#no license bullshit you own the actual game

[knightofleo]

A small PSA: Today (i.e. 12/12/24) is your last chance to grab Warcraft I & II on GOG before they're delisted forever and the only versions of these games available will be the (apparently kinda botched) upscales from Blizzard at twice the price. They're already pretty cheap but use the code MakeWarcraftLiveForever at checkout for a few bucks off.

[scary-grace]

Opposites Attract (Chapter 5) - a Shigaraki x f!Reader fic

Your quirk lets you capture almost anyone with ease, and you can't believe you let Shigaraki Tomura escape. Shigaraki can't believe it, either, and according to the League, there's only one possible explanation -- you let him go because you've fallen in love with him. He decides to find out if it's true. You decide you won't fail to capture him again. You both get a lot more than you bargained for. (cross-posted to Ao3)

Chapters: 1 2 3 4

Chapter 5

“Shigaraki.” Spinner snaps his fingers in front of Shigaraki’s face, and Shigaraki snaps out of it in a hurry. As much of a hurry he can manage. He’s not used to having the kind of daydreams he doesn’t want to wake up from. “Hey. Toga said she’ll have a route for us soon. Do I really have to drive?”

“I can’t drive,” Dabi says. He’s leaning against their stolen truck, lighting a cigarette. “Compress. Can you drive?”

Compress waves his metal arm. “I’m disabled.”

“You pickpocketed me with that thing! Bullshit you’re disabled.” Spinner is getting desperate. He must be, if he’s looking at Shigaraki for help. “You can drive, can’t you?”

“You won the game,” Shigaraki says. “You’re better.”

Nobody in the League has a driver’s license, so they played successive rounds of Grand Theft Auto to see who was the least bad at it. Spinner beat Shigaraki pretty soundly. Spinner scowls. “If you said that’s why we were playing it, I’d have thrown the match.”

“Too late.” Shigaraki feels the urge to either pace or scratch, and for the first time in maybe ever, he starts pacing. “You’ll be fine.”

“Did you hit your head or something?” Dabi gives Shigaraki a weird look. “You’d better have hit your head, because if you’re high on something and you didn’t share –”

“I’m not high,” Shigaraki says. “We’re about to take revenge on Overhaul. The heroes did all the hard work. And –”

And I have a girlfriend. “And what?” Dabi says suspiciously.

“And I’m not driving. Buzz off.”

Dabi rolls his eyes. And another cigarette. Spinner looks like he’s practicing driving on an imaginary car. Shigaraki keeps pacing, wondering if he can get back to the same daydream he was having before. It was a good one. A lot of his daydreams have been good ones lately.

Shigaraki hasn’t made a ton of progress – or really any progress – on turning you to his side, but in spite of that, he’s pleased with how it’s going. He might have fucked up with the handholding, but what he got instead was a lot better – you sitting next to him for the whole second movie, tucked under his arm, very clearly not freaking out like you did in the kitchen. Shigaraki probably missed half the movie between trying not to squeeze you like a stress ball and trying not to pop one over the fact that you were about ten centimeters of elevation away from sitting in his lap, but it doesn’t matter. The movie’s one of your favorites. He’s willing to bet you’ll watch it with him again.

It’s going really well. Probably too well for the fact that you aren’t turned yet, because Shigaraki thinks about you too much for his own good and it would be easier not to wonder where you are and what you’re doing and if you’re thinking about him and how much you’re thinking about him if he actually had eyes on you. This Overhaul thing would be easier if you were here, too. Shigaraki’s pretty sure you know how to drive. You could drive today, teach Spinner later, and then the League would have two people who knew how to drive the getaway car.

Compress’s phone pings. “We have their destination,” he announces. He puts his phone away and cracks his knuckles one-handed. “I for one am looking forward to this.”

“Same.” Shigaraki watches as Spinner climbs into the cab of the truck, and Dabi and Compress take their places in the back. He himself climbs up on top, all according to plan, and raps against the cab’s roof with his knuckles. “Move out!”

It goes well. So well that Shigaraki’s almost suspicious, because his plans never come anywhere close to going off without a hitch – but this one does. They cut off the convoy transporting Overhaul. Shigaraki distracts the driver while Dabi takes out the single escorting hero. Shigaraki knew there’d be a hero escorting the convoy, and part of him was worried it would be you, which is why he put Dabi on hero-neutralizing duty. He knows you could handle Dabi. He doesn’t want to get stuck fighting you. For a lot of reasons.

Heroes always talk about how revenge doesn’t make anything better, but in Shigaraki’s opinion, they’re just doing revenge wrong. Stealing Overhaul’s quirk-canceling and quirk-boosting bullets and stealing his quirk along with it makes Shigaraki feel pretty damn good. It’s good for the rest of the strike team, too. Compress has a spring in his step as they walk back to the truck, and even Dabi’s bitching less than usual. Shigaraki, meanwhile, is already thinking about how he’ll tell you what happened. How you’ll be impressed. How you’ll agree that Overhaul deserved everything he got, and be pleased that Shigaraki gave it to him. How maybe this time you’ll understand that the rules you’re playing by get in the way of doing what needs to be done.

But he’s not going to need to tell you. You’ve already found out. “We’ve got trouble,” Spinner says, and when Shigaraki looks through the windshield, he sees you standing in the middle of the road.

Shigaraki’s heart sinks. You’re standing squarely in the truck’s path in full costume, right down to the boots that keep you from being yanked off your feet by your quirk. Even from this distance, he can see your expression, determined and perfectly calm. So much for the plan going well. Spinner is looking to Shigaraki for direction, a little more panicked every time he takes his eyes off the road, but Shigaraki’s frozen. And he has to make a decision. Now.

Maybe you’re here to help them escape. Maybe you’re here to join the League at last. You love him. You’re his girlfriend. There’s no way you’re just going to –

“Floor it,” Dabi orders, and Spinner hits the accelerator. “She’ll move.”

No. You won’t. Shigaraki sees you plant your feet, extend both hands in front of you, and he feels the exact moment when your quirk catches hold of the truck. You can’t stop it. It’s too close to you. But the front wheels of the truck lift, followed by the back wheels, up and over your head – and then it inverts into a slow barrel roll, still moving forward, steadily shedding momentum. Spinner’s got his seatbelt on. He’s the only one who doesn’t fall towards the ceiling.

But Dabi and Compress freeze in place. Shigaraki doesn’t. Shigaraki falls headfirst to the ceiling, because he still doesn’t have enough iron in his blood for you to catch him. And because he’s not paralyzed like the others – being rescued by you comes with a price – he can get all four of them out of here, because he learned from last time. Shigaraki ignores the sharp pain as his shoulder strikes the ceiling, fumbles in his pocket, and activates his phone’s location tracker. Kurogiri can find them now. It’ll be mere seconds before they’re safe.

The last of the truck’s momentum fades as it spins through the air, and you lower it carefully to the ground without turning it right-side up. Now that the strike team’s escape is secured, Shigaraki can focus on you, on just how insanely strong you are, how you can split your focus well enough to control the truck’s speed and rotation without losing your grip on Dabi and Compress. The heroes were stupid for letting you fill the role of an underground hero, keeping you away from the spotlight. Their loss is the League’s gain.

“Get us out of here!” Dabi snaps at Shigaraki as you walk towards the truck. Next to Shigaraki, Spinner looks similarly panicked. “We’re in a metal box. I can’t blast her without cooking us. If you don’t –”

Kurogiri’s warp gate swallows Dabi first, then Compress, and Shigaraki realizes all at once that while he’s about to escape clean, you aren’t. You haven’t done any of the things he knows you’re capable of to stop Kurogiri from rescuing them. You haven’t contracted the cab of the truck around them or bent off pieces of metal to bind them to their seats so Kurogiri can’t separate them from it. You’re going to be in trouble again for letting the League escape, and you’re going to be pissed at Shigaraki – unless Shigaraki finds a way to let you win at something.

And he’s got just the thing. As Spinner vanishes into another warp gate, Shigaraki fumbles the box containing the quirk-canceling bullets open in his pocket. He pries two out, palms them. Then he makes a show of pulling the box partway clear of his pocket.”

The box is metal. You melt the windshield one-handed – since when can you do that? – and snatch it, and before Shigaraki can stop you, you steal the box with the quirk-enhancing bullets, too. That’s fine. Shigaraki wasn’t going to keep those, and he only needs two of the quirk-canceling bullets for what he’s planning – and it’s not like he has a gun to fire them out of right now, anyway. You can keep the bullets, and he’ll escape. And he got to see you today when he wasn’t expecting to. Shigaraki smiles at you as the warp gate consumes him. He’s gone too quickly to see if you smile back.

Back at the hideout, Shigaraki discovers that nobody else thinks it went as well as he does. Spinner’s the least dramatic about it. “We got away,” he says with a shrug. “Overhaul was punished and we still got some of the bullets. All our win conditions were met.”

“They should not have been.” Even with the mask on, Compress somehow still manages to look disturbed. “That hero let us go.”

