#removed from later pods to save space for more important data

[arolesbianism]

Vibrates. Normal. I'm normal. I'm so normal.

[borntobelime]

Shidge Galra/Altean AU

This is another AU I talked with @nicht-vobla but honestly i have something else also in mind to give her as a tribute from our chats .... This one is for  @besh-drawing-stuff  HAPPY BIRTHDAY (so its kinda like a late birthday gift ) (because the idea i had kinda reminded me of your rose Goddess Au (you’ll see why )  I Call It  : Warrior’s Lullaby 

During the destruction of Altea a couple of Altean Alchemists launch a Cryopod into space inside the Cryopod is there baby girl Katie for many many years the pod traveled through the universe until it entered the atmosphere of planet Olkarion the pod crushed into the forest close to the great tree the olkari found the pod and soon discovered what was inside the olkari named Reiner took in the baby under her care and raised her as her own.

Inside the pod she found information that confirmed that the baby was an altean  there was a small video projector on a recorded message  it was too damaged to project the images and the full video  but some of the audio  was not as damaged she made out the important parts of it ….My name is Samuel  my wife Coleen…and……...……………. whoever finds this pod please look after our child Katelyn protect her from what we can not…………….. the galra are taking over we don’t have much time  ………..  .she could only make out those parts she knew very well from history of the destruction of Altea and the race itself fearing for the child’s and her planets safety she gave her a new name …..Your name is Katelyn this your Altean name  it will only be known between us  (reiner would never have kept her in the dark) ….from now on you are one of us dear on  i will give you a second name an olkari name …. Pidge …..Pidge grew up with the Olkari even though she knew only knew very few about where she came from her only clues was her old name stories about a planet  she never seen she wasn’t always feeling alone her powers grew stronger as she grew older been an Altean growing up in the forest her magic adapted differently not only she learned the Olkari  magic  her connection in nature grew so it was able to use nature magic she could make plants grow and move and heal Reiner was very proud of her daughter’s gifts she always tried to find anything she could based on altean alchemy to help her in to learning but  unfortunately there resources were very low to all this lost knowledge , Pidge didn’t had any trouble fitting in but always been aware of she is not olkari   she would use he chameleon like abilities to try and fit in even wear her hood  as to also wear her at first with other kids  but Reiner told her to be herself but if she felt more secure that way she will not stop her from doing so and so she was her passion in tech and knowledge her love for nature 

Commander Takashi Shirogane also known as Commander Shiro or Champion  from the Galra Empire proud of his race he was born raised in in a environment of constant violence

conquered planets in the name of the emperor Zarkon defeated all his enemies or more like executing them wherever in the arena or on a war  learned to live with the words Victory or Death a true Galran warrior

He was sent off on a scout mission quite a boring one for his taste  to planet Olkarion to gather data on the quintencesse there the quintencensse signals were indeed very unique so he hopes he gets the opportunity to invade the planet when he returns with good resorts  but  there was a glitch on the system of his ship and he lost control of it and crushed on olkarion during the night …the crush was hard his wounds were too deep  he was  impaled by parts of  the ship .the last thing he remembers is a figure tearing a hole on his ship’s  ceiling from the outside ……….

