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bombshellsandbluebells · 5 years ago

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1, 2, 3 and 5 for the female characters top fives?

Thank you!! Okay, listed in no particular order and with short rant included because I couldn’t help myself. So this is long, prepare yourself!

1 - Protagonists

Elizabeth Swann (Pirates of the Caribbean) -

I love her so much. She’s so stubborn and won’t put up with anyone’s shit and is ruthless and is more of a pirate than Jack Sparrow. I love that she longed for the sea and learned about pirates in secret as a kid and then got her own ship and crew and became Pirate King!! And that her story was always about freedom and she got it in the end. I love that Elizabeth doesn’t wait around for Will to save her, but goes out and saves herself and makes her own destiny.

Tohru Honda (Fruits Basket) -

Tohru’s proof that kind/compassionate characters are not boring or less complex. Tohru feels so real; the way she ignores her trauma and grief and hides her issues to try to always appear perfectly selfless and happy is so human and relatable and her journey is really, really interesting. She’s so kind but still has so much room to grow and I honestly see a lot of myself in her.

Emori (The 100) -

I mean most of you already know how much I love Emori, but I LOVE EMORI. She’s such a fun, interesting, unique character with a really interesting backstory and unique challenges to face. I love how smart and manipulative and conniving she is. I love how she doesn’t know how to trust people and has to slowly learn how to be part of a group. I love how insanely loyal she is once she’s found that group. I love that being one part of a romance story didn’t fix all her issues, but finding community and acceptance helped her grow even further. I love that she still loves herself despite what society says about her. I love her look even if the shape and size of her tattoo keeps magically changing.

Annie Edison (Community) -

I love how Annie is ruthless, and I love how that contrasts with the sweet/innocent/naive stereotype she appears to be at first. The more you see of her the more you realize that Annie Edison will steamroller over literally anyone in her path to get what she wants, Jeff included. The hints we get about her backstory and family life are also really intersting, even if the show never really goes into it - probably because it wouldn’t really stay comedic.

Lucretia (The Adventure Zone: Balance) -

It is my mission to get more people to give TAZ a try. It has so many great characters and Lucretia is one of the best. She’s so complicated. Your outlook on her constantly changes. She goes from being a mentor archetype to possibly the antagonist to a tragic hero. She did something terrible to the main characters for good reason and you see the awful affects of it but it’s also made clear why she did it and just how awful she feels about it. She’s such a tragic character and every time I relisten my heart breaks for her more and I just love her.

Also she has some amazing lines like “Hot diggity dog, that is a baller cookie” so how could you not love her.

2 - Villains

A.L.I.E. (The 100) -

She’s probably my favorite villain ever. Every season I want them to bring her back. I’m still bummed s5 didn’t take the PERFECT opportunity they were given. She would be my one weakness to start watching the show again.

Azula (ATLA) -

Azula’s far more threatening than Ozai ever is, and she’s so flawed in such interesting ways. One of my favorite moments of her is the scene where she says, “Are the tides the captain of this ship?” because at first it seems like such a badass, in-control moment, but it honestly reveals just how much Azula’s pride and arrogance hinder her. That’s such a foolish, reckless thing to think, that what you want is above the forces of nature, but Azula is foolish, prideful, and arrogant, even if she is incredibly talented and smart. I think it’s also really interesting how they parallel her decline with Zuko overcoming his trauma, because for most of the series it seemed that Azula only benefited from their upbringing, and then you realize she’s just as messed up from it, just in different ways.

Bellatrix LeStrange (Harry Potter) -

I don’t have a rant for her, she’s really not that complex, she’s just such a fun, terrifying villain and Helena Bohamn Carter plays her to perfection.

Dolores Umbridge (Harry Potter) -

I mean I don’t like her at ALL but we all collectively DESPISED her and that’s just proof of what a great villain she is. When she showed up again in Deathly Hollows I remember just feeling rage as I read it. I was like, her??? AGAIN???

Last one below the cut because major spoilers for Fruits Basket!!!

3 - Superheroes

Nebula (MCU) -

I really love her journey in the MCU from villain to hero. The best parts of Endgame were getting to see her find a group of her own that supported her and learn to have fun and smile.

Natasha Romanoff (MCU) -

I don’t always love how the MCU handled her, but I do like the character the MCU ultimately created, if that makes sense. She’s snarky and kind of dorky and it’s such a contrast from the shallow femme fatale cliche she started as and is usually portrayed as. I love that we get to see some of her weaknesses and fears over the series. I think they screwed up with her narrative a LOT, but I still enjoy the character they ultimately created.

Pepper Potts (MCU) -

Badass business lady turned occasional badass superhero when her husband’s in trouble. I really love her visceral fear of the superhero business and her hatred of it for most of the movies. It makes sense and makes her human that she doesn’t just go along with it.

Raven (Teen Titans) -

Raven was one of my favorite characters as a kid. Apparently I like characters who are isolated but crave community and slowly learn to love others and let that love and acceptance in, because that’s part of what I love about her.

Carol Danvers (616) -

I don’t like Carol in the MCU because of writing/directing reasons, but I love Carol in the comics. I love her “fuck you” attitude that is so at odds with most superheroes and her stubborness and her tendency to punch first, talk later, even when it gets her into trouble. I love that she named her cat after Star Wars and makes really corny jokes.

5 - Queens/Empresses/Royalty

Apparently I don’t watch a lot of shows with queens/royalty, so I’m going to do a grab bag of five other great female characters that come to mind.

Aqua (Kingdom Hearts) -

KH isn’t great at handling it’s female characters, but she’s the one exception. She’s a keyblade master who tried to keep her friends safe and stop the main villain, and she failed! She sacrificed herself trying to save one of her friends, letting herself get trapped in the Realm of Darkness, and the tragic part is that she didn’t even save him. So then she wanders the RoD for 10+ years, alone, being haunted by her fears and doubts and regrets, slowly losing herself. She eventually gets saved and gets a happy ending, but the part of the series exploring her endless wandering is so interesting. She’s a protagonist of a series aimed for kids, but she fails, and she has flaws and doubts and she has parts of herself she doesn’t want to face, and she’s just cool.

Echo (The 100) -

Because I didn’t list her in protagonists. I really fell in love with Echo in s4 when we saw her internal struggle between what was right/just and what was required to protect her clan. She was a great antagonist because we still saw so much of her humanity and now she’s a great protagonist with flaws and desires and self-doubt. And she’s a badass.

Riza Hawkeye (Fullmetal Alchemist) -

Another really interesting, flawed, complex lady. Riza is a soldier who fought in war and her actions during it still haunt her and drive her to push for a better world and country, even if she fully expects and accepts that a better world will punish her for her actions. She’s so interesting.

Judy & Jen (Dead to Me) -

They’re by no means favorite characters of all time, but I do really love both of these characters. They’re just well written and interesting and the conflict between them is really interesting and I just want to include them for being cool female characters.

Furiosa (Mad Max: Fury Road) -

What an awesome character. Her design is cool. Her actress is amazing. Her risking her life to get the wives to safety is fantastic. The way the movie slowly humanizes her more and chips away at her harsh exterior to show the emotions underneath is so good. She’s got a disability and fights around it. She’s great.

Villains (Cont.) below the cut ; spoilers for Fruits Basket

Akito (Fruits Basket) -

I put this under the cut because people are just starting to get into Fruits Basket for the first time and the fact that Akito is even a woman is a major spoiler, because she was raised as male her entire life because she was head of the family. Akito is so unlikeable at first and so awful and manipulative. She takes joy in hurting other people. She has a hand in most of the other characters’ trauma. And then you start learning more and more about her and realize she’s a traumatized, lonely, hurt person and is lashing out. It doesn’t forgive what she’s done, but it humanizes her. She’s a great parallel of Tohru in that they went through very similar trauma and experiences but Tohru had a loving mother who taught her the importance of love and kindness and Akito’s mother was awful and abusive and she learned that the only thing that mattered was power and control. She’s a really interesting character and I honestly still don’t know to feel about her most of the time.

#ask game #thanks!#:)

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lesnocampoi1976-blog · 6 years ago

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pathetic-at-the-disco · 7 years ago

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What Really Happened in Myrtle Beach...

It was late June in 2006. Panic! at the Disco were on their first headlining tour, which was quickly becoming even more of a success than anyone had expected. Brent Wilson was finally out of the band and had been replaced with the actually talented Jon Walker, and everything was going great.

Except for Ryan Ross, who recently broke up with Jac Vanek and was still feeling lonely and sad about how it all turned out. In true Ryan fashion, he tried to throw himself back into the game and rebound with someone he was “justfriends” with. (It’s unclear who, but there’s no more reason to believe it was Brendon than Jon, Spencer, Greta from the Hush Sound, one of the backup dancers, a fan, or literally anyone else on the planet.)

The band had a show in Lake Buena Vista, Florida (their third Florida show in as many nights) on June 23, 2006. And... things apparently got a little wild that evening after the concert.

