The Man Who Sold the World: perhaps one of the greatest little riffs ever conceived and also btw i am a nirvana fanboy 😁

Emma Blackery - Blossom: mostly just putting this in bc i don't think i've ever had the chance to talk about how much i adore this song. easily emma's best track, i so wish she would make more that sound like this. it fits her voice so nicely and it's just so breezy and catchy and cute..... summer's a-comin'

Suede - Animal Nitrate: this goes so insane i can't believe it took me this long to find it. and i may be prone to homosexuality... but anyway this just *sounds* sooo good, the crunchy production and the riff and the melody and oh! chef's kiss!

Staind - Mudshovel: revisiting an old favorite! i so wish to perform this song live someday.... i could make it even better. and i wouldn't be a republican about it either

Ice-T - Big Gun: PENIS ALLEGORY!!!!! and VIOLENT WOMEN!!!!!! i need to watch this fucking movie so fucking badly

Limp Bizkit - Back Porch: genuinely one of lb's best songs but completely slept on bc of its placement down at the bottom of gold cobra of all things god help us. also a returning winner from a prior WILT

Sonic Youth - Death Valley '69 feat. Lydia Lunch: sonic youth good. this song in particular hits me every time as if i'd never heard it. gay

Korn - Twist: i've taken to my funny bit of unpromptedly doing the rrh na oom rah dah nn rah mm dah oom rah dah thing in the middle of conversation

Eminem - Just Don't Give A Fuck: i will confess to having a little eminem moment these past days 🫣 but this one is genuinely so good i love his early scrappy shitty music. he just don't give a fuuuuuuck

Sublime - Santeria: this has always been my favorite sublime song bc it's so pretty-sounding and summery and it's about tracking a guy down and shoving a gun in his mouth

Big Pun - Beware: the beat is crazy but admittedly the main appeal of songs where guys say a bunch of words really fast will always be the part where the guy says a bunch of words really fast

The Decemberists - Down By The Water: mostly kind of over the whole radio alternative indie folk pop rock whatever shit but this is so prettyyy and melancholy and i love the harmonizing bc i love harmonizing

Powerman 5000 - Nobody's Real: my friends and i have been watching this music video over and over, it's so fun..... pm5k at their peak was such a cool band with all the visuals and cartoon antics. plus this shit is catchy as hell

DANGERDOOM - Sofa King: i previously thought i wasn't much of a DOOM fan, though i certainly respect the craft, but these days i think it might just be that his most popular material, the stuff people always recommend, just doesn't hit for me as much as his other stuff does (and hopefully will continue to, the more i listen). g

Twin Method - Flawless: these guys were too late to the nu metal game to really get their due (not to mention they were british; that was never a big spot for the genre) but i would posit that they were damn good for a 00s-era entry in the nu canon. this is their "big" song and it holds up pretty good!

Fudge Tunnel - Grey: checked this one out bc lol funny name but they're kinda legit. speaking of british alt metal. i almost wonder if they were on the other side of things, a little ahead of their time...

Blue - All Rise: heard this in an uber and it's been stuck in my brain ever since. i do love boy band r&b, AND i love a courtroom drama, so really i han't go wrong here. lots of brits in this installment i'm noticing

[clowndotgay]

if you dont mind me asking, how do you do the card renders?

so i'm not 100% sure how to answer this because its kinda vague - i'm not sure if you're asking about the card (image editing) part or the rendering process! if you want to know about the process of getting the characters and areas into blender, i've written a few posts about that already - they're under the "toontown models" tag on my blog, so they shouldn't be too difficult to find. RAMBLING ABOUT IMAGE EDITING BELOW THE CUT EXCLAMATION MARK EMOJI! THIS ISN'T A TUTORIAL IT'S JUST ME TALKING!!!! (only slightly related, but i'm putting it above the cut so more people might see it - i wrote some mock pokemon cards for managers a bit ago but i don't want to make them full images, would anyone be interested in me just posting those as text?)

