The Zorca and their Migration Routes
Brain zoomies strike again but I wanted to add visual aid to these particular bits of story that have been running in my brain. Putting it all under a cut FOLLOW ME!
Spring: Lanayru Sea
Taking the events going on in @werewolfsister's comic, the relationship between the Domain and the Zorca have grown. Sardon, Cironus, Kaska ,and sometimes little Kaso, have become frequent visitors while their pod remains out in the bay and ocean area.
The water ways allowed Sardon and Cironus to get into all sorts of trouble when they were younger.
When they were just starting to test the limits of how far they could go from their pod, and small enough not to alarm other hyrulian races(mistaken for slightly taller zora boys) They came upon Kakariko Village by chance and during the late hours of the night raided a pumpkin patch and devoured everything. Not knowing they were the reason the present day Olkin is so protective of them. Maybe one day they can go back and make amends somehow…
The end of spring marks their next journey along with their big courting event!
Summer: Akkala Sea
As spring comes to a close, other pods start to converge in Lanayru so they can all make the trip together to Akkala. The main reason for this is for their courting event called Turning the Wheel. Which is a metaphor for life and death cycles, as well as their destination, the Rist Peninsula!
The younger zorca who are of age participate in a race to get to the end of the spiral at Rist Peninsula. But it's less about who gets there first and more about who they end up racing side by side with ("the treasure is the friends you make along the way!"). Older zorca take their time because they're socializing with old friends and previous partners. Those who participate in the game usually arrive a day earlier before the main group.
The pairings can come about unexpectedly! A zorca may hit it off with someone as they race. Or it can be planned, where partners agree to race together. There's no shame for anyone reaching the end without a partner though as they can try next season.
Non-zorca partners are allowed to participate in this event as well. Couples don't have to finish the race either, if they want to, they can break away and join the slower group, or head off together for more private entertainments. But a many enjoy reaching the end because once the entire group reaches the center of the peninsula they have their own party with food and singing to mark the start of summer!
Cironus and Sardon have played the game several times, and always reached the end solo. To avoid the matchmaking attempts by his grandmother, Sardon found a way to avoid courting by simply being faster than anyone trying to keep pace with him. Cironus enjoys the thrill of the game but no one has matched his pace either.
Once the summer of love is over its time to move on to...
Autumn: Necluda Sea
This is an especially important time for pregnant zorca! Their pregnancy can take over a year, so those who participated in last years courting event are ready for babies and need to be prepared for what's to come.
@werewolfsister's Domain of the Sunken Garden is located between the South East coast of Hyrule and Eventide Island. The Zorca have done gift exchanges with Oley and Tajin since the zorca themselves cannot reach the depths of their home.
Somewhere south of Eventide Island is where the Zorca perform their burial rites. When an individual passes, no matter the season, the pod travels to these waters to lay them down to rest in a whale fall event.
When the temperature shifts, and due dates are getting nearer its time to head on...
Winter: Faron Sea
Faron Sea is where the Zorca go to have their babies! Every baby born is a precious addition to their pod since the Zorca are so few in number. New and experienced mothers work over time with hunting and everyone else pitches in to help care for the little ones. The nursery is closely guarded, and anyone who doesn't have business there sticks around in the open waters.
Because the villagers of Lurelin fish in the same waters, the Zorca offer their assistance in any way they can, by helping them catch fish or chasing off monsters!
When spring rolls around again, they say goodbye to their friendly neighbors, and the newborns are strong enough to make the trip back to Lanayru to begin the seasons all over again.
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Me vs FF14 part... 2?
It's taken me pretty much three full days of running from cutscene to cutscene. But I've finally reached Heavensward.
And like... on some level? I'm kind of offended?
Like, a part of me genuinely wants to replay the entire game from the start "as something else" (different main-class, different race, different starting-area, whichever), because the dungeon-queuing system is actually really fun when you start to Understand it.
As in, FF14 has somehow made an MMO that has almost eliminated the feeling that it is a level-grind? Partially? It's turned the whole thing into a surprisingly comfortable level of (limited, but genuine) social interaction.
To the point where even someone who isn't obsessively grind-focused like me, can genuinely enjoy themselves. Just queuing up for dungeons, Hunting some bounties, and-...
And then FF14 has so many fucking quests that it literally chokes the life out of the gameplay.
As an example, one of their biggest dungeon-draws (bcs high rewards) is a quest that almost everyone hates playing. Because doing that dungeon means watching literally eighteen minutes of unskippable cutscenes.
And that's with them having reduced the amount of cutscenes in that dungeon, because the players complained so much about them.
Like... I'd be perfectly happy replaying the game from the start with a different character, even knowing that leveling isn't some kind of pain-free thing. But the thought of having to restart the fucking Main-Quest? Of having to spend literal days just running back-and-forth to cutscenes?