After midnight, one of the backup dancers named Dream posted this on her Livejournal:

Sat, June 24th, 2006

It’s our last night in Florida and let me tell you… this finally turned into a crazy rock tour… lots of shenanigans happened tonight… but I’ll save this story for the memoirs! Every night I stand on stage and tell the crowd that Brendon is a virgin… let’s just put it this way… it ain’t true!!!!

This information is unsurprising, since Brendon was already partying heavily after shows during this tour. This was to the exasperation of his other bandmates, who did not drink or otherwise involve themselves in the party scene. It’s likely that Ryan, Spencer, and Jon weren’t even privy to what inspired Dream’s post in the first place.

Ryan Ross, for example, was spending his evening with someone. And that night, Ryan, known as i_amclandestine on Livejournal, also wrote a post:

Sat, June 24th, 2006

I’m the ghost in the bed.you can touch because i can’t rest. and the lights are always off so I can mold you in the dark.i can shape and pretend.”i just want to have a good time, just like everybody else, but i don’t want to fall apart”

The quoted part is a reference to the lyrics of “Good Time” by Counting Crows, a morose song about wanting to be closer to a romantic partner.

Clearly, whoever Ryan was with that night was making him more upset than anything. He was trying to lose himself in someone, hoping to forget his problems, and realizing that it wasn’t working.

The tour went on, though. Everyone piled back onto the bus and drove to their next gig, which was scheduled for that night at the House of Blues in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina (pictured below).

The show went off without a hitch, and everyone was in a fantastic mood. The band even signed some autographs and let the fans take pictures of them after the concert (note the House of Blues sign and the building’s distinctive facade in several of the photographs).

And shortly after this, the members of Panic! at the Disco and the Hush Sound, in addition to their dancers and crew members, were feeling so good that they decided to walk a mile to the beach and go swimming in the ocean, followed by more shenanigans.

This experience was immortalized in an interview with Greta from the Hush Sound:

Q: Tell us about your craziest touring experience.

A: On the 2006 Panic Tour, we played the House of Blues in Myrtle Beach [JUNE 24TH]. After the show, most of the bands and crew walked a mile to the beach and, having not brought our swimsuits, decided to swim in underwear or totally nude. Bob and I opted to skinny dip and, at one point, he was trying to get back to the shore but the waves were crashing over him and he was gasping for breath. I yelled to him, 'Bob, are you going to live? As much as I want to help you, we are both naked so I can't.' (Would have been far too awkward). Thankfully, he survived in one glorious piece.

This sequence of events was also referenced in another Livejournal post from Dream:

Sun, June 25, 2006

Last night we played in Myrtle Beach, NC… I’ve always wanted to go to Myrtle Beach so it was fun to finally get there and to do it in such a special way. The girls we meet at the show were amazing. They were so spirited and friendly. They were fun.

After the show Greta and I, she’s the lead singer and from the The Hush Sound (the band we’re on tour with and in love with…!) well we decided we wanted to go for a midnight skinny dip in the ocean after the show and in the end more then 20 of us made the mile hike to the beach, stripped down and dove in! it was magical under the stars and moody clouds above. After about an hour splashing and riding the waves we all broke into the pool and hot tub of the condo up the beach to wash the salt away and laugh at our genius of managing to sneak so many crazies into this spa without being caught… just as the security arrived and we all scattered like geese! It was a fun night.

At around 4:30 in the morning, Ryan also made a Livejournal post (his last, in fact). It’s notorious in the fandom and everyone has read it, but here it is again:

Sun, June 25, 2006

The moon bred new Atlantic life tonight.the salt burned you right out of my eyes.and secrets we’re not proud of were taken with the tide. We were all newborns with blurred vision and no sense of direction.

Today I saw cancer, cigarettes and shortness of breath.

this is why I walk to the ocean.swim with jellyfish.I may never get this chance again.

this is why if you want to kiss you should kiss.

If you want to cry you should cry, and

if you want to live you should live.

You don’t have to love me. You already did. At least enough to keep me smiling from South Carolina to Virginia.it’s for lovers (orjustfriends)

This is why I do it.

Clearly, Ryan was feeling better than he had the previous night. Whatever happened in Myrtle Beach was enough to make his outlook on life a little more optimistic, at least for a night.

It is imperative to point out again that there’s no reason to assume it was about Brendon (who also had an active Livejournal account at this time and didn’t post at all about Myrtle Beach or Florida. If it was about him and was apparently so special and romantic, don’t you think he would have said something?). We don’t know who Ryan wrote this about, but that doesn’t make his poem any less meaningful or beautiful.

Basically, the lesson to be learned here is that even though it theoretically could have been about Brendon or Jon or Dream or a fan or whomever (as none of these can be proven or disproven), at the end of the day it’s foolish to attach it to a specific person without proof. The world will probably never know who Ryan’s rebound was, and that’s fine!

Assuming that it automatically points to Ryden is confirmation bias, which is not actually a valid reason for believing something. (I know, shocking.) You may as well say that Ryan was definitely having an intense affair with Spencer. Or Brent. There’s as much evidence.

Thank you to @future4angelz for requesting this post! It’s a bit tricky to specifically disprove the Ryden conspiracies because so much is unknown here, but I hope I did well enough at convincing people not to read too much into things. (Also, most people think Dream’s post from the 24th is about Myrtle Beach, even though she says they’re in Florida. Use your critical thinking skills, everyone!) :)

~Mod C

P.S. We don’t ship Ryden. Just thought I’d clear that up one more time for the people in the back, haha.

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stompsite · 6 years ago

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Dreaming Of Another World

It was all Narnia’s fault.

I grew up in a deeply religious family, one that eschewed ‘worldly’ media for the religious variety. I remember Dad dragging us out of a showing of the Lion King one rainy September day--I think we’d gone to one of those theatres where the tickets were cheap and they only showed movies that had been out for a long time because my family was thrifty like that--because he was furious. Some time later, he explained to me that Disney was trying to brainwash us with “New Age Philosophy,” and he was angry at the spirit that tried to do it to us. Not a great birthday memory for me.

But Narnia? It had magic and monsters and demons and werewolves, and for whatever reason, we were allowed to watch it whenever we went to Grandma’s house. My parents drove us up to Independence, Missouri every few months for something called Enzyme Potentiated Desensitization, where we would stay with grandma and watch Narnia. EPD was an experimental allergen treatment that was banned in 2001.

I remember drinking water with bismuth in it and eating an awful meal that had the consistency of literal shit. This was supposed to help us get over our allergies, but I think the treatment was far worse. We weren’t allowed to eat many things, and most of what we could eat was disgusting, so most of the time, we laid around, sick, feverish, and vomiting, and we ate reheated french fries from Wendy’s (McDonald’s wasn’t allowed due to the oil they used), and we watched all of Grandma’s old movies.

My favorite one was The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, a movie about kids who escaped the horrors of World War II by traveling to another dimension where it was always winter and a cruel, monstrous witch ruled with an iron hand. Eventually, thanks to the help of the Christ-like Aslan, they overthrew her.

It was a dark movie, a far cry from the generally happy, low-intensity religious movies Mom let us watch. Aslan died, y’know. It was, to 8 year old me, the most incredible thing in the world. Later, I read the rest of the books, and I loved them too. My favorite was The Silver Chair, the darkest and least hopeful book of all. No one book had more of an impact on my artistic sensibilities than The Silver Chair. Real stakes! Real pain! Hope! Triumph! All the good stuff.

When I was 10, I found Digimon.

I was hanging out at Hyram’s place watching The Magic School Bus, a show that we weren’t allowed to watch at my house because of the magic. Hyram’s family, being Mormon, had a more enlightened--so it seemed--outlook on the world, being okay with sci-fi and fantasy stories that my parents forbade us from seeing. So there we were, watching The Magic School Bus, and the commercials came on, and Fox Kids aired a commercial for Digimon (Adventure 01, Episode 28, in case you were wondering--the one with the ferocious Devidramon).

Digimon was even darker than Narnia. It’s villains were literally Satan and a Vampire. There’s an episode where one of the kids is told her mother doesn’t love her and as a result, she’ll never be able to help her friends. There was drama, self-doubt, pain, misery, and, in the end, the kids overcame the darkness that opposed them and triumphed.

Over the years, I found increasingly creative ways to catch my Digimon fix, going to the church next door with a cable I’d found to connect to the TV so I could just barely catch Fox 24 when it was broadcasting. When Digimon stopped airing, I desperately searched for a way to download the show online, which led me to IRC, which took me to roleplay forums, which led me to Kotaku comments, and finally Twitter, which is where I know most of you from.

I realize this may all sound very self-indulgent, and I’m sorry for that, but I feel it’s important to establish the personal context here. I love these stories about going to other worlds and experiencing things that our worlds could never give us. The stories acted as a kind of meta-transportation, a way of letting me escape the frustrations of my own life.

When I finally made the transition from cartoons and books to video games, everything seemed to snap into place. Games were the closest thing I’d ever found to actually visiting Narnia or the Digital World. My friend Robert introduced me to Halo in his trailer home. My parents gave me Microsoft Flight Simulator, and it was like being able to fly planes in real life, so much so that when I eventually attended flight training, my instructors told me I flew like someone with thousands of hours under his belt.