“Yeah, no shit she let us go. That’s the crazy one who’s in love with Shigaraki.” Dabi smirks, like he thinks he’s making fun of Shigaraki – except you are in love with Shigaraki, and Shigaraki maybe likes you a little bit. “Compress is right. If that had been any other hero, we’d have been fucked. Next time we should leave from the scene instead of driving off into the fucking sunset.”

Shigaraki can acknowledge when a plan needs some refinement. He nods in agreement, and Dabi, who seemed like he was looking for a fight, wanders off grumbling about how he needs a cigarette. Spinner sticks a little closer. “Did you know she could do that?”

“She stopped a train.”

“Yeah. That was one big thing moving away from her. She flipped us up and over her head while we were going 80km at her face,” Spinner says. “She’s really strong.”

Shigaraki struggles to hide his grin. “Yeah.”

“If she likes you, maybe you should use that,” Spinner suggests. “Her actions align with Stain’s principles, which means she can’t be happy with the way the rest of the heroes act. Maybe she’d want to join us.”

Spinner has good ideas. Next time there’s a plan to be made, Shigaraki should listen to more of him and less of everybody else. “Already on it.”

Spinner stares at him. “How?”

“How do you think?”

Spinner looks like he thinks Shigaraki is out of his mind. Then again, Shigaraki thinks Spinner is out of his mind for being so fixated on Stain. Spinner’s the weird one. A little weirdness doesn’t bother Shigaraki. Once he adds you to the League, it’ll straighten out. In the meantime, Shigaraki tucks the bullets away to an inside pocket of his coat and makes his way over to Kurogiri. “Is she back yet?”

Kurogiri’s yellow eyes narrow as he opens a warp gate into your apartment and peers through. “Not yet,” he reports. “It will likely be some time until she returns, given the paperwork that results from an incident like the one that occurred today.”

Shigaraki feels weirdly disappointed. He wants to see you now. But it’s not practical at the moment, and until he can bring you and the League together, he can’t let you distract him from them. “Keep checking,” he instructs. He turns to the other three and pitches his voice up. “When Twice and Toga get back, we’re celebrating.”

“How are we going to celebrate? We don’t have any money.”

“Something will work out,” Compress says. “We’ve had very good luck today.”

They do have pretty good luck. Twice and Toga grabbed some stuff to fence on their way out of Overhaul’s compound, and with that sold, they’ve got enough to send Compress off in search of snacks. He comes back with half a convenience store and way too much money left over to have paid for most of it. Shigaraki doesn’t eat much. More for everybody else, and he’s going to eat later. You’ll cook at your apartment or you’ll order in, and either way it’ll be better than feasting on convenience store snacks. It occurs to Shigaraki that he’s getting sort of spoiled, and sort of picky, except the other way this time. After eating real food as often as he’s been doing, it’s hard to get excited about instant noodles.

He makes Kurogiri check on the hour to see if you’re back at your apartment yet. He wants Kurogiri to check on the half hour, but Kurogiri says no. “Allow her some time to get settled,” he says. “The chances that she will react poorly decrease the longer you give her.”

You haven’t reacted poorly to seeing Shigaraki, except the first time when you weren’t expecting him, and the last time when he tried to hold your hand without telling you he was going for it first. Shigaraki feels weird about that. You clearly thought he was going to be offended that you were scared to hold his hand, and he definitely wasn’t expecting you to panic like you did. To somebody else, it probably wouldn’t have looked like you were panicking at all.

But Shigaraki knows you. He should, since you’re his girlfriend who’s in love with him. And even if he was completely clueless, the fact that the shackles around his wrists and ankles were starting to vibrate would have been a major tell. You’ve been so calm both times he’s faced you in battle. It was weird that you freaked out holding his hand.

Maybe not weird. Shigaraki was freaking out, too, just on the inside. And maybe Kurogiri’s right about letting you have a little more space. “Go two hours before you check again,” he says, and Kurogiri nods. “I don’t want to, like –”

He doesn’t know what. This girlfriend thing is a good thing, sure, but he spends a lot more time being confused about shit than he used to. Shigaraki toys briefly with the idea of asking Toga for advice, then rejects it. Toga is still seventeen, and still basically insane, and besides, he’s not ready for everybody to know about you yet. He can keep you to himself a little while longer.

Shigaraki means to wait the full two hours, but he snaps at an hour and a half and tells Kurogiri to check. Sure enough, you’re back at the apartment, and it’s getting dark early enough now that no one will notice him outside your building. The difficult part is getting away from the others, but he tells them that he’s cultivating an ally – something they’re all supposed to be doing – and sneaks off through a warp gate onto your fire escape. The restraints encircle him almost the second he steps through, which means you were waiting for him to show up. Hoping he’d show up. Good.

He settles on a grade for the restraining job this time while he waits for you to let him go – a solid B. Like always, you don’t let him go all the way. He’s still got metal around his wrists and ankles. Lately Shigaraki’s been thinking about getting some metal of his own to wear, so you won’t keep fucking up your fire escape every time he swings by. The window opens, like always, and he climbs in.

But something’s different about your apartment this time. It’s subtle, but it’s there. Usually you’re already cooking, or just started. You’ve got the ingredients laid out and two place settings at your kitchen table – but you’re sitting on the couch instead. You aren’t watching anything, or looking for anything to watch, or even looking at your phone. You’re just sitting still. It’s weird.

Maybe you’re mad at him. Shigaraki speaks up as the window shuts behind him. “How much trouble did you get in?”

“Less than last time,” you say, without looking away from the black screen of your TV. “The HPSC had a rare second of self-awareness and realized that they should have come up with a stronger escort, given who they were transporting and who might be interested in getting revenge. And recovering the bullets didn’t exactly hurt my case.”

“I thought that would help,” Shigaraki says. You nod. “Uh –”

“One of the cops sent a distress signal before you crashed his car,” you say. “It went out to every hero in the area. Dispatch hit me up specifically.”

Just like the heroes should have seen the League’s attack coming, Shigaraki should have guessed that the heroes would send you to stop him. There aren’t many quirks better suited for stopping somebody escaping in a vehicle than yours. “It worked out,” he says.

“No, it didn’t.”

Shigaraki gets the worst hit of foreboding he’s felt in a while. “What do you mean? I got out, you didn’t get busted –”

“We got lucky,” you say flatly. “If there’d been another hero with me, I wouldn’t have had a choice but to capture you. You’d tell on me the instant you were in custody –”

“Hey,” Shigaraki says, offended. “You think I’d sell you out?”

“Why wouldn’t you? I’d have just captured you and ruined everything.”

“I wouldn’t sell you out,” Shigaraki repeats. The longer he thinks about it, the more offended he gets, but him being offended isn’t fixing this. Whatever it is. “If I turn you in, I won’t have anybody to break me out.”

Your quirk was basically designed for prison breaks. Shigaraki’s not kidding, but you must think he is, because you laugh, quiet and dull. “That’s why this can’t keep happening.”

You’re breaking up with him. Shigaraki feels like he’s gotten punched. You can’t break up with him. You’re in love with him. You can’t break up with someone you’re in love with, right? Knowing that doesn’t change the sinking feeling, the sickness sweeping up over him. “What do you mean?”

“I mean –” Your shoulders tense under your oversized t-shirt. “Do I have to spell it out?”

“Yeah, you do.” Shigaraki needs you to talk. He can’t come up with a countermove until he knows what you’re thinking. He pries off his shoes, hops the back of the couch, and sits down next to you. “Pretend I’m stupid or something.”

“When this goes wrong, and it will, one or both of us will lose everything.” You’re still staring at the TV, even though there’s nothing there. “It’ll be better to stop now, before it gets worse.”

“Before what gets worse?” Shigaraki asks. You don’t answer. You aren’t doing anything. What’s going on with you? “Look, if you’re done with me, just say that. Don’t make up some bullshit excuse about –”

“I let you escape. Again. What part of that says I’m done with you?” You don’t move, but the shackles are starting to vibrate. You’re getting upset. “We got lucky this time. Next time we’ll get caught.”

“Or not,” Shigaraki says. The despair from before is fading a little bit. It doesn’t sound like you actually want to break up with him, which means he might be able to talk you out of it if he plays his cards right. “Stay out of my way on the job and I’ll stay out of yours. We’ll deal with it once we can’t anymore, but – with your arrest profile, there’s no way they’re putting you on my case. You’re strictly small-time.”

You shouldn’t be, but you are – and that’s how you like it. You’ve said. Both times you’ve crossed the League, it’s been because you’ve been somewhere you shouldn’t have. If you stay where you’re supposed to be, this big clash between your feelings for Shigaraki and your responsibilities as a hero will never happen. Shigaraki looks around the apartment, trying to come up with his next move, and something on the coffee table catches his eye. He reaches over, nudges aside an English-language horror novel that’s been there for weeks, and picks up the pair of gloves.

They’re not your gloves. They’re new, and they’re weird – missing the thumb and first two fingers on each hand. They look like they were designed to be that way. Shigaraki goes from miserable and frustrated to some weird buoyant feeling he can’t describe in a split second, and the change in elevation almost makes him dizzy. And nauseous. He waves the gloves at you. “If this has to stop, what are these for?”