I'm currently feeling a bit burned-out as a result of the binge I went on to get here, but I'm pretty damn sure that I wouldn't replay this fucking thing even if you paid me for it.
(And, of course, Heavensward also has a Main-Quest continuation that you have to follow. And now I'm not even allowed to fly everywhere to cut down on the "running back-and-forth"-part of my complaints. Not until they arbitrarily allow me to discover flight for the new areas, by going through even more of the Main-Quest.)
(Not to mention that now I have to go back and do even more Class-quests, with their own cutscenes, in order to unlock a bunch of skills.)
(I'm very fond of the "the church is evil because it doesn't let you fuck dragons"-meme, and I'm very much seeing it. But like... come the fuck on. Why is this MMO a feature-length movie-series? Why can't I just play the game and have fun?)
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Raw hatred for mobile advertisements these days.
Earlier it used to be five seconds and then you could exit. Now you have to wait five seconds, hit a button that will take you to the App Store, go back, wait for another five seconds for a blurry screen to take you to another page, and then wait another eight seconds to finally leave. That’s thirteen extra seconds!
When I decide to actually watch an ad for rewards, I get a bunch of extra seconds that does not convince me that the game is worth anything. Why am I clicking so many buttons just to get second hand embarrassment from some guy absolutely failing and then some fake “play our game” that doesn’t let you tap anything without sending you to the App Store?
And then there’s the phenomenon where some advertisements randomly stop in an attempt to force you to watch them instead of tossing your phone aside. The only thing that will change is that instead of tossing it aside, I am going to hurl it into the wall.
And do not get me started on this one specific advertisement that refuses to let me skip. Most of the times it’s one of those forced advertisements instead of a reward, so instead of the five seconds usually pushed at me, I am getting nine times the amount. What the hell.
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I slept in and just woke up, so here's what I've been able to figure out while sipping coffee:
Twitter has officially rebranded to X just a day or two after the move was announced.
The official branding is that a tweet is now called "an X", for which there are too many jokes to make.
The official account is still @twitter because someone else owns @X and they didn't reclaim the username first.
The logo is 𝕏 which is the Unicode character Unicode U+1D54F so the logo cannot be copyrighted and it is highly likely that it cannot be protected as a trademark.
Outside the visual logo, the trademark for the use of the name "X" in social media is held by Meta/Facebook, while the trademark for "X" in finance/commerce is owned by Microsoft.
The rebranding has been stopped in Japan as the term "X Japan" is trademarked by the band X JAPAN.
Elon had workers taking down the "Twitter" name from the side of the building. He did not have any permits to do this. The building owner called the cops who stopped the crew midway through so the sign just says "er".
He still plans to call his streaming and media hosting branch of the company as "Xvideo". Nobody tell him.
This man wants you to give him control over all of your financial information.
Edit to add further developments:
Yes, this is all real. Check the notes and people have pictures. I understand the skepticism because it feels like a joke, but to the best of my knowledge, everything in the above is accurate.
Microsoft also owns the trademark on X for chatting and gaming because, y'know, X-box.
The logo came from a random podcaster who tweeted it at Musk.
The act of sending a tweet is now known as "Xeet". They even added a guide for how to Xeet.
The branding change is inconsistent. Some icons have changed, some have not, and the words "tweet" and "Twitter" are still all over the place on the site.
TweetDeck is currently unaffected and I hope it's because they forgot that it exists again. The complete negligence toward that tool and just leaving it the hell alone is the only thing that makes the site usable (and some of us are stuck on there for work).
This is likely because Musk was forced out of PayPal due to a failed credit line project and because he wanted to rename the site to "X-Paypal" and eventually just to "X".
This became a big deal behind the scenes as Musk paid over $1 million for the domain X.com and wanted to rebrand the company that already had the brand awareness people were using it as a verb to "pay online" (as in "I'll paypal you the money")
X.com is not currently owned by Musk. It is held by a domain registrar (I believe GoDaddy but I'm not entirely sure). Meaning as long as he's hung onto this idea of making X Corp a thing, he couldn't be arsed to pay the $15/year domain renewal.
Bloomberg estimates the rebranding wiped between $4 to $20 billion from the valuation of Twitter due to the loss of brand awareness.
The company was already worth less than half of the $44 billion Musk paid for it in the first place, meaning this may end up a worse deal than when Yahoo bought Tumblr.
One estimation (though this is with a grain of salt) said that Twitter is three months from defaulting on its loans taken out to buy the site. Those loans were secured with Tesla stock. Meaning the bank will seize that stock and, since it won't be enough to pay the debt (since it's worth around 50-75% of what it was at the time of the loan), they can start seizing personal assets of Elon Musk including the Twitter company itself and his interest in SpaceX.
Sesame Street's official accounts mocked the rebranding.
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