Games let me go places.

Games let me see new things.

So, one day, in early 2007, I found a copy of PC Gamer with Bioshock on the cover in the Wal-Mart magazine aisle. I remember furtively browsing the issue, making sure Mom didn’t suddenly round the corner and catch me reading it. The game looked incredible, but I was focused more on roleplaying forums at the time, and I forgot about it until that fall, a few weeks after it came out. CompUSA was going out of business and was selling off their games. I couldn’t game at home--our computers were old Boeing surplus and ran the Half-Life 2 Ravenholm demo like a slideshow--but with a portable hard drive I’d purchased and hid in the ceiling tiles of my bedroom, I could play them at the university I was attending.

So I did.

First person games appealed to me because they let me experience the game worlds as though they were real experiences. It was the closest thing to going to another world; third person games didn’t elicit the same response, so I didn’t play them as much. I was a big fan of the Age of Empires: Rise of Rome demo that came with my copy of Microsoft Flight Simluator, though. But it was the first person games, the ones I found on Maximum PC demo discs, that really mattered to me. I’d played hundreds of hours of Unreal Tournament 2004, Call of Duty, and even Far Cry.

When I played Bioshock, everything changed. I had to get my own computer. Had to. I moved out in late December to go learn to fly at K-State Salina. Got really sick that spring--my illness was just starting to reveal itself--and I flunked most of my classes. I was so sick most days I couldn’t leave the house. Got diagnosed with severe social anxiety disorder later. Only left the house at night unless I had classes, when I could make it to them at all. I’d earned enough money the previous fall to build myself my own computer.

I played games.

Bioshock had led me to System Shock 2. I pirated a copy of STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl because I’d seen the disc at CompUSA (alongside Blacksite: Area 51) but only had the cash to buy Bioshock and The Orange Box without my parents noticing. I played FEAR and its expansions. All the Half-Life games. Crysis. Call of Duty 4. It was a great time to experience a lot of amazing first-person games.

System Shock and STALKER were the biggest influences.

When I moved back that summer, I scrounged and saved and used the last of my savings to buy STALKER: Clear Sky and Crysis Warhead. I played them while living in the unheated camping trailer my parents used to own (it was cheaper than paying for dorms whenever we attended church camps). It was cold. I could see my own breath most days. I got a job at Office Max and used it to buy a copy of Far Cry 2. A few weeks later, I picked up Fallout 3.

If you’re familiar with these games, you’ll notice a lot of them have things in common. They do interesting things with the game world. Many are heavily systems driven compared to their contemporaries. STALKER’s world especially feels completely alive. System Shock 2 does a bangin’ job of making you feel like you’re really exploring an abandoned spaceship. Far Cry 2’s systems-driven gameplay is fascinating and influences designers to this day. Fallout 3 has one of the best ecosystems in a video game, with enemies who you can wound and terrify and allied characters who will come to your aid.

Even Blacksite: Area 51 was a fascinating game. It had this cool morale system that had your soldiers responding to your commands and combat prowess in ways that, at the time, felt believable and awe-inspiring. In Crysis, if you dropped an unconscious man in a river, he would die because he drowned. Incredible. It felt real.

The games that shaped my experience took me to other worlds, shaping my perception of what games could be in a very specific direction. As someone who’d grown up reading the old Microsoft Flight Simulator tagline “As real as it gets,” I felt right at home.

I tried other games, like Nintendo’s platformers or controller-centric spectacle fighters like Devil May Cry 3, but I didn’t like them. They were too obviously games. You got points. Everything was abstract. I was playing. I wasn’t going anywhere.

As my health declined, the importance of traveling to other places increased. The mark of a good game for me became one where I could forget about the world I lived in and exist in another world. I’m reminded of Lord Foul’s Bane, a book in which a writer with leprosy is transported to another world where he is healed of his leprosy. Games provided me that escape, especially the immersive ones.

Ah.

Right.

That word.

Immersion is nothing to be afraid of. Some people say that any game can be immersive, because one of the meanings of the word is roughly analogous to “engrossed,” but the English language is weird and tricky and sometimes two words share the same meaning in the dictionary but mean very different things.

To be engrossed in something is to have your attention completely arrested by it. To be immersed in something, well… when you’re immersed in water, you are literally, physically inside of it. You are a part of the water, as much as you can be.

I was seeking out immersive qualities in games without really understanding it. I would learn that some of my favorite games in the genre were literally called “immersive sims.” Some people will argue that they are not engrossed by those games, so they cannot possibly be immersive, but I’d argue that when you’re immersed in something, it surrounds you, you’re inside it. Whether or not it grabs your attention is up to you.

When a game is immersive, it might not grab your attention, but it’s doing its best to create a living, breathing world. When you drop an unconscious man in water, he drowns because that is what would happen in real life. When you perform well in combat, your allies rally around you. When you shoot an enemy in the leg, he limps.

An immersive game is one that does its best to represent a cohesive reality.

If you don’t believe me, go listen to Paul Neurath, a founder of Looking Glass, a studio that made games like System Shock and Thief, talk about why they made the games they did. Look at the cool attempts at simulation elements in games made by LGS alumni, like Seamus Blackley’s Jurassic Park: Trespasser, or Warren Spector and Harvey Smith’s Deus Ex. Emil Pagliarulo got a job at Bethesda and has a senior role (I forget what it is, exactly, sorry) on simulation-heavy games like Fallout 3 and Skyrim.

Heck, the Sega 2K Football games were praised as having some of the most sophisticated and realistic AI in sports games before the NFL decided it wasn’t cool with yearly games being priced at a sub-premium price point. Marc LeBlanc worked on the AI for those.

The way I heard it, Looking Glass made flight simulators with realistic physics (I believe that was thanks to Blackley’s background as a physicist). At some point, the folks at Looking Glass thought it would be cool to take Dungeons and Dragons style tabletop and make a game out of it, but instead of building something like the isometric Ultima, they’d apply the flight simulator logic to it. The whole thing would be first person, and you could treat it like you were really there. Their publishing partner decided this new game should be an Ultima game, so Ultima Underworld was born.

After that, Looking Glass made a mix of flight simulators, golf games, and weird first-person games that took you to other worlds. System Shock put you on a space station. Thief let you do exactly what it said on the cover. Terra Nova was… well, read this piece on Rock, Paper, Shotgun. All of these games were fascinating and transformative, even if they had weirdly inaccessible control schemes.

Eventually, the studio died. Sony and Microsoft passed on buying them, Eidos made some poor financial decisions and couldn’t pay them. Talent moved off to other studios. Eventually, they shut down.

A few developers tried to carry the torch. Ken Levine’s Irrational games released Bioshock, which was like the bro shooter version of System Shock. Ion Storm Austin produced Thief 3 and two Deus Ex games. Bethesda’s work has become increasingly Looking Glass-influenced over the years. Clint Hocking’s Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory and Far Cry 2 clearly learned from Looking Glass’ games as well.

Over in France, a guy named Raphael Colantonio founded a studio called Arkane. They made a game heavily inspired by Ultima Underworld called Arx Fatalis. Then they made another one, called Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, using a Ubisoft license.

As game tech got better, simulation elements became more pronounced. The German Yerli brothers unsuccessfully pitched a neat dinosaur game, but eventually managed to convince Ubisoft to publish Far Cry and EA to publish Crysis. Their games are mostly known for their graphics tech, but I’ve always been fond of their intriguing stabs at realism; on its highest difficulty, Crysis’ enemies speak Korean, making it difficult for most players to understand their callouts. Crysis lets players use the game’s physics to enhance its combat, collapsing buildings on enemies or leveling foliage to give them access to easier sight lines. I wrote about one of my favorite levels here.

Bioshock brought the attention back, though. Even though it wasn’t very simulation heavy, it gave players that sense of presence that so many had been craving. Some developers stumbled; Far Cry 2 is beloved by game designers but wasn’t the critical or commercial success Ubisoft hoped. STALKER was one of the buggiest commercial games I’ve ever played, capable of crashing if you so much as blinked, so it didn’t sell as well as THQ would have liked, and GSC Game World sought a new publisher for Clear Sky, then shifted to yet another publisher for Call of Pripyat.

Fallout 3 had more simulation elements than most of its contemporaries and, I’d argue, did a better job presenting a living, breathing world than any other game of its generation, but people were too busy being mad that it wasn’t a classic isometric RPG to notice.

So, this is where my head was at when I entered into the world of immersive sims. I was fascinated by simulation elements, in love with the idea of exploring other worlds, and, most importantly of all: I needed an escape from my health. Immersive games, some of them sims, some of them not, provided the escape I craved.

In 2011, I downloaded the leaked demo of Deus Ex: Human Revolution. I’d been mowing the lawn and was going to take a shower before sinking my teeth into it, but it was so engrossing that, before I knew it, five hours had passed and I’d played the entire thing. As soon as I scraped the cash together, I bought myself a copy. It was the first game I’d been able to afford in years.

I loved it.

