#sure its a little janky in some places and a lot ridiculous but its got so much HEART i just. gah.

[aro-aizawa]

yeah the sonic the headhog movies wholeheartedly and unironically slap so hard i love them

[absolutebl]

This Week in BL - Things are Very Mixed

May 2023 Wk 1

Being a highly subjective assessment of one tiny corner of the interwebs. Organized by which ones (in each category) I’m enjoying most.

Ongoing Series - Thai

Step By Step (Thai Tues WeTV & Gaga) ep 3 of 10 (MDL still says 12, but Gaga still says 10) - The subs are janky on YT, so you might want to watch this on Gaga. This is such a good show, it just feels so much more authentic to an office environment and first job then anything else I’ve seen in BL. Now that might be because it has western source material, or it might be because it is actually kind of old-fashioned (it’s been years since I worked as an office grunt). While the authenticity may be a little triggering for some, I love how much tension it adds to the leads’ dynamic and the quality of the narrative. I also really love the brothers’ relationship, now that we got to see them on screen together for a bit. Walk of shame was great! Oh look, character development, how novel. This is what Boss & Babe should have been. Not sold on the sides tho it’s nice to see a faen fatal as the main character in a dynamic for a change. 

La Pluie (Sat iQIYI) ep 2 of 10 - This one is really grabbing me by the throat. I love the starter concepts, what a fantastic twist on a meet cute not to mention soulmates. I hope we spend more time with the vet and his coworkers, they seem awesome. And another surprise, the guy we think is being set up to be the brother’s love interest is now clearly interested in the wrong brother. I love the trope subversions going on with this show! 

Our Skyy 2 (The Eclipse) eps 5-6 - FirstKhao are just ridiculously cute as a couple. Honestly? Aye just seems like he would be a lot of work as a lover. I’m not as wild about the premise of this installment, with the film clips and stuff (as I was of NlMG’s installment). And then, the singing. Oh well, you can’t have everything. I gotta say, First is a great crier, although I don’t think this story warranted his tears. In the end? My feelings on this installment were mixed, the movie storyline didn’t grab me and the birthday storyline seems a touch mean spirited, but I do think it adds substantially to the original Eclipse rather than feeling superfluous or slapdash like many of the other Our Skyys. So I’m going to go with 8/10 

Future (Thai Sun YouTube & Gaga) ep 6fin - More of the same (which I like) but I’m glad it ended. Didn’t need to get dragged out. Such drama over nothing. In the end? This is just a soft sweet cotton candy fluff piece about a younger boy who pursues an older boy and then manufactures silly gay drama. Nothing wrong with that. But I don’t think this style of BL really appeals to a very large market share. Will I rewatch it? Sure. Will anyone else? Nope. 7/10 RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS.    

Pastsenger (Thai Weds Gaga) ep 9 of 12 eps - And now the amnesia trope. I’m not a fan. This is such a pulp. At least it ends next week? Groan, no 3 more eps.  

A Boss and a Babe (Fri YouTube) ep 10 of 12 - one thing I realize I like about this main couple’s dynamic is that the seme/uke seems earned, where it didn’t in Echante. I don’t have much else to say except it’s crazy when a narrative betrays its characters like this and why to poor ForceBook keep having to deal with it? 

The Promise (Thai Weds YT & WeTV) ep 7 of 10 - Honestly, who wears an all white outfit to play around with coffee beans in the countryside? I LOVE the faen fatal, he’s so good, courageous, honest, and morally sound. He even gives his rival fair warning. Nan should totally go out with him. I made awwww noises over the faen fatal! I NEVER do that. I guess Phu was right all along? Nan won’t date a friend. Ultimate friend zone. Well shit. This show. Ouch. 

House of Stars (Thai Mon iQIYI) ep 1 of ?? - There seems a slight horror element which I do not like and it’s also confusingly like Melrose Place or something. Everyone is sleeping with, or wants to be sleeping with everyone else. It’s kinda hilarious to watch something where all the actors are supposed to be good actors but it’s a pulp so they just really aren’t. So far my main issue is I can’t keep them all straight in my head (pun intended). 

Tin Tam Jai (Tues Gaga) ep 10fin - There is very little I enjoyed about this show. The entirely forgotten side dishes gave us 5 min of excellent high heat and then vanished, but otherwise this show sucked in the wrong way. It’s forgettable and I intend to do just that. 5/10  

Ongoing Series - Not Thai

Our Dining Table AKA Bokura no Shokutaku (Japan Thurs Gaga) ep 5 of 10 - The way these two are very quietly yet thoroughly falling in love with each other is executed with such grace and subtlety that only Japan could have handed this out. It’s not even “falling” it’s more like sliding gradually into love. 

Love Mate (Korea Thurs Viki) eps 1-2 of 8 - Launched very much openly gay so that’s fun. Also very much bubble too, so no one around them cares. So: Seo is a player jaded older uke (fun character type we don’t see often) and his seme is a romantic if arrogant weirdo. Can you see my hands clapping? Combative trope activation! Absurdity. How fun. Also workplace harassment but hayho that’s BL for ya. (Also a nonBL Kdrama specialty.) ALSO whole office in on seme-stalker’s side? All in all, it’s odd and questionable, but I’m into it. Why am I like this? 

Happy Merry Ending (Korea Thurs Gaga) eps 3-4 of 8 - OK I’m not super into the main couple but I love all of the surrounding characters. The overly protective best friend with a crush is giving bad advice but it’s understandable and he’s super hot so I forgive him. And the idol character is a wonderful addition, he is my baby. Also, evil ex is v evil. 

Vian the series (Vietnam YT ) - I thought this was gonna be Tiktok only but apparently it’s showing up on YT too. It’s cute! My cat boyfriend (which is more common that it should be) and this seems to be Vietnam’s installment (we got Thailand’s last year). The boy playing the cat is the prettiest human being on the planet. Fight me. No fight him, get scratched. Serious tho. Holy hairballs. Look I don’t really like vertical content but I am watching this for him. Meow, indeed. 

The Day I Loved You (Vietnam YouTube) eps 2-3 of ? - BL Express’s first impressions mirror mine. Niks is so flipping cute. Rich kid is so into him, so is bestie. So much gay macho posturing. So much bi fear and het shame. But also it’s killer to get a femme main characters who isn’t being mocked. Dancing trope continues (better than singing together). It is kinda Heartstopper goes Pinoy BL. Honestly, I prefer kids a little drawings to terrible sound effects. This is better than it or we have any right to expect. 

Naked Dinner AKA Zenra Meshi (Japan Fri Gaga) ep 4 of 12 - There is a lot I like about this drama, except the weird central conceit of the naked dining. But the romance part is cute, if a tad simplistic. 

My Story (Pinoy Sat YouTube) ep 4 of 10 - chukchuk went missing and so did my interest in this show. I’m DNFing this one. 

Dancing together, the baby sub-trope of 2023. (The Day I Love You) 

It’s Airing But ...

Love Syndrome (Thai Sat WeTV) stopped at ep 2 of 12 - I’m just not into any aspect of it (except Lee Long Shi) - saving to binge if the end is solid.

Venus in the Sky (Sat YouTube) pilot/tester?) 0 of 10 - not entirely sure what’s up with this one distribution-wise, but the pilot was classic university-set pulp. I hope it happens because the leads are cute with good chemsitry and I thought it was fun. However, this pilot holds together as its own little short too.

Stormy Honeymoon (Vietnam) - meh

In Case You Missed It

Actors Bas Suradej (2 Moons etc...) and Copter Panuwat (so much BL) have left Starhunter. So Copter and Kimmon will part ways as an on-screen pair (RIP KimCop). Their upcoming show Boy Never Smiles will still air, but will likely be their last together. (source) 

Restart After Come Back Home (highly recommended), Athlete, Capture Lover, Tkumi-kun, His the movie (recommended) and also a bunch of the dark stuff like Forbidden Love and Shortest Distance are all leaving Gagaoolala soon. So watch ‘em while you can. A few are also on Viki, but many will be difficult to get hold of without Gaga. 

I finally finished the second season of The Reason Why He Fell in Love with Me (Japan Gaga) and gave it a 4/10. I just don’t like or recommend any of the installments of this franchise, but if I had to pick, it’s season one. 

Make a Wish finished at 6 eps. Stars Fluke Natouch (OhmFluke UWMA etc...) & Judo (The Miracle Of Teddy Bear) in medical-fantasy about a doctor who sees ghosts and a deity who resides in a Bodhi tree that earns merits whenever he fulfills a wish. Based on a y-novel by Sammon (Manner of Death, Triage). I will watch it if I get hold of it, but for now... who knows how it went? 

Here’s a really interesting podcast ep from 99% Invisible on captions and captioning.

Next Week Looks Like This:

Coming in May 2023:

5/18 - Starstruck (Korea ????) - A boy has had a crush on his childhood friend for a long time. Stars Zuho (Kpop SF9 - noted good egg) opposite rookie actor Kim In Sung (the one with the crush).

5/27 The Luminous Solution (Thai ????) 10 eps - Thana is having trouble at work and in his relationship. He can't seem to catch a break. So he makes a wish to change everything. The wish has a price.

5/27 Takumi-kun Series 6: Nagai Nagai Monogatari no Hajimari no Asa (Japan) - NO ONE ASKED FOR THIS (but that has never stopped Japan before) and no, I have no idea where to get it, why would I ?????  (Say it with me everyone: Oh Japan, must you?)

2023 forthcoming BL master post (see comments, some are inaccurate, NOT KEPT UPDATED)

Defining Gut Wrenching from The Promise

Honestly you gotta be so careful who you case as the faen fatal, sometimes he steals everyone’s hearts. I caught a BAD case of second lead syndrome. 

THIS WEEK’S BEST MOMENTS

Future reviewing itself for us. 

Tiny king of the GMMTV cameo. (Our Skyy et al)

Frankly if this weren’t such a bad story, Cher might be one of my favorite BL characters. (Boss & Babe) 

(last week)

Current Kpop earworm? BTOB's - Wind & Wish (I don’t consider myself Melody but I make no case for that statement)

[faunusrights]

OFFAL HUNT REMASTERED LIVEBLOG // CHAPTER 14

IN THIS EPISODE OF THE OFFAL HUNT LIVEBLOG:

On the other end of the line, Cinder let out a tight sigh. “Yeah. Okay, well—I’m in a difficult position right now. I’m balancing a lot. So, that wasn’t, you know, directed at you or whatever… I’m just trying to deliver you to Atlas. That’s all.”

“Yeah,” Glynda said. “This apology sucks.”

CINDER FALL TRIES TO HAVE MANNERS. AND FAILS. BUT SHE TRIES.

it’s been a WHILE but i’m STILL HERE!!!!!!!!! also i’m a little late to the draw and also unlike w/ prior chaps i did actually read this one when it came out so i’ve had my first run already. BUT that means i actually get 2 Focus so lets get this party started

so we’re now entering into the New Umbraroot Arc which Frightens me on a deep and intrinsic scale because now i have no padding to ready me for whatever the Hell is going to occur, but i do know it will be gay(er) than the current content was (is/shall be) and here’s the proof

It had only been a day, but the sound of Cinder’s voice was a relief to Glynda’s senses.

glynda that’s gay. hey. hey. glynda have u been told yr a lesbian. lesbeeb. besbion--

“Not at all.” Thank god. It was one thing to be traveling with Cinder Fall. It was entirely another to have her checking in on Glynda’s well-being.

cinder: my well-being is SHIT but thankfully there’s someone nearby doing WORSE than me, which makes me feel better at least,

“Oh.” Our sounded strange in her mouth.

my favourite thing abt any gay media and content is that it’s gay in ways that hettie(tm) nonsense can only dream of being. when a story is abt a guy and a gal all the romantic tension comes from like. looking at a tiddy or getting naked or w/e the shit. here? it’s literally found entirely in the use of the word our. such power. i love it.