“Shut up,” you say, but your face is flushing, the same way it did when you got all awkward about the sex scene in the first Terminator movie. It was cute then and it’s even cuter now – more than cute, because if you went out and got special gloves that will let Shigaraki touch you safely, it means you want him to touch you. “At least admit that I have a point.”

“Yeah, you have one.” Shigaraki starts putting on the gloves. He wonders if Sensei knew about these, if they had them back when Shigaraki was a kid. If he had a pair of these, he wouldn’t have Decayed so many of his favorite things by accident. “But I have one, too, and mine’s better. You didn’t get made, I didn’t get caught, and Overhaul got what was coming to him and more. So we shouldn’t break up. We should celebrate.”

“Break up?” You look at Shigaraki like he’s lost his mind, and the last bit of worry evaporates. He never had anything to worry about. Of course you weren’t going to dump him, when you react to the idea of it like this. “How am I supposed to break up with you if –”

“You aren’t.” If Shigaraki wasn’t such a chickenshit, he’d kiss you right now – except the last time he sprung some kind of physical contact on you, you freaked out, and you already look sort of on edge. But you’re not breaking up with him. You don’t even want to think about breaking up with him. Fuck it. Shigaraki leans in.

In hindsight, he should have known better than to push his luck. He’s off-balance as he closes the distance between the two of you, courtesy of only putting one glove on and having only one hand to lean on. And because he’s off-balance, he misses. He manages to tag the corner of your mouth, but that’s it. The rest of his mouth is on your cheek, or maybe your jaw, and your skin is soft, smooth. So are your lips – the tiny piece of them he made contact with, anyway.  The opposite of his lips, which are dry and flaky and constantly cracking. How did Shigaraki forget how disgusting his mouth is?

He sits back from you, but it’s not far enough back. He retreats all the way to the end of the couch and tries to regroup. The longer he thinks about it, the more certain he is that there’s no way to regroup. He fucked up the first kiss. No bouncing back from that. He can feel you looking at him, and he knows his face is flushing. He knows how ugly it looks, too, and as the seconds tick past, Shigaraki’s options for what to do about it grow narrower. Turning away makes him look stupid. Covering his face with his hands makes him look like a little kid. Decaying your couch so you’ll kick him out is such a dumb idea that he can’t believe he thought of it. But the dumbest thing of all is just sitting here, waiting for you to figure out how to ask him nicely to leave.

“Quit staring,” he finally snaps. “Just kick me out already.”

“I’m not kicking you out.” You’re watching him from the other end of the couch, head tilted, perfectly calm. Your face is still a little flushed. “You have to warn me with this stuff, Shigaraki. It goes a lot better when it’s not a surprise.”

Shigaraki’s pretty sure it would have gone like this whether he surprised you or not. He doesn’t answer, and you get to your feet, leaving your end of the couch and sitting down next to him, close like the last time he was here. Your hand comes up to hold one side of his face, and your thumb runs lightly over the scar on his lip. Shigaraki freezes. This must have been how you felt when he tried to hold your hand the first time. Except you aren’t able to kill him just by touching him.

It feels like you could, though. Shigaraki’s heart is beating too fast. “What are you doing?”

You lean in slowly, not breaking eye contact. It’s intense enough that Shigaraki closes his eyes to avoid it, and a moment after he does, your lips press against his. Unlike him, you don’t miss. You don’t stay for long, either – longer than Shigaraki thought you would, shorter than he wants you to. Even knowing that his mouth’s disgusting. You sit back from him, looking pleased with yourself. You don’t look like that a lot, but you’re almost smirking, and Shigaraki remembers suddenly that he’s dealing with a hero, one who can flip speeding cars and stop out-of-control trains. “Uh –”

“It goes better when it’s not a surprise,” you say. “Don’t you think?”

It’s not even a question. Shigaraki nods, and you get up from the couch and head to the kitchen like absolutely nothing happened at all. Shigaraki sits there for another five minutes, inert like somebody’s stun-gunned him, before he pulls on the other glove, scrambles off the couch, and chases after you.

Whatever you’re cooking already smells good, but Shigaraki has something else on his mind. “Hey. You can’t just do that.”

“Do what?”

“Kiss me and walk away.”

“That’s what you were going to do,” you point out. “How was I supposed to feel about that?”

“It’s not the same,” Shigaraki says. You raise your eyebrows, and he grits his teeth. “You didn’t fuck it up like I did.”

You don’t make fun of him, but you don’t argue, either. Shigaraki gets back to the point. “You can’t kiss me and leave. That’s not what’s supposed to happen.”

“What did you think was going to happen?” You drop something into the pan on the stove and a cloud of steam billows up. “We’d kiss one time and then have sex on the couch?”

“That’s not what I thought,” Shigaraki says at once, except it must have been sort of what he thought, because his face goes up in flames. Either it’s what he thought or he thinks it would be hot. Or both. “It sounds stupid when you say it like that.”

“It sounds stupid because it is stupid,” you say.

“Why is it stupid?” Shigaraki challenges. Maybe you’re playing dumb. “That’s exactly what they did in Terminator.”

It’s also what they do in every porno Shigaraki’s ever seen – at least the ones that don’t cut straight to the sex. You stare at him for a second, jaw dropped, then burst out laughing. “What?” Shigaraki snaps, but you’re cracking yourself up. It would be cuter if you weren’t laughing at him. “Don’t just stand there and –”

“It’s a movie, Shigaraki,” you interrupt, wiping your eyes. “That’s not how it works in real life.”

“No shit it’s a movie. I don’t see any robots in skin suits from the future,” Shigaraki says, which only makes you laugh harder. “It’s not funny. I’m not stupid. If you just –”

“That’s how it works in movies. Maybe it works like that for some people in real life. That’s not how it’s going to work for us,” you say. Shigaraki doesn’t hate that, mainly because you’re implying that it’s going to work at some point. “I don’t know about you, but I don’t really want to do things Terminator-style.”

Shigaraki is working on calming down. He thinks you might be joking a little bit. “Yeah, if we go that route, you get knocked up and I die.”

“Or you get knocked up and I die,” you counter, straightfaced. “That would be bad, too.”

Shigaraki’s pretty sure that would be worse. You’re snickering again. “You’re crazy.”

“I’d have to be,” you say. Some of the mirth evaporates. “Wouldn’t I?”

Shigaraki remembers thinking early on that you had a screw or two loose – for naming yourself after a villain, for getting dragged behind a train, for falling in love with Shigaraki in the first place. You having a couple screws loose worked out really nicely for him. “Yeah,” he says. He takes the three steps into the kitchen until he’s right alongside you at the stove. “I like it, though.”

He only got ‘like’ out of his mouth at the last minute. Something else tried to get through instead. You nudge him lightly with your shoulder and it almost comes out again. Shigaraki swallows it. “Okay, so not Terminator style,” he says, and you nod solemnly. Your mouth is twitching again. “Then what?”

“I don’t know,” you say. “We might have to watch some more movies.”

“Fine,” Shigaraki says, and you smile. Your rice cooker beeps on the counter behind you. “Which ones?”

“If you don’t hate old sci-fi, more of those,” you say. “I made a list.”

It almost gets out again. Shigaraki’s in trouble. He’s not going to think about that until later. “See, you could have led with that. If you’d started out saying you bought me gloves and made a list of movies for us to watch, I never would have thought you were trying to break up.”

“I told you. We weren’t breaking up.”

The last time you said that, Shigaraki kissed you and fucked it up. This time, he taps your shoulder with a gloved hand and waits for you to look up. He tries to remember what you did. Eye contact. One hand on the side of your face. You don’t have a scar on your lip like he does, but Shigaraki improvises, brushing his thumb across your lower lip. Your eyes widen slightly, and your lips part. Shigaraki leans in.

You were right, he decides as his lips meet yours for the second time. It goes a lot better when it’s not a surprise. And it gets even better than that when you set one hand on his chest and kiss him back.

It takes some getting used to, to see kissing as something other than an achievement to check off on the way to getting laid. Out of context, kissing is a weird thing to do for any significant length of time. In context, Shigaraki’s annoyed every time you have to stop kissing him so you can do something to the food. If kissing is where the two of you are at right now, he wants to get as much out of it as possible. Besides, you’ve got your quirk. You don’t need to let go of him to move things around on the stove.

“Come on,” he mumbles, after probably the eighth time you’ve drawn back. “Who cares if it’s messed up? Order takeout.”

“Are you paying the delivery fee?” You take your other hand off Shigaraki’s shoulder, too, when you absolutely don’t need it for what you’re doing. “Takeout’s expensive, it’ll take longer to get here, and this has more iron in it. You’re still anemic.”

“So I should come over more often,” Shigaraki decides. Then something clicks in his head. “Wait, is that how you decide what to cook when I’m here? By how much iron it has in it?”

“I cook like this all the time. My quirk doesn’t work as well when my iron concentration isn’t high.” You seem like you’re focusing really hard on stirring what’s in the pan. Too hard. Stirring doesn’t take that much brainpower. “And yours is still too low. That’s why I dropped you.”