The next year, Arkane roared back to life with Dishonored, which was one of my favorite games, not just because it’s really fucking good, not just because the world is fascinating and creative, not just because Harvey Smith, the man responsible for Deus Ex and Blacksite (he deserved better treatment from his publisher on that one; if they’d had more time, I think it would have been rightly hailed as a masterpiece; as it stands, it’s a fascinating thing that I love to pieces), partnered up with Arkane to make it, but because it helped me get my first writing gig.

If you wanna read my thoughts on Dishonored, check it out here.

And yet…

Something felt off.

Not about Dishonored, but about the conversation surrounding immersive design. I’d read posts by people who talked about the importance of design, who placed a weird focus on systems-driven design, who seemed to think that immersive games were stealth games and nothing but.

Before Dishonored and Human Revolution, I recall reading one of the foremost voices in immersive design discourse proclaiming the genre was dead because Looking Glass and Ion Storm had shut down. He argued, while Fallout 3 was selling millions of copies, that immersive sims were dead because they weren’t commercially viable. Many agreed with him.

After the apparent sales failings of Prey (Arkane), Dishonored 2, and Mankind Divided, I’ve heard those conversations picking up again.

I think they’re wrong, and I’d like to try to explain why.

I think a lot of the people who talk about immersive sims, focusing on immersive design and talking about what these games should be, tend to get hung up on Very Specific Details without looking at the bigger picture. Go watch the Underworld Ascendant Kickstarter pitch video, and you’ll hear Neurath talk about how important it is to solve problems logically. Go listen to a lot of the immersive sim fans talk about games, and you’ll hear them talking about… well, other things.

One thing I feel like I see a lot is an emphasis on stealth mechanics. That’s great! I love stealth games. But I’d argue that stealth is not an important part of immersive games. Some people have told me that they don’t think Bethesda games are immersive sims because the stealth in those games is nowhere near as in depth as Thief. Maybe, maybe, but here’s the thing:

I think you could make an immersive game where you’re 12 years old and you’re visiting your grandparents at their farm on an island somewhere, and the entire game is just about being a kid exploring a little seaside town and making new friends. I think you could catch fireflies and go to the library and go fishing and do all sorts of things on an island that feels just as alive as STALKER, without actually doing any stealth.

But if you go play Dishonored or Deus Ex: Human Revolution, or the Thief games, or whatever, you’re going to have the immersive sim community types talking about how important stealth is. Thief is good, but get over it. It’s just one manifestation of a broader genre. Stealth is GREAT. Dishonored so good I will buy any Dishonored game sight unseen. I would kill to get a job working for Arkane, even if it was like… as a janitor or something. I love those people and I love their games.

I think the emphasis on stealth is part of the reason a lot of these games have failed. I love stealth games for the same reason I love horror games; they’re high-intensity, high-stakes games that, when you play them well, make you feel like a real master. I’d also argue that stealth is exhausting. Maybe I’m more attuned to this than most due to the whole chronic fatigue thing, but like…

In a stealth game, success can feel like failure. You’re constantly feeling the pucker factor. If you are seen, you fail, even if the game doesn’t actually have an instant failure state. When I get seen in Dishonored, I have to fight. Fighting is really fun, but getting caught means I wasn’t able to do what I wanted to; I messed up. I’m a failure. A lot of stealth stuff ends up feeling like constantly being on edge and failing because you had to kill like 5 dudes who saw you. I played Hitman last night and every time I killed or choked out someone who saw me, I just wanted to start the whole thing over.

I’d argue that most people feel this way when playing stealth games. They don’t like the stress. A little stealth is nice, especially in a game like Far Cry 5 where you can approach a base with a sniper rifle and take out like 6 dudes without them noticing you, but getting into a firefight afterwards feels fun and purposeful too, so you get a nice mix of occasional stealth and action. I think that’s probably why Far Cry 5 is the best-selling video game of 2018 so far (Red Dead releases tomorrow).

I love that we’re making stealth games with immersive elements, but I think we’re making a mistake when we assume that immersive games must be stealthy ones. There are so many games that claim to learn from immersive games--Mark of the Ninja, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Wildfire, Quadrilateral Cowboy--and they do, but they’re also so very focused on stealth (the ones I’ve played are all among my favorite games, by the way! Please don’t think of this as a knock against them!). I can’t think of any game that claims to be influenced by immersive sims that doesn’t have stealth.

Stealth is a verb (short version: game design speak for ‘thing you can do’). It is not the genre.

Then there’s the whole “design” thing. Mario games are exceptionally designed. Each level is a unique, bespoke challenge, stacking mechanics on top of mechanics and helping you develop your mastery over the experience. This design comes at the expense of… well, I’ll get to that later. For now, I’ll just say that Mario Feels Like A Game.

That’s not a bad thing, but, like, you’ve got this for, so you know what I’m about. You can see why that might not appeal to me personally.

Buuuuuuut… a lot of the newer, like… I don’t know, it’s weird to call them “design-focused,” because all games are designed, a lot of these newer immersive sim type games seem focused on that kind of immaculate design. Walk into the bank in Deus Ex: Mankind Divided and you’ll see The Person You Can Talk Your Way Past If You Have That Skill, you’ll see The Lasers You Can Sneak Past If You Can Turn Invisible, you’ll see The Vending Machine You Can Lift If You Have The Strength Ability, and you’ll see The Air Vent You Can Crawl Through To Get To The Computer You Can Hack If You’re A Hacker.

Mankind Divided will give you The Most Experience Points for playing this without being detected and without killing anyone.

Suddenly, you are incentivized to treat the game like a game because it is objectively better for you to approach all objectives in a specific way. Heck, in Human Revolution and Mankind Divided, after you’ve nonlethally subdued everyone in a room, you can hack all the computers (even if you have a password) and crawl through all the vents (though there’s no reason to) for Maximum Points. It… it makes no sense. You’re not trying to be a part of the world. The game rewards you for engaging with it on a level that must recognize the game as an illusion.

It’s not the only game. I loved Prey, but I got the sense that I was being graded as I played, which meant I started playing more to the game’s expectations of me rather than how I felt I ought to act. Look, I grew up in a family environment where people were sneaking up on me to see if I was acting righteously. I grew up in a church where I was paraded in front of two hundred kids and told that I had The Devil in me because my pottery had shattered in their shoddily-built kiln and destroyed most of the rest of the pottery. I am so fucking tired of being judged, so exhausted of having to act a specific way to avoid being treated like garbage, I don’t want games to do it to me too. I just want to act in a way that feels appropriate.

In Eidos Montreal’s immersive sim games (and most immersive games, for that matter), I felt like I was running into The Metroid School of Design, in which a player is unable to progress through a level without the right tool, with one key difference: there are multiple tools you can use to progress. Four routes into the same room, every room, all the time.

This creates a sense of artifice. When I see a bunch of chandeliers and mysterious, architecturally suspect vents that show me an obvious route through a map, I see the designer’s hand. I see that the designer has planned all these routes for me. They have planned for any eventuality. They want me to sneak my way through this room, regardless of the skills I have at my disposal.

I can play their game in just one way. I can ghost-stealth it perfectly and get The Good Ending, or I can Violence Through It and get less progress points and The Bad Ending. If I am a hacker, there will always be a door to hack. If I am a fighter, there will always be a man to fight.

Oh, sure, the best games will give you a dozen tools that can be combined in really interesting ways, but someone has figured out what all those tools are and designed each level to perfectly accommodate every. Single. tool.

Every level is a puzzle, and puzzles are designed by a human with the intent to solve them. You don’t need to be creative--heck, sometimes, being creative is actively discouraged--because all you need to do is figure out what the designer wanted you to do and do it. Ah, I have tools X, Y, and Z? I know exactly where I’m supposed to deploy them. See, there’s the path you can blink through and the door you can bypass with a specific tool or the fish you can possess to swim through.

And… I cannot stress this enough:

It’s not bad.

It’s good.

It’s very good. I fucking love these games. They mean the world to me. They do.

But can you see how that might not be what I was looking for, and how I feel that’s… quite a long way removed from what Looking Glass was trying to do? Instead of solving solutions in a natural way, these games have created very nice puzzle worlds. As someone who loves puzzles, this is wonderful, but as someone who loved what Looking Glass and STALKER were doing… I can’t help but feel my own needs and interests aren’t being met.

I mentioned I was playing Hitman. I love it. I love it to pieces. I just did a Suit Only, Silent Assassin run and it was thrilling. But, like… I knew the route the guy would take. I knew The Device that I could interact with to take him off his path. I didn’t feel like I was improvising; instead, I was looking at one of several dozen ways the designers had very carefully placed in my path.

I can see you, designer. I know you’re there.

I couldn’t see the designer in STALKER. Everything felt natural to me. I woke up in a bunk. I met Sidorovich. He asked me to run a job for him. On my way to the job, there were dead animals and a wounded Stalker. He asked me for a med kit. I gave him the med kit. He became my friend. I joined a few Stalkers and we took out a bandit camp.