I went from unknown to one of Atlas’ most wanted overnight, which is charming… And also annoying, because they refuse to stop pasting wanted posters on every street corner.

i feel like cinder is the type of bitch to send pics of them back to emerald like ‘is my face ACTUALLY that janky??? my hair is a state. you think they’ll use a selfie if i ask nicely???’

Cinder hummed, affirmative. “Which would be unnecessary, if you hadn’t reported me.”

Glynda returned, “I wouldn’t have reported you if you hadn’t been committing a crime.”

glynda you snitch. you narc. you bootlicker. does be gay do crime mean NOTHING to you,

We left a funny taste in her mouth, almost as strange as when Cinder had said our. She tried not to examine it too closely.

again. look at this shit. this is real slowburn hours. this is how u DO IT.

Her heart was beginning to feel like a pin cushion with all the needles pulled out, little holes left in their wake.

would i be showing my age if i glanced at this and wondered if it were a reference to the inciting og offal hunt inspiration fic or. it does doesnt it. okay moving on.

“Okay.” And then, in an effort to change the subject to something lighter: “I’ve never broken into a country before.”

glynda’s complete and continuous inability to actually like. do what she plans on doing is SO funny to me. she’s going to be stealthy, she says, throwing a man aside in obvious fashion. i’m going to be subtle, she says, being as conspicuous as possible. she’s a disaster and i live for it.

"The Faunus." Cinder's voice was cold. "Don't speak to her."

this part of this fic is subtitled ‘cinder’s rank opinions time’, apparently. not that u can tell. but it is. dsfhgjsdfghjghfjdk

In the silence that followed, Glynda thought of the stunted horns jutting above Cinder's hairline at the restaurant.

Glynda murmured, "That’s a horrible thing to say."

"Don’t start." There was no concession in her words. “I mean it.”

“...I just didn’t expect that from you.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

There was something in Cinder’s tone that told Glynda that nothing she said would be correct. She said nothing.

cinder’s! rank! opinions! time! honestly this section victimises me the MOST as i very famously cried over an earlier section in which cinder thought abt all the faunus she grew up with, so i know that kc and diesel were looking to hurt me directly. that said i DO find it funny that cinder, yet again, looks like a pile of shit.  she can’t do anything right. naturally inclined to be the villain completely unintentionally. what a moron.

A harsh laugh. “What do you think we are, friends?”

“Well, no—um. Not really, but—”

YOU SEE. CINDER. PLEASE. £10 FOR U TO BEHAVE FOR FIFTEEN SECONDS.

“Then, just—just listen to me. I’m going to get us there. I p-promise.” There was a soft sound, like disgust or the prelude to a gag. “Urgh, your soul—give me more space.”

cinder: i’m inclined to being an asshole glynda: every time yr mean 2 me i’ll make u feel worse cinder: ah no. ah shit. i have to be nice??? ah fuck. what the shit is this.

Glynda thought of Ozpin. It wasn’t a comforting thought—more like the memory of a near-accident, like sliding on ice and feeling the world shift beneath you. It was a flinch-thought, and it would have made her miserable instead of just homesick had she not shut it out so quickly.

god the writing in this fic is so especially pristine. everything feels so real and visceral and you just know Exactly how that feels. it’s brilliantly punchy and i adore the way u get have the exact sensation click into place. it’s SO good.

She wondered if it was the same moon Bacia and Vivienne had looked upon. If they had felt the same beneath its pale light. The Great War had seen two shatterings of the moon, so perhaps it had appeared different, but… Glynda couldn’t help but wish that it was something they shared, even lifetimes apart.

👈😎👈

actually im a little nervous abt doing fingerguns because WHAT IF SMTHNG HAS CHANGED... but i think this bit is. safe. maybe. diesel. kc. am i safe,

Glynda closed her eyes and tried to feel out that instinctual power within her. Tried to know herself better. It resonated around her like a water in a tank, nearly palpable.

again this is just GREAT storytelling. i just LOVE how well kc and diesel turn abstract ideas into such physical manifestations it’s completely unreal. r y’all seein this shit???

upon checking his number, she’d discovered it had been blocked.

i love that glynda is abt as knowledgeable abt little jumps like this as the reader is. are we surprised as a reader? yes. is glynda also surprised? HELL YEAH SHE IS. SHE AIN’T GOT A FUCKIN CLUE MY DUDE.

Remembering the notes to herself not to trust Winter, Glynda opened the log hesitantly.

glynda no yr sending read receipts to yr future gf and thats a bad move on everybodys part

The indicator showed this wasn’t the first time Glynda had accessed the message. She couldn’t remember doing so. 

OH NO BITCH U ALREADY DID

“Special Operative Schnee, things are…” Glynda paused, searching for something suitably vague to say. “Proceeding.

do you see what i mean abt glynda’s ineptitude. it’s slapstick levels of ridiculous and i’m living for it.

Do you suspect she’s attempting to cross the border?”

“Maybe.”

‘sure,’ glynda says. ‘you could word it like that if you wanted to.’

“Bold of her, if nothing else. She should know there will—” Glynda skimmed through the rest of the paragraph to reach the end, the corners of her mouth curling. “—can make arrangements. Let me know if there’s anything else you need.”

HGSDFGKHJSFDGHKJDF JESUS CHRIST

its like in fallout 4 when someone tells u important info and when u click past it the main character just goes ‘uh huh’ ‘yeah’ ‘okay’ ‘sure’ ‘mm-hm’ as the text boxes whizz by GLYNDA PLEASE

Bubbles appeared, showing that Cinder was typing. Glynda waited.

And waited.

And waited.

The bubbles appeared and disappeared four times.

She flipped back to Cinder’s conversation and found that, after all that time, Cinder had finally settled on a reply.

It said:

“Good.”

i just had to pair these up for a second if only to say: dis me lol

okay let’s double back for a second just to cover this Juicy Lore:

If you’d like, I can arrange a bouquet of flowers to be left at your mothers’ memorial site. My thoughts are with you.”

For a long moment, Glynda simply stared at the screen. [...] In quick succession, she realized that it had been sixteen days since she’d met with Cinder in the restaurant and that it was soon to be the anniversary of her mothers’ deaths.

WHAT IS THIS LORE MA’AM AND MX??? **MA’X**??? firstly idk what the HELL the Black March tragedy is but im fascinated but also: did u have to do that. can ONE person in this fic not have [spoilers redacted cant say that yet no sir] problems??? no??? die. dsfhjgghjkfsddf

Glynda picked herself up from the armchair, neat and tidy, and disassembled into bed, pulling the covers up to her throat. With her Semblance, she turned off the lights. She closed her eyes.

It was quiet. Cold. The only thing she felt was the weight of her soul.

Her Scroll buzzed. Glynda answered it.

“Glynda.” It was Cinder. “I can feel that.”

okay following on from cinder’s text message, i just. love that cinder’s having such direct repercussions to her shitty shitty actions. like this is all tying together in some 👈😎👈 instances but having cinder be her usual callous self and having to literally turn around and start fucking Being Nice For Once is VERY gratifying. fuck you you lil round-faced one-braincelled baby. time to learn to have some Manners. jgdsfghsdfghfjd

She’d simply resigned to the loneliness of having no one to trust but Cinder, and then, not even having her.

... thats gay. hey lads is that gay? its gay. it feels gay.

On the other end of the line, Cinder let out a tight sigh. “Yeah. Okay, well—I’m in a difficult position right now. I’m balancing a lot. So, that wasn’t, you know, directed at you or whatever… I’m just trying to deliver you to Atlas. That’s all.”

“Yeah,” Glynda said. “This apology sucks.”

this feels like a reference to 👈👈👈😎👈👈👈 (IS IT. AM I RIGHT. IT IS ISNT IT) but also: LOOK AT CINDER GO. TRYING. BADLY. BUT TRYING. i love her she sucks so much shes such a dumbass. feel the consequences. feel them.

Glynda chided herself; Cinder Fall wasn’t capable of remorse, but she was more than capable of simple math. It seemed the worse she treated Glynda, the worse she herself would feel.

glynda: she’s doing this because it makes her feel better, not me cinder in like idk 20 chapters down the line:

(i guess thats another 👈😎👈 moment but for GOOD REASON)

There was a shift, like Cinder was rolling over, or maybe propping herself up. Was she in bed also? It triggered the remembrance of Glynda’s own physicality, and she turned over as well, searching in the dark for the nightstand and the lamp upon it. The light clicked on. The room brightened. Glynda settled in, ready.

OOOOOH THE PARALLELS. glynda turning the lights off and sinking into darkness and the void versus perking up and sitting up and turning the lights on when talking to cinder!!!!!!! POETIC CINEMA. OOF. OOF. HOW DOES FIFTEEN POINTS OF LOVE TASTE.

“Great! Lovely. Glad to hear it.” Fangs rounded out the words like scissors. A pleasant sense of satisfaction unfurled in Glynda’s chest. “So, once upon a fucking time—”

there were two gays and they were enemies to lovers but didnt know it yet. but they will be.

THATS CHAPTER 14 BABEY!!!!!!!! i LOVED this chap and i can rly feel kc and diesel gearing up for umbraroot. its great being able to like. feel the shift of focus goin on here and im SO ready to see this arc play out. once again offal hunt is the best fic ever made. this is a fact.

[doctorocsid]

THE MAKING OF PHOENIX WRIGHT’S SECOND DAY OFF

Or: The Immense Struggle of Trying to Make Decent Content

A good year and a half. That’s how much time passed between me starting Phoenix Wright’s Second Day Off and me uploading it to YouTube. What a hell of a load off my back that was. If you couldn’t tell, making this video was a bit of an undertaking, to say the least. And by “undertaking” I mean “an exercise in pure agony”. So, I figured I’d do a bit of a writeup here so I can get across to you the absolute hell of an experience making this video was.

PART 1: THE INITIAL PLANNING STAGES

The original “Phoenix Wright’s Day Off” was released in February 2018 to, though not a lot of views, a generally very positive response. Despite its janky animation, people seemed to enjoy it for its complete ridiculousness, comedic timing, and overly-choreographed fighting. Not to mention literally being the only Ace Attorney-themed Garry’s Mod video ever made that actually uses the Ace Attorney characters. (I’m still the only person to ever do that as of the time of writing. Woohoo.)

Given the positive reception and the fact that I literally ended the video with a “To Be Continued”, I was ready as I could ever be to start work on a sequel. The first one only took me a couple weeks to make, so surely a sequel wouldn’t take much longer, right?

Oh, how wrong I was. Still, I started planning out exactly how things would go. Throwing around ideas in my head. I needed it to be bigger and better than the original, of course. How was I gonna do that? Well, my initial plan was, uh, misguided, to say the least. What I wanted to do at first was create the sequel entirely in Source Filmmaker, along with giving it a darker, more serious tone to contrast the ridiculous slapstick of the first. Not a great idea for a sequel to a video that mainly relied on throwing ragdolls around for comedy.

https://streamable.com/taxrn

The original intro for PW2DO, based off the intro for “Fargo”. A lot less cool-looking than the final intro I made. (Even though I intended the video to be made in SFM, I made the intro in Gmod solely because I could just film myself driving the car instead of having to animate it manually.)

The final intro was done in a not too difficult fashion - the characters were animated in Garry’s Mod on top of greenscreens, which I then imported into Premiere and changed to solid colors. Added some extra video effects I found in places. Set it to an instrumental of Propane Nightmares. I’m proud of how it turned out, mostly. I won’t deny after I introduced the characters I didn’t exactly know what else to do with it, so I just filled it with some random actiony shots I thought might look cool. Incidentally, this was the only part of the final video that was made in Premiere - the rest of it was just edited together in Vegas Pro. Which crashed many times during editing. Fun.