He wakes up in a small room his vision a bit blurry and he hurts everywhere and he feels like his is burning with fever the only thing he can tell is  the  figure is trying to treat hi  …and a warm light over his injuries …...a few days he is recovered enough not to sleep out of consciousness and then he meets her or more like grabs her shawl and removes it revealing a beautiful creature …and the last thing he sees is a vine grabbing him and hitting him hard against the wall . Later waking up tied up on a bed and the woman’s glowing  hand on his head after a lot of negotiations of he will not try anything funny she untied him and as his recovery progresses enough for him to stand he gets to know his savior  ..Pidge offers him to show him around the forest …..she understands what his motives are knowing been a galra and what he wants from her planet so she tries to show him the importance of every existence (yes think of it like the avatar(2009 film)  or pocahontas )  …… she gets him a cloak  so he can stay low and for the next days  she shows him around the city how a civilization can grow without wars she shows him the forest and even go on a boat ride and last but not least the great tree (that is a weeping willow like  ) that glows in the night ………..they look at the night sky for once shiro feels something he never felt or knew if he could feel …..Peace is that what it is ?………... she is like i wish i could go around the universe and travel on different places…...for one moment he thinks maybe he could  do that show her the universe but no he is still  royal to the empire and yet why does he feel so confused about it …and so he asks her why you are not an olkari so why do you love this place ….its my home , just because i am not a olkari doesn’t mean this is not my home ...home can be anywhere you want to ..they stay here in silent …they fall asleep under the stars …shiro wakes up finding pidge a few feet away seeing listening to a small audio the recorded message from her lost family she says i know they are not here anymore i never met the never seen them   but what  i know is  they really cared about me and that is all that matters Mama told me this tree is a symbol of everything is connected i come here to think often and sometimes its like i  feel there presence .....she  wanted me to have this to know no matter what i will they watch over me ..do you have someone like that ………….no ...i was raised by the military as long as i remember  ...do you ever wonder about it ? no the galra don’t wonder about things like that she says i asked you not the galra ...then the answer is the same no i don’t or had someone to make me even wonder if i am watched over ….she takes of her necklace  …….now you do she smiles ….......pidge with her abilities tries to rebuild his ship totally nerding out on it and his arm because how different galra technology is ..but  when she finished  shiro offers her to come with him to save her and not her planet she refuses to do so ..he says i  don’t know when they will come if they come but the least i can do is to find a way to open negotiations i can try that when he takes off  a galra armada are starting invading by Sendak they get a message Shiro ordering to  stop the invasion claiming he found on this planet very valuable resources that could be lost during the attack   ….Sendak says denied saying  he has  orders from the hire ups  who ? …. Haggar comes out  she  came to research the data she gathered from shiro’s  last update  they we couldn’t get in contact with so she arranged commander’s sendak’s armada  to invade …..Shiro blames himself  over the fact it was his fault after all  he speed up the invasion .....before he makes a decision to turn back or join sendak he gets a message of the emperor himself to report his absence he has no choice but to follow the order ….meanwhile as the galra attack and destroy the city and the forest …..Pidge tries to fight protect her home but the galra win and so everyone is under their  rule . she tried to make a one last stand but she loses due to the witch Haggar’s powers been far great ...Haggar see her potential and takes her as her prisoner planing to turn her into a druid just like her .

Shiro comes back to the galra everyone welcoming him back after the sudden disappearance it feels like he never left and yet he feels different he feels she changed him …..he soon gets news about olkarion before sendak suggests to drain the planet shiro stops him saying the olkari are more useful alive…fearing for what happened to pidge …...3 months later after trying to research every possible way Pidge could survive maybe she evacuated or maybe she is with the rebels of the olkari...or maybe she is ...dead ? no he can’t think of that ….. he visits Haggar receive a report for a  mission  but Haggar is not there yet he hears a sound coming out he would usually ignore that that but he got curious so he enters the door and so he finally sees her on Haggar’s lab strapped and starting to change … her marks growing her hair turning a bit white and a blue tone starting to slowly spread on her body …...she begs shiro to help her shiro can’t move from the shock haggar comes in and sees shiro …..Beautiful isn’t she …She will make a fine druid to serve the empire…….I tried to see  her memories ….but  she is still strong i can’t read her yet  very well  but it will not matter she will not need them here is the report commander  you may go…..she turns and shiro is about to leave but hears a faint…. Please help me ..Shi..ro….haggar turns did you hear something ? no ma’m ...i must have been imagining things….she turns only to face shiro’s attack it knocks her out  shiro tears the straps off and picks pidge bridal style the alarms start he fights his way through the sentries into a ship for escape   her condition getting worse  but they reach the planet Olkarion and he takes her to the great tree there she  starts to transform back into her old self …..you saved me ….i am never letting you go again …and they kiss ..they know they can’t stay for long on the planet  but they have enough time for pidge to reunite with Reiner

On the day of there departure Reiner asks Shiro to look after her Shiro simply says Always….You have my word .