the actual image editing part i do in photoshop! it's kind of a bad program but my usual art program dies when i try to do what i do for cards because it kinda struggles with text. i've started doing the text in-render for the cards recently, though, because it's kind of a blast?

it's probably obvious to anyone who's looked at them hard before, but my mock cards use the Series 1 Cog cards as a base (the official Disney ones)

they've just got a sort of weirdly unhinged vibe to them, they're so far off of the cogs representation in-game and kinda gives a look at (imo) how the cogs were originally imagined, as I feel that some of the card art is closer to original concept art (or probably is concept art) than it is close to in-game character appearances. man, Cold Callers card doesn't even look like the same guy! he's lanky here!

and i mean, kinda obvious, but i can't get the same level of craziness these cards are on with renders, but i can try. so i do! it's fun!

i don't know if anyone has really noticed it, but for the last handful of cards i've been opting for colouring the border of the card dependent on the department of the cog. green for cashbot, pink for sellbot, etc. here's a test i did of it a couple weeks back when i was playing around with the idea in my head (the renders were randomly chosen):

(the boardbot colour is kinda subtle - but that's just how it is in-game, exe bd skelecogs are super close to exe lb skelecogs, but maybe that's just my eyes)

the actual "process" of putting the card together once i've done the render is kinda just plopping the render into the .psd and telling photoshop what department the cog is (for the border colour) & then i'm done. the file is super simple, it's just a series 1 card but i edited everything out other than the border, bunch of layers connected to the border that give it the department colours, layer of a kinda-crappy filter i slap on to try and give it the same "feel" the card scans have, layer for the text (optional now that i do it in-render), layer with the render.

there's some extra fun stuff i try and do with effects in the renders, but i'm kinda new to messing around with blender stuff like that, so i try and hold it to a minimum. as an example, the CFO render is kinda hue-shifted so i could get the colours closer to what i was basing the lighting of the render off of! to use a better example of silly effects i used for a card, i'm gonna talk about this high roller card:

dude this thing took forever because i wanted to do Everything in-render (would've taken way less time if i wasn't stubborn). it's a bunch of layers and gradients and shine. i'm kind of tipping my hand here, but there's straight up just a blindingly bright cube in their hands that's making the shine, and then i kinda just. told blender to add a lens flare. and it did. i had to simulate rain for that one misty render and that was a time. y'know. i actually have to finish up a commission where there's blinding light emitting from something and it's really really good and probably one of the best renders i have done and it is 99% thanks to the commissioner because the ask is So Good.

anyways that's kind of all i wanted to say. i hope this answered your question? maybe? was your question just "what do you make them in?" if so, it's blender and photoshop. sorry for making you read a text wall instead. at the risk of sounding too silly, i really like speaking about the things that i do, but i feel weird talking about them unprompted? so i took this as being prompted and talked.

[wiihtigo]

As Wolfgang has popped up in my dreams a few times, I must ask: 3 (where'd the benny stuff come from?), 7, aaand 17

ask game

3. Do they have a love interest, and was that their choice or yours?

it was...IT WAS DESTINY.....WOLFGECKO FOREVER 2024...I JUST BECAME SO ATTACHED TO BENNY WHILE I PLAYED FNV FOR THE FIRST TIME I WAS ENRAPTURED I WAS OBSESSED....wolfgangs character is pretty much developed by how i played fnv for the first time so the way i kept trying to help benny get out of his own fuckups alive and also kept falling for his tricks i took to characterize wolfgang as the sort of the big stupid yandere we know and love today. the comic i drew of him beating tf out of the legion was based on a moment when i was streaming the game when i tried freeing benny from the fort like 800 times but he kept dying so i was eventually told to just cheat code go godmode so i did killed everyone in sight and got that funny dialogue where bennys like Dear lord. I thought it was so funny

it helped along the characterization i have where wolfys big and strong and scary and yandere. hes so cutes.

from there i just kept thinking about their relationship and what that might look like past the confines of the game! obviously he keeps following benny around. does some real Misery shit to him. they live the rest of their days in the house from courage the cowardly dog in the middle of nowhere

heres some artwork from both me and my friend andy of tiny (andys oc and wolfgangs friend) coming to visit them

7. What attribute of them (some facet of their personality, their history, their look, or whatever etc) would you find most important to somehow preserve if they were transplanted to an AU fanfic?