PART 2: THE PAINS OF INDECISION (AND ALSO SOURCE FILMMAKER)

Nonetheless, I got to work, despite not actually knowing how to use Source Filmmaker. “I’ll figure it out as I go along,” I figured. And over time, more or less, I managed to figure it out. Sort of. And by “figure it out” I mean “become subject to the true hell that is SFM”.

Let me give you some quick background here. SFM has two main editors for animation: The “motion editor”, and the “graph editor”. The motion editor uses a relatively easy-to-understand method of animating: you select an object you want to animate (a prop, weapon, ragdoll, etc), select the span of time in which you want the thing to move to its new destination, and then you move it to the new destination. Sounds simplistic, but can be used extensively to create good-looking animation. (I myself used this method for the bar fight in PW2DO.) The graph editor on the other hand, is much more involved, depending on the tried-and-true method of using keyframes for animation. Some people prefer this one because it allows you to directly edit and fine-tune each little animation curve to your liking. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUXnpk8xDLg

This unfinished PW2DO prototype was animated entirely with the graph editor in SFM.

Really, you can use either one for animating, whichever suits you best. For me, personally, the graph editor feels like something designed in the seventh circle of hell specifically to torture me. Why does adding a new keyframe screw up all my preexisting animation? Why does adding a new keyframe make the ragdoll’s bones stretch out to infinity? Those are just a couple questions I shouted at my computer screen while trying to figure it out.

Eventually, I just gave up. I came to terms both with the fact that I wasn’t satisfied with what I was making, and with the fact that trying to use SFM’s graph editor to animate was making me want to julienne my keyboard. (I hadn’t figured out, or really even considered the motion editor at the time.) “Screw it,” I said to myself. “I’ll do in Gmod, like the last one.”

PART 3: OH RIGHT, GMOD SUCKS TOO

The first PWDO was relatively simple to make, at least compared to the second one. There were two main tools I used: Stop Motion Helper (a tool for animating stuff within Gmod itself without the need for actual stop motion or whatnot), and the classic technique of “throw stuff around in front of the camera”. I had little to no experience doing 3D animation when making it, but it worked out anyway. It let me practice some camera framing stuff, too. All I was really doing for most of it was animating the characters moving along with the camera. But for the second video, I desperately wanted to up the ante. I wanted it to be cooler. More edgy. More cinematic. Turns out, there’s one main reason that proved difficult for me. And that’s that Garry’s Mod kinda sucks for long-term animation.

Here’s the difference between animating in SFM and animating in GMod. SFM is made for animation. GMod isn’t. So, if you want animating in GMod to be anything less than horrendously tedious, you need some addons to help you. Stop Motion Helper is a neat little addon that lets you animate stuff in Garry’s Mod with the “tweening” type of animation. Simply put, you pose something in point A, make a keyframe, move it to point B, and then make another keyframe. Stop Motion Helper will then automatically animate it moving between the two points. Thus, instead of the stop motion method where you have to pose every individual frame, you technically only have to pose the beginning and end. Not that it looks very good if you only do that. Of course, like any kind of animation, it’s still something that requires a lot of effort if you don’t want it to look cheap and robotic. But it works. Sort of.

Doesn’t work too well with vehicles, though.

There were a multitude of small limitations and annoyances, however, that proved to be annoying to deal with in GMod nonetheless.

FIRST PROBLEM: Because GMod isn’t made specifically for animation, resuming a project within it is kind of a hellish endeavor at times. Unlike Source Filmmaker where you can just open a project file and everything remains the same, Garry’s Mod’s saving tool doesn’t save a lot of the addon-related data when you create a save file of whatever scenario you’ve made. That includes stop motion helper animation. While SMH does have its own support for saving animations, you have to save every single animation as its own separate file. Take the scene in PW2DO, for instance, where Phoenix shoots those cops to get the security footage.

https://streamable.com/2ikd1

There are seven moving parts in this scene - Phoenix, the picture frame, both cops, the gun, the shampoo bottle, and the camera. Note how many of these are moving in each camera shot along with how many shots there are (ignoring after the cop goes out the window, because that’s not done with SMH). That’s ten shots, if you didn’t want to count. If I wanted to save this whole scene for potential later tweaking, I’d have to make a save file for the session along with saving the animation data for all ten shots - that’s ten separate animation files for this one scene - and then I would have to manually reapply the animation to each individual moving element. 

On top of that, not everything can be saved at all just by sheer concept. The muzzle flash, for instance. While the flash graphic over the gun was added in post, the actual light emanating from it was something I had to do in-game, and it’s not something you can animate with SMH. Therefore, I had to play the animation in GMod, and then specifically time me hitting a button on my keyboard to make the flash happen at just the right point. That’s just one workaround in a program that, when animating in it, is like 80% workarounds.

But nothing about Garry’s Mod frustrated me quite as much as the final fight scene.

PART 4: THE BAR FIGHT

The final fight scene of PW2DO was the one thing that kept me from releasing the video sooner. Seriously, out of that year and a half or so, I’d say only a month or so was spent working on the GMod portions of the video. The rest was just that stupid, godforsaken fight scene. (And mostly procrastinating on making it.) Allow me to try and outline to you what I went through doing this.

Now, the fight scene went through three specific incarnations. They were all based around Maya and Athena tracking down Phoenix and beating the crap out of him, it just differed on two basic things: the location, and the fight music. The first idea I had was them fighting Phoenix in an alleyway while ABBA’s “Waterloo” played in the background. (i know that sounds silly but i swear i couldve made it work) That one didn’t get beyond planning stages - I’d kinda choreographed some of it in my head, I know Phoenix was supposed to get a crowbar at some point, but it didn’t get any farther than that.

The second incarnation was much more well-developed. The way I figured it was as such: Phoenix, after retrieving the security footage from his office, would go on the run and get on a bus. However, when he got on the bus, it’d be revealed that Athena was driving it, and Phoenix would fight Maya as they went down the road. (No comment on how Maya and Athena got a bus.) This was gonna be set to “Let’s Go Crazy” by Prince, inspired by the opening car chase scene from Kingsman: The Golden Circle. (Meh movie, neat fight scenes.) Eventually they’d crash the bus, all go flying out the window, and then Phoenix would get arrested by the cops as he did in the final video. Sounds neat, right? So, what stopped me from doing this?

jesus christ so many things

Everything wrong with this concept centered around one particular problem. I absolutely could not, for the life of me, figure out how to animate a fight scene in a bus that was moving down the road. In SFM that might’ve been possible, but in Garry’s Mod? Good luck with that one. I practically tore my hair out trying to come up with a single working solution to this. Allow me to present to you the various ideas I had and why they all failed miserably.

IDEA 1: Animate the bus moving and the characters moving in it at the same time

This was the fastest-thrown-out idea because the complexity of something like this was just too much for Gmod and an animation addon. What’s that? You want to be able to stay with the scene as it animates? No, that’s basically impossible to do. It’s not like SFM where you could just attach yourself and a camera to the moving vehicle and animate from there. It just wasn’t feasible.

IDEA 2: Create moving textures and place them outside the windows to give the illusion of movement

This one went out the window too, unfortunately, as rotating the camera to any degree kinda just seriously killed the illusion. I could’ve done the scene without the cool cinematic fighting camera movements, but… is it really Phoenix Wright’s Day Off without those?

IDEA 3: Create a 3d video of going down the street in GMOD and paste it onto a greenscreen outside the bus, and animate it rotating properly in Premiere

I don’t blame you if you don’t understand what the hell I’m talking about. See, miraculously enough, there is actually an addon for GMod that allows you to record 360 degree videos within it - and after a decent amount of finicking around with it, I actually managed to make one that seemed to work fine. It was from this point I actually set out and started making the scene - I got about ten seconds in, mostly comprised of driving shots, a neat easter egg with Homestar Runner (not something i’d do nowadays tbh) and a single shot of Phoenix beating on Maya. I was all set to get going.

And then Premiere just refused to work with the 360 video. Don’t get me wrong, I was able to animate it rotating and stuff, but it wouldn’t let me do this at the same time as the normal 2D video that was meant to be pasted on top of it. It frankly just. Wouldn’t let me. And after a lot of struggling, I just. Gave up. That ten seconds of video, trashed.

https://streamable.com/4omnep

I did manage to re-piece it together from the old files on my drive, though. With mostly missing sound effects.

So, that was scrapped. I wasn’t doing the bus fight. What, then, would work out better than a fight scene based off the first fight scene of Golden Circle? Apparently, my mind decided that would be the last fight scene of Golden Circle. Cool.

Thankfully, things went a lot smoother there, but it wasn’t without hiccups. Now, if you’ve seen Phoenix Wright’s Second Day Off - I don’t know why you’re reading this if you haven’t - there’s a chance you might’ve found the music choice for the bar fight scene a bit odd. If you’re not aware, it’s a cover of the 1986 Cameo song “Word Up”, by a German country band called The Bosshoss. This is the song they used in the movie so you’re not allowed to question me on this.

Given how western-y the song sounds, though, I had to at least make the context fit. Despite that, I couldn’t really find any GMod maps that had a good enough bar interior for a while - and I really wanted it to be a bar fight. Bar fights are cool. Thankfully, I did eventually manage to find one. This one, in particular: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=806759276&searchtext=

Yes, that’s a My Little Pony based map. I worked with what I had, okay? That was the least of the issues, anyway. By this point I’d had enough of trying to animate with GMod, and as such I’d decided to move back to SFM, but that caused a whole new issue. This map wasn’t made for SFM. And opening it in SFM just. Crashed. I won’t go super into detail of how I fixed this, but essentially I had to download a program called BSPSource so I could decompile the map, re-open it in Hammer, and export it to properly work with SFM.

Still left me with some annoying issues though, as you can see. Not too difficult fixes, though - The first one I just covered up with another corkboard, and the second thing was fixed by typing mat_specular 0 in console. Was a bit annoying that I had to do that every time I reopened SFM, but whatever. It was working, at least. (that’s something you’ll think to yourself a lot if you ever get into using SFM.)

 Anyway, things went pretty okay from this point on. You know, aside from me proceeding to barely ever work on the thing for like a year and a half. I didn’t have many hardships during it other than my own procrastination, so instead take a look at some of the funny tricks I pulled to get this scene to go the way I wanted.

https://gfycat.com/OldfashionedForkedFlatcoatretriever

Engineer telekinetically swooces his shotgun back to himself.

https://gfycat.com/SleepyShadowyLadybird

I had to make Phoenix hover over Engie to let his arms reach him without his legs obscuring the camera.

https://gfycat.com/AptHomelyGoral

The rope was way too short to reach the soldier, so I had to have Phoenix basically throw the rope in order to reach his gun. I also forgot to detach the rope from his hand afterward, so it kinda gets flung around with it off-camera.

https://gfycat.com/AgonizingScrawnyAbalone

Phoenix apparently decided for himself he wanted to go out the window.

Aside from all that, though, things finally went okay. Eventually. I managed to finish up the animation, add some extra ending stuff in GMod, and do a neat credits sequence to David Bowie music. All in all, it went okay.

And that’s it. After all that waiting, I finally managed to put an 8 minute video out from one and a half years of it not being finished. It was quite a load off my mind, for sure, and to this day it stands as my proudest video. It’s silly, has its down moments, but I can at least confidently say it’s the best Ace Attorney gmod video. If only because there is basically no competition.

So, what’s in store next? Not much of anything as far as I feel right now. I could make a third one, one day - I did envision it as a trilogy - but although I do have some ideas for it, I still have zero motivation to actually make it. So who knows. We’ll see how it goes. Maybe Phoenix Wright will escape from prison one day.

So, this was the experience of making Phoenix Wright’s Second Day Off. I hope this gave you something of an idea on how agonizing this video was to make, and totally means you should go and share it everywhere to get me more views because I DESERVE it after the hell I went through.

Seriously, though, thanks for reading, and may this post serve as a warning if you ever decide to do Garry’s Mod or SFM videos. Not a warning against it, mind you, you can make some totally cool stuff. Just be prepared to suffer a bit in the process.

