#serious… thought talk up in here

[morawcrumb]

I feel like a lonely goat now that I dont see a 52 yr old man’s face, music and appearance all the time. I seriously do not know what to do with myself. Like I still listen to his music at some degree… (Right now its only 🍫🇺🇸 I can listen to without feeling weird) and like just not talking about his music, projects, himself all the time feels abnormal…and sad

Like I’ve been sad and I’ve been trying to get hook up to something to feed that loneliness but it just makes me even more sad. That podcast has helped me a-lot and it made me who I am and it just really helped me deal with my own issues. Now, just not being as enthusiastic as before just feels like “Who am I anymore?” What am I without that special ‘quirky underground’ podcast that you can tell to someone with or without context and it still makes you sound like a madman?

Another thing is that my fixation is still the collective but I need something to draw that involves it otherwise I barely have drawing ideas (Which at this point It might take a while to even think of something) to like keep myself sane. Im so used to having some idea all the time and drawing the same character in my sketchbook 100 times and filling an entire page with them but now I dont know what to draw. I do draw him every now and again (the janitor) as little doodles but I dont …know

I still like it because it holds a special place in my heart and plus he has been a comfort character and I can see myself in the janitor (I will not go in depth) I know you can separate art from the artist because I do do that but its just…so complicated theres a-lot of stuff that It just… it connects to him yknowww….

Ough this sounds like im going to never listen to his stuff and never listen to the podcast ever again, in which I will…possibly in time (Plus I listen to 🍫🇺🇸) Not as deranged listening as when I was well… deranged but like maybe revisit? I’m still healing and trying my hardest to cope with this new change in life. But basically in short terms I feel out of place, lonely and lost, like really lost.

[tzarrz]

to all people who said PART 1 made them laugh - i lov u 💗 this is for u

[tornoleander]

Nya has the best writing out of anyone in skybound an I will not hear otherwise

(this is just a rant but I will finish my argument with evidence soon but I was feeling like yelling at phone)

Just watched a video completely butchering her character.

I’m fuming about Nya’s treatment in general like RRRRR SHE IS LIKE THE BEST WRITTEN. Most people I see talk about her never tried to see Nya’s motivation.

And because she’s grumpy and won’t take bullshit treatment. And a large part of the audience Treat her like she’s a brat for it like…

Her ark against all odds is great. The only reason so many people don’t get that is ALL because of the awful framing and them focusing on Jay at all the wrong times I PROMISE YOU.

The audience is made to focus on Jay’s feelings in moments that should’ve been about her.

Nya always thought she would end up with Jay like she said later on. She always loved him She wasn’t trying to hurt or play with his feelings but she had bigger problems, and she simply didn’t want to be dating him. Because she hated how that would make her be perceived. Which was the issues that she overcame by the end.

She is frustrated by way she’s perceived by the city. They only see her as her gender. A self insert of sorts. (There’s a scene about it first ep subtle but boils my blood) Not a person. She HATES IT.

BRRRR

Nya has A lot more going on like it was never her Job to walk on eggshells around Jays feelings. She was having a lot harder of a time that first episode but more screen time was dedicated to Jays moping about her.

Just AAA ggghg

LIKE EVERYONE REWATCH SKYBOUND AND FOCUS ON NYA Specifically. Ignore how much the narrative drags you to look at Jay. I swear Nya’s struggle is shockingly the most well written bit

[alongtidesoflight]

so here's my honest thoughts on dragon age: the veilguard, after ~40 hours of playing. i finished the main quest after having finished all companion quests and major faction quests. just to clear up what content i saw, i played as an elven transmasc rook who is a member of the lords of fortune. he romanced lucanis (although after finishing the game i'm now leaning towards taash). i don't know what's happening in playthroughs that have a different race, gender identity, romance or faction going on.

full spoilers ahead, i mean it. don't read further if you want to avoid them. i don't want complaining about it in my asks.

oh and also, if you're worried because of a few negative reviews online i can comfort you by saying don't give a fuck about a certain big name youtuber who is very much tied to bethesda franchises giving this a negative review. i'll explain why.

i'm starting off with the things i liked

the game looks really pretty. i was worried it wouldn't feel like thedas anymore (with them trying to "focus on northern thedas only" i thought they'd make a clear cut in environmental design. they do and they don't. it's complicated. i'll elaborate on it when talking about the negative stuff). anyway it does. minrathous feels like kirkwall. treviso enchanted me like the winter palace did. the hossberg wetlands reminded me of the hinterlands and a couple other inquisition maps. arlathan looked like... arlathan. the crossroads were different, but familiar. overall i like the way it looks and feels. it's thedas, with a twist. it's a good one, and gives everything a solid but unique feel.