OUGHHHH well maybe some stuff i think could be misconstrued is that he genuinely never wants to hurt benny? hes always working to keep him safe and close to him (forever...! /dracula music) .even though hes big and scary and punches people to death its more in like a...(knocks on his head) (its hollow) like hes kind of without malice. he does things without thinking too hard on them, be that good or bad. he doesnt hold any ill will or grudges towards people, even his blowing up the legion was kinda like "they wont let benny go and theyre cruel to some people that have helped me so ill get rid of them" HE DOESNT REALLY HAVE ANY MORALS UNLESS A BEAUTIFUL MAN TELLS HIM TO. LOL... humm also he def can talk but hes quiet, and doesnt talk a bunch at once. and mostly only speaks when hes spoken to

17. Is your character holding any grudges? Are they likely to stop?

ohh..kind of answered above LOL NO HE DOESNT you might call him forgiving but its more that hes not offended by much in the first place so theres nothing to forgive. this is probably something that fucks with bennys head, completely convinced that one day the other shoe is gonna drop and its gonna be him splattered against the wall next (well good, he should feel scared. it was fucked up what he did to my boy)

[kafkaoftherubble]

所以2023年的最后那这几天你都去哪儿了？

...还问什么问？当然是去玩啦！不然做什么? 在什么树下打坐冥想几天然后悟道吗？哈！

傅尹比俺还有可能来这套啦！

Since I documented the Coldplay event here (and failed to find the time to document the same event in Paradehye, the diary, beyond the journaling scraps written in The Commonest Man in Festo, a.k.a our commonplace book), I'll also record some of the stuff happening on December 23rd and 24th here.

Yo bruh, what else could we have done?

It's fucking CF!

It's our way of semi-celebrating Christmas! Where you get to see Christmas splendor and cheer melding with weeaboo shits! Lotsa lotsa weeaboo shits!

Report: Still way too many Genshin Impact cosplayers. There was also a huge bunch of Chainsaw Man and Jujutsu Kaisen, but generally, I think this year was impressive in its diversity of costumes. There were a lot of really unexpected shits and some old anime/video game/pop culture cosplays reared their heads, but damn, you'll get to the Indisputably Bestest Cosplay Ever In My History of Attending CF real soon, Lyndises of the Future.

This time, we got to invite and induct Sharon, who had been missing from the main family for more than a decade. She couldn't even remember the correct terms she needed to address our uncle and aunt anymore! So the Me At That Time greeted Ah Cik and Ah Jim loudly before she did, so she could copy me!

She also said she had social anxiety and was really nervous about seeing everyone whom she hadn't been meeting for, again, more than a decade. But really? Wei Wei is bonkers and laughs like a banshee with an easy threshold for humor. Ah Jim likes to listen to gossip and is an impressive conversationalist. Ah Cik is an extroverted businessman with an origin as a salesman; holding conversations and making things not-awkward is his forte. Qian Qian takes some time to warm up, but she easily talks a storm when it's something she likes—such as performing on stage and Loki and some manga/manhwa and cats. Hang Hang? Bro dips in and out. But he laughs at the stupidest things until his face flushes and is generally chaotic. He acts like a cool bro and yet his body betrays him by farting when he's excited.

And she's got me. It's my principle not to make anyone feel left out or lonely as best as I can in a given room. What's the point of training to be observant and attentive to people if I couldn't even realize someone's feeling left out?

Oh, it worked out in the end! And I don't think it's because of me, either. It's because she's a good sport who did try to join in on the conversation and listened and talked! And because everyone else was so welcoming to her, too. I really picked the right family to induct her back into the Big Family. Phew. Good thing I was skillful enough at choosing...