[listoriented]

“B”een There

done that.

So here ends my time playing games that start with the letter B. Thanks for reading! It's been three years plus change. Back in early 2016 when I pondered how the world might look when I finished another letter, I never imagined, even from that unsteady ground, just quite how different things would become (in terms of global political-psychological landscape) - though really all the top-down drama happened that year, and everything since then has just felt like the normalisation and ratification of it, this splintered-systemic madness, the post-parody, post-fake fake-real. Or whatever you want to call it.

Nor did I imagine that it would take me so long. But, life. I went overseas, moved houses, moved cities, went through a breakup, started a PhD, rode a bike, read some books, faffed around. I anxiously played hundreds of hours of Rocket League; I ticked off every achievement in Mini Metro; I spent too long trying to remember what I was doing in Stardew Valley. I reviewed some games over at Gamecloud, which wrapped up earlier this year.  Time accumulated in a predictable but upsetting way.

Beloved demigod of gaming blogs RPS went through a full staff turnover, pretty much. It's weird, man. VR happened but remains a bit beyond my periphery, even if it gets brought up from time to time in the groupchat. Battle Royale games weren't a thing a few years ago, then they became everything, now they are still a big deal, the biggest deal, or maybe a large-medium deal, or just a large part of the background - I honestly don’t know how to quantify this. Steam's ubiquity has slipped markedly, through a mixture of managed negligence and increasingly aggressive competition. The inherent limitations of being bound to one commercial distribution system on one hardware platform have always been at the back of my mind, but I do increasingly wonder if my time would be better spent on a project that dug through other veins. The answer is, for now, that sometimes you've gotten keep doing the thing you said you were gonna do, if no other reason than because. 

Tumblr, our home since 2016, has gone through its own shifts and controversies in this time too. They no longer seem to allow unencoded links (so no-one ever knows what they’re clicking on), it became less friendly to adult content, and as of today apparently Tumblr has been sold on to wordpress. I don’t really know the implications of this last thing.

Some Maths

I played fifty one games beginning with B. Of the forty-eight that I'd deem to have some notional metric of completability, twenty-four of those I (often in the most flexible sense possible), "completed". 50%: Not as bad as I'd expected, TBH, especially as that includes a couple of painful six/seven game streaks where I didn't finish anything.

Ceremonious Award Giving for Games Starting with ‘B’

It is always hard to pick favourites, and from any given vantage point they tend to change. Nevertheless, an act of self-canonisation is in order, as is tradition. Given the nature of this project, I do put a lot of value in titles that surprise me in one way or another. Batman: Arkham Asylum and Bulletstorm were equal Best Goofy Action surprises (it pays having low expectations, sometimes), with an honourable mention to Brigador. The Banner Saga was the most surprisingly thought provoking. Davey Wreden’s autoficitive The Beginners Guide gets the Anodyne Prize for Most Enjoyably Difficult To Put In A Box. 

Botanicula was probably my Favourite (total) Revisit, or the best non-surprise. 

B was a letter characterised by a few high-budget action series (of which my favourite part was Bioshock 2 (Minerva's Den)), held up by substrate of modest indie things of varying impact. My attention span was all over the place, too. We had a lot of short forays with little to say, but there was there were also more than a few wordier attempts at thought. I'm bad at judging what makes "good" writing, particularly of my own, which I oscillate between accepting and loathing, but I can tell you which games/posts took the cake for length and effort: Baldur's Gate for longest playtime; Burnout: Paradise for highest word-count (and longest gestation period); Battleblock Theater for the most time-consuming method of putting a post together; The Beginners Guide for the most times played through a game in order to try and parse it; Braid for the most external reading and referencing.  

I think the most absurdly Expensive-at-purchase game here was Battlefield: Bad Company 2, which also gets the newly thought of I Can’t Believe It Still Has Functioning Online Multiplayer prize. I'm handing the Most Disappointing badge to Broken Age, despite (or because of) already having played it a bunch before attempting it for the list, though Before the Echo (fka Sequence) takes the Aquanox Award for game I inexplicably sunk the most time on trying to finish despite not really enjoying. I hold the Most Contempt for Breach & Clear. Black Mirror had the Worst Voice Acting, and it was also the Oldest Game here (2003), at least in terms of no-significant-alterations though depending on how you want to factor in remasters and remakes, you might alternatively give that prize to Broken Sword (1996) or Bionic Commando Rearmed (1988). Blueberry Garden was Purchased Most Long Ago, in 2009, though the Aquaria Trophy for Longest Unplayed Incumbent goes to Bob Came in Pieces, which I'd bought in 2010 then never installed (it's pretty good, it turns out!). However, the special Emotional Closure Award goes to Baldur's Gate, with which I already had nearly two decades of fond, scattered memories, before finally finishing for the first time during this project.

More Maths

When I started this letter I had 438 games in my steam library. Right now I have 1049 games, which is almost exactly three times the amount I had when I started this blog in October 2015 (~350). I've played 70 games total. A further 57 entered the list behind the marker, into the exempt scorched land of the already visited alphabet, which means we're at 127/1049 = 12.11% of the way through the list, which is a +7% increase on where we were at three years ago. That's not nothing. But at 2.5% per year, it's not a lot. Globally, the average human lifespan is 68 years.

Terrifying Implications For the Future

The maths says that the current terms aren't working, that I'm drowning in a heady mixture of my own relentless consumerism, hesitation, and procrastination from this task which is itself an avenue of procrastination - that at this rate I will probably die (or certainly give up) before even getting to the halfway point, and that we can't continue like this in good faith. 

So I'm going to get a bit reckless, even change the rules slightly, in order to try and breathe new life into this thing. All games must still be played for at least an hour - yes, that one stands. But. BUT. I'm setting a hard time limit of one week, from one game to the next, post to post. For now at least. No more lofty words about striving to "finish" games as a rule rather than exception. It's quantity over quality (pretending for a second that quality was ever a concern) from here on out, business over pleasure, irreverence over lengthy considerations, scrapbooking over essays.

On the bright side, this means I can have a weekly posting schedule. Let's say Tuesdays? Tuesdays seem like a good day for posting.

A couple of other things: 

List Oriented now has a ko-fi tip jar, just in case you, dear reader, enjoy this blog - or did before it went completely silent for the first half of this year - and feel like helping to pay for my caffeine addiction and/or encouraging me to keep going with this task. 

Another thing I want to do is compile a list of links to good places for games-writing and other things that I like, because a) I feel like such a page would be helpful for me to keep a record, even if for nobody else; b) my conception of the internet is permanently stuck in 2008 but also; c) it's hard to remember where to look for good things on the internet, sometimes, these days, given our habitual over-reliance on various platforms to direct us to CONTENT. But one thing I want to include is a list of other places where people are doing this kind of list-oriented project thing. I remember a bunch of them sprung up a couple of years back when we gained a brief and relative flash of notoriety, though I’m not sure how many stuck at it. If you yourself are doing one, or you’re aware of any others who are, Let Me Know! 

Anyway, looking ahead. C. An obtuse but interesting letter. Not so many of the big-hitters. A buuuuunch of city builders and management games, a few influential and/or janky platformers, more than a handful of puzzlers, some famed RTS series, a heap of question marks, a coupla interesting art things and a few uh *squints* Shooting Game. Happily for me, a lot of titles that I've not yet gotten round to giving a go, so this will be all...fresh.

I have a vague memory from when I got through A, of looking ahead to C and thinking at least it was a much more compact section than B, at the time, some light on the other side of what I'd already known would be a slog. But here we are three years later, and now there's fifty seven such games beginning with C, so there goes that thought. You'd think, having identified the consumerist-excess problem that catalysed this stupid thing, I would have stopped buying game bundles at some point, made this ridiculous project a bit easier for myself, a little more plausible for everyone else. 

But, we must continue. It's a new day. A new letter. A new schedule.

The way is long and it is littered with videogames.

above: “celebrating” my “achievements” with a ‘b’eer

[shxdowoforre]

((I made a banner! A basic one for my basic ass self but it helps organize things still! Now then, today’s headcanons are--))

TEAM SNAGEM HEADCANONS

(and how Snagem affected Wes)

A thank you to @tenderpoison for making me think of doing this. Because, honestly, I completely forgot that I had barely made any hc’s for Snagem! So it let me think a lot about how stuff worked there.

Snagem was founded by Gonzap and they were independent at first. Essentially just a bunch of bums from Pyrite, The Under, and any other asscrack in Orre were what comprised the members.

It was founded because, as stated on my base list of Orre hc’s, Orre’s government is a shithole and so was the economy, and Gonzap and co. wanted some damn money.

They literally stole anything and everything at first. Anything they needed for survival, or once they became stronger, anything they wanted. They stole shit. That’s just about their whole deal.

When they discovered the black market for Pokemon was hot in Orre because of its competitive battle scene is when they decided to focus on stealing mainly Pokemon. Stealing anything became kinda risky business when they tried stealing from a Trainer with ridiculous Pokemon because he battled the Colosseums all the time. ‘Cause at first there weren’t many of these types, but as the competitive battle scene picked up they were everywhere. And everyone wanted to win, and they’d pay top dollar for fighting machines.

Now, Snagem’s members had pretty decent Pokemon themselves, but they were nothing like the Orre Trainers’. They had trouble stealing any until Gonzap had to personally step up and crush some dudes to get the ball rolling. Because Gonzap is the only one who actually trained up his own Pokemon when he saw the Trainers getting tougher.

Even after this, the Snagem members Pokemon didn’t get much stronger, and they often borrowed some stolen Pokemon on loan from Gonzap to get stuff done or, more commonly, they instead taught their Pokemon moves to turn them into trolls. Status moves like Sleep Powder, Smokescreen, Swagger, etc. They began relying on these moves to KO the Trainer and just take their Poke Balls rather than deal with a tough battle. Quicker, easier, why not?

Plenty of Snagems members didn’t even steal though, because they're lazy asses. These guys would hang round the base and just laze on the couch or be general mechanics/contractors.

Snagem’s HQ is a janky hovel, but it’s tough to breach. The canyon helps a lot with providing defense, but the stolen pieces that comprise the whole place are still pretty sturdy. Orre tech in general can be as advanced as Aether’s, so with that stolen stuff they can still have a pretty tough fortress.

If you get through the front door, you then have to deal with all the crowds of Snagem dudes that will rush your ass when they discover an intruder. See: Pokemon Colosseum opening. No matter how tough your Pokemon are, Horde Battles are a bitch, and Snagem does not follow standard battle rules.

In addition to the HQ, Snagem had several points of territory across Orre that they enforced and kept other smaller gangs off their turf. There were no other set bases besides maybe the abandoned house of the day.

For the internal hierarchy of Snagem members, it started a little like this.

1. Courier/Frontman: You’re not so much a member of Snagem as you are just somebody they hire on as a mule or pretty face to advertise. Couriers just run packages to people Snagem is dealing with or other Snagem members who need it. You compete with Pokemon for the Courier position too. Wanna know why Wes is a fast runner? Wanna know why Wes has such a speed machine and can drive so well? There’s some reasons. He started in this position, and he damn sure wasn’t gonna lose it. Now, as a kid, of course, he could only handle small hover bikes, but he learned how to mod them fast.

2. Base member/Lazyass: Base members of Snagem don’t do much besides just do basic errands and stuff. Anything other members can’t do basically gets shoved onto these guys. Including the grosser stuff like cleaning up ‘the messes’. They never elaborated on what. They’d just say to go clean up this mess or that mess. And Base members gotta do it. Or they can be lazy. A lot do. The HQ doesn’t smell nice. Especially since Orre is hotter than Groudon’s Drought.

2.1 Mechanic/Contractor: These guys are still technically Base members but they can actually, like, do stuff. So they’re treated a little better, and they don’t have to clean gross stuff up! They fiddle with all the machines and make sure the HQ is in good condition.