combat is top tier. if you're a hardcore dragon age player you WILL miss the tactical aspect of it for a bit, but i promise you, once you're used to the way the combat works, you will be lapping that shit up. and once you get to ability combos you'll mourn the control you used to have over your companions in battle a bit less

the MAIN quest and its story. i expected worse, way worse. and for a while the game even had me tricked (harr harr you'll get it in a second) it is Really That Much Worse. but holy shit was it good. i walked away satisfied ngl.

your choices have SOLID weight. there's consequences, good AND bad. i got minrathous blighted, ruled over by venatori, and the leader of the shadow dragons ultimately died because of my decisions. i made those at the beginning and throughout the game. he died at the end. DAVRIN died because i didn't expect what i was saying to have that much weight. i thought i was in the clear. he had hero status. well turns out, your choices can still get your companions killed even if you do everything right. i fucking love him. he shouldn't have made that sacrifice just because i told him to do everything it takes once.

the inquisitor, morrigan and dorian being there, surprisingly. there's also negatives to this though, see below.

speaking of companions dying and the inquisitor playing a bigger role: the final quest feels like me2's suicide mission. i was blown away by it and the fact that i got to see the results of all my efforts playing out in front of me.

bioware are NOT trying to redeem solas. they love him as a character yes, but i wasn't forced to see any good in him. he betrays you. he fucked my rook over twice. he fucked him over right back, for good this time (the veil wasn't torn down, i anchored it by binding him to it, he's doomed to uphold it). but solas really lives up to his name as the trickster elven god. rip to all the people who grew really attached to him over the years.

varric died. if you like him that's probably as hard reading it as it was watching it. varric died and the game lies about it until the very end. when the realisation hits, it hurts. but in the very best way.

the amount of care they put into gender expression and trans identities this time around. (i'll add onto this with negative points as well too).

rook feels very much ingrained in the world of thedas. he doesn't ask questions that expose the player to lore through dialogue as if he's stepped foot into thedas for the first time. those conversations feel very solid and good. i hope other faction players got as much joy out of this as i did.

and the things i didn't like and boy there's a lot unfortunately

the music. let's just get that out of the way holy shit. it doesn't feel like it belongs in this universe. it gets so incredibly sci-fi-y at times you'd think it's taken straight from mass effect andromeda. there's not a single song unique to veilguard that i really enjoyed. it broke my immersion, real bad. hearing a busker play the tavern songs from inquisition on a lute right after i killed some venatori with wobbly bass songs playing in the background is just odd. weird tonal shift. don't like it. it's made for people who like flashy light-weight cinema.

tevinter nights is required reading. the podcasts are required listening exercises. the game is so fast paced, especially at the start, that there's no time to introduce you to characters and how much weight their names carry in-game. i would not have known who half these people are if i hadn't skimmed over tevinter nights. i'd care even less about them than i already did. there is no time to get properly attached to them. people will act as if you're talking to a legend personified and you'll be thinking man goddamn which chapter of tevinter night were they in again and what did they do???

there's a weird mismatch with the animations. you'll have beautifully fluid ones, like emmrich casting spells. and then you'll have rook's face animating in the most unnatural manner that's sorta reminiscent of mass effect andromeda's "my face is tired" addison, when their emotions SHOULD be landing with the player rn instead.

i'm not vibing with the art style. sometimes it works. most of the time it doesn't. at points i felt like i was watching tangled.

that also brings me to some of the dialogue. same issue. i am watching frozen. i am watching tangled. someone on the writer's team really likes the adorkable trope. bellara is its victim.

for all the talk about identity, bioware sure doesn't like theirs. the grey warden armor got a redesign again and it just makes them look like a generic army. i hate it lol

in general, i don't like the armor design. the wardrobe/appearances system is fine, but it's just not helping if all the armors are just... kinda bland or downight bad looking? and don't get me started on the lords of fortune armor. that is orientalism personified.

the world states should have been carried over, full stop. i know they said they didn't because they want to separate what happens in the north from what happens in the south, which... i could have lived with that. but the inquisitor sends you letters that keep you up to date on... the south of thedas. you learn that there's a blight again, that people are standing strong but it's difficult, denerim's fallen, the rulers are taking care of it, orlais is fighting and they're successful for a while, etc etc. what's good bioware. i thought we don't care about the south this time around. why are you feeding me so much boring generic information. if you're not gonna show any of it and just write letters, then carrying the world state over should not have been an issue. i have a game dev background. those few lines of code would not have broken your budget or pushed your engine's limits. fuck right off.