And so the couple travels around the universe seeing new worlds together and they join the rebellion and the blades in hope of saving Olkarion and  for a better future  

[sketchiedetails]

Nier: Minutiae [Diegetic Game Mechanics]

I finally played through both Nier and Nier: Automata this year, and I’ve been wanting to post my thoughts on them for a while. I think I’ll make this a series of posts so I can focus on particular themes and go in depth where I want to. Some of this might be really clumsy analysis, some of it might be me thinking about plot holes, and most of it might just be me gushing about little details sprinkled here and there throughout both games.

If you wanna read more of my rantings, I’m gonna assume you’ve played both games so spoilers after the jump.

Also, for clarity’s sake I’ll refer to the first game solely as Nier and the second game as Automata.

When people talk about Dead Space one of the things they remember about the series is how they integrated the HUD in the game to be part of the world. Because the games are set in deep space, everyone wears R.I.G.s on their backs that displays their well-being as a health bar on their spines. The game’s inventory menu is framed so that it looks like both you and the player character Isaac are looking at the same display. 

Dead Space made its HUD diegetic to the setting as a way to allow players to immerse themselves into the game. It’s an action-horror title and in order to ensure that the game evokes the desired sense of dread in the player, the visual noise you would expect from a game’s HUD has been absorbed into the player character and the game world itself. 

Automata also takes a similar approach, but for exactly the opposite reason. Where Dead Space tries to blur the line between the player and the character, Automata uses diegetic game mechanics as way to distance the player from the character.

The player characters in Automata are androids, and one of the core mechanics in the game is the ability to customize your androids via chipsets.

 These chips can affect your characters in several different ways - their base stats (damage output, running speed), passive and active abilities (Auto-Heal/Deadly Heal), and even what information their HUDs will display onscreen. You can remove the ability to see your own health bar or to see the minimap. To take the mechanic to its logical extreme, there is what’s called the OS Chip in every chipset. If you remove that chip, you will kill your character and prematurely end the game.

The point of all this is to ensure that the player never forgets that they are NOT playing human characters. Automata wants to put you into the mindset of an android. Almost every fantastical element in the game is grounded by a technological explanation. Automata adopts Nier’s control scheme almost down to the same button configurations, but reinterprets Nier’s magic as programs the player can equip on their Pods, the helper robots that accompany each android.

(Below: Magic)

(Below: Technology)

This grounding of common video game abstractions is present in every aspect of the game. After the game’s prologue, 9S performs calibrations on 2B at the YorHa Bunker - the game is basically going through the Options Menu with you. During the setpiece, 9S (the game) asks you to adjust the volume and doing so will affect whether or not you hear his voice. There are other ways to interact with 9S and yield interesting responses, and the part to take note is that he says this session will be recorded for future reference. Indeed, when going through Route B the game will playback the same calibration session, down to how long you spend on each option and which bits of interaction you engaged with 9S.

The diegetic mechanics do not end with the player characters; when you start Automata the game warns you that it DOES NOT AUTOSAVE and that you will have to play the game to learn how to save. I had said before that Automata has made saving your game an important mechanic and story element, and this is what I had meant. The very act of preserving your state is diegetic in Automata. There are savepoints peppered throughout the game world disguised as broken down vending machines. When you clear the surrounding area of hostile machines, the savepoints offer new map data and broadcast a signal that allows you to save your game. If you’re outside of the signal’s radius, you can’t save.