This will happen in every playthrough. It has been designed. I get that. But it wasn’t like a designer came in shouting PLAY YOUR WAY, ALSO THIS IS A STEALTH GAME, right? I could take out that encampment however I wanted. The more I play, the more tools I find. Sometimes, they randomly pop out of an anomaly. Other times, I find them on the corpses of people who died in a brutal gunfight. In Clear Sky, the gun you wield in the opening cinematic can be found right where you left it. It’s broken, but you can find a man to repair it, and later, you can get ammo for it by eliminating high-level enemies.

If someone says “hey, please help me take out this facility,” that’s all the direction you have. How you take it out is up to you. Stealth it? Sure. Lead mutants to it? Absolutely. Come in under cover of night or rain? You bet. STALKER’s verbs might be limited, but the game itself is so much more flexible. Sneak in through a crack in the wall or charge the front gate.

You play your way, but “your way” doesn’t mean four skill trees, it means “here’s a real, tangible space, with no hint of the designer’s hand. This feels real, like it actually exists in the outskirts of Chernobyl. There are bad men inside. Go get them, using whatever tools you have available to you.”

STALKER feels natural.

In fact, if there was one word I’d use to describe my ideal immersive game, “natural.” Would be that word. When I play Far Cry 2, I am playing a Designed Game. This is the Friendly NPC Zone. There are no friendly NPCs outside it. You can safely kill everyone because they’re bad. Everyone hits hard, so it’s best to snipe them. Make sure to go to the safe house, which looks exactly like all the other safe houses (and has the exact same supplies plus one unique bonus gun) to engage The Buddy System™, recharging your Buddy Meter® so your Buddy® will come to your aid when you go down One Time. If you go down a second time, he will die. This is how it always happens. It will never deviate.

In STALKER, I was caught finding bandits when a man named Edik Dinosaur passed by. He and I had met on occasion on the road. Edik Dinosaur fought valiantly alongside me, because he hated bandits and he liked me. I accidentally shot him during the encounter. He died because of me. That was way more impactful than Far Cry 2’s Super Obvious Buddy System, you know?

It was like I was there. I had to grapple with a sense of guilt at shooting blindly into the brush after a fleeing bandit.

I remember a story of someone playing an old Zelda game, I think it was Ocarina of Time, when their mom walked in and asked them what they were doing. They explained that, to cross a bridge, they had to get some item to unlock it. “Why don’t you just chop down a tree to cross the river?” came the reply. The storyteller said they rolled their eyes at this and thought their mom was crazy, but later, they were like “actually, yeah, why can’t I do that?”

Breath of the Wild let players do just that. It was hailed as a brilliant new Zelda game and seems more beloved than… basically every Zelda game in decades? This is a game where you can shoot a fire arrow, watch the grass catch fire, and use the updrafts to fling yourself into the sky, which lets you drop down on top of your foes for a powerful melee attack.

I have my complaints with the game, which you can read here, but I’m fascinated by the way its overworld avoids just outright telling you how to play and letting you figure out how to solve the problems it presents to you. Instead of being A Puzzle Game, Breath of the Wild’s overworld feels like a stylized yet real space. Its people are alive. Its spaces are not clearly designed to be exploited by specific mechanics. The Designer’s Hand is invisible.

This brings me to Bethesda.

Yes, sure, if you’re an RPG fan, Bethesda probably isn’t going to make you a happy camper. The writing can be stupid at times. They let you do anything, even though the narrative acts as though you’re on an urgent mission. The modular system design makes the world feel super artificial, and you can exploit the game’s systems in dumb, unrealistic ways, like putting a bucket on a person’s head (the AI has no sense of personal space and doesn’t mind) so he can’t see you steal things, or you can craft a million daggers so you can be The Best At Blacksmithing or whatever.

But… the thing is, when I hop into a Bethesda world, it feels relatively real. While you have a lot of skills that make you better at playing specific ways, like Unarmed or Melee or Rifles or Handguns or whatever, you’re never walking into a fight and seeing Five Specific Tool-Driven Routes and deciding which tool is The Best One For The Job.

I feel like too many immersive sims are specifically stealth-driven games with immaculate designer-driven puzzles that give you a dozen different tools to use How You Want (but, hint hint, there are a few very clear routes).

Bethesda games give you a billion tools and let you loose in the world, much like STALKER does. You can shoot someone so much they become afraid of you and run away, but some people are less afraid than others and will fight you to the death. Take out a guy with a good gun, and his buddy will run over, pick it up, and use it against you unless you can get to him first. Approach this fort aggressively, sneak in, talk your way in, do whatever. It’s going to depend as much on who’s in the fort as it is on you. Heck, I think in Skyrim, if you’re wearing Imperial gear, you can walk into an Imperial fort without anyone realizing you’re not an Imperial.

Bethesda games let you play how you want in the moment.

They let you formulate a plan based on what you feel like doing, and sometimes, you’re going to find places you can’t take on because nobody bothered to design a way for a specific character build to attack. Come back later or get creative. It feels more natural than most immersive sims because it’s trying to be a real place, rather than an artfully designed one. Yeah, Bethesda games have rough edges. They do!

And yet… they are immensely successful, and I think it’s because they’re actually trying to send their players to other worlds. They’re not demanding you play stealthily, they’re not giving you the same routes so that every player can play One Specific Play Style. They’re bringing a world to life and letting you live in it. In Skyrim, I can go save the world and become the boss of the Magic College, or I can be a simple elk hunter, peddling my wares.

I guess where I’m at is… we saw one studio trying incredible things in games, and they went under through little fault of their own. Their successors didn’t find the smashing success that the enthusiasts think they deserve, but I think that’s because… well… a lot of the enthusiasts are just looking at one or two games on the spectrum and refusing to make anything else. I think so many of the genre’s fans have a very limited, very specific view of what the genre can be, which is why none of them have managed to recapture the glory of Looking Glass; they’re not making the kind of games Looking Glass was, no matter how much they claim that they are.

There’s too much artifice in the inheritors.

Bethesda’s out there making billions of dollars because their games live up to the Looking Glass ideal more than anything else out there. These other games, this other design philosophy, it’s great. I love it. It’s wonderful and beautiful and fascinating, but when I see people arguing that “nobody wants immersive games,” because those games didn’t break sales records, I want to scream “how would you know? You’ve made something else!”

STALKER sold like 6 million copies. Skyrim’s up at like… what, 20 million now? Breath of the Wild has sold a bajillion copies. Red Dead Redemption 2 is poised to be the second best-selling game of 2018 after Black Ops IIII. Grand Theft Auto V made a billion billion dollars and it’s got some of the most sophisticated immersion elements in video games. Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is one of the “could this realistically work?” games out there and it made a ton of cash. When you make a game that’s really about existing in a living, breathing world, you can make a shitload of cash.

When you make a stealth game with a lot of Specific Tools and Obvious Routes, you’re making a great video game, but you aren’t making an immersive one. That’s okay, but please don’t argue that we should stop making immersive games because your model didn’t work. The immersive model is thriving. You just made something else.

I just want to escape to other worlds.

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anti-yandere-dev · 7 years ago

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Just a rant

I went into the Yandere Simulator related tag, and found a post saying that if you in any shape or form respect YandereDev, then you are a good person. I’m not going to link the post, as I don’t want this person to get attacked (despite the fact that they are supporting this jackass of an ‘indie developer’). I sort of just… face palmed, because what does this say for people who DO NOT respect YanDev? They are bad people? I guess in the eyes of his blinded fans, yeah, we are seen as bad people - the haters. There is literally no reason for me or anyone to respect him. I used to respect YandereDev once upon a time, but when he doxxed the owner of the first YandereDev crit blog, I lost most, if not all of my respect for him.

I tried to stay within the fandom, and contribute to it because I liked Yandere Simulator a lot. The bugs made me laugh, and I meme’d the crud out of them. I made 3 MMD vids, and even wrote fics about the ‘game’ because I enjoyed it so much. But then I realize now that I continued to like Yandere Sim mainly because of fan contributions. Be it fanart, mmd, or fanfictions. I didn’t even leave the fandom and delete any posts about it til August because I got fed up with where it was going. I would have been alright with YandereDev’s past had he owned up to it. Yes, I’ve done some pretty stupid things as a kid and in my teenage years. But I’ve since did away with my own bad habits. YandereDev aka Alex Mahan has not.

After all that he’s done, I refuse to respect YandereDev again. It’s never happening. It doesn’t make me or you a bad person if you don’t respect him. He clearly has no good reasons under his belt to make him respectable. What YandereDev has shown us is that he is incapable of being honest and productive. He lies to his fans about his general schedule regarding the whole idea that he spends HALF the day working on the code for the game (which is a fucking mess, and you literally don’t have to be a programmer to recognize that because… Looooook at all those bugs in the game). He can’t even take criticism for crying out loud! Even if it is constructive, he will insist that you’re the asshole in the situation and that he’s the one to get off scott free.

Instead of doing what he claims he does 12 hours a day, he plays a multitude of video games. Which is something I’m not against, but don’t go claiming that you dedicate 12 hours a day to coding the damn game in order to meet that bi-weekly or monthly update to your game, Alex. Ontop of that, he steals character designs, game mechanics, rips certain environments in the game from MMD, uses copyrighted material (music, assets, etc) in Yandere Simulator, and makes 60k a year off of the unity run game. Yandere Simulator is devoid of any originality. If there is any, then well, it’s very little.