3. Thieves/Snaggers: Aka when Gonzap actually starts to give a fuck about you. If you meet your quota. This is arguably the most valuable tier members can be, even more than Admins. Anyone in this tier is part of the group of people that are assigned to go out and steal what is needed. Don’t care how, don’t give excuses, steal it. Steal everything you’re told to, or it’s back to Base member for you. Even some Snaggers were just those types that used Sleep Powder, but if you could steal, and steal all on your quota, you could be in this tier. Snaggers are regularly in contact with Couriers to pass off the goods to, and this is where Wes first met a Snagger. Immediately, it sowed the seeds in his head that would eventually lead to him wanting to pursue a higher position in Snagem. Snaggers are often the ones who get busted out of prison. Mechanics and Contractors, maybe. Admins, yeah. Snaggers, absolutely. Base members/Couriers/Frontmen? Lol they’ll send you a postcard.

4. Admins: Usually Gonzap’s close and trusted advisors and enforcers. Strong, yes, but they don’t have to be a Snagger. If you are, you may as well be a unicorn. Wes was on his way to being that rare combo before he stabbed everyone in the back.

5. Boss: Gonzap. Duh. The toughest dude, leads only the most important missions. Pretty standard stuff. A lot of day-to-day stuff gets left to the Admins but if he gets involved, you probably fucked up big time.

Now, Snagem also has a fun little ‘initiation’. It’s actually quite simple: Go to the HQ and report to Gonzap. Thing is, they have a messenger, usually another Courier, tell you this. No nice cushy ride for you. Go get there yourself. The most you may get told, if the member is nice enough to tell the Courier, is that it’s at Eclo Canyon. Normally people stop right there and go ‘Nah’ and back out. Plenty who try never show up. It’s safe to say, if you successfully find the HQ, you now know Eclo Canyon like the back of your hand. Which is important as all members need to know how. Wes cheated a little and stalked a Grunt there after being lost, but it worked!

New members are often treated roughly and used as a whipping boy a lot by other members. Aka they’d battle and fist fight a lot. Base members are the ones who really do this because they’re bored and it’s funny to punk a new guy.

They are nice to give you a uniform, but Wes didn’t like wearing it because they didn’t have a lot of different sizes and he was too small. He got a LOT of ‘attention’ for a while because of that.

Food in the earlier days of Snagem was a little scarce, and they didn’t ration. Get to your food first and take it before someone else does. Hiding it can work, but it normally gets found and it’s always nobody’s fault but your own if it does. That leaves eating it right there, but if another grunt is upset they didn’t get any they may just fight you until you puke it up to spite you. Wes had this happen several times himself.

Now, you don’t have to eat the food Snagem scrounges up. Nobody stops you from going out and getting your own. The HQ isn’t Snagem members’ house. It’s an HQ. You don’t pay rent for it, you work. Food is considered a luxury provided when they can give it. If you do go out to grab your own, don’t think other Snagem members won’t tail you. Just ‘cause you’re getting it from somewhere else doesn’t mean they won’t still try to take it or spite you.

Earning your respect in Snagem can take a while or it can happen really fast. Normally it involves asserting yourself enough to know that if anyone tries something, you’re gonna get thrashed. Contributing to Snagem a lot is another route. If you contribute a lot to Snagem but aren’t strong, you’re a ‘Daddy’s Boy’ and they fuck with you more than if you were just a new guy.

When you do earn your respect, everyone backs off, and you’re more or less finally seen as an equal, and people generally can get pretty friendly. You are ‘one of them’ sorta. It doesn’t mean any of the bullshit will stop, but they sorta feel like you can be trusted as far as Snagem is concerned. About as close to good friends and bros as can be. As long as you stayed with Snagem.

If you turn on Snagem, they will hunt you and utterly beat the hell out of you. Probably take all your stuff too. And they won’t stop. Not unless Gonzap calls them off.

So, overall, Snagem’s atmosphere is very much summed up as ‘a junkyard full of a pack of junkyard dogs’. Come on in if you can find em, but we ain’t gonna coddle anybody. Figure it out or leave.

All this was fine and dandy until Cipher came along. They gave one special thing to Snagem, and that was the Snag Machine.

Cipher completely took advantage of Snagem about it too. They knew Snagem would jump at the chance to use it, and so they used Snagem first as test subjects with their clunky Beta versions. The ones that were like vending machines.

These things were cumbersome and ridiculously hard to make use of. It wasn’t until Wes got the bright idea to actually disguise them as vending machines sitting on the back of a concealed truck did they actually steal any Pokemon with them. But Wes saw huge potential in this technology and was eager to see where it would go.

Eventually, to ‘thank’ Snagem for its help, Cipher ‘gifted’ them the only handheld Snag Machine. But it came at a steep price. They could have the Snag Machine, but Cipher demanded they go out and steal for Cipher as well as themselves.

Snagem, essentially, became Cipher’s bitch and stole at the snap of their fingers. Wes noticed this shift very quickly and he did not like getting put back into that tier after clawing his way out of it. He wasn’t gonna be nobody’s bitch, but if Snagem wanted to, Wes would treat them like one.

Snagem’s reaction was pretty basic when Wes betrayed Snagem, as seen in Colosseum, but Wes felt nothing when he betrayed them. Wes is a product of his environment, and Snagem undoubtedly created a monster by fostering his megalomania with their system. Several things, like the literal fighting for food, and the treatment of new members, contributed to the complexes Wes still has, such as never wanting to depend on anyone. The hyperaggressive environment, in turn, made Wes hyperaggressive when he felt threatened or wanted to assert dominance. He wouldn’t have even felt a need to assert any sort of dominance if Snagem hadn’t beat it into him that he had to, lest he be pushed around by everyone. Wes had his own bad traits, but Snagem basically took all of Wes’ bad personality traits and amplified them.

[bibbykins]

A Convoluted Code

A/N: This is hours late, but here it is!

Pairing: College au! TA! Taehyung (based off of 707 of Mystic Messenger

Genre: Fluff (Soon), Comedy

Word Count: 3.2k

Summary: Technological Special Agent, Kim Taehyung, never made mistakes... until he did, and that led him to you, a mistake he couldn’t live down

It started out as just another petty job so that he could buy another computer. As if the multiple screens that surrounded him in his office plus the five laptops lying around weren’t enough for him. However, he was the best, and he required the best equipment.

The job was simple enough, hack into this guy’s phone and see if he’s cheating, but even the best make tiny mistakes.

Usually all he needed to hack into a person’s phone, laptop, and any other accounts was just a phone number, this was thanks to how connected everyone’s accounts were.

Then Taehyung could sift through what he wanted to, report back, get the money, and call it day. The customers he worked with were usually fairly prestigious, so he figured that they would be intelligent enough to write down a stupid number correctly.

And with that foolish assumption concerning the snooty, the best had made a mistake.

It was somewhere between his third caffeinated soda and second bag of chips he realized he hadn’t hacked into Seung Chanwoo’s laptop, it was yours. However, he realized this only after hacking into your laptop camera, it was then the texts he had just read from you and a Soha had finally made sense.

You: Oh btw, I can’t close it anymore

Soha: What? Why not?

You: It’ll snap right in half, and I need it until I can find the money to get a new one… or a sugar daddy that’s around my age, whichever comes first tbh

Soha: Yeah right, have fun writing your little heart out

Maybe a man and his mistress wouldn’t be talking about getting sugar daddies.

This clicked when he was met with you sleeping on your bed, only wearing a tshirt and underwear, he immediately diverted his eyes. You were beautiful, and he wasn’t prepared for that. He was now looking at your wall with several rewards on it and your high school diploma on your wall reading Y/N L/N. With crimson cheeks, he exited out of your laptop’s view from your desk and decided to do research on you, because your number was off by only one digit, and he was thorough in his investigations, and he could swear your name was familiar.

After just a few hours, he knew just about everything about your past and current job. You went to a high school he’s never come in contact with, got decent grades, and you only joined journalism-related extracurriculars, a real recluse. Currently, you worked from home serving as a third-party editor for several magazines and newspapers both online and on paper, but nevertheless keeping up with reclusivity.

It was on his fourth bag of chips and seventh caffeinated drink he realized he was nearly late for his cover job.

Taehyung’s line of work was high-profile and unbeknownst to many of his friends, he often took care of government work. Plain and simple, he was special agent Kim Taehyung, basically a spy. With such a job, the government had suggested he take a cover job to keep him in plain sight, relieving suspicions other hackers may have, since hiding is the easiest way to be found in his world.

He chose to be a paid virtual Teaching Assistant at an average college for a variety of classes from Computer Science 101 to Economics 305, he just did all the electronic grading as instructed by professors he had more credentials than. Only time to time would he have to physically be present when a student requested tutoring and the professor wasn’t there or just didn’t feel like it, or the professor was out sick and he had to lecture.

Today, he had to lecture for Computer Science 101, which he dreaded the most. The students’ work was like grading kindergarteners on coding, just ridiculous. The class only had one lecture a week, but teaching beginner’s computer science is about as mind-numbing as reciting the ABC’s for two hours, especially since most of the students only took the class to avoid a proper math class.

He hated this class.

You hated this class.

Tech-savy was nowhere on your resume. Electronically proficient, maybe, but the 0s and 1s turned your brain to mush, it made an ironic sum of zero sense, but you would crumble in Calculus, so this was the only sensible choice you had. You almost regretted it. You didn’t know a soul in the class, nor wanted to, not to mention your laptop was five years old and beginning to quite literally come off its hinges, but luckily your professor was a slightly creepy yet understanding middle aged man who didn’t make you close it during a written test,like one you had today.

You weren’t worried until you walked in to see the fine piece of man that was Kim Taehyung, dreamy TA, and most likely unbeknownst to him, distractingly hot neighbor in your nice apartment complex. He was beautiful, made his own money, and a lot considering of the quality of the apartment building you only reside in due to the connections you have with very wealthy editors who offer discounts. Nevertheless Taehyung was amazing, smart, sort of kind, and completely ignorant to your presence. Not that you could blame him, you never really left your apartment safe for class or if Soha forces you to, and even in class you don’t make a peep and make average grades, so no real reason to cross paths.

But your worry didn’t come from the adonis’s looks, it came from the fact you had to formulate a sentence to him when he tried to make you close your janky laptop.

Okay, just let him know before class starts. Go to the desk and- or just keep walking like an idiot and wait to be called out- or spend a solid minute turning forward and backward repeatedly, that works too, idiot.

Finally,you mustered up the courage to utter a sentence to him, “Uh, my laptop won’t close,” You mumbled, cursing yourself that you didn’t offer any explanation. Taehyung typed away on his own laptop, not looking at you when he responded.

“Just pull the top screen down, it’s simple,” His response was snarky at best and you flinched.

Your face scrunched in annoyance, “No, it’ll snap in half if I do.” Your voice had gotten smaller.

Taehyung rolled his eyes, not caring to talk to any of these students longer than required, “Fine just put something over it and make sure it’s on sleep mode.” He said, never looking up at you. You nodded meekly and went to your seat in the very back of the lecture hall.

After a few minutes of everyone making sure their laptops aren’t accessible, Taehyung skipped roll call as he counted and everyone was here, so he administered the test to each student, and when he got to you, he was met with a terrifying view as a pseudo official.

You were in the middle of taking off your sweater to reveal only a black tanktop that brought attention to your cleavage, “What on Earth are you doing?” Taehyung deadpanned, making you jump, since you didn’t see him near you.

With heated cheeks, you quickly stripped off your sweater and put it on your laptop and as you placed it there you spoke, “Sorry, I got a bit trapped in there,” You explained as he just put a test in front of you. It was then you made eye contact and his whole word stopped, “Thank you,” You smiled as he walked off.