After a critical plot point, the savepoints serve a later purpose as fast travel nodes. The conceit behind fast travel is that your android transfers their consciousness over to another fast travel node and uses the android shell stored in that node. Saving your game and fast travel are common video game mechanics that are usually interpreted by the player as abstractions of character actions as opposed to being part of the setting. The player usually assumes that the character actually did travel to the destination and recorded their experiences between sessions and the player is merely picking up where the action begins again. Not so in Automata; the post-human qualities of the androids allows the game to ground those fantastical elements and integrate them into the world.

My favorite mechanic that Automata has integrated is taunting. Automata is a Platinum game, and offers the ability to taunt much like their other titles. It’s a mechanic that draws inspiration from Capcom’s Devil May Cry series and God Hand.  Like other game mechanics, it’s usually shown as an abstraction of what an angry enemy would look like and behave. Usually, these kinds of games show taunted enemies glowing bright red with some icons denoting their status as a way to alert players that they will either deal more damage, attack more often and/or faster, or both.

(Jump to 1:17 to see Sam taunt because I couldn’t set the video to start at that time. Sorry!)

The enemies in Automata are machines; when you taunt them they also do the same things taunted enemies in other games do, but the effects have been tweaked so that they blend with the setting. They don’t immediately flash red, but their faces gradually turn bright red as if their insides are overheating from anger and you hear an audible hiss to go along with the sense of a machine overheating.

(Taunt at 0:12)

It’s so cartoonish yet it still fits with the tone of the game, and I love it to death. I’m not joking when I say that I wrote all this just to gush about this feature!

I’ve read explanations about Automata’s themes and the one I think is the most important is that it asks what it means to be human from an inhuman perspective. Automata  goes out of its way to get the player to think about the world as an android. It uses the common language of video game interfaces as a worldbuilding tool to always remind the player that they aren’t assuming the role of a human being. It’s a deliberate layer of separation between the player and the protagonist so that the player can judge the actions of the protagonists separate from any personal bias players would usually invest in their own avatars.  This distancing effect makes the drama of the game all the more compelling. The androids initially look like they are everything humanity wishes it could be, but they’re just as vulnerable to their emotions as their creators.

[nrclc-blog]

142 Technology and Hardware Computer Basics Storage Devices

A computer as we all know is capable of storing data. Computer storage devices are hardware that store data. The most common and basic storage device that all computers have is the hard drive. The hard drive is any computer’s storage device that stores the operating system and applications needed to run a computer. In the hard drive also are the user’s files and folders.

Although the hard drive is the storage device present in all computers, there are also numerous other kinds of storage devices that are as common. Understanding what kinds of storage devices you can use will refrain you from using too much of your hard drive storage space. Besides the lesser the stored data on your hard drive, the lesser is the possibility it will crash causing you to lose all the data stored in the device.  Lesser content in your hard drive will cause your computer to run at top speed.

The 8” floppy disk was the earliest disk drives available. They were later replaced by the 5¼ ”floppy disk drives and finally the 3½” floppy disks. Nevertheless, today because of the limitation of the floppy disks in terms of reliability and capability, most computers no longer have floppy disk drives. They have been replaced with the more reliable and capable CD-R and flash drives.

CD / CD-RW Drives and Media

A Compact Disc (CD) is an optical disk. It was originally made to store digital audio but has been widely used to also store digital computer data.

CD+R (Compact Disc Recordable)

This is a CD that is used to record audio and once you have written on it, you can no longer erase or rewrite anything on it.

CD-RW (Compact Disk Rewritable)

This is a CD that is rewritable, meaning even if something has already been written on it, you can still erase and rewrite over it.  You can write about 650 megabytes of data into a CD-RW media for an unlimited number of times.  CD-RW media and drives are more expensive than CD-R media and drives. CD-R media and drives have been considered to be a more secure archival technology because it cannot be accidentally erased or written over. However, for practical reasons, a CD-RW is more cost efficient because you can re-use it when you no longer need the data previously stored.

Notwithstanding the price difference, CD-RW drives have the capability to write both CD-RW and CD-R media.