“I figured.” Shigaraki’s not mad about it. A sore shoulder’s a small price to pay for not getting paralyzed like everyone else. “Do you feel bad or something?”

“That depends. Did you get hurt?”

“That depends. What do I get if I say yes?”

“No,” you say, and Shigaraki snorts. “Is this what it’s going to be like? We meet up after fights and figure out who owes what?”

That’s really stupid. “We’re going with my plan. That means we aren’t going to fight.”

“And what happens if we do?”

“You still can’t grab me,” Shigaraki says with a shrug. “Unless you want to do it like this.”

He pulls your hand, wraps it around his waist, then steps in close. “And if you do it like this, we’ve got bigger problems than whether you’re trying hard enough to capture me.”

You still don’t look convinced, and instead of bringing your other hand over and putting it back on Shigaraki’s shoulder or on his chest or anywhere, you’re still stirring whatever’s in the pan. “All you have to do is not go plus ultra,” Shigaraki continues. “I know that’s a lot to ask from somebody who went to UA –”

You roll your eyes. “How long have you been sitting on that one?”

“About as long as you’ve been sitting on being in love with me,” Shigaraki says. “So, the whole time.”

“Shigaraki –”

“The plan is a good plan. It’s going to work,” Shigaraki says. Since you’re finally looking at him – and not touching anything on the stove, and probably expecting it now that he’s done it a few times – he kisses you. Then he keeps trying to talk. That doesn’t go as well. “It’ll work out.”

It’s going to work out. For Shigaraki, absolutely – and for you, too, once you finally realize the truth about the system you’re upholding. Maybe all it’ll take is one more clash with the League, one more time where you catch the blame that should belong to everybody, not just to you. Or maybe you’ll wake up one morning and it’ll all make sense, the way it all made sense to Shigaraki after he talked to Midoriya at the mall before Kamino. Either way the game ends, Shigaraki wins big.

He hasn’t gotten a win like that in, well – ever. And with the way things are going right now, he doesn’t mind waiting a little while for it to happen.

[fantasyfantasygames]

Metal Gods (the actual game)

Breaking kayfabe to give you weirdos something nice.

I decided to write Metal Gods for real. I had the concept together and was going to pitch it to a company, but that company is not looking for RPGs at this time (totally reasonable), so I wrote the review instead. And then it stuck in my head, so I had to write the game. I'm giving it away for free. Here you go:

Metal Gods Rules (Google Doc)

Metal Gods Cards (Google Slides)

It works mostly like I said it did in the review. I have an older version elsewhere on the web that was Fate-based, but this one is its own weird bespoke system. The rules come out to just 6 pages, but the cards were honestly much more time-consuming to write. I ended up creating a spreadsheet to randomize the combinations of names, personality traits, and professions for the humans, so if you think that a particular character combination is weird blame it on Excel and implicit bias.

I have done zero playtesting. If you find that the breakpoints for Fallout rolls feel wrong, let me know and I might adjust them.

It's licensed CC-BY-NC 4.0. The art on the cards is all stock, from Pexels, Pixabay, or Unsplash. Digital art is from the now-defunct CanStockPhoto, mostly by GrandFailure - you've seen their work before. You cannot reuse the stock for other purposes; you have to go get your own (and let me tell you, finding good stock art is the worst.)

I'm not going to do this most of the time. It's happened for about 1 out of the 100 fake games I've reviewed so far; I would expect that ratio or something like it to continue. As always, if one of you wants to write one of the games I invented, go for it.

Back to our irregularly scheduled bullshit.

[zooophagous]

Im so sorry if you’ve been asked this, but would you have advice for people wanting to look at breaking into the tattoo game? What was the process like?

I won't lie to you anon, getting into the tattoo industry legally and safely is a very competetive game that has a high drop out rate. The way you get into it also heavily depends on where you live, as the laws governing tattoos change not only from state to state but even city to city.

For example, in some states you're required to have a 2 year college degree from an accredited school to earn a license, and you can actually major in tattooing the same way someone might go to cosmetology school.

Where I am, and in most places I've heard, however- tattooing is taught from master to apprentice, and you typically learn on the job.

Apprenticeships are hard to come by, lots of people want them, not a lot of shops offer them, and sometimes even if you get one a great tattooer can still be a lousy teacher. Many people will move shops at least once before finishing an apprenticeship, and apprentices usually are not paid, and will be shelling out for a lot of their own materials, so you'll either need someone supporting you or you'll need a backup job until you graduate.

Some places even charge people to teach them tutor style, but I don't personally agree with that form of apprenticeship and find it predatory. It's usually something like an unpaid internship that includes duties like cleaning, answering phones, handling bookings and other menial tasks in addition to the learning hours.

I personally got an in at a shop by working part time as counter staff, with no promise that a tattoo position would ever open up. I was able to ingratiate myself to the artists and one of them believed in me enough to train me. I did end up moving shop towards the end of my apprenticeship and finished learning under a different mentor, as my first one was no longer able to keep up with the responsibility of a student.

It's a very fun, very worthwhile career path and I honestly believe if I hadn't found it I would be either dead or on death's door by now because corporate life was slowly destroying my mind, body and soul. But I won't lie, the bullshit hurdle to get there is a steep one. You have to be incredibly stubborn.

This is why the trend of ignorant style tattoos done by tiktokers with Amazon machines is so prevalent, because the actual legitimate path is a difficult one.

I don't say this to discourage you or anyone else who wants in the industry. It's a great industry that's gotten way more friendly and has way more mass appeal than it used to. I mostly say it to let people know the path to employment is not a straightforward one and that the high polished glamor of social media tattoo artists don't show you how many months or even years of crap you have to wade through to get to their point.

[armentas]

Hey there, everyone! My name's Elliot. I've had a writing blog for a while, but I've never tagged a post to officially "join" writeblr before. My blog is more a place to store random photos and silly posts that remind me of my OCs, but I really would like to turn it into something more substantial!

Some stuff about me:

I'm 19.

I'm a trans man, bisexual, and physically disabled.

My favorite genres are contemporary/literary fiction, surrealism, horror, Southern gothic, and historical fiction/fantasy.

You will always find me writing about tragic siblings and religious trauma. If there's a will, there's a way...

I might not always see them or stay on top of them, but I'm fine with being tagged/ask games/stuff like that.

Now, for the wip intros!

Haven

Plot: When a teenage girl finds herself back in her child self's body after wishing for "the good old days", she attempts to use this chance to prevent her brother's suicide.

Genre: Contemporary coming of age, second person interactive fiction

Heather: The main character. An extremely shy, isolated, self-absorbed 17 year old who wants to be unconditionally loved above all. Endlessly curious, and longs for independence while fearful of it. Artistic and daydreams to cope.

Beau: Heather's older brother. Taking care of Heather was his responsibility as a child due to their father working, and their mother's depression confining her to her room. Well liked and deeply kind, but coddling and dishonest, Beau does everything he can to keep his struggles from himself and others. Suffered from a traumatic car accident at 19, and killed himself at 24.

Erin: Has known the two since she was 12, and dated Beau since his car accident. Good sense of humor and doesn't bullshit anyone. She thinks Beau's digging his own mental hole, and that Heather's burdened him too much. The siblings' parents don't approve of Erin's relationship with him because of her drug addiction. 24 years old.

Trigger warnings: Suicide/suicide ideation, death, self harm, neglect, intense portrayals of anxiety and panic attacks, car accidents, drug use

Prodigal

Plot: A priest decides to bring justice to the world by slaughtering those he deems morally reprehensible in the eyes of God.

Genre: Loosely Victorian inspired fantasy horror, in a setting controlled and dominated by Catholicism. Religious (trauma) fiction. Third person present tense

Celio: "The" main character. Keeping many secrets. Thoughtful and patient during his priestly duties, rigid and very bad-tempered otherwise. Well known for being one of the best speakers of his time. Selfish, arrogant, and extremely paranoid, especially of immorality and what others' intentions are, yet it does nothing to stop him sinking further and further into immoral and criminal behavior. 32-35 years old.

Finn: A main character. Celio's secret lover and pawn. Saved from prison time by Celio after Finn was falsely deemed responsible for his family's massacre. Looked down on and considered an outsider by all; pursuing becoming a doctor and surgeon with no license or ability to read. Coolheaded and humorous, but passive and stubborn. Just wants to do good for his poverty-stricken hometown, and to be respected. 32-35 years old.

Charity: Main antagonist. A mostly nonverbal, "orphaned" teen girl who Finn becomes a caretaker for. In actuality, she ran away from home after being ostracized by her church. She likes Finn, and gets along with Celio well enough, until she discovers his crimes and tries to separate Finn from the danger to no avail. Calm, sensible, and strongwilled, but with a bite to her. Has decided she's had enough of betrayal in her life, and that she'll take matters into her own hands, even if it means having to turn on those she once cared for. 16-17 years old.