It was official, Kim Taehyung had made a mistake. What kind of hacker doesn’t check what university she goes to? Or what classes she’s taking? No wonder her name seened familiar. As if he hadn’t done so enough, he stared at her, wondering how it is he never seen her here before. He was usually very good at recognizing faces and being observant, but then you come out of the blue. Goodness, he feels creepy, but there’s something suspicious about you. Maybe it’s his pride trying to avoid the fact that he made a mistake, or maybe you are a fellow hacker trying to play him.

And with these grades, his pride diminishes. He started down at your test probably the same way you had. Your grade wasn’t horrible, but the mistakes you had made was horrendous. Okay, so maybe he was just losing his pride, but he couldn’t stop looking at you through your laptop camera.

You had been getting your makeup done by Soha, who was in beauty school and needed a test face, plus she thought you needed a confidence boost as you had been viciously dumped last week, leaving you even more of a hermit, “We should go out or something, sucks I have a date,” Soha pouted, “Hey maybe he can bring a friend for you?”

You shook your head, “I don’t need another boyfriend,” You stated as Taehyung researched your past one. He was average looking, but he seemed to have bounced back quickly after six months of you two being together, “I need a sugar daddy,” Soha chuckled at your words, “I do, this laptop is killing me-”

“I should be killing him,” Soha seethed, “Sex in the practice rooms are you kidding-”

“Soha, it’s okay,” You chided and scrolled through your phone to see ankther voicemail from an unfamiliarly familiar number, “That angry voicemail lady is still there” You shrugged, referring to the awkward calls and text you had been getting for a few weeks by some crazy women. You didn’t bother answering to correct her since you and Soha had agreed she’s probably just lonely and wants to yell, since Soha’s troubled mom would do that too in the past, “Anyway, there’s better guys around the corner.”

“Or next door,” She giggled and it was then Taehyung realized he hadn’t looked up where you lived.

Your cheeks heated up, “Shut up, like he knows I exist.”

“If I lived next to sexy Kim Taehyung, I’d let him know I did,” Soha stated dramatically at the same time Taehyung figured out where you lived, making him freeze.

Your eyes widened, “Shut up! The walls might not be as thick as-”

“He probably is?” Soha smirked and Taehyung wore a smug smile while your cheeks heated and your hands flew to your ears.

“Lalalala, I can’t hear sin, sorry,” You retorted as Soha rolled her eyes, continuing with your makeup.

“Don’t you have him as the TA in your computer science class? Does he give you the eyes?” Soha spoke dreamily as you snorted while her brush made contact with your eyebrows.

“And my English Lit class, but he probably doesn’t even know we’re neighbors. I’m pretty sure today was the day he learned my name just because I got stuck in my sweater like an idiot.” Taehyung chuckled slightly at the thought, “Anyway, any word from your sugar daddy- sorry boyfriend?”

“Stop being mean,” Soha huffed.

She was with a married shit stain of a man whose wife was most definitely catching on.

“I just think you deserve better than being a mistress,” You remarked.

Soha was a notorious party girl with an expensive appetite, so rarely was she ever in a progressive relationship in the years you’ve known her.

“Chanwoo promised he was leaving his wife soon,” Soha pouted and Taehyung perked up.

“Giving his wife the wrong number like a child is not leaving her, besides what did he even give her as his number?” You asked and Taehyung watched as Soha’s face went guilty.

“Well, he gave her one that’s just one number off,” Soha stopped putting makeup on you and looked for another product awkwardly.

“That’s super irresponsible. Shouldn’t it be someone you know that won’t bother correcting…” You trailed off as it clicked and you let out a humorless laugh, “You have to be fucking kidding me.”

This wasn’t the first time Soha roped you into her affairs, and you were sick of it.

Soha bit her lip as she packed up, knowing what was to come, “He asked me if I knew anyone that was-”

“Stupid enough to let you convince them not to correct their poor wife?!” You raised your voice, “God, Soha you heard that women she isn’t crazy, she’s suffering!”

“You don’t get it-”

You didn’t want to hear it. Lying like this was something you hated most. If someone is not happy, they should leave, it’s very simple.

—- one week ago

You didn’t want to work on your piano. You wanted to go home and sleep, but this class was required and it beat history work for the time being. The practice rooms were rather informal, but nevertheless you booked one anyway. The music building was basically vacant, which made the not-so soundproof practice rooms less of a nuisance.

Except the music building was exceptionally rowdy upon entering the practice hall. You had known the practice rooms were a popular place to hook up. This was due to the assumption they were sound proof, but most couples weren’t so stupid to be this loud.

You rolled your eyes, choosing to ignore it for the time being, thankful you brought your headphones and disinfectant wipes. All the other practice rooms were filled with people actually practicing, so you had no choice but to break up the most-likely unintentional baby making session, you considered it as saving a couple’s future for the time being.

With that mindset, you swung the door open to be faced with your semi-serious boyfriend and a semi-bitchy girl connected in a way you and him had never been.

“Oh, awesome,” They froze immediately when they heard you let out a humorless laugh, “You know these things aren’t actually soundproof, right?”

Your, now ex’s, eyes went wide, “Y-Y/n, I can-”

“Save it.” You seethed, slamming the door behind you as he struggled to pull his pants up to chase after you.

He was successful in his attempt as he grabbed your arm, “Y/n, stop running!” He shouted.

“Stop trying!” You shouted back, tears beginning to well up in your eyes, “You…”

“Don’t you dare make me out to be the bad guy!” He snapped, “I wasn’t happy, you didn’t make me happy-”

“Then say it, dumbshit! Dump me! Don’t lie like this-”

“I didn’t want to face your tears or hurt you-”

You scoffed, “You think I’m crying because I loved you so much?” His face dropped, “I’m crying because I feel like a fucking idiot wasting all this time on the world’s shittiest liar!”

—-

You scrunched your eyebrows as Taehyung took note of what makes you tick, “You’re disgusting, he’s disgusting, and before I say something that I just might regret you should leave, because I hate being sucked up into your mistress drama shit,” You seethed, “I love you, Soha, but I hate that you don’t respect yourself or me enough to not do this, let yourself out.” You took a deep breath as you turned around to go to the bathroom to calm down.

Soha looked down, sighing as she walked away. Taehyung concluded fights concerning the man he was supposed to be tracking happened quite a bit. With this and the texts he had gotten from the man’s real phone, he could wrap this up and never spy on you again.

When the door closed, you entered your bedroom again and then made a move that made him eat his words, you angrily slammed your laptop closed.

Taehyung’s visual of you went black and the room was silent for a while until he heard a resounding, “FUCK!” Which resonated through his walls, paired with a desperate, “No, no, no, no, not now!”

You panicked as your laptop now seemed to be a tablet and a keyboard, both of which could not be used separately. You had work to do, which all required a laptop. It was then you determined today was shit. You’re basically friendless for the time being, and now you cut off all shots of virtual friends and good grades and work and money and to top it off, you had started crying.

Five minutes into your ugly cry, you decided you had one option, and that was to go next door to the computer genius himself and beg to have him fix it.

Taehyung noticed you were oddly silent for quite a bit, and he shrugged it off until he heard a knock on his door. He opened it only to see a red, puffy-eyed you standing in his door way, “Hi, I’m Y/n, your neighbor, may I ask a question?” You sniffled and he nodded cautiously, “Hackers can fix computers too, right?”

Taehyung’s heart nearly stopped at your words. How in the hell could you have known he was a hacker?

“Who said I’m a hacker?” He leaned against the door, “I’m a TA.”

You tilted your head, “Yeah, but you’re also special agent Kim Tae-WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!” He had grabbed you by your collar into his apartment, pushing you against the door and using his hand to support him on the shit door.

“What leads you to those assumptions?” He asked trying to keep his cover.

“The walls are paper thin and all your calls are by speaker dumbass- wait why am I echoing?” You questioned and Taehyung realized your microphone still worked and your feed was still up.

“No you’re not,” He quickly replied.

You looked to his many screens, which he then put his arm on the other side to block the view, “Yes I am!” You struggled to see past his arm.

“No, you’re hysterical,” Taehyung quipped with a nervous chuckle.

“No, I’m echoing, why am I-” You caught sight of the window titled Y/n’s feed, “OH MY GOODNESS, EW!” You groaned.

Taehyung’s sense of composure was long gone, “No, let me-”

“WHAT KIND OF AGENT USES HIS SKILLS TO SPY ON-”

Taehyung clasped his hand over your mouth, “Seung Chanwoo’s wife hired me and gave me what evidently wasn’t his number to hack, okay?”  You were still mumbling a question through his palm, “I kept tabs of you just in case you were connected to him in any way, I didn’t even know who you were until today, understand?” You stopped struggling and nodded.

Taehyung sighed in relief, letting his hand drop from your mouth, “You know what? I don’t care. Sure, whatever, I digress,” You held up your hands, “Can you fix this piece of junk or not?”

“Not for free,” Your eyes widened at his reply.

“You watched me, without my consent, and now you’re going to charge me to do a simple fix?” You scoffed, “I suddenly remember why I don’t do one-night stands, a shit time with a shit payout.”

“Sorry, I need a new laptop myself,” Taehyung shrugged, “And I spied for business, okay?”

“You have three laptops on your couch, not to mention the plethora of monitors!” You seethed, gesturing around the room, “One of the laptops haven’t even been opened!”

“I’m very busy,” Taehyung crossed his arms, suddenly understanding why you don’t have many companions.

“You know what? Fine, I’ll offer free hand jobs outside the IT building,” You huffed, “Maybe a blow-job will get me a new laptop?” You pouted as your laptop full came off its hinges and the monitor fell to the ground, “Looks like I’m putting this virgin mouth to work tonight then,” You groaned as Taehyung awkwardly shuffled to help you, but you smacked his hand away, “Just get the door for me,” He nodded, opening the door wide open as he stood next to it.

Now, you don’t know why you did what you did next, but you couldn’t turn back. Usually, you would never do this you were rather nervous around people of Taehyung’s caliber, but you were having a shit day and a bad life, so to have someone like Taehyung spy on you and act like such a prick about it, made you lose all sensibility.

You dropped your laptop, grabbed the box with his new one, and ran.

Before he could even register what you had done, you had shut your door. You locked it as soon as Taehyung touched the handle, and he banged on your door, “Y/n! What the hell?!”

“Shh! You’ll disturb the whole floor!” You responded.

“We’re the top floor, it’s just our places up here!” Taehyung yelled, pounding on your door again.

“Hey, Taehyung!” You hollered back, clutching the box to your chest.

“What?”

“Shut up!”

“Give me the laptop back!” He yelled.

“Fix mine!” You responded.

Taehyung was taken aback, “Why would I? You can’t stay in there forever!”

You laughed, “I’m a girl who is pitied by my breakup, so I have class notes taken care of, I work from home, and I just got groceries, so try me!”

Taehyung let out a growl of frustration as he slammed on your door one last time, “Fine! I’ll have it done it two days!”

[everygame]

Yakuza (PlayStation 2)

Developed/Published by: Sega Released: September 5th, 2006 Completed: February 20th, 2017 Completion: I beat the story, and finished nearly all of the side missions apart from the most annoying item-ferrying/fight a million encounters/be good at a mini-game ones. Trophies / Achievements: n/a

Yakuza! One of the few cross-over success from Japan in the last decade or so, or at least, in my own circles. The one that really stands out that it feels like people love and actually play all the way through when a new one comes out, compared to something like a Monster Hunter or any number of weird anime-styled RPG things (oh, also I’m not counting Nintendo, here.) It’s a bit of a weird one, really, considering that it was incredibly dicey that they were going to release Yakuza 3 or not, and when they did they chopped all kinds of stuff out of it. And whether or not Yakuza games are more successful than, say, an average Atlus release I don’t really know, all I know is that people never seem to shut up about them.

Anyway! I’ve been a terrible dilettante for this series and never really dug into it past this first game, which I loved, and have reviewed before (but I can’t seem to find that review now, in that I believe I did it for The Globe and Mail and it seems to have dropped of the internet.) You might ask “why play this again? Isn’t Yakuza: Kiwami, the remake, coming out real soon?”

