#now... just need her to not do this then have streaks of super being spotty and quiet. please. I'm begging.

[breannastewart]

STEWIE ON THE DAY: 33 points, 7 assists, 3 steals, 6 blocks

Became the first player in WNBA history to have a single half of 20+ points/5 assists/5 blocks. Only the second game in league history where a player had 20+pts/5+asts/3+stls/5+blks. Breanna Stewart has that other game (in 2017), she got the second in just one half. Her third 30 point game this season, and became just the fourth player in league history to finish with 30+/5+asts/5+blks 🔥

[aknosde]

I have a lot of thoughts about Percy’s junior year because Rick is stupid and literally forgot about an entire year of Percy’s life. I also made the executive decision that this is the year Percy backslides (but can you really call it backsliding if he never worked through the trauma?) Without further ado

with a little mist they patch up Percy’s extended absence but decide it’s better if he doesn’t go back to Goode. He doesn’t really care because he didn’t have any friends there besides Rachel, this is where he goes to AHS (literally the only thing I know about TOA, and the rest of it will be ignored)

He’s not going to school with Annabeth because she said senior year together, so she’s still in California, which he’s thankful for so he doesn’t have to feel like he’s disappointing her

Originally he had been reported as missing, but now that he’s back it raises too many questions (this is where they use the mist) so it’s resulted in a really weird transcript that makes it very unclear if he actually finished his sophomore year (he did it online over the summer, and he did pretty well too)

As always he is singled out as ‘the weird kid’. This is because he only wears the longer versions of the uniform (even when it’s really hot out), has a problem with staring, and the grey streak in his hair (ignoring cannon for this one)

He makes approximately two friends (kinda?) and all of the popular kids hate him

There’s this ‘professional administrative counselor and student consultant’ who isn’t an actual counselor and thinks Percy is hella sus. A lot of its because Percy’s transcript and record, but basically he tries to not let ‘bad kids’ into AHS and he wants Percy to leave so the school’s reputation doesn’t get tarnished

Some of the teachers are nice but a lot of them are ableist

Due to that and Percy’s severely under diagnosed PTSD, anxiety, and depression, his grades really fall, but he doesn’t tell anyone

Chemistry is his favorite class and chemistry and history are the only classes he does well in.

This one popular kid who is on the football team or something really likes to physically bully people and in Percy’s attempt not to reveal how strong he is he just subs in for the kids who used to receive a regular beating instead of fighting back

At one point he accidentally catches a punch on reflex (while tons of people are watching, mind you) and freaks out, blah blah blah, that fight ends up with his hand severely broken in multiple locations

BUT he doesn’t like going to the hospital/doctor’s/nurse’s because those are the people who ask a lot of questions about his scars and old injuries and such, so he just walks around for like four hours with a broken hand

(insert my Percy is ambidextrous head cannon here, which comes into play)

eventually his (kinda)friends make him go to the nurse and it’s just straight up not a good time for anyone. Paul has to pick him up. He has to go to the ER. This is when he really starts lying to his parents because he doesn’t want them to know about the fights

He’s kinda all over the place on who he’s talking to, which he feels guilty about, but he just doesn’t have the energy to talk to people who knew him before all this because it’s harder to fake being that happy again (even though he wasn’t that happy even then)

Which brings me to something a bit happier, every Friday he visits Camp Jupiter. No matter what. He started it about a month after the war, it keeps him connected with Hazel and Frank and some other people he was friendly with, but the new thing is Reyna

It takes a bit to get through all of the stuff between them, but they end up becoming really good friends, to the extent that she, Hazel, and Frank become the sole people that he confides in. (Reyna knows that they’re special, but the other two don’t)

There is definitely a big fight he has with Sally in his second semester, and he shows up at Reyna’s quarters, it’s 11 pm, she opens the door wordlessly and he spends the weekend at CJ.

Reyna’s also the person he talks to most about Gabe. He has a lot of built up stuff there and she works through some residual feelings towards her dad too.

He and Nico are in a lot of contact during this year, with varying degrees of tension. They start off really well, but as Percy falls further back it gets a really weird vibe because he still has a whole thing about protecting Nico. Basically Percy’s not good at being vulnerable right now. But they do get better and eventually develop a sibling like relationship.

Talking about sibling like relationships: Hazel! She’s amazing. Due to the Friday visits and her and Percy already being super close she starts calling him her brother really quickly and he picks up on it immediately. She’s probably the person he’s most honest too, and they spar a lot.