(Annoyingly, when I told her we're actually an introvert, she called me a liar. Lyishere called me a liar too just two days ago. Liar?! Moi?!)

Anyway, this was us!

Damn, should have made sure Malaysia's easiest landmark is included in the picture instead of just the Christmas tree. The goddamn Twin Towers where Mei Mei was near in one of the last episodes of Jujutsu Kaisen: Shibuya Incident should have been here...

Why aren't my pocket-flowers showing?

Okay, this one showed a little.

We spent the first day completely inside Art Market so there wasn't time for cosplay pictures. I mean, the market took 5 fucking hours to tour, and I didn't even comb through everything as carefully as I wanted to because Qian Qian was suffocating from the crowd and the smell. Sharon was tired; she had never walked so much before. Conventions are tests of endurance.

This was one of the best stuff in the market! But it was too expensive for my budget. Goddamn it! I swear I will even make space for this amazing ass banner had I bought it. Kulit Wayang style on Zonai aesthetics? Fucking swell!

We did find the Uncle-est Nanami ever while we were on our way out, and honestly, he was one of the best Nanami I found on Day 1! Sure he didn't have the abs and the height, but he had the semblance!

There were some missions, really. Find buff ajuicy Nanami; take pictures of them. Find Nanami re-enactment; take pictures of them. Things I do for Crow Curry, man. THIS IS FOR YOU, YOU NANAMI SIMP!

This cosplayer was so happy, you know? He was so excited to see us excited to take pictures with him, that he forgot his gah-chang, okay? Ya know, the knife?

Even after we left, Qian Qian said she saw him still grinning widely over the whole thing. I didn't even know he could be so happy about it, because cosplayers are so used to being taken pictures. Turned out, his Instagram revealed that this was his first time cosplaying. No wonder!

When we later told Ah Cik about this, his Buddhist ass immediately characterized this as 布施 (Dāna). I mean, none of us thought we were making someone's day, so does it even count? But I'd be lying if I pretended that making one person—goddamn Nanami at THAT—happy didn't please me.

We then walked a few kilometers to Pavilion and the surrounding malls to find some place to eat. KLCC で大変混んでいったから食事が無理だった。

---

Day 2, 24th December 2023

We were pissed not to have taken pictures with any cosplayers (except Uncle Nanami), so we did what Ah Cik and Ah Jim and Wei Wei and Hang Hang thought was insane—BACK TO CF DAY 2!

The best part? I think most people had the same idea as we did! There were even more cosplayers on Day 2! Most of them hung out at the park, like us. I mean, right off the bat we got this:

Dude did work on their eyes!

She couldn't walk without her 4 assistants/friends helping her! Now that's fucking dedication. I wonder if I did end up doing my Monster Rika cosplay (don't bet on it), would I need help walking around too? My ears may be my best sensory organ, but I don't think they are good enough to replace my eyes. I've been a seeing person all my life, after all. I'm also not as good at sensing things as Fionn is...

Fucking found Waldo! And Waldo found us! Yo, here's Wonka over there too!

We looked good for each other, right? Wrong!

Every year during CF, there is a tradition: Qian Qian will always encounter people who just wanna take pictures with her even though she made it explicit that she wasn't cosplaying and was just putting on whatever she likes. The only makeup she ever does is her lips, but she's really pretty and eyeball-attracting, innit? Ha! Stuff like this makes Ah Cik proud.

This professional photographer was just one of the many people who wanted to take pictures of her.

I wonder what it's like to be so visible and eyeball-attracting. All the Past Lyns had wondered the same at some point, right? It would definitely ruin our ability to not be noticed and then jump on someone, that's for sure. Can't be a ghost if you're too visible. But I wonder if being so seen would lessen that feeling of being a see-through not-there... "thing", the way it seemed to be to us throughout our life.

HOLY SHIT ALICE LIDDELL FROM MADNESS RETURNS! Now that's old stuff being brought back!

(Here's the Twin Tower!)

GET IT?! BLUD WAS USING A SWITCH AX! A SWITCH AX!!! AND HE THEN TURNED IT FROM AX MODE INTO GREAT SWORD MODE!