Trigger warnings: Religious trauma, homophobia, sexual content, death, murder, gore, suicide, gun and knife usage, abuse (physical, emotional, financial, domestic, spiritual), harm to animals, smoking and drinking

The Day You Left (TDYL)

Plot: A teenager travels back to his hometown and reunites with his childhood best friend, sparking a slow, difficult mending of happenings previous.

Genre: Romance novel taking place in the mid 2000s, third person present tense

Skip: The main character. A very monotone trans 19 year old with a photography hobby and history of homelessness. He used to have severe anger issues, and they still come to the surface sometimes when reminded of his trauma. Ex-Christian atheist, vehemently. Avoidant to a fault.

Milo: A boisterous, reckless, punk teenager who used to be friends with Skip. Current sufferer of anger issues and struggles to pay the bills, usually resorting to delinquency. They have a complicated history, so Milo feels very mixed about seeing him again. "In between" Christian and atheist. 19 years old.

Josie: Skip's older sister, who he no longer has contact with. Traditionally evangelical and defensive of authority to the end. 17-18 years old in flashbacks.

Trigger warnings: Religious trauma, familial abuse, sexual content, suicide/suicide ideation, self harm, mentions of homophobia, underage drinking and smoking, arson

Finally, I do have a wip called Kettle Creek, but it's...very much in an in between state, which is why I'm not introducing it here lol. But if you ever see me tagging something as Delora or Olive, that's where they come from!

[beddhead-red]

I saw someone saying that "with Funimation out of the game, Crunchyroll is that much closer to a monopoly [on anime streaming, presumably]", and I just want to set the record straight.

Let's not get it twisted here. Crunchyroll already is a monopoly. They were before any of this. No, they don't hold a monopoly on the idea of streaming. There are a hundred different streaming services out there. Crunchyroll isn't unique; streaming services are inherently monopolistic. That's how they work.

Crunchyroll (and Funimation (and by extension, virtually every other streaming service that exists or has existed) doesn't make their money because their particular streaming service is the best. You don't pay for Crunchyroll so you can get their primo quality video player. You pay for Crunchyroll so you can watch the particular shows they hold exclusive licensing for in your region.

That's it. That's the thing. Streaming services don't compete via their actual streaming service. To put it another way, streaming isn't their product. Their product is the shows they have exclusive license to. That's how every streaming service operates--if you want to watch this show legally, you have to pay for my streaming service. You can't get it anywhere else.

Copyright is a legal monopoly. That's how streaming services get their paydirt. That's why they're able to get away with bullshit like they're trying to push now--you have to go to them to watch these particular shows if you're operating legally. There is no meaningful competition in service or pricing. That's why streaming services suck. Funimation having their own streaming service didn't make that better; they weren't competing in a way beneficial to the consumer.

Never forget that. Do not give them money.

[forcedhesitation]

maaaaaaaaaaan. ridiculous to be calling DBD "pathetic" because it couldn't get licensing for various final girls. as if it hasn't always been because of some bullshit on the end of the copyright holders. fuck, we would have gotten more material from Hellraiser, had it not been for the copyright holders. we lost Stranger Things temporarily because of the copyright holders being out of touch with fans and greedy. Ghostface exists in the game because luckily, the character of Ghostface isn't actually owned by Big Bad Viacrap.

also like. DBD isn't Fork Knife. it's just not. and if I'm not mistaken-- it's not like Fork Knife has any horror character that DBD doesn't, apart from Eleven and Hopper. Eleven could never be in the game anyway, because any character added has to be over 18/a legal adult (for legal reasons). and we have Steve, Nancy, and Jonathan instead. It makes much more sense that they chose those characters for the game, as this followed S2, which made Steve one of the most popular characters from the show. so much so that he can even contend with Eleven in popularity.

and let's not downplay the fact that DBD does have other, very, very impressive licenses in it. such as Silent Hill. that was the first big thing Konami let happen with the ip in YEARS. Resident Evil was...HUGE. Wesker's chapter brought in an unprecedented number of players and anyone who played survivor at that time knows that for WEEKS, all you would get was Wesker after Wesker. We have Chucky and Tiffany, voiced by their original VAs. Sadako from the original Japanese Ringu, not the American version of the same concept! You can play as the Xenomorph, and the Xenomorph Queen! Vecna, from D&D is a killer, and he is voiced by Mr. Matt Mercer! We have Ash Williams, Alan Wake, Leon. S. Kennedy, Cheryl Mason, and very soon Lara Croft! and then After her-- we are getting Castlevania!! So there is no shortage of incredible of characters from horror that are in this game, and it's disrespectful to act like the people who work on this game don't care enough about it to try their fucking hardest to give fans the best possible licensed chapter dlcs they can. it's not their fault if the copyright holders want something different.

Besides, I think it's gross to suggest that DBD doesn't have a claim to the title of "Horror Hall of Fame" just because it doesn't have specific licensed characters in it. what about all the amazing original characters that the game has? do those suddenly not count, just because they do not include super well-known characters from popular old horror movies? A lot of these popular old horror movies don't include/don't give much of a spotlight to people of colour, so the original chapters often give the devs the room to add diversity to DBD's cast of characters, whereas a license might have otherwise not allowed it. and many of these original characters even have nods to existing horror media, like the End Transmission chapter drawing inspiration from both the horror-survival game SOMA, and the sci-fi horror movie/comic book Virus. Does the hard work that the many talented members of the DBD team put into making this original chapter, among many others, mean nothing, just because Sidney Prescott or Sally Hardesty aren't in the fucking game? I should hope the fuck not.

[dm-clockwork-dragon]

Another Unpopular Opinion

I was asked to delete my earlier reblog by the OP, so they didn’t get sucked into discourse, so I’m reposing this as it’s own thing Well, here I go publicly stating another opinion that will probably get me cancelled. To be entirely fair, I’m sort of beyond caring at this point?

I think people need to calm their fucking tits - homegrown, surgical, or happily removed - over not just this game, but about HP stuff in general.

I’m a recently hatched egg, but I’ve considered myself non-binary for almost 15 years, and been an ally for as long as I knew what an ally was. I also have no particular love for the franchise, despite enjoying it a lot when I was a kid. That’s not virtue signally, or an attempt to defend my position - just letting you all know a little context, and that I do actually have a horse in this race.

I get it, I really do. JK is a fucking terrible person, and should burn in a thousand multicolored hells for the bullshit she spews and the hate she engenders in others. On top of that, she’s a shitty writer, to the point where she accidentally created an entire wizarding world where the difference between the good guys and the bad guys is just what flavor of Nazi you want to choose. But there’s a couple reasons I think that people really need to try and separate her from the franchise that she started.

1. Death of the Author.

This is the one that everyone else gives. It’s possible to enjoy, appreciate, or interpret a creative work in absence of it’s author or their intent. We do it with music, we do it with painting. and Like OP here points out: if we were to burn every book written by a problematic author, we would leave glaring wholes not just in our understanding of our own history and society, but in our understanding of how to avoid the same injustices and suffering caused by those authors. Dead or alive, the author’s right and control over who others interpret their work the moment they share it with the outside world.

2. You guys don’t know how JK makes money, do you?

I see all kinds of arguments out there about how engaging with, or - dare I even mention - paying for HP content is somehow a crime against transfolk because it directly supports a raging TERF and her platform. It doesn’t. Aside from the argument that JK makes all her money through investments and stock market trades - just like any rich person - She also DOESN’T OWN THE FRANCHISE. She retains intellectual property rights: AKA, she can write new books or shit if she likes (we have seen how that goes for her), and she is still treated as the primary source, but the IP and all production rights are owned by Warner Bros. JK doesn’t make a dime off of game, movies, or anything else that WB license or produce based on THEIR franchise. She already made her money by selling the franchise to them years ago. Honestly, she probably got the raw end of the deal at this point. At most, she might get some meager royalties that are eaten up entirely by the cost of paying someone to process them. That’s how publishing contracts and movie deals work - they are a fucking racket.  3. HP isn’t just something some people can throw away.