this gripe of mine carries over to all the cameos. as a lord of fortune you have to deal with isabela a lot. it's fun. i missed her. you get to go drinking with her and taash and bellara! also my hawke romanced her. she's not mentioned once. they had the opportunity to put a sentence or two about her in there with not a lot of effort, trust me.

when varric dies, all she has is a single line about it. for gold, for fortune, for varric. she only says it if you interact with her on your way to the final push. that's not mandatory.

morrigan is there. kieran isn't. the old god soul that mythal and then solas absorbed? who cares at this point, the gods are dead now and solas is locked away for eternity. i suppose? why is morrigan there. she feels unneeded. i wish they'd just left her down south, at least that way i wouldn't have had to witness her god awful redesign.

dorian at least feels as if he belongs in this story. the shadow dragons are a crucial part to protecting minrathous. he's also weirdly underutilised. isabela and morrigan had more lines than him in my playthrough.

on the topic of romance: bro that was underwhelming. no, genuinely. you know when romance picked up a bit? after the point of no return. i heard maybe two lines of companion banter about it before that. maybe i missed something which i honestly doubt, but romance did not play much of a role in lucanis's storyline. i saved his grandmother as he wished me to (and if you read tevinter nights you know she was rather abusive and their relationship not the healthiest) and told him to focus on his family. a reunified family my rook wasn't even introduced to as a partner at the end of all that.

really, do not buy this game if you're only in it for the romances. others might be better, lucanis's basically gave me nothing. except for an outing (the second coffee date i had with him, it was getting repetitive) all of it played out once i committed to the final quest. the sex scene was a fade to black. annoyingly right after davrin died. if you're looking for well paced and good spice, pick up something else. the sweet talk and the final goodbye were nice though.

for all the good the ever-presence of gender identity does, it is brought up in such a disruptive manner too. it doesn't even play out naturally if you CHOOSE the lines that are meant to be said. hearing the words trans and non-binary in this setting doesn't feel right, and i'm saying this as a trans guy. i think it could have been handled more gracefully. the amount of times my rook went "i'm a MAN" as if he's about to start drumming on his chest and roaring any second now got super nerve-grating. "i'm so glad you're into me... the me who is trans. remember?" just. tell me one trans person who'd talk like that to a person they've grown close with and are trying to romance. this game doesn't handle sexuality well, so all this hey my body might not look like the way you're expecting it to look talk amounts to nothing anyway. i feel about this the way i feel about krem: this is partial exposition to trans experiences... packaged up for cis consumption. the ONLY exception to that is interacting with taash. holy shit was all of that heartwarming and bro did it feel good and natural to talk to them about theirs and rook's gender.

rivain and nevarra are new locations added by veilguard. they're also incredibly underwhelming, small and constricted maps. rivain is a coastline with a few ruins. the hall of valor is a partial ruin nestled into a cave on a beach, with a fighting pit. isabela is there in her skimpy outfit commentating your pit fights. that's it. i'm sorry if you were looking for a bustling pirate cove or whatever. you're not gonna get it. the nevarran crypts btw are a long ass dungeon crawl. that's it.

speaking of maps. i thought people were being dramatic when they said you're gonna be fighting the same enemies on them again and again. i thought they were figure of speeching it. they're not. you WILL fight the same amount of enemies. in the same spot. every time you reload the map. best to stay on a map and clear out the enemies and do as much questing on that map as you can before leaving, because you WILL have to do it all over again once you return.

the three choices i made for my inquisitor didn't matter lol she didn't have to face solas and therefore couldn't stop him at any cost as she had sworn (maybe because my rook tricked solas into binding himself to the veil, there was also an option to fight him. would she have stepped in? who knows). blackwall wasn't mentioned. and either her using a small amount of her forces in the final fight was the reason the civilians of minrathous fared so well..... or it just didn't matter. ultimately i think she had very little impact on anything

[sysig]

Go play pretend on your own (Patreon)

[pup-pee]

bart getting both intrusive & impulsive thoughts willl destroy me actually thanks

[lightbulb-warning]

i used to freehand comics all the time as a child and since the part i liked was the drawing part i would just draw panel after panel because i didn't want to stop drawing to think about icky icky words, plus the story TOTALLY still made perfect sense! to me! and noone else, but 'whoooo caaaaares omgggg its not like comics and sequantial art are a communicative meeediummmm lmaoooooo'. i spent my entire childhood telling myself stuff like "oh pfft I know this story by heart- ill SIMPLY remember the dialogue and write it later" ...and. I can't help but admire baby maiora's (call that a minora ba tm tsk) fucking audacity? hubris? confident wrongness? kid couldn't even remember to finish the comics in the first place? INCREDIBLE levels of unearned self assurance, wish that were me, genuinely- what an icon!!! anyway i think i have forever cursed myself

[primus-why]

I really love the headcanon that, to tfa warbuilds, challenging an authority figure can also be seen as flirting.