DVD / DVD-RW Drives and Media

DVD- R is a higher capacity version of the CD and is the same 5 inch disc. A DVD disc has a capacity of 2.6GB of data as compared to a CD’s 650 MB. A DVD has a capacity four times that of a CD. A DVD-R can be recorded on both sides although you will have to flip it to Side B manually. DVD drives use UDF (Universal Data Format) to store/record data.

DVD-RW is a disc in an erasable format, can be played in DVD drives and players, have a capacity of 4.7 billion bytes and can be rewritten for about 1,000 times.

DVD-RW drives can write DVD-R, DVD-RW and also CD-R and CD-RW discs.

Blue Ray Disc Drive

A Blu-ray Disc is an optical disc storage made to succeed the DVD format. Just like the CD and the DVD, a Blu-ray disc is 1.2 mm thick and has a diameter of 120mm.  Blu-ray discs have a capacity of 25 GB (single-layer), 50GB (dual-layer). The 100 GB (triple- layer) and 128 GB (quadruple-layer) are re-writable drives. Blue-ray discs can be used for data storage, high-definition audio and video, stereoscopic 3D and PlayStation 3 games.

Tape Drives and Media

A tape drive is a kind of data storage device that does digital recording. With this technology, data is written on a magnetic tape. This type of data storage device is normally used for offline-archive data storage because of its long strength.

Unlike a disk drive which has a random access storage a tape drive has sequential (chronological) access. Thus while a disk drive write and read head can transfer from one position to another on a disk, a tape drive has to wind or rewind to read any data. Tape drives have a capacity of up to hundreds of gigabytes.

USB Storage (Solid State vs. Magnetic Drive)

A USB drive is a portable storage device that makes use of a flash memory. It is a plug and play device that is so lightweight, it can be attached to a key chain. A USB drive is an alternative storage device to a floppy disk, a CD or Zip drive. When you insert a USB into a USB port of a computer, the operating system will recognize it as a removable drive and will assign it a drive letter.

A USB is a very convenient storage device because it can:

Store data for longer periods

Does not required the computer to reboot after it has been attached

Does not need a battery or external power supply to function

It is not dependent any platform to function

Multi-card Reader & Driver

A multi-card reader is an input data device. If your computer does not come with a card reader, a multi-card reader is what you will need. If your USB port has a 2.0 speed, a multi-card reader will transfer your files between your memory card and computer (or vice versa) fast.

A multi-card reader is an attachment to your computer that will allow it to write and read a variety of flash card memories. Memory cards are available in various sizes and formats, the most widely used being the ones in digital cameras.  In digital cameras, the flash memory card will save your pictures and will allow you to download them into your computer. This process is done by inserting your memory card into a multi-card reader attached to your computer.

Solid State and Magnetic Disk Hard Drives

A Solid State Hard drive is a Flash Memory drive similar to a USB thumb drive. The main advantage of a solid state hard drive with a magnetic hard drive is the fact that it does not have any moving parts. While a magnetic disk hard drive is a mechanical device having components susceptible to shock, and magnetic failure, solid state drive does not have any moving parts and does not get damage when dropped.

Mobile Media Devices

With the proliferation of cell phones, MP3 players and PDAs, media devices have come to be portable and mobile and have become the major sources of information and communication.  These mobile media devices have an important bearing in the lives of millions of people all over the world. Pod-casting and live streaming over the internet is a way to download media into mobile devices.

Back-up Services

Anything can happen to data you have stored in your computer’s hard disk or any storage device. The only way to make sure that you do not experience any loss of data you can store them in either an online or offsite storage back-up system.

Using an online storage back-up does require any software to be installed. You just have to connect to the services of an Online Storage Network. You can then access your files through their website from any location other than your own computer.

An offsite storage back-up, on the other hand, requires server software for remote back-up systems. The transfer (uploading) of your data to the offsite storage occurs during off-peak internet hours.