Like I said above, I sorta grew out of my HP phase, long before any of the issue of JK being a TERF ever came up. And I know that a lot of people who considered themselves fans have also willingly distanced themselves from the franchise in light of her shitty views and actions. But not everyone has that ability. To give you a different example: I grew up reading the Dune books. I finished the core series for the first time when I was 8, and have re-read the entire extended series more than a dozen times since then. It’s more than just my favorite book series, it’s a formative part of who I am as a person. So much of my beliefs and identity as a person have been informed or inspired by those books that I would argue it is impossible to truly understand myself without them. Hell - I’d argue the entire reason I started explore my gender and sexuality in the first place is because of the emphasis those books placed on the “Quisach Haderach” as the perfect fusion of male and female. Even if I were to verbally disavow the series for some reason, those books still define who I am today, and It would be physically impossible for me to separate myself from them Harry Potter is the same way for a lot of people. I think some of us loose sight of just how meaningful those books are to a generation. Not all of us - even within that generation - had the same connection, but for a lot of people who grew up reading them from the time they could turn a page, those books are just as formative and intrinsic to who they are as Dune is to me. they couldn’t separate themselves, even if they wanted to. And pissing all over someone for something they can’t change about themselves is exactly the sort of thing we are supposed to be fighting against! Same can be said of the bible, the Torah, the Quran or any other work that was meaningful and formative to a persons cultural upbringing. Even within the trans community, there are countless Christians, Jews, and Islamic followers. They make the faith their own, because it is an intrinsic and immutable part of who they are. If you are going to condemn Trans or Allies who can’t separate themselves form HP, then you are also condemning any Ally or Transperson who still practices or believes in some form of the religion the grew up with.  4. If we can reclaim slurs, we can reclaim this! I see so many of the same people who rail against HP, also writing or relogging posts about how important it is to reclaim slurs and other labels that have been historically used against us, and I agree. But that shit goes a lot further than just the names we have been called. Reclaiming something from those who would hurt you with it is like picking up the rock that was thrown at you, and saying “neat, this is mine now, you cant have it back”, as opposed to just kicking it back to the abuser so they can hurl it at you again. JK is a terrible person. which is all the more reason that we have a responsibility to take this beloved franchise away from her. She doesn’t deserve it, and as long as it remains in her power, she can continue to use it as a platform to hurt people. And this isn’t without precedent: Look at Butch Hartman, or Joss Wheaton, or Notch, or Gary Gygax. We have a history and a present filled with examples of taking beloved content away from shitty people a deciding “this is ours now, you can’t have it back.” We take those things that were or are important to us, and reframe them, re-write them, or reimagine them into something positive and supportive.  As an author myself, I know quite well how painful it can be to see your work taken away from you, and transformed by people who don’t share your vision. So lets hurt JK where it counts! Not in the wallet, not by railing against her on social media, but by taking away the one meaningful thing she has ever created in her miserable life. Because she doesn’t fucking deserve it.

[chilidogloverr]

“I just came from r/196” ask game

Saw another post. I think I should invite y'all to one of our longstanding traditions. Answer the questions then tag 10 (or more) people. I'll go first.

Name? Jarrod

Pronouns and gender? they/he, guy???

Sexuality? Pansecual

Country? USA MERICA FUCK YEAH🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅

Top 5 fandoms? hazbin/helluva, fnaf, team four trees two, i forgor the rest

What is your Most forbidden snack? fabuloso also chapstick

Would you pet a bug? scared scared scared of bugs. dont like them. scary scary.

Share a weird fact/story about yourself with the class. i love fixing things, no matter what it is. my silly little brain just latches onto it like a puzzle, which it kinda is. i can already fix most electronic devices, or alteast know how to (FUCK apple and their stupid fucking anti repair policy. thats actual fucking bullshit. i dont want to have to pay for a 200 dollar course and license to fix your shitty god damn phones. mac books and ipads are aight. but FUCK apple as a company. all this does is protect their silly little fucking income from their stupid ass fucking phones breaking all the fucking time. all it does is make it so that people who do fix phones for a living fucking cant, and no devices to fix means no food on the fucking table for them or their families. they're toying with peoples livelihoods for a bit of fucking profit.) if i dont know how to fix it (cars, microwaves, tvs, literally anything that could break) i want to learn

What does the color blue taste like? mmm yumby

What is the most beautiful thing you've ever seen? the ocean. it goes on forever. it doesnt stop. i didnt realize that until i saw it in person. it stopped me dead in my tracks.

What is the stupidest thing you've ever done? ive got this protein bar. in 2020 (my second year of marching band, freshman year) i was eating a box of them on the way to marching band camp. i lost one. this was in july. i found it on the ground still sealed in january of the following year. i still have it. im going to eat it my senior year at the end of the year band dinner. i have not done it yet. im going into my senior year. im going to do it. it will kill me. i will not regret it.

Stupidest thing you've seen/heard someone else do/say? a pastor for a church i used to attend (unfortunately hes my uncle) blamed crime and evil on transgender people

Hyperfixation song? long list. Starman David Bowie, banana man tally hall, mr white keys cherry poppin daddies, play that funky music wild cherry, cant take my eyes off you frankie valli, sh-boom the ink spots, the devil went down to georgia the charlie daniels band

Is there any meaning behind your profile picture and/or username? I've been asked several times where "Chapstick Man!" comes from. It comes from TF2. I named a rocket launcher "chapstick gun" with the description "ngl chapstick taste kinda good" and then i thought the joke was funny and it stuck. my name is now Chapstick Man on like everything. i have not been sued yet. Im too cool to be sued.

Dream career as a child? also electronics repair technician (i am answering these out of order)

Dream career as an adult? still kinda a child ig. but i want to be an electronics repair technician, running my own little computer/electronics repair shop. i already know how to do it, i just need a building and to be 18 (i turn 18 in december) and people to come and give me their stuff to fix. i love fixing things.

Thoughts on cilantro? its aight ig

Have you ever been banned from a location and if so, why? I havent. but i plan to be. i am going to be silly and they cannot prevent it.

What is your cursed food combination? I did my burgers in ketchup if i want ketchup, i did my biscuits in gravy for biscuits and gravy

Trans rights? are epic!!!!!!

@everyone im lazy

[cinemageddonreviews]

Super Mario Bros Movie

So… the Super Mario Bros movie… let me first start by saying that no matter the outcome of this film, Illumination are one of the worst animation companies active today, due to their terrible animation practices and prioritizing of celebrities over voice actors.

I have no respect for them or what they do because of how intentionally cheap they make their movies along with having the most safe and marketable writing they can commission, all so they can make back their money with celebrities they put on the poster.

THAT HAVING BEEN SAID, I am happy to report that not only is the Super Mario Bros movie actually good, not only did it live up to the impossible expectations I set up for it given the company involved and the predictable cast of celebrities they put on their poster.

The scariest part about all of this, is that the movie succeeds in being a good adaptation of the Mario universe, and it also works as it’s own unique creation.

This movie lives and breathes Super Mario, right down to the music which JESUS MADRE deserves all the acclaim it’s gotten. I don’t think I’ve ever been brought to tears out of happiness watching a movie before except maybe when Your Name came out, but Bryan Tyler’s incredible score does 35 plus years of Super Mario’s legacy Justice. Storywise, the film can feel pretty paper-thin, especially given that it still manages some typical “believe in yourself” and “you’re not so small” type of inspirational jibber jabber. To be honest though, the story was honestly more moving than I expected and the fact that they gave Mario an internal obstacle to overcome gave this movie more nuance than anything Illumination has ever done.

Speaking of Mario himself, let’s talk about Chris Pratt… look, we all agree they should have used voice actors and not celebrities, especially not one who’s really only known for using his own voice; That being said… I think we all collectively owe Chris Pratt an apology, because his Mario wasn’t only well voiced, he added so much dimension to the character that not even the games were able to provide.

It doesn’t hurt that he and Charlie Day have great chemistry as brothers and play wonderfully off of one another. The same can be said about the voice acting overall. Both the celebrities they cast and the voice actors involved with the rest of the picture. Everyone’s voice fits perfectly, and no spoilers, but Charles Martinet isn’t wasted.

If there is one thing that took me out of the movie on occasion, it had to be the unnecessary use of licensed songs. And before u all come at me with the whole “The Super Mario Bros Super Show did it too”, I don’t care! It’s jarring watching Mario and Luigi on their way to work and suddenly “No Sleep Till Brooklyn” by The Beastie Boys starts playing. You get kinda used to it after a while, but this was completely unnecessary, no matter how good the songs actually are (I’m never one to say no to Thunderstruck by AC/DC no matter the context).

The Super Mario Bros Movie may not be perfect as a movie, but this is definitely a film that will satisfy everyone who doesn’t care too much about nitpicky bullshit enough to let it ruin their enjoyment of it. The fact that so many kids are gonna be introduced to Super Mario this way is honestly really incredible and I can’t describe the joy in their eyes seeing the movie yesterday in a packed theater with kids everywhere smiling and laughing. This movie is for them as much as it is for us. If it wasn’t obvious, I really enjoyed this movie and I encourage everyone to give it a watch, if nothing else because this movie actually does Justice to both the Super Mario Bros brand, but to Nintendo as well, even paying tribute to the late Saturo Iwata, which they didn’t have to, but I’m happy they did. ❤️

[pixelpoppers]

Minor design decisions and immersion in Star Trek: Resurgence

I finally played Star Trek: Resurgence, which I'd had my eye on for some time. It's an interesting game in its own right, but also significant as the first game from Dramatic Labs (a studio formed by Telltale Games veterans) and as part of a new wave of licensed Star Trek games during an exciting time for that franchise.

So naturally I'm here to ignore all of that and instead discuss a specific design decision that most people would probably ignore instead of fixating on. (What can I say? You come to my house, you get my bullshit.)

Okay, so. Resurgence is mostly a game about making choices. There are a few other flavors of gameplay including stealth/combat sequences, shuttlecraft piloting, walking around and investigating areas, a handful of minigames and QTEs, and so on. But the core is making dialog choices that have various effects on the characters and the relationships between them.