His and Annabeth’s relationship is kinda weird too. They both still really love each other, and they talk a lot, she starts working through some of her issues and he’s really good about being there and helping her, but he’s also really good at hiding his own problems around her. (This is a new development, she could read him until he went missing or Tartarus, I haven’t decided) 

He becomes really spotty at communication. Sometimes he won’t text back for a week, and he used to be really good at getting back to people. This is the only thing Annabeth has evidence of. The rest is just a feeling of off-ness so she can’t really see that something’s wrong with him.

Panic attacks and breakdowns become supper common for him. Usually at least one a day, but he’s good about hiding it. However his powers, tied to his emotions, start going haywire and that’s really difficult to hide, especially at school.

He has a really bad panic attack during chemistry one day and his friends find him in the bathroom and try to get the nurse and get him to go home. It wasn't very pretty. 

He looses so much sleep that it rivals Annabeth ‘I stay up ‘till 3 for fun’ Chase

Also becomes a low-key vigilante? Not really, but he does stop several robberies and muggings and its just the right number to look a little suspicious but also not. 

during this whole ordeal he’s spending a lot of time at the school’s pool. At first there isn’t much swimming because he’s still afraid of drowning/suffocation, but Reyna’s just like “Well if you became a better swimmer that wouldn’t be as big of a problem” and he rolls with it. 

Part of his whole healing thing is learning more about competitive swimming and talking with the swim coach. And of course he gets really good at it. Sometime during his second semester he does end up joining the team.

It’s past competition season but the coach thinks he needs it so he just,,, joins

He actually gets along with most of the team REALLY well, and around this time he works on strengthening his relationship with his (kinda)friends, not his actual friends.

Honestly I’ve been considering turning these into a fic, so maybe when I finish Peanut m&m’s there will be another multi chapter in my future.

[crystalized-dreams]

Will you ever upload more abyssrium or word villas or some other mobile games?

In general, mobile games are really tricky to record. I used to have a fairly decent program I used-- Side Sync, but it’s been discontinued and is now broken. I can still kind of use it (as I did with my recent Pocket Camp video and the STYLIT video), but it’s a huge pain and skews the video entirely as essentially the vertical game is being shown squished into a horizontal perspective. There is no fix. 

I haven’t found a program that works for my needs. The closest I can find either have a monthly fee (I don’t mind buying something once, but I don’t use things enough to justify a monthly fee), some kind of recording mark over the video and/or will record sound through the microphone. I actually generally play mobile games muted and live in a very loud house so that helps no one. Or they aren’t for screen sharing at all and are really just to get your emails/alerts which I don’t need.

And Samsung Flow, Side Sync’s replacement, is honestly terrible. I can’t get it to work. 

While I could consider an emulator, the issue there is not all games properly carry over progress and my computer is slowly having more issues and just can’t always run them. I do try to use an Emulator for games where I know I will play for a long time, but it can be pretty glitchy (Using Choices and Hogwarts Mystery as examples, my progress isn’t always properly saved and sometimes I have to redo things on my phone after). 

As for the games you specifically asked about, being completely honest, I don’t think I’d be uploading more of Abyssrium or Word Villas regardless as, to put it nicely, both have became a bit too greedy for me. 

Before I go into it, I want to say I never have an issue with putting money into a game I enjoy. I’ve spent a lot on Abyssrium and a fair amount on Word Villas. But I have very little patience with subscriptions for one and I just... haven’t enjoyed a lot of choices either game has made recently (of the two, despite playing Abyssrium longer, I think Word Villas has made me more upset about the direction they’ve gone). 

This will also get quite long, so....

My first worry with Abyssrium came with the pearls. I dislike second currencies and we already had some expensive things (they had a Mermaid for $100 for crying out loud, but they at least seemed to be slowing down with that). Next were some of the event features... like the 150 gift boxes for an event fish. That is A LOT of constantly logging in and I am very much a “let be just be done ASAP and be good” person (I’ll be talking about this more in an upcoming entry) so the added walls were another thing really making me kind of anxious about Abyssrium.

Then they added subscriptions. No ads (which with the amount of their stupid events that required you to watch ads now was HUGE to save time) and the adorable Puffin taunted me, as I had every other fish up to this point. I couldn’t justify $7 a week for that though so I only ever temporarily did the subscription whenever an event happened.

And thus our problem-- we started getting monthly events. Which included a $10-$20 exclusive new species (and sometimes even a second one for you to spend even more money on). And also new dailies which removed more accessible pearl getting, but also were another layer to these events as every single one would have a whole second set of objectives with one that required you to complete 3 Dailies in a row. 

I rarely did the dailies, partially due to my burnt out issues when it comes to monotonous tasks, but also because I find tapping incredibly painful. So I was killing my wrist every single event. And that adds up fast.