Monster Hunters, riseeeeee! And he wasn't the only MH cosplayer with an amazing weapon prop! There was also a Zinogre cosplay set. You gotta see it for yourself in the album.

I didn't think Cursed Miku would show up, but show up she did!

Okay, here they are. Indisputably Bestest Cosplay Ever In My History of Attending CF:

NANI THE FUCK IS GOING ON?!

Goddamn Guanyin and Buddha cosplays?! And really, this wasn't even the only bunch:

AND THERE WERE AT LEAST TWO GUANYU, AND ONE SUN WUKONG, AND ONE XUANZHANG that we didn't manage to take pictures of—like guys, where did all these deity cosplayers come from?!

Fucking dope though!

Of course, the Nanami Shrine is ALSO hella dope. Hey, wanna see a dead body?

Rate them peaches Rest in Peace!

The Ubiquity of Gojo Satoru: How I Was Space Cleaved by Sukuna and Transported to Another World Along With Many Other Me

You don't always get to see a Mob Psycho 100 cosplay, so all three of us took pictures with them! Mob Psycho 100 is our commonality!

BRUH.

And last but not the least, because it was such a beautiful day where the rain was only half an hour long and a drizzle, and the sun was beautiful, I recorded my official drip of that day,

These are by no means the only pictures we took, guys. Please go to the Google Album attached to the account "black bird" and "short skirt" and "gmail." You know the one.

[thatgirlonstage]

Hey! So I don't recall if you watch tokyo revengers or not and I might be misremembering it but if you did watch it, is it any good? Can you car salesman pitch it to me like I'm a reluctant buyer? Only if you're in the mood to of course! If you don't watch TR then could i ask you to maybe sell blue lock to me?

I have not watched Tokyo Revengers (I think @puppetmaster55 I remember you rb'ing some stuff from that series? If you're in a pitching mood) but I will absoLUTely sell Blue Lock to you

*in my best used car salesman voice*

Now y'see what's special about this baby is that it ain't like your typical sports anime. Power of friendship and becoming stronger as a team is all very nice but if you're looking for some spice... somethin' a little different… well, perhaps I can interest you in some death games soccer today?

The funniest thing about this show is that every time I describe it to someone as "death games/hunger games football" and then start talking about the premise more in depth people have reacted with "OH YOU MEANT LITERALLY" and yes, I do, minus the actual death. The premise is that in order to choose a new striker for Japan's national soccer team, a dude locks 300 high school boys into a facility away from the rest of the world and makes them compete in various elimination games and tournaments, with the eventual goal of whittling down to one person. If you get eliminated, you never get to play professional soccer in Japan ever.

Does this sound absolutely fucking unhinged to you? Good, it is. This anime is so much "let's take this bugfuck premise and Just Run With It." These boys are going to be so good at football and also absolutely fucking insane by the end.

If you are here for ships, I have good news: so many of these boys are intensely homoerotically obsessed with each other. That also is a different flavor to a lot of sports anime—less learning to rely on each other and more "I don't need you but I'm choosing you anyway/I hate you actually but you make me stronger and I want to see what else I can do because you're there to challenge me/I used to rely on you and I don't want to anymore". There's a lot of good shit to choose from.

If you're here to be generally horny this show is. So Normal. So Incredibly Normal. Their holographic goalie has a collar and chain around its neck. Why? I don't know no one ever acknowledges it. There are cameras all over this facility. 300 boys are locked in together with only each other and zoom visits from the man running the death games for company. Just So Deeply Fucking Normal.

tl;dr D'you like death games? Sports anime but want to try a different flavor? Shounen Rivalry™ and its associated homoerotic undertones taken to the extreme? Want to lock a bunch of high school boys in a building and watch delinquency ensue through football? You should watch Blue Lock it's incredibly compelling.