Correspondingly, those choices are the foundation of the game's achievements/trophies. There aren't any for, say, clearing a combat section without taking damage. None of them are skill-based (except inasmuch as you need to be able to complete all previous parts of the game to reach the particular decision the achievement is for) and I think that's absolutely the right call. Those more-active parts of the game are for pacing and immersion; it'd be weird to turn them into things the player has to master for full completion.

What seems like a less-right call to me is that the achievements aren't for passing decision points, but for making specific choices. Like at one point there's a crisis, both your science officer and security officer have recommendations for getting through it, and you have to decide which one to follow. There isn't a trophy for getting through the crisis: there's one for following the science officer's recommendation and one for following the security officer's. Almost all the achievements are like that. (On PlayStation, there is additionally the Platinum trophy for getting all other trophies; on Xbox, there are additionally three progress trophies for getting through the three "acts" of the game.)

Now, that does mean that a player's achievement list for the game becomes a reference for the choices they made, which is kind of a cool thing to have and to be able to share with other players (though the achievements have pretty explicit descriptions so the list is full of GIANT SPOILERS until you finish a playthrough). But the game's website already provides a mechanism for this, and achievements are particularly poorly-suited to this goal.

By positioning all the alternative choices as items in a completion checklist, the game signals that you should see them all before you can consider yourself truly done. This isn't as obnoxious as it was in Q.U.B.E. 2, because the game is at least about the choices and there is new stuff to see on a replay, though I still think it smacks of insecure design. But it does mean that anyone who replays the game to make other choices and get all the achievements renders their list useless as a reference for their "actual" choices--and it turns those choices from ones that allow the player to express something about their values to obligatory ones that are just checked off a list with no personal meaning. And the more effective the game has been at creating a real-feeling world and characters, the less interested I am in doing that.

(It's the same reason I was so relieved to see that Resurgence didn't have secrets or collectibles. Hunting through all corners of the map to find golden ships or research data would destroy immersion instantly; I was really happy I could just go where my character would go and not worry that I would be mechanically punished for it.)

Resurgence wasn't a perfect game, but it did a better job than anything else ever has at making me feel like a Starfleet officer. I loved the scenarios it put me in and the opportunity to make decisions that best reflected Federation values and balanced protecting my crew with advancing our mission. I recognize that I'm more sensitive to this than others, but I resent feeling nudged to go back and make different decisions that will turn Resurgence from a world populated with people to a series of arbitrary levers to pull.

[gemsofthegalaxy]

I really really hate that WOTC are *still* trying to deauthorize the OGL1.Oa (still remains to be seen if they legally can but they are going to try and it will be an expensive legal battle to determine the answer)

And I do not trust their "no harmful content" clause for one second. Thankfully, a lot of community members seem to still be talking about the issues with it and not automatically falling for this garbage.

However, I could understand why it sounds okay-ish on paper for WOTC to be allowed to force the removal of 3rd party material over it being "harmful, discriminatory, obscene, or illegal."

But they also get to decide, at their sole discretion, what constitutes "harmful, discriminatory, or obscene", and by publishing under this license, you would be agreeing that you CANNOT challenge their decision.

As a queer person, I am extremely wary of a company in the United States getting to define what "obscene" means to them. Sex-related things are often considered obscene, and "gay and trans people" are often treated as inherently related to sex, which is used as an argument for discriminating and stigmatizing queer communities. Sex itself is often considered bad and inappropriate by many people, even in 2023. Does that mean if I, say, publish a dnd 5e expansion that has "sex worker" as a background, I am violating this rule, despite the fact that sex workers, yknow, exist, and it's not at all unreasonable for adults to want to tell stories and include them in our game concepts?

I really don't trust it. Many things that range from unpleasant to genuinely horrible in real life might fall under "harmful" or "obscene", but might still be fun to play out when you are literally giving the Players and their characters agency over them. Another example, an adventure where a group of fantasy-marginalized characters run a game where they overthrow discriminatory systems (I plucked this one from Roll of Law on youtube).

I fully understand why WOTC themselves, a giant company that is owned by a very family-friendly, whitebread brand, would attempt to put out fairly general, open and non-riqsue content (despite the fact they continuously come under fire for having implicit discrimination in their books and very bad implications with some of their set ups, especially when it comes to character races...) but I do not think 3rd parties should be as restricted and I do not see it as WOTC's responsibility to take those things down, not least because other parts of the agreement state that WOTC does not endorse 3rd party content. Especially not when WOTC get to decide what "harmful" means and there is NO recourse for challenging it or for actually hearing the definition, and no way to know that if you revise the book you could possibly remove the "problematic" elements because they will not tell you what they are.

So. Please don't believe their bullshit. They are using diverse communities as a shield for their overreaching and easily-abused licensing agreement. I do not think you should trust them to use this agreement to try to keep us "safe".

[maddiem4]

As someone versed a bit in video game development, I actually can't think of an example of video game AI behavior that would even count as machine learning.

For many years the state of the art has been the Goal Oriented Action Planning of F.E.A.R. which is well documented at this point in how it works, but ultimately boils down to the same thing as most game AI must be - a manually defined algorithm for choosing what to do, and manually written code for how to do each action. Artificial player behavior that rises above this "prioritize and perform" dynamic is rare (if anything, it's usually simpler/dumber, just a basic flowchart). Most advances in game AI are making the prioritization part more subtle and clever, though I can't stress enough how often this is just "decades old algorithm gets particular care in how it's configured" - something that is, essentially, handcrafted content. The Sims is in this category (with its own algorithm), and the cleverness of its algorithm is mainly that it's very flexible at incorporating a lot of rule content from many sources, which is why they're able to ship so many DLCs that can coexist with each other.

If the enemy starts changing strategy to counter patterns of player behavior, congratulations, you're looking at what amounts to Furby level "learning" - that there is a predefined list of "detect this pattern? deploy this countermeasure" responses compiled into the game. If you do manage to come up with a behavior the developers didn't anticipate, you won't see the AI respond to it, or you'll see the AI respond to a different trigger you happen to be setting off. The machine isn't really learning, it's just an invisible progression system.

Underneath it, you could probably call pathfinding algorithms - which are usually not just set in stone, but much older than the average person reading this - AI. In fact, A* is still an industry standard even though many higher performance alternatives exist (I'm counting jump point search here, even though it's an optimization of A*, because the version of A* so many games use is Original Flavor). Why? Because the old shit is well understood, proven reliable, and won't do hard to predict bullshit in a shipped game.

This gets at a larger point. Even in a modern era of endless patches in production, AI in video games are usually chosen on a very risk-averse set of standards, because games are complex and nobody wants to debug a black box, especially not during pre-release crunch with a deadline at stake. The presence of machine learning in game development is, at most, baked assets that can't learn at runtime, like denoising algorithms for raytraced rendering. Usually something even less impressive like "one of the textures is a Photoshop-polished image originally produced by Dall-E 2." For that matter, machine learning has such high requirements for training data volume that, for an individual install of a game, there's essentially nothing worth learning (and a risk of visibly stupid overfitting if you try to force it).

The game development industry has so many ethical problems, but no machine in your video games is learning jack shit. At most, some assets were licensed from content theives, which isn't great, but small potatoes compared to the low grim standards of game industry crunch or abusive monetization.

tldr: game AI is not some OpenAI kinda bullshit. Very different categories of thing.

Some of y'all will see the word "AI" and freak out without actually processing anything that's being said like a conservative reading the word "pronouns"

[iridescentshifting]

merry shiftmas! 🌟

⌗ 𝟏𝟎. icicles ; What is your occupation in your dr? Your coworkers? (Or if student, your classmates?) What is your favorite and least favorite aspect of your occupation?

in twisted wonderland, i am a member of staff, but only on a technicality. i’m actually a “special student” that’s trying to get their layman’s license, but in between the two or three classes i take i help crowley with all of his bullshit tasks paperwork!

my favorite class to listen in on is advanced alchemy. vil and azul are the best at potions and watching them work is incredible

my least favorite class to listen in on is enigmics. it’s mostly math and puzzles, but not being able to do it is boring :(

my favorite part of my job is student interaction! i manage the basketball and magift teams, so i travel for games, plus helping out as a TA in the classes i sit in on!

my least favorite part of my job is meetings with crowley. you don’t need to explain that we can’t siphon an allowance to my dorm for the fourth week in a row. I KNOW. I MAKE MY OWN MONEY. I PAY FOR EVERYTHING THERE

i love most of my coworkers, living and dead. i can’t say that i really don’t get along with any of them

i don’t get along with epel though, at least for a good long while :/

[violetsystems]

#personal

I've been trying to not think or write about work. Ironically it has had me working on my day off no sooner than yesterday. I've been confronting that directly in a guarded way. Part of that is probably playing more games lately than anything. I've set my studio up in my office again and done my half hour hawkwind jams on a synth pad. Haven't felt much more inspired than that. If there's anything I'm more nostalgic about it is playing diablo ii on a wall street power book in the back of a car somewhere between Germany, Luxembourg and France. And that is a real fucking story. Look out the window and see a license plate tailing us clearly labeled "jihad." This was my first musical tour in the Netherlands before the Euro even had its day. And that probably dates me more than how many video games I've played. Which are many uncompleted trials still left on a bookshelf from playstation 3 and beyond. I had a dreamcast and a ps2 in my old office. Both were thrown away with my Korean edition of Neuromancer. I know what you are thinking? This guy I've been following for ten years is absolute bullshit. So is torment two in Diablo IV. There's four levels of torment. Elden Ring was definitely hard to a point up to the grind to level three hundred on first play through. I still haven't beaten the DLC. I beat the main game a year later with the Ranni ending and feel very accomplished because of it. But in the line of unfinished shit, from software titles are first in line. Bloodborne has had a few pushes and pulls over the years. Father Gascoigne is a significant drop off point for me. I played past it but it took me forever to understand the twitch mechanics with the trick gun.