Well, I’d say, I can’t resist seeing the progression of a series from its beginnings, and the original Yakuza is still super fun. Plus I can play Kiwami when I’ve played the rest, it’ll probably be different enough.

So! The original Yakuza, then. It’s neat! Like everyone else at the time I was hard on the terrible, “can we add some more swears here, and also there, and over there too please” English voice acting, but there’s a dated charm to it now (Mark Hamill’s performance is a bit out of place, but I actually really love literal voice of Goofy Bill Farmer’s Detective Date.) The game is also far more limited than you’d expect from a Yakuza game by this point, with the world of Kamurocho is represented in the now low-poly, awkward style of the PS2.

But the original Yakuza is such a brilliant introduction to considering the way the series split off from what was, and in some respect is, conventional wisdom about open world games. While undoubtedly directly inspired by the small-scale story of Shenmue, it’s also inspired by the PS2 era of Grand Theft Auto. Each GTA game got bigger and bigger and while they added stuff to the world, there would never be quite enough to make you feel like it was a real place, with large swathes of repetition and other quirks (who remembers swinging the camera back and forth to try and get new vehicles to spawn for you to steal?). It would be a playground, yes, but the small details didn’t matter—just the broad strokes.

Instead, Yakuza is about imbuing the world with a sense of place, where it’s the small details that you remember. At this stage, sure, you can’t go into every building or restaurant, but so many people mill about, and every restaurant or convenience store feels like a real place even if you do, ultimately, select “bento box XL” or whatever from a menu. The world is drowning with beautiful art for the low-poly aficionado from vending machines to neon signs; a perfect nostalgia piece, looking like your memory of a game like Grand Theft Auto rather than what they actually did look like (seriously, probably don’t look.)

Yakuza, by virtue of the voice acting and general style, is a lot more serious than the series would go on to be, while still being utterly ridiculous. Side stories never get “wacky” and there are several scenes of women (and children!) being hit that are shocking to modern eyes and feel like they should have been shocking in 2005 (I wince if I see something like that in a Yakuza film from the 60s.) It all feels rather bizarre when you consider that the plot almost always comes down to “something happens, and protagonist Kazuma Kiryu is forced to beat up a lot of people until they say sorry” and that “beat up lots of people” usually means something like “Kazuma breaks a man in half by hitting him with a bicycle” or “Kazuma throws a traffic cone at a man, then curb stomps him so hard he dies twice.”

It’s an awkward fighting system, but one—by virtue of pick-ups and tons of special moves—is never not hilariously fun and cinematic (well, apart from some of the bosses, which make it hard for you to do any fun stuff by constantly dodging. Foolish.) You’ll find yourself holding off from ending a baddie just so you can finish him off in the coolest way—smashing his head into a shop window, maybe, or performing an absurd wrestling move.

It’s a breezy little title, too, with the side quests so optional that you can polish it off in a matter of hours if you’re in a rush for some reason, but I was quite happy to stay in the world, beating up random hoodlums and getting involved in side scrapes for about sixteen hours, even if I didn’t bother too much with the (pretty janky at this early stage) hostess bars or mini-games.

Overall you’re probably better off waiting for Kiwami, but I don’t regret giving this a once over once again before I move onto its sequel, also on PS2.

Will I ever play it again? I’m going to play the sequel and I’ll play Kiwami, I’m sure.

Final Thought: Something worth mentioning, I guess, is that while it does breeze along quite pleasantly, for the last couple of chapters the game becomes rather… cut-scene heavy. And the plot gets… let’s say… over-complicated. Virtue’s Last Reward over-complicated. It’s a bit unfortunate in that way video games often are—where a simple story of, say, betrayal has to be juiced up with seven other twists, explosions, helicopters… it doesn’t ruin anything, though. Kazuma still solves it all by beating up people until they agree to stop doing what they were doing.

[architectureordevolution]