He is doing the equivalent of taking food from a fast food restaurant, putting said food on plates and bringing it to the guests (aka fans) claiming that the food is his own cooking. Yes, I just referenced that Steamed Buns clip from the Simpsons, but that element of the clip really does fit well with what Yanderedev actually does. Do the fans realize that they are supporting a fraud who will indeed never finish Yandere Simulator at the rate it’s going? Probably, probably not. For all we know, they are in denial. Or they unfortunately don’t care. I’m not saying Yandere Simulator will never be finished to be a downer. No, not at all. It’s the realistic outlook of things. Yes, FFXV took 10 years to make (Previously was XIII versus), but that’s because it was in its conception stage for 6 years, then it began to flourish as a more final product in 2012.

But, does this give Yandere Simulator an excuse to be developed at such a slow pace? No, no it doesn’t. There was no conceptual stage. All Yandev did was combine Hitman and the Yandere trope into one game, using Unity assets. As an overall, Yandere Simulator is not that complex. It literally is a killing people simulator with little to no story. Now I get that it’s a sandbox build but it shouldn’t be a sandbox build at this point! It shouldn’t be using the Unity models any longer. Osana should be finished, heck, 5 or 6 rivals should be done at this point. It’s not that hard to implement YanSim’s equivalent of bosses into the game.

I’m not undermining the difficulty that is involved in developing a game. It does take a lot of work. Truth of the matter is though, is that Yanderedev doesn’t work nearly as hard as he probably should to get this game developed and into something more than a sandbox. Yes, it’s a pain in the neck to code and program the game. It can also be difficult to come up with proper character designs, personalities, and stories but it’s not impossible. Yandere Simulator could have become something amazing. It still would have been closely compared to Hitman yeah, but it would not be in what I tend to call Video game development purgatory edging onto development hell. If Yanderedev does not fess up, and turn himself as a person around, much less turn the game he is developing around then it will never be finished.

I’m very, very glad I never gave Yanderedev money on his patreon. Because I would have sorely regretted it. I respected him for a very long time, and found him to be great as a developer and as a person. Obviously through my ramblings, you can tell this isn’t the case anymore (Thank god). Yanderedev isn’t a saint. He is not a good person. Do I hope he grows the hell up and takes responsibility for his actions instead of blaming e-mails for the slow development of his “game”? Yes, I do. I really do. I doubt this will happen, but one can hope right?

I’m not saying every YanSim fan is a bad person. Many, many of them are young and impressionable - misguided. Some of them are genuinely not good people, but unlike Dev, they have more potential to grow into better people whether they are minors or not. The biggest problem with Alex Mahan is that instead of taking responsibility for his past doings and trying to grow into a better person, he has retained his habits from his past even to this very day. I would have been “Whatever” about his past had he proved that he was a genuinely better person who learned from his mistakes. But the fact that he is the complete opposite of being mature and showing growth within himself as a person as well as his dishonesty are the biggest reasons why I turned my back on Yandere Simulator. Why I gave up on supporting YandereDev in general.

rant over. I’m sorry about that. ________________________________________________________________

**Submission by anonymous**

-Mod Bella

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norsecoyote · 6 years ago

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MCU Rewatch: Guardians of the Galaxy

My god, I had forgotten how much of a sucker punch right to the solar plexus the opening three minutes of this film are.

I mean, I remembered that it opened with Peter losing his mom, but not how insanely fucking painful it was to watch the child actor, who knocks that tiny but critical part out of the goddamn ballpark. It probably doesn’t help that I became a parent between the last time I saw the movie and now, and so the emotions in that scene felt way more real thanks to having an actual relationship in my life to map them onto. And with all that hitting so damn hard, the suddenness and unfairness of the abduction comes through in blazing contrast; I really felt the despair of losing any chance at closure that I already understood intellectually that it represents.

(I realize I’m doing the thing where I write about myself rather than the movie, but I was so totally unprepared for my response to its opening that I can’t not discuss it.)

Anyway, after paying the Despair Toll, the rest of the movie is still superb; the worst I can say about it is that, three viewings in, some of the shininess has worn off, but nowhere close to like with Avengers. The vast majority of jokes still work, thanks to excellent delivery and timing (even the bit where Quill flips off the police officers processing him, which by all rights shouldn’t be funny once you know it’s coming because it’s just about the shock value, still works beautifully because of Pratt’s incredible facial expressions). It also continues to amaze me how not just non-terrible but actively good the character of Rocket is; despite looking on paper like a cringingly stupid gimmick, the combination of Cooper’s voice acting and the amazing subtlety the animation gives his body language turn him into probably the most real character in the crew after Quill himself.

Ronan the Accuser... still really sucks as a villain. The movie does pay lip service to the Kree/Skrull war that sets up his motivation, but it (quite rightly) doesn’t spend any time actually exploring that backstory, and so it leaves Ronan as what I thought was the single most one-dimensional cardboard-cutout MCU villain until I finally watched Ant-Man a few days ago. They vaguely try to make him funny? but it’s nowhere near enough, and he just kind of sucks all-around; neither genuinely threatening nor campy enough to be worth anything.

But okay, if you’re still with me after three and two-half paragraphs of random farting around, I want to actually talk about something this movie does exceptionally well: shockingly rarely for the MCU, every single action scene actually means something and teaches us something about the characters. We’ve got five heroes and two villains, and each of them have a physical fighting style that reflects their personality and outlook, such that seeing them fight is part of how we learn about them.

Consider Rocket, for instance: trying to capture Quill on Xandar [1] he uses traps and snares, keeping himself distant from the actual fight; we learn that he’s a sneaky and opportunistic bastard, and begin to form a mental picture. When shit goes down in the Kyln, however, as soon as he gets some guns he’s up on Groot’s shoulders, spinning around and firing wildly and screaming in some kind of crazed rictus. In other words, beneath the cool, sly exterior there’s some really uncontrolled anger.

I’m not saying that these are shocking and revelatory observations about Rocket; I’m just pointing out that they’re both elements of his character that we first encounter via the action scenes, before the more complex and subtle exploration of them in dialogue. And this is true for every character, from Ronan’s first onscreen act being crushing a dude’s head with a gigantic sledgehammer to Quill’s signature move (as we see in his very first fight scene) being using hidden jets in his boots to run away from tense situations (which, again, comes before we get a single line of dialogue expositing adult Quill’s serious avoidance issues). Not even to mention the incredibly-obvious-but-nevertheless-perfect metaphor of the Xandarian forces fighting literally via the power of friendshipunity

Also, every fight scene has a purpose to the plot; there’s not a single action sequence that’s the equivalent of “Captain America beats up some more Nazis” or “Iron Man shoots up some terrorists.” Every fight has at least two clearly defined sides, whose motivations for that particular fight are clear and sensible, and in which the shape of the battle and its outcome are determined by/determinative of character and narrative.

Contrast this with, say, the battle against the giant fire robot thingy from Thor. Why is it there? Loki sent it, presumably, because... he suddenly wants to kill Thor? He is punishing the Stupid Buddy Crew for their accessory to treason? He hates cutesy little coffee shops? Why is it a giant fire robot? Like, ice has associations in that movie, but not ones that set up a direct contrast (Asgard, after all, is associated with gold). I mean, I know that the gun was hung over the fireplace in the first act, but why was the gun there at all? Why that gun?

Whereas every element of every action sequence in Guardians makes perfect sense and fits into a broader picture. Nothing is arbitrary, and it means that even on a third watch, everything is still exciting, because even the bits with no dialogue are integral parts of the narrative.

So yeah. I am pleased to discover that Guardians remains one of the best films in the franchise.

[1] I absolutely had to look up that name, but after my wife gave me shit about “Indiana or somewhere” from my Iron Man 3 writeup actually being Tennessee I wasn’t going to try and reconstruct it from memory. Otherwise I’d be calling it “the white planet” throughout this post.