When I came back to it after playing Elden Ring, I made it to the blood starved beast and scratched my head. And was too much in a depressed state to continue to be harsher by my misunderstanding of the mechanics. My boss at my old job has famously platinumed every from software game from demon's souls on. I remember them just not showing up to work and expecting us to manage to do it. Nowadays it's just some dude recording his Fleetwood Mac cover band on work time. But as far as someone who has played both his fair share of western and asian rpgs, diablo iv was what took me away from the relentless grind of Elden Ring. Partially because it is buggy as fuck in a mathematical way. Drawn in by some perverse micromanagement of statistics. I was actually a computational statistics major at one point after English. My area of expertise was psychology and data science. I think this is what holds people back from playing Elden Ring as a JPRG. Morrowind and company from Daggerfall on had that kind of sadism. It also let you play the game wrong and rewarded you for it situationally. I hacked Morrowind on my first xbox. I did the same as a kid to the original bard's tale series. In that I edited the hex values on the disk to create glitched characters with ridiculous stats to power level my party. And that was my first lesson in American time management. I had a lot of time on my hands when I completed Elden Ring. Now in commute mode, the only time I seem to have is staring out the window of a train. I have busted out the ds fat for a few rounds of Culdcept. And I play that with intention when I do.

I liked Bloodstained so much when I had playstation plus that I bought it for pc. And it does just kind of sit there until I'm in the mood and is rewarding like tea with a good friend. And I own Nier Automata after years of people raving about it. And it's the kind of game over when it ends that leaves you feeling frustrated. Armored Core 6 was kind of the same way except for the fact that it looks amazing on the tv. Which is something at native 4k and sixty frames per second let alone 120. I still have a copy of breath of the wild sitting barely played next to my Wii U. I used to have a Wii but my neighbor borrowed it and never gave it back. I've thought about buying more games on sale because of Black Friday. Sekiro is tempting. But may as well be another game sitting on the shelf with my money attached to it. Along with probably ten thousand magic cards sitting in storage or arranged in decks to be played Balatro style at the kitchen table by myself. I keep myself busy when people aren't around. Which is often aside from my dash and the mail. And work. Which can be a grind in and of itself but makes it easier to enjoy when I choose games over bullshit. I still collect and listen to music to. Read when I'm inspired too. Watch shitty movies because they are more authentic than real life. And often think about playing games with other people. I bought a copy of soul calibur on the ps3 for a date once. It could be a major red flag if the other person picks Voldo. I own it on pc for nostalgia's sake. But that doesn't really have my attention or focus. Favorite JRPG that I've actually played. I liked Final Fantasy XII a lot. But it would probably be Shin Megami Tensei Digital Devil Saga. Queue the "this is why you don't have friends" focus group. <3 Tim

[redphienix]

I think the tipping point that finally convinced me to stop supporting consoles was the mid last gen "improved" versions of the xbox and ps4.

Was that some majorly huge damning statement for consoles or something? No. Not even close.

But it was the tiny nudge of awareness to how consoles have lost purpose "To Me" that added to all the other tiny nudges and made me go "Actually. Fuck this." and promise myself I wouldn't get the current gen consoles and that I'd be salty towards what consoles are now-a-days even if altogether- they're "fine". Not Great. But "fine" so long as you're not fueled by salt and vinegar like I am.

But consoles, for all of time, have maintained purpose in comparison to PC gaming because they are accessible as hell, and For The Most Part that stays Partially Enough To Be Considered True.

It's still easier to buy an xbox game or a nintendo game and have it work on your xbox or switch than it is to learn how to check pc specs- that is one among a million "little barriers" that console allows players to circumvent.

But man have they lost purpose to me, and not just because I have overcome those PC barriers myself.

Watching consoles progressively nickle and dime more and more and more and more over the years has been a very irritating itch on the subject.

Watching them all adopt Xbox's bullshit "pay to use your own internet" fee was damning. Full stop.

Watching them all create tiers of subscriptions was ultra damning. It was Mixed! But damning- because I watched as they all tried to add "value" to their fees. Game pass has games! Plus gives freebies! Switch has retro titles!

But to me each step towards adding value made it more and more evident that modern consoles aren't about just providing an accessible platform to own and play games on, it's about Subscription Fees. It's about Temporary Access. It's Renting But We Hope You Pay Forever And Ever And Ever To Keep Renting.

It gave me a bad taste in my mouth. I see them add "value" and all I feel is sick to my gut watching rich mega corps slithering their way into another meaningless extra subscription fee to fatten their wallets.

All this while pushing further and further away from physical products- a convenient way to lower their overhead while increasing profits! (And to not let you actually own the thing you think you own, something that used to be a much bigger thing for console vs pc!)

It also stung to see consoles always lagging behind against PC's potential in many ways- PC has a bigger library- PC has modding- PC doesn't charge to use your own internet- PC has old and new- Console ignored these weaknesses, or rather refused to meaningfully interact with them- and I'm not PISSED about all of them because I GET IT. Modding, for example, would risk their security. A mostly excusable thing to ignore in the face of being so accessible in comparison (ignore that the move towards multiple sub fees and digital /preferred/ is slowly leaking away that benefit and is instead turning it into a death sentence to manipulate cash but k)

Anyways I'm rambling at 3am.

The weaknesses of console made sense to me for decades because consoles offered something worthwhile AND were simpler. Now the simplicity is turning to manipulative prices, the games cost more, the old trappings (paid internet) still hang on, and they don't meaningfully compete- instead offering MORE subscriptions and claiming that's competing when a lifetime rental is not the same as being able to mod my game for forever content.

Hell, they even fuck up the digital shit. You can buy mario for the 16th time on the switch 2 if you want because nintendo refuses to recognize previous purchases as any form of personal license of ownership or whatever. You can own digital games on your PS3 that haven't ever been brought forward. There are PS4 games that aren't compatible with PS5. Compatibility and a recognition of previous purchases is a null concept in consoles.

But to circle back. All of this was irritating, but I kept with it, but then in the middle of last gen they spat in my eye and I went "You know what? fuck this."

Because the generation BEFORE last also had mid-gen-console iterations. These were made both to improve on design failures that often bricked prior console versions and to offer an often times cheaper version of the same console with the same capabilities for late adopters. Xbox basically released a 360 that had over double the capacity for the same price as what the original released at, things like that.

But last gen? The PS4 and Xbox one? They released upgraded consoles.

Meaning these weren't for late adopters. These were greedy shitheads double dipping into the same pool for money. These were meant for everyone, or, IDK, you could stick with the old stinky version and get worse frame rates on all the new games, up to you!

I saw that greed and went "Really? Fuck you." and all the other things fell on top of each other and made me REALLLLLLY spiteful.

Because now I look at the big 3 and think "Oh great. 15 subscription fees, less modifiable gameplay experiences (INCLUDING JUST SETTINGS, NOT MODS, YOU CAN DO LESS IN THESE FUCKING GAMES BECAUSE THEY DON'T TRUST YOU IN THE NAME OF ACCESSIBILITY- SOMETHING THE SUB FEES DAMN AS I MENTIONED BEFORE [Accessibility at a COST and limitations in the name of Accessibility]), and in a couple years they'll release a "better" one to "entice" more money out of me. I'm done being a victim to these blood suckers I think."

I wish I better quantified all my reasons but everything really did just fall into place when I saw the upgraded consoles and the blatant greed being placed on display instead of further improving the entire purpose of consoles vs pc stuff.

PC is still a struggle for plenty of reasons, I just wish consoles were better than they are. They were! And they still have plenty of purpose but fucking christ everyone deserves so much better than what they are getting. and I hate it.

This isn't a "PC IS THE BEST HA!" post because dude, I basically own nothing on PC! I use STEAM! It's the same digital nonsense I said before! I own the idea of owning the thing- steam IS pretty good about it- but I STILL DON'T HAVE THE FUCKING THING ON A DISC IN MY ROOM WITH A PROMISE OF ACCESS FOREVER NOW DO I?

PC is good for what it is. I just feel like Console was also good for what it was- and now it's "Good"* for what it is

*= please pay 6 more subscription fees to continue having access to your Good (note, Good is being removed from your pass subscription in 2 months, but you don't own it anyway so who cares)