It was just too much to keep track of. And then they added in a gacha system too that cost event currency or materials and it just... it was too much. This was too much every month and like why I dropped Pocket Camp (and now only really check in for the special gifts), I just couldn’t take a chance to breathe. 

Adding in Abyssrium Pole just made it worse which continued some of the worst parts of the original while also making things even slower at times and it’s a shame as there’s some really neat things they did with it, but it was just annoying. 

This doesn’t even go into all the other little intricacies I had with some events (Like having to create more than one of each or remake ones I already had because of some objective), but it was just exhausting. 

----

As for Word Villas... Just... ugh, I think what really breaks my heart with this is I LOVE decorating games, but I HATE Match Three′s with a passion so this was so much more my speed and they just had to ruin it. I don’t know if I’ll ever find a replacement either because for some reason every single time someone makes a decoration-based game, they have Match Three firmly printed on their forehead. 

I’m going to bullet-print this one because none of it really requires the long description as Abyssrium did for the most part, but it’s just a lot of frustrations and the fact that they just didn’t seem to care about their fans up to this point.

Constant events. Some people hated these events as they just wanted more rooms, but I actually really enjoyed them! The issue mainly came as they were just, like Abyssrium’s issue, happening constantly. I would’ve been fine with a break of no updates, but it was getting a bit exhausting to constantly be doing event stuff... Especially as the events generally required 60 levels minimum to get everything (Some only required 40 but it was still a lot) and it was just tiring to power through so many due to the limited time.

Similarly, there was a glitch with the Chinese New Year/Lunar New Year event and not everyone even got the photo, yet they were never able to fix this. 

We also started getting Competitive Events which nobody really seemed to want? Myself included. The game was a solo game. This was entirely pointless and making some items only available to the person in first was super scummy, especially when some people were already out of levels and thus, couldn’t keep going for that #1 spot in the first place. 

The Blossom Problem - Blossoms are no longer even in the game, having been replaced by Blue tickets which you can only get randomly through certain things ooor by buying them with a premium currency that you can only get with real money... yet these are now used to get things the blossoms were-- Collectibles that can be used as decorations in various house areas. Some people had over 50,000 blossoms built up only for them to be dumped. They kept asking for more things to be used on. Blossoms were only gotten for hitting certain combo streaks and while not having the combo streak pressure is nice, it’s still a huge slap in the face to long-term players who saved up. 

The writing is kind of spotty. In all honesty, I glance over this a lot as I like the characters quite a bit, but anytime the main character talks with her best friend about dieting and not wanting to get fat when they’re super thin, I just cringe. The dialogue is unneeded. It’s a game for crying out loud. And honestly, proof reading is needed. 

They did recently let use customize the MC’s appearance to an extent, but we still can’t change her eye color or skin color and hairstyles are set to whatever color they are. But we can’t adjust her sleepwear appearance... 

The Premium Currency - There’s just... no ways to get this in-game (or if there are, I have not found them and it’s definitely not much) and yet they keep adding more things that require them. 

New Visual Novel feature? Every choice that is somewhat romantic or just not being awful requires it. And this is a shame as I’d genuinely love to read some. 

Furniture options you like? Might require it. (Heck, the only other option in the current “limited” boardwalk decorating does each time). 

Certain customization options? Require it. 

As a note, I’m not even necessarily against premium currencies as long as the prices are fair and it’s possible to earn in-game too, but otherwise when your game has a huge focus on customization and/or collecting, it’s essentially pay to win and that’s a problem. 

My biggest issue as we get more and more currencies though is the main one often ends up taking a backseat because of it. 

As I mentioned above with Abyssrium, I have no issue purchasing games, but I think having to repeatedly pay to remove ads is super dumb and getting ads between rounds is so annoying, but I don’t always play enough to justify paying every month to remove ads. I also just find it kind of distasteful. 

The upped star costs. I get that I’m pretty far in, but needing 3 minimum to 4 or 5 Stars at a time now to do things is honestly just kind of boring. I liked to do bursts of levels than story, but now I just have to do too many levels to do that and I can’t switch off enough to keep myself from getting burnt out. 

The stupid mission pass thing. Let. People. Play. At. Their. Own. Pace. And don’t prevent rewards just because people won’t pay for the premium version... there shouldn’t even be two versions. 

Too grindy. Too many levels needed for so many things (events, the stupid competitive stuff, etc.) and it’s just exhausting. 

The constant events also really did just end up burning me out in and off itself and then running out of my “no ads” time period due to how little I’m playing just gets me more discouraged. I used to be up to date, but I’ve been behind due to the larger costs and lack of time (and then the ad issue and ugh). I can’t even bother with most of their events lately as it just isn’t fun.