#mcu-rewatch

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maryseward666 · 7 years ago

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LARS ULRICH: 'We're Having The Best Year For METALLICA In Probably A Quarter Of A Century'

RARE BLACK METAL COLLECTIBLES

On November 9, METALLICA drummer Lars Ulrich was interviewed by Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff as part of this year's Dreamforce, Salesforce's annual user conference, in San Francisco, California. You can now watch the chat below. A couple of excerpts follow (transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET). On how METALLICA's music has managed to survive and grow, crossing generations: Lars: "It's pretty crazy, 35 years in, that people still care at the level that they do. We just played three weeks in Europe. We're playing on a small in-the-round stage, and every single — and this is not to pat ourselves on the back, but more how dumbfounded we are about this stuff still happening — in every single building we just played in Europe in the last two, three weeks, we set a house attendance record, because we get more people in because our stage is smaller. These are the big indoor arenas in London, Birmingham, Glasgow, Belgium… They're all between 18 and 23 thousand — their version of the hockey and basketball arena. But it's pretty crazy that we continue to set attendance records. We're having the best year for METALLICA in probably a quarter of a century. And it should be no secret that we're obviously not quite a young as we used to be, but it's amazing that still at the concerts, half the audience that are down at the front row are 14 years old, 12 years old. They raise their hand when James [Hetfield], our singer, asks who's seeing METALLICA for the first time. And it's amazing that half the audience are experiencing METALLICA literally for the first time live. That is a crazy thing. It's, like, do they not know that we're old enough to be their parents? [Laughs] So we've had a lot of good fortune, and we're very appreciative and humbled. And I think the one thing that happens to you as you get older is that as you get older and you raise families yourself and so on, that's when you can really open your eyes and take it all in, slow down long enough to realize the moments that you're in, bringing people together, connecting people through music. You know, when we were 22 years old, we never stopped long enough to know what was going on, but now, 30 years later, you can really feel that impact that you're having on a global scale. So it's been an amazing, amazing year. And we still have about another year and a half of touring left. So we're just getting started. [Laughs]" On the reasons for METALLICA's enduring success: Lars: "I think it's two-fold. Number one is that from a creative point of view, you have to be willing to always look ahead rather than look behind. You have to turn over every rock, every stone and open your eyes, open your ears, be inspired, let those influences and all that great culture — whether it's music, whether it's art, whether it's film; whatever it is — just take you, and you have to be open to letting the process take you where it's gonna go. It becomes this interesting dichotomy between sort of steering it but also being open to letting… almost like hanging on, letting it kind of go where it's going and just making sure it doesn't derail, like a train, kind of. So, for 35 years, we've tried to never look back when we were making records, always try to challenge ourselves and see what else was out there that could inspire us to let the music take us some place differently. Secondly, when you're in a group, when you're in a collective, you really have to know how to work with other people. You have to learn empathy, you have to learn… when somebody else is steering, when you're gonna take a backseat and when you… that balance point about it's really important that this idea solidifies itself to somebody else in the band. Even though I may not personally agree with it a hundred percent, in terms of the balancing points of an internal dynamic that works in a group setting, you have to just know how to work with other people. When you're 20 years old in a group, in a music group, that's like being in a gang, and that's easy. When you're 50 years old and everybody gets their own patterns, and you talk to anybody — whether they're in THE ROLLING STONES or our friends in U2 or the RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS or any of the great bands that have been through Dreamforce in the last couple of years, being in a collective, being in a group, being in a band in your 50s requires a lot of work. We spend more time internally in METALLICA on just making the band function. We spend more resources on making the band function in terms of giving everybody the space they need. You know, somebody needs to take spring break off to go with their kids — we're not working that week. Somebody needs this, somebody needs that… It's all an open door, because the minute you do something that's gonna put a bandmember in a position of doing something where he has something else in his head, that's the beginning of the end. So you've gotta spend a lot of time working on the collective and the group dynamics. We somehow turned a corner maybe 10, 15 years ago — we all grew up a little bit, and we sort of reprioritized our outlook on life. The first 20 years of METALLICA, it was the band first and the individual and the family second. And about 10, 15 years ago, we swapped the model, and now it's the individual and the families first and METALLICA second, and that has given us a functioning dynamic that has… We're in better shape than we've ever been, and that's part of the reason, I think, we're enjoying the best time we've had in 25 years." METALLICA played a benefit show earlier this month in San Francisco to raise money for victims of the recent Northern California wildfires. The European leg of METALLICA's "WorldWired" tour kicked off in Copenhagen, Denmark on September 2 and ran through November 3. After a break, the trek will pick up again on February 1, 2018 in Lisbon, Portugal, and continue through May, finishing up in Helsinki, Finland.

youtube

Thank you @Benioff for having me as a guest at @Dreamforce today and showing me your incredible universe which occupies the @MosconeCenter for 4 days a year ... WOW!!! #DF17 pic.twitter.com/r1Z2VFkHol

— Lars Ulrich (@larsulrich) November 10, 2017

[Read More ...]

MY BLOG: http://www.rockoutwithyourcockout.com/

from Rock Out With Your Cock Out http://www.blabbermouth.net/news/lars-ulrich-were-having-the-best-year-for-metallica-in-probably-a-quarter-of-a-century/ via IFTTT

#IFTTT #Rock Out With Your Cock Out

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theroyallinders-blog · 8 years ago

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Day 5: The First Man in the Castle

Amina was thrilled that today she got to spend time with one special man. It was someone who had automatically filled her with positive feelings. It didn’t take her more than a minute to decide who she wanted to spend her first bit of one on one time with. As she heard the bell for the gate ring, Amina, feeling giddy, nearly skipped to go let her visitor in.

“Landon!” she squealed “Thank you for coming! Follow me”

As Landon continued to follow Amina up the stairs, he realized he was too busy looking at Amina with her long, sun kissed legs in her shorts, to even take in how beautiful the castle was. Although very ornate and elegant, it still had a warm and almost cozy feeling to it.

After many long and winding hallways, they reached their final destination and Landon smiled as he looked at their indoor gym.

“After you went and worked out the other day to try to release some stress and tension, I thought that maybe I could use some of that in my life! I don’t workout nearly as often as I should and I was hoping that you would want to workout together today! Maybe help me learn a few things?” Amina asked tentatively, hoping he would agree. She was nervous. She had never had a man alone in the castle with her before and she was afraid that maybe her idea was stupid...she had just been trying to think of something that would set a nice, casual, comfortable tone for them to get to know each other.

“Of course! Let me go change!” Landon said with a big grin. Amina was relieved that he seemed pleased with the idea.

“Alright, coach, I’m all yours!” Amina said and grinned as Landon walked back in. They started off doing some basic stretches before they both hopped on treadmills.

They chatted along for a bit, getting to know each other more and more with each passing minute.

“So I already learned that you can dance and that you can workout...tell me a little bit more about what you like to do” Amina prodded.

“Well, I’m actually an archaeologist. Searching for and uncovering hidden artifacts and treasures is a huge passion of mine. I’ve been lucky enough to turn something I love into a source of income for me. Everything I find is so cool, even if it’s not valuable. And getting to scuba dive for it is just great.”

“That sounds amazing! I’ve really never done much exploring myself...it makes me sound kind of lame but most of my life has been spent here, in this castle. Even when we got to visit foreign lands, it was always strictly business for my parents and I never got to explore much. That’s something I definitely want to change in my life.” Amina’s words drifted off.

“Yeah...my parents never really cared too much about what I did. They weren’t around much...” Landon replied.

“Well, I guess when we have kids of our own, we’ll have to make sure our parenting style is somewhere right in the middle.” Amina gave him a serious look before they both burst out laughing.

“Kidding, obviously I’m kidding and not actually planning for babies just yet” they both kept laughing until it made it a little difficult to run.

Both stepping off of their treadmills, Amina added, “But on a serious note, I am happy that we seem to be becoming friends so quickly. It’ll be nice to have someone I can call a friend throughout all of this.”

Landon ran Amina through a bunch of different strength and toning exercises and she tried her hardest to keep up. Landon had a sheepish grin on his face.

“What is that smirk all about?!” she asked.

Landon replied, “I’m just thinking that you’re not used to all this, which means you’re going to be really sore tomorrow...too bad you guys have so many dang stairs and hallways and twists and turns...it’s going to take your forever to get around!” he chuckled and Amina stuck her tongue out at him. “Well, you know what’s good for hurtin’ muscles? Our hot tub!”

Upon getting in the hot tub, Amina was excited to still have more time to get to know more about Landon. “So”, she began, “As I’m sure you’ve guessed, I have literally no dating experience, seeing as how my parents rarely let me out of the house..so, what has your dating experience been like?”

Landon’s stomach was instantly in knots. Was it too soon to talk about Bethany?

“Oh, you don’t want to hear about that”, he said with a wave of his hand, forcing a stiff laugh and trying to play it cool, hoping she would just drop it.

“No, seriously, I do! If it’s not too intrusive of a question that is, if not, it’s okay. I didn’t mean to pry...” Amina stated, sensing that she had made him uncomfortable and feeling bad about it.

“Should I just tell her?” Landon thought to himself “I mean, when’s the next time I’m going to get one on one time with her...I’m sure she’s going to see everyone else individually before she gets back to me and that’ll take weeks...”

“No, no, it’s not being intrusive...really, I want to tell you. I should tell you. It’ll feel good to get it off my chest..” Amina didn’t reply, but gently placed a comforting hand on his shoulder, sensing that whatever Landon had to say wasn’t happy, and gave him her full attention.

“There was one girl, her name was Bethany, and I was young, but she meant the world to me.” He paused, unable to continue.

Amina gently squeezed the shoulder her hand was on and patiently waited for him to go on.

“One night, I had been able to steal a couple of beers out of the fridge from my Dad. My parents were away, as they often were, and we got a little tipsy. We went outside for a swim and I swam out really far, assuming Bethany was right behind me as she usually was. But by the time I realized she was gone, I was too late, Amina. I couldn’t save her in time and she drowned.”

Amina’s jaw dropped. A million things ran through her mind, she tried to grab at the right thing to say, and was relieved Landon went on before she could respond.