I especially love to imagine Optimus' crew having to temporarily team up with Megatron to take down a threat, and as the leaders continue to butt heads over tactics/protocol, all the 'Bots are like "omg so scary poor Optimus 😣" while the 'Cons are like "omg get a room already 🙄"

[russell-crowe]

INT: To be totally honest, coming here, I didn't know who I was going to meet. From a personality perspective, you read all sorts of things about you. RUSSELL: You do, don't you? INT: Do you feel that this image of 'Hollywood's bad boy' is overblown? RUSSELL: Here's the thing mate, I'm not from Hollywood. I go there to work. But it's all made up and I'm sorry to burst your bubble. What do you think the whole tough guy thing is? I put makeup on for a living, brother. That's all. That's what I do. But it's not an act. It's a perception that somebody writes and then the next person goes on top of that and goes on top of that. You know, I'm in no way, shape or form like an angry person, you know, but if you do my job. And you don't get irritated by certain points of it, right? There's something wrong with you.

[hellaverse-critical-confessions]

(from this video)

[thevegetablewhichnoonedaresname]

I'm starting Mission to Zyxx Season 5 now, and I have feelings about that.

First, it generally scares me when people hype anything up at all because there is no guarantee that anyone values the exact same thing I do to the same degree. Even if I trust the creators of a thing to value something and try to do right by it, that doesn't always necessarily mean it will be successful, especially if that involves doing something wildly different than what made it good in the first place (I have been burned this way before). I guess I'm just hoping they continue the format of goofy improv shenanigans for the majority of it with something more planned and emotional in the finale if they want, like they've been doing all along. I'd think they would, and I've heard nothing bad about the ending, but I guess it still makes me nervous because I'm so close to the end and I want it so badly to stick the landing. I'm setting my expectations on the floor so I can be surprised instead of disappointed, but honestly, I don't need it to be better, I just need it to be on par with the rest.

Second, and more briefly, I'm happy it's (hopefully) ending before it has a chance to decline. I am so on board with that philosophy. But on the other hand, finishing a thing that I really, really like and knowing there's not another one out there gives me a special kind of heartache. Like, I know there will be other good media, and stuff that's good and unique in other ways, but I know for a fact that there are no other podcasts out there that have the same mix of a balance of off-the-wall improv and structured narrative, quality comedy, fantastical sci-fi setting and loveable characters, and high quality production. There are other things out there with many of those qualities, but nothing that checks every one of those boxes. It's a lightning-in-a-bottle thing that very much feels like the right people had to be in the right place at the right time to do it. Attempts to do it again would feel hollow because it had to be born out of necessity and passion and the talents of the people involved, so if you switch out the people it loses the reasons it's great, and if the same people tried to do it again it'd feel tired. That makes me so, so grateful it exists, but also so, so sad that it doesn't, and I'm 80% of the way done. When it's over, it's over.

Anyway. Now that that's all out there, I'm just gonna finish listening and have fun. Wish me luck.

[purpurussy]

i log on to this site. i write essays about dnp and their gay little antics. i save them to my drafts because i am scared of being perceived. i log off again

[bronzetomatoes]

If one more person on that stupid poll leaves tags implying I'm a bad person for making gun of my friends and that we don't have real friendships and should stop hanging out w each other I'm gonna start mailing out bombs

[werewolfmack]

Started the day texting my mom back and idk I'm really determined to talk WITH her about what the fuck is wrong with our relationship every time we DO talk because I'm sick of this burying her head in the sand thing she has been doing and I'm trying to overcome my own confrontation avoidance. But its also a hard way to start the day because it was a birthday text where she dreamed I gave her a hug, so that sucks.

[dutybcrne]

Kaeya once jokingly referred to Bennett as 'Bennett Guildson' in lightly scolding him over endangering himself, and Bennett most Definitely considered making that his actual name on his official Adventurer's Guild paperwork, send post-

[sysig]

Animal collection as a hobby, a perfect fit! (Patreon)