[pixies-and-poets]

Ok! Time for some SPOILER FREE Mario movie impressions!! I'll post plenty of more detailed thoughts later, of course, but these are general thoughts about its quality. Of course this is still very long because I always get carried away, lol

So, I had a great time, but I can definitely see where some of the criticisms come from. Let's get the less good stuff out of the way first. The plot is nothing to speak of, it's basically a video game plot which... whatever, there are actual Mario games out there that have better story and dialogue and themes than this, but at the same time I don't see a problem with this approach? I've seen people bringing up Super Paper Mario (which as you may know is my favorite Mario game) as evidence that Mario can have a good story around him but at the same time, like. This is an origin story, and they wanted to tell a fairly basic story that resembles the incredibly basic plot of the VAST MAJORITY of Mario games and that's fine, they didn't need to pull an epic story about ancient prophecies and mystical macguffins and doomed lovers out of their ass. It's fine y'all. They can save epic RPG plots for sequels.

The dialogue is serviceable. I know it's a kids' movie and whatever (which is almost always a poor excuse for whatever it's defending) but there were plenty of moments where the characters basically hit you over the head with the themes or state exposition so bluntly I thought it was leading into a joke. That made the moments where certain characters started to gel with each other and have naturalistic and endearing dialogue stand out all the more, and yet those charismatic moments are over almost as soon as you realize they're happening.

Overall I think the movie's rapid-fire pace is what hurts it the most. We are given very little time to sit with these charming character interactions, or scenes where a sense of wonder is evoked, before it's on to the next colorful and action-packed setpiece. On the one hand it's nice to have a movie with such a pared down runtime, but I think a little bit of extra space and breathing room in there could have done wonders in getting people who only know Mario as the funny Wahoo man who lives in the Nintendo to buy into the appeal of these characters and their world. I guess they thought kids couldn't pay attention in quiet moments or something, but again, give kids a little credit.

All that aside, the movie's strengths are many, in my opinion: outstanding animation and design, attention to lush visual detail, creating a Mushroom Kingdom that maintains a sense of magical bizarreness while actually seeming like a real place that people live in, and a sense of sincerity to the whole enterprise with a minimum of irony and self-distancing snark. It's also a very good, fun and refreshing take on some of the characters and their relationships - although, again, I just wish there was more screentime for it. I'll go into more detail when I talk spoilers later.

I've seen some snippets of criticism which I will say I disagree with, which is... People are justifiably cynical and tired of the Space Jam 2s and Ready Player Ones of the world where the creators are like "Look at all these nerdy references!! Look at all the IP we got access to, PLEASE POINT AND CLAP" and saying this movie is the same type of thing, but... Idk in my opinion there's a huge difference between a massive crossover of shallow nerdy references, and a movie based on one single franchise making a bunch of deep cuts that fans will recognize. Like yes there are references to other Nintendo properties but those are all subtle background things and sensibly contained to the Brooklyn portions of the movie.

Listen, I know Nintendo isn't my friend, they are out to make money and in a very real sense we ARE being advertised to... the Kart portions felt especially like "Hey did you ever buy Mario Kart 8 Deluxe yet??" Still, I think between the outstanding musical score and all the deep-cut references, this movie was obviously made by people with a deep love and care for the Mario franchise who were excited to work on this project. So in a sense it's kind of an ad for Nintendo's games rather than some pure work of art free from ulterior motives, but one that comes from a place of sincerity and care. If you want to be maximum cynical you could view that as even more insidious, but idk... relax and have some fun, go play some Mario Party.

It's not an advertisement for those of us who are already bought in. And maybe that's the major disconnect with some critics, which isn't to write them off as elitist, but just an attempt at explaining the difference in fan reception vs critical reception. Some people feel like they're being advertised to while others feel like they're being treated and the video game world they love is being respected. The idea that there are people, adults, who take video game IP this seriously, so much that we've pretty much already played all the games being referenced, is either hard to believe, or seen as even more cringey than being into Marvel movies or something. But there are plenty of us, and we know what we're getting into and are excited to see it.

Some of us are even Donkey Kong fans in particular and this is the best/most content we've gotten in years so LET'S GO TEAM KONG