“It was hard. It still is really hard some days. But the one thing that it’s taught me is that nothing in this life is for certain, nothing is concrete. Things in your life will come and go. All that you can do is be as grateful for them as you can in the moment and that’s really helped to shape me into who I am. I’m always just so grateful and happy to be alive and to be enjoying life...especially when I’m twirling a beautiful princess around on the dance floor or getting to navigate my way through the corridors of a lovely historic castle.” He gave her a small smile.

Amina was in awe at what a wonderful outlook Landon had on life, especially after what he had been through.

“You know, I got that feeling from you, Landon... that feeling that you would be the kind of person that would help me appreciate life more. Thank you for opening up to me a bit more and for helping me see a different perspective.”

They sat in silence for a while, but it wasn’t the awkward kind of silence. It was comfortable. It was nice for each of them to be able to sit and relax without thinking of anything else.

Landon broke the silence, “Thank you for a great a day. I knew you wouldn’t let me down. At least I know that whatever happens, at the end of this, I’ve found a really good friend.”

They smiled and hugged before Landon left to walk back over to the guest house.

#sims 4 #sims #ts3 #the sims #simblr

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xevgone · 8 years ago

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like yesterday (trigger warning)

How do I even begin something like this? Something so sad, something so misunderstood. "You're a coward" "only cowards do things like that" okay. So when a person feels so down about themselves and decides to end their lives , and go through with that they become a coward. How? How does that person become a coward? All of a sudden it's not about them anymore, it's not about how much they were hurting inside, it's not about the mental pain they went through everyday. Now since they are gone it's about the people they left behind. Where were they before the suicide took place? How can you justify calling someone a coward for ending their internal isolation. You can't. Someone who's suicidal doesn't see a way out of their misery, they don't want to hear about "how it gets better" and they most certainly don't want to think about their loss. That is gone , those feelings about saving yourself are erased because they want to feel at peace. There is no hope to be found when you are suicidal because you are tired. You are exhausted with life & waking up everyday feeling out of place in reality. You are exhausted with the emotions that you are filled up with inside, and you can't wait to let it all go. When I was 16, I contemplated and attempted. It feels like yesterday , every emotion I had was mentally destroying the person I was. I got home from school ran up into my room and wrote a goodbye letter to my family. I told them this pain was unbearable. I took out my razor blade from under my bed and stared at it for a while . I cried, I soaked my pillow in tears filled with fear, sadness, and confusion. I didn't understand why I was at my breaking point. I just knew I was and I didn't want to live anymore. I didn't want to get up the next day and have to endure the reality I lived. I didn't want to walk into a school filled with familiar strangers and wonder why I am still breathing. I just wanted to be gone. The razor blade sat next to me in my bed, i picked it up and ran the top of my finger across the sharpe edge. Tears were filling my eyes and my surroundings were becoming unrecognizable. This was it. I sat up in my bed with my pen and letter, "I'm sorry that i couldn't be a happier person. I'm sorry I was the way I was. I'm sorry I was always so sad and angry about my life and everything in it. If I seemed ungrateful , I wasn't. I am not okay and I haven't been ok in a long time. I love you mom , thank you for trying to help me. You are an incredible mom and I know you wanted me to get somewhere in life, but everyday I feel like I can't go on anymore. I love you dad, thank you for loving me and teaching me new things. You tired hard to make me smile and sometimes you even did. I just can't smile by myself and it shouldn't be that way. I love you lilly, you were an amazing sister. You always saw when I was depressed and down. You wanted to help so badly and I appreciate that. You will go far in life, please go far in life for me. Thank you to my family for loving me. Thank you to the friends in my life for trying to make me laugh and smile. But you all gave up on me. I get it. I understand. I'm not worth saving anymore. Please make this world a better place to live in. The future is my biggest fear leaving this world. Goodbye." I folded up the letter and placed it on my pillow case. I called my razor blade "smilie" that's how impactful a piece of sharp metal can become to someone so depressed. Smilie was a comfort buddy, just like heroin can be to an addict. Smilie was always there for me, whenever I needed it. It took me away from the numb outlook of myself. It soaked me with a new color of my reality. But red was the only color i felt I'd ever see again. My wrists were covered in mental damaging thoughts. I was bleeding from every new release. My closet was in front of me and I knew the rope was in there too. I had taken the rope from my dads garage a few days before. Beside myself I sat there, "how'd I get to this point in my life." Breathe me- sia was playing. Like I said I remember this like yesterday. I was terrified of the rope, the closet , but I was addicted to being gone forever. Then it happened, i opened my closet , picked up the rope and tied it to the top of my closet door. Breathed. Wiped my eyes, and stared again. Spotted with blood, the rope hung. "Go , gooo do it, no one will miss you." I stared for a good 10 minutes thinking about everyone, about my life. I knew that my life was literally in front of my eyes and if you've never experienced a moment like that, you will never understand the way it feels. My thoughts went from : * people will pretend to be sad at school they will pretend to mourn you, pretend to say you were their friend* *people will post Facebook memories about you, "remember that time we walked to lunch together oh I'll miss you so much." Sure you'll miss me* * a funeral and it will all end , the school will deny bullying, and will say everyone was my friend* *no one was my friend, they all came at me anonymously online calling me a lesbian freak, even telling me to kill myself.* The rope still hung and my thoughts just made it easier to go thorough with the final step in my decision. (This is going to get graphic, trigger warning) I took the rope and placed it around my neck. *bye world* It hurt , I screamed, I screamed so loud, I cried, my wrists bled more. My mom, my mom had just walked in the door from work and heard my screaming. My door flew open, it broke. She screamed " NO NO NO NO WHAT ARE YOU DOING NO." I was unconscious, she thought I was gone. Hanging there , lifeless. She pulled me out of the closet. Cried on the top of her lungs. She thought she lost her child. She almost lost her child. I was 7 minutes away from dying and my mom pulled me out of the closet. She pulled me out of the closet Out of the closet. Think about how close an item can be to ending a life, to ending a future, to ending memories, relationships, family, opportunities. Suicide has shaped me and I've learned so much about my attempt , I understood why I was saved, because I never would of met myself.

#suicde

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bohomoth · 8 years ago

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Lisa Barrett, Glowology: “My sleep has improved, in that I fall asleep quicker and if I wake up in the early hours, I can thankfully go straight back to a deep slumber without annoying Stressed Husband by huffing and puffing until the alarm goes off! But although I’m sleeping better, I am sadly no more inclined to jump out of bed with renewed energy — the snooze button is still getting more action than it should do. Well, Lumity gets some great feedback but it has never claimed to dish out miracles! The biggest change in my appearance is my hair. In fact, on my the last visit to the salon, my hairdresser asked me what I had been doing to it as it had got so much thicker! I’d thought so myself but when she mentioned it without me even telling her that I’d been taking Lumity, I knew it wasn’t just a figment of my imagination. Before taking Lumity, I had been a bit downhearted about my hair getting thinner and had put it down to ageing and a fact of life, but it has really improved and so I’m delighted. Overall, I am impressed. There’s no doubt I’ve seen and felt some positive changes that can’t possibly be just a placebo effect and I’m quite happy to fork out for a monthly supply of these as, when you think about it, at £79 a month (which is the automatically replenish price) it’s not much more than I spend on buying a large coffee each day.”

Lyn, The Lavender Barn, beauty blogger: “Within the first two weeks my sleep has been amazing, a true solid night with not even waking (amazing). I have way more energy than before, this could be where the combination of the two supplements are working in harmony, whilst I have not looked in the mirror and seen a 20 year old looking back at me, I can 100% see an improvement in the moisture levels of my skin, most noticeably on my shins, knees and elbows which really do suffer from dryness in the winter months, apart from the skin improvements I think the main thing for me is feeling better all round, better quality sleep with more energy in the day is, in my book pretty amazing in such a short time, I can only imagine there would be further improvements over time.”

And last but certainly not least, Yasmin Le Bon told the Daily Mail’s You Magazine that Lumity is a crucial part of her anti-ageing toolbox: “I don’t believe in any magic pill; I believe in a much more holistic approach — you’ve got to tackle the body and the mind. “I noticed that with Lumity I was sleeping better (and that I even wanted to go to sleep in the first place), that I was feeling calm at a time in my life when I’m not supposed to be. “I am very hormonal, but I have been on a surprisingly even keel, more so than I have ever been, which is extraordinary because it’s not meant to be like that.” She has even been able to get back to the gym, ‘which is such a blessing’ Yasmin says.

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Lumity is an all-natural, anti-ageing supplement. Containing a cocktail of amino acids, omega fatty acids, vitamins and minerals to protect and rejuvenate the body – the key to Lumity’s success is our night and day capsules that work in tandem with the body’s natural biorythmic cycles. Lumity works to: – Improve hormonal balance – Improve immune resilience – Reduce PMT symptoms – Increase energy – Provide a more rejuvenating sleep – Improve the quality of skin, hair & nails

Take three in the morning when you wake, and three right before bed. Looking and feeling your best is that simple.

Lumity Love: What They’re Saying About Us… If you're looking for a super supplement, you've come to the right place. Don't believe us? - The Times newspaper…

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