The Leftovers,’ Life, Death, Einstein and Time Travel Maureen Ryan Chief TV Critic@moryan     MAY 31, 2017 | 04:50PM PT This post is not the usual kind of fare you see on Variety. But then, “The Leftovers” isn’t a typical show. As we’ve been saying all season (and before), not only has it been a beautifully acted and thoughtful exploration of love, separation and loss, it’s also been surreal, strange, funny and willing to take breathtaking risks. But no matter how wrenching, weird or wry, the HBO drama has always been deeply rooted in the most powerful bonds and the most primal emotions. On “The Leftovers,” there are a number of coincidences that may not actually be coincidences, which is one reason the three-season evolution of the show has been especially strange and moving for Variety’s chief TV critic, Maureen Ryan. The arc of several characters has contained echoes of her own progress through grief, doubt, death and the kind of mysteries you ultimately have to let be. She shares some thoughts on these matters below — and you don’t need to have seen “The Leftovers” to read this (though it does mention a few tangential details from the show). But like a viewer of the drama, which ends June 4, you have to be ready to settle in for a long, strange trip. “The Leftovers” is about quantum mechanics. Don’t let the sex cults and post-death karaoke distract you. It is essentially a showcase for physics. I recently read Walter Isaacson’s biography of Albert Einstein, and it’s wonderful as a character study of the man and his times, but it also elegantly explains the science of Einstein’s discoveries. Even so, I only grokked about 30 percent of what Isaacson was putting down, science-wise. But I did understand this (I think): For all intents and purposes, at least as far as an observer is concerned, a subatomic particle might as well exist in more than one place. At certain points, it’s not quite possible to tell where an individual particle is — its location cannot be determined with accuracy. So an observer has to treat it as if it were in multiple places. There is no fixed point, no particle or phenomenon that exists without affecting something else. Einstein understood this. And yet, until the day he died, there were things he couldn’t work out about how particles and waves and light work. “Spooky action at a distance” is a gem of a phrase that came up in his work; “entanglement” is another evocative word physicists use a lot. These might as well be episode titles for “The Leftovers,” where what seen is unreliable, and what is unseen and speculative may be more important. Some people — some scientists — got angry at Einstein, because he took away a lot of the certainties that physics had been built on. But he was right about many things, and we now accept that there are states and dimensions we only barely understand. The veil between here and there is tissue-thin. This is a staple of science-fiction storytelling: The crew member or away-team officer who is right in front of everyone else, but a glitch in the space-time continuum has made him or her invisible. It’s a go-to construct because it reflects one of our deepest fears: To exist in two states. To be here and unseen. A ghost, a wanderer without a voice. All the characters on “The Leftovers,” even the sane-ish ones, exist in many places, with chasms often separating them. Some are present but unseen; some, when absent, are more powerful, even at a distance. Time’s relative, according to physics: How it passes and whether it passes at all depends on a lot of stuff (mass, velocity, the amount of wine a particle has had, etc.). The show has found ways to illustrate these highly variable quantum states, to show how far apart these people are from each other, and from different versions of themselves. They see each other, sometimes, but they often cannot bridge these gaps. And that’s OK. Sometimes all you want is to be seen. “The Leftovers” is the observer, viewing human particles who exist in many modes and places and times. They, like us, are here and there, with the living and the dead, hopeful and undone. Here and not here. Gone and left behind. (Echoes of a classic music videofrom A-Ha.) The show has never delved too far into various scientific explanations behind the Sudden Departure, but on a bone-deep level, something about the event the show describes feels right — it feels true, like it could happen. Because there is no fixed point, the center cannot hold. Death is always coming, separation is always lurking, sudden tragedies happen every day, and, if we are entangled, we are undone. We all know that’s part of the package deal of being human, and if we don’t know that, we’re taught that by time, the slowest and most exacting teacher. As I told a friend who also lost someone recently, grief is the boss level of love. (In some alternate universe, there is a version of me that has turned that observation into a smash-hit collaboration with Ghostface Killah.) In our undone-ness, we make jokes, we hug, we learn sometimes, we cry, we drink, we may get back tattoos of a fish turning into a dragon. Responses vary. We lose hope in mid-range hotels, we find redemption in living rooms and churches and the Outback. We see a truth and mistake it for the Truth and feel comforted by the imposing structure we give that Truth, for a minute or a decade or a life. The thing that unites the characters of “The Leftovers” is that the Departure confirms their worst fears: That they didn’t deserve to be loved, that they didn’t deserve a family, that they were always in an unstable environment, that, sooner or later, rug was going to be pulled out from under them. They were waiting for it, on some level. In the wake of this worldwide and intimate tragedy, they’ve split; They exist across many dimensions. Like subatomic particles, their trajectories cannot be predicted. *** I live in a multitude of quantum states. I have for almost a decade. There is a 50 percent chance that I have the genetic disorder that killed my mother six months ago. She was diagnosed about eight years ago. There is no treatment for Huntington’s Disease, which destroys the mind and body with equal indifference. There is no cure, only witness. I live in two modes: I have it, and I don’t have it. Sometimes I live in a third state: I don’t think about it. Fourth mode: Checking medical websites at 3 a.m. to make sure I definitely have it (though medical professionals frequently assure me I’m fine in every way). Fifth state: Travel. Sixth state, the one that so often saves me: Writing about made-up people who definitely exist in my head and heart. Seventh state: Listening to people I love laugh. All of these worlds, all these selves, exist at once. I am afraid and unafraid. I care more than I ever did, and I don’t give a damn. “Yes,”“The Leftovers”says. “Yes.” This show makes me feel seen. Because it doesn’t try to solve these core problems. It is a dramatic recognition of the fact that contradiction and collision define us, and may break us (or not). It is a lamp in the darkness, not the end of darkness. A lamp is a wonderful thing, but it doesn’t negate the arrival of night. There is no solution. The problem — the joy — is that we are alive. And so many people have stories like mine. Or worse. I am lucky, compared to many in this world. Professionals tell me I’m healthy, aside from a janky knee. I get to do this job, and I love and I am loved, and I have money for therapy, for trips to see my family, for tea parties with my favorite five-year old. My mom was here for 75 years. Some get half as many. But there is no fix, no medicine, no answer. Sometimes broken things (and people) stay broken, sometimes there is no good option. Sometimes choice itself is an illusion. If I don’t have HD, one of my siblings probably will. I can’t think about whether my son has it, because that Schrodinger’s box is kept locked. In the main, however, there is no escape from this inexorable truth that waits in the genetic wings. It is the slow, artisanal Departure. I want truth, not pity (though I will accept a little pity, especially if you’re buying). In all seriousness, though, it’s a form of disrespect to discount reality (and the most amazing healthcare practitioners I’ve encountered never, ever do that, and they still manage to be kind, which is a form of magic). Don’t reject the darkest timeline; like the characters on this show, I have to live there sometimes. If you don’t see that version of me, you don’t see me. But that’s not all there is to life. We laugh a lot, those of us who live partly in that timeline; it’s quite possible that we find more things funny than you do (and the fact that “The Leftovers” understands this is one of its core accomplishments). So much that happens in our weird, unexpected alternate realities is ridiculous, absurd, surreal, hilarious, hilariously sad. So many things at once. Because we humans are greedy, we want all of our states and dimensions and depths to be seen. Easy, right? Whatever our damage, we all just want to be known, to be seen unflinchingly — and maybe even compassionately — no matter how many worlds we inhabit or places we hide. Human beings can find those bonds — those momentary, subatomic collisions — in the most unlikely places: At the bottom of a well, at a dinner table, on a bridge in Texas, on a Tasmanian sex boat. If we’re lucky, our shaggy, spectacular, evolving, terrible selves are recognized in this life, once in a while. Maybe even all at once — the dream is for all of our quantum locations to be spotted. What if, for the briefest span of time, an observer could pause the hurtling energy of the universe and pin down every single place and time in which we exist? Everything seen, mapped, understood. I have had some moments like that. More than a few courtesy of an HBO drama featuring an orgy. (I know.) Those flashes of recognition are not just enough. They are everything. I wish I didn’t identify with Nora Durst so much, some days. Because Carrie Coon is such a great actress, and because this show is working on such an enormously accomplished level, Nora’s heroic effort to seem normal slays me. It’s perfect, it’s wrenchingly real, it’s a meteor screaming across the sky, one that I can see from every plane of existence. In flashes, in small moments, Carrie shows you just how monumentally difficult it has always been for Nora to go through the motions, to get through the day, to tell herself that everything is more or less OK. She’s got this. No one sees the strain, the gears working at capacity, the levers and pistons giving off steam, the boiler close to exploding. But it’s in her eyes; even when she’s silent, she crackles with ropey, alert energy. It’s so much damn work to live, much less to care. Nora can’t stop, she won’t stop, she’s afraid to stop. She can’t afford to know what happens if she does. For years after the Departure, she kept going, because she didn’t have a choice. Did she? Actually, for a long time, she chose a lie. I get it. What monster would deny Nora her lies? That she loves (loved?) Kevin, that she could survive losing her family, that she could find a new career and reasons to keep living, and that it would be OK. Sometimes you fake it ’til you make it, and who’s to say she wouldn’t have made it, if she believed hard enough, if she tried hard enough, if she just endured? There’s that great “Deadwood” episode title: “A Lie Agreed Upon.” We make these agreements all the time, sometimes from the best impulses. Nora and Kevin did bring each other comfort. She was able to love again, or feel flickers of connection. She never stopped making an effort. Sometimes a lie is just a future truth that hasn’t come into focus yet; it keeps blinking out and shifting position, like an indecisive electron. “The Leftovers” is full of people willing alternate realities into being. But sometimes a lie is just a lie. In “Certified,” Nora showed us the cost of her big lie. She couldn’t lend it her energy anymore. Past and present, love and rage, what was true and not true: There was just too much of all of it. Her resting state, underneath it all, was exhaustion. The gravity well of a black hole had hovered nearby, for such a long time. It had nothing but time. It ate time. Spinning all those plates in the air, she resisted it so mightily. Wasn’t that enough? Maybe not. It’s tiring to grieve. It’s tiring to not know. I haven’t had the test for HD, for all sorts of reasons. But I understand the desire to make a choice. I understand wondering about what something means, and being tired of the question. I understand standing on that hill, wanting to test out the box the scientists made. One state, not multiple states. One location. An Answer, finally. We saw an older version of Nora in the season three premiere, so what happened in that box? Her face looked hard, shut down. I understand. You want the Answer to be final. Nothing is final. I told a lie about death. *** My mother died six months ago. The day after Trump was elected. (I know.) The story I told myself during the years I watched her die was this: When she was gone, it would be hard, but I would have my life back and wouldn’t that be a little bit good? A lot good? Wouldn’t it be a relief? To not silently bend under the weight of so many psychological, legal, medical and logistical needs? To no longer have my life — to no longer have her life — stolen, an atom at a time? That was a good story. Not imaginative, but it got the job done. The lie helped me get through the last year of a long string of hard, deeply confusing years of self-discovery and fortitude and sadness and lightning bolts of joy. I’ve written about these years, and thelarge tattoos that resulted. One for a dying father. One for a dying mother. A dragon for something else that happened. A dragon for all of it. I had so much time. Not enough, and so much. Einstein was right: The passage of time depends on your perspective. Blink: My son is two feet taller. Slooowww motion: There was enough time to wish, from the bottom of my soul, for a different velocity, an alternate life. Frozen in amber: Summer 2015. The end of a long, hard day. Spontaneous speech was hard for my mom by then. She somehow willed herself to get out this entire sentence: “Maureen, there’s no point in going on like this.” She didn’t die for 17 more months. I am in that room. I am here. I am the astronaut, coming back to a different planet, a faster time, another life. Sometimes my mother was with me, sometimes she was elsewhere, lost in memories or …. I would look at her face and not know where she was. Don’t look to Heisenberg for expertise on uncertainty, a black hole that eats love. Frozen in amber: She tries to tell me something, its importance stamped on her face. She can’t get the sentence out, and sits back in her chair, defeated. Words are my salvation, and they’ve been taken from her. I hold every word I write tighter, like Matt with his holy books. Unlike Matt, I didn’t believe it was all part of a plan. I just wanted to be free, for so long, and I told myself I would be (and in some ways, I am). This is the reality of caring for and loving a terminal person. That’s the reality of not knowing if today the one who named you will know your name. All of it is hard on a scale you are never prepared for, and nothing ever prepares you for the next part. The ladder gets harder as you go. And you don’t want it to stop, because then they’re gone. That’s the Catch-22 that drains you dry. The lie — about After — got me through a lot. The lie was a lifeboat. Some lies amount to pretty great PR spin. I do feel good about how hard I tried, don’t get me wrong. I trudged through Mordor and I threw the f*cking ring into Mount Doom — twice. Thanks, mom and dad! Few want to know this truth: Yes, it’s all made me a better person, but I would have been OK being less good. I didn’t choose any of this. On some level, on the most grinding days, I would have been fine with being 48 percent less worthy. Maybe 70 percent. No more tests of my character, I would say to myself through gritted teeth. No more Now I Am Better Because Suffering. I see you, Nora. Can’t we just be hobbits, getting quietly drunk back in the Shire? Can’t I live in Miracle, Texas, which was spared? I wanted the cup to pass from me. It did. Time is a Judas. I want it back. Well, not all of it. Some of it. Patient: “Tell me what to do.” Laurie: “I don’t know.” In recent months, I gave up on the lie. It was a start. The other state, that fictional universe, that untruth about After — it was attractive bullshit. Slowly I admitted what I always knew — that my lifeboat was sitting on top of a boulder in a dusty lake, and it was full of holes. I was angry. Someone sold me a defective boat. I was resentful. I had been prepared for some light, pastel, tasteful grieving for mom. I am a presumptuous idiot. I’d gone through such a mountain of pain and strain since my father died in 2013, right when my mother got worse and needed much more from me. During this slow, grinding time, I grew enamored of the idea that I would get a break when she died. A release from the gravity well; the tractor beam would let go of my little shuttlecraft. I deserved that release, that hall pass. I forgot a universal truth: “Deserve got nothing to do with it.” “Jane the Virgin” is phenomenal at everything — obviously — but its recent arc about what characters have gone through after a significant death is just too damn real. “You are in a long-term relationship with grief,” Alba told Jane. I only wanted to casually date grief. Nothing serious. Alba helped me admit that my wished-for subatomic state — hovering, bouncing, never committing, flitting between polarities — wasn’t going to work. Damn you, Alba. (I love you, Alba.) *** “You are someone else I am still right here.” What kind of person asks to get shot while wearing a bulletproof vest? What kind of person writes a holy book about a dude named Kevin? What kind of person builds an Ark in the backyard? This is grief: You keep meeting new versions of yourself, people who surprise you. These variations were there the whole time, or they are new. Where do they come from? Who opened the TARDIS door? There are so many versions and reversions, so many regenerations, so many faces for the faces that you meet. Some are great. Some are mysterious. Some are the president, wearing white. Some sit on a roof, afraid. Day to day, it can be hard to keep up. These strangers keep coming, and they bear a startling resemblance to me. I don’t wear all-white or visit the afterlife or get shot. I listen to Johnny Cash’s cover of “Hurt” on repeat. “If I could start again A million miles away I would keep myself I would find a way.” I understand Kevin’s desires — to visit his other self, to be somewhere else, where the questions and answers don’t neatly line up, but he feels closer to the possibilities of both than he does in his everyday life. It’s a departure lounge for the next phase, full of duty-free gifts and intense possibilities. God might be in that realm and He might be a dick; Patti Levin might be there, she seems certain of who she is and what needs to be done. “The Leftovers” celebrates our ability to split, to copy ourselves, to take advantage of the inevitable Enterprise transporter accident — the split timeline, the dueling realities. Why not? Why not see what happens in those other realms, those branched lives? After all, what happens in Kevin’s non-life — in the dream life, the prophetic life, the death-life — it may hold a key, some answers, an Answer. Relief. At least, in the May 28 episode, Kevin got to make a choice. Fear is not the mindkiller, doubt is. It’s not wrong to wonder where the kids’ shoes went, but some questions eat a hole in the soul, like the blood of the Xenomorph burning through a spaceship’s hull. I see you, Laurie. Oh, Laurie. We talk about being there for someone. We talk about what it takes to be moral, to bear witness. We never discuss the price of true compassion. The ability to listen, to care and to serve and to respect privacy — we don’t often get into where those energies comes from, what they cost. The daily expense of just one acidic question: Could I have done more? (Yes. No. Both are true.) Every single heartbreak I endured while going to the pharmacy, buying groceries, watching “Judge Judy” with mom, watching my father make coffee for the last time, his bones brittle and wrong — yes, Johnny Cash, I remember everything. I thought the everyday aches I had to put to one side during a time of sheer survival had been dropped, had slunk away, had eroded over time. Like Laurie, I thought the memories, the hour of witness, had had the good taste to fade. Some of it did. But much of that lump of witness remained, waiting for a chance to take center stage. The boxes are packed, the possessions have been given away, the logistics of death are wrapped up. And so it comes back; the regret, the laughter, the stories, the images. The times I held their hands. The times I didn’t. Ripley is the only human being to get on her ship at the end of “Alien”; She is alone, but the ghosts come with her. (And that movie is one of my all-time favorites not for showing that Ripley was brave, but for showing that she was afraid, so very afraid. And she did it all anyway.) The persistence of memory means you’re always in in many places at once. I understand, Laurie. I understand, Nora. Two Kevins, both admitting that the reality of love made them want to flee in terror. I understand wanting to forget, and not wanting to. Bearing witness is an act of love and a rebellion against that eternal asshole, time. How do we talk about this? Have you enjoyed a few thousand words about how you can’t? We need them, but we don’t have many words that are more functional, more useful, than “grief,” “memory,” “love,” “regret,” “relief,” “connection,” “loneliness.” It’s that last one that “The Leftovers” understands in its bones, in its molecules. How lonely it can be. You can be a product of quantum mechanics — a Costco assortment of lives and times, shadowboxing with all the different versions of yourself, past and present — and yet we want more. We want to connect, for someone else to know what it was like. It’s just science. “What have I become My sweetest friend” Nora knows no one can understand her pain —and few can see her normality. She wants to know that someone understands the magnitude of her loss, but who could? And at the same time, she doesn’t want to be defined by the unique conditions of her suffering. Her eyes are lasers, shooting out a message, “See me, see what I’ve been through —but that’s not all of me.” See my mundanity too, my stupidity, my mistakes, my terrible singing voice and my tendency to blather. See my haircut and my new shirt and that I’m trying. See how much I love blueberry preserves and bad puns. See me as Judas, as a savior, as a friend. Don’t just look. See. Witness the truth and live with the lie. Accept that it’s all true, and none of it is. We explode into new selves; they mutate yet remain bound to the past. The equation of love remains vexing; all of these problems without solutions remain as necessary as oxygen. All states are possible; there are laws that control them, but we can’t penetrate the deepest mysteries. Entanglement, at a distance. Questions, always questions. Even Einstein didn’t know. Two women embrace on a hilltop. They were near each other, electrons circling an atom — and for a moment, they existed in the same space. They knew. They saw. Nuclear fusion, but for emotions. I go through pictures of mom and think of them in terms of thefts: That was back when mom could walk. That’s when she could stand. She could still talk then. A picture of her swimming with my son a dozen years ago jolted me into remembering another life, a dream I once had, a parallel universe. She always smiled at me, every time I came through the door. Until the very end, when her eyes no longer followed me. She had been my fading ghost; I became hers. She went inward, eyes on a new destination. She was looking at a ship, I think; in my mind, she walked to it, proud and tall and smiling. She went into the West. Take me with you, I said. No. I can be both places. Wait for me.