#thats why theyre so simple

[failsquirrel]

breed of cat that is able to glide like a flying squirrel. they tend to be small compared to the average cat with flat tails. they tend to mostly be ticked tabbies and fur on the underside is much lighter than the fur on top. traditionally, they live in tree houses

[koifsssh]

some Rainy's for your amusement!

(and an updated reference sheet!)

[carnivalcarriondiscarded]

wooooo warlock Wally and his delightful totally normal patron

[storywestistrash]

watched mouthwashing finally. the fact that i saw people be more aggressive towards curly than jimmy is kinda strange. kinda real weird

[buwheal]

Nosy? I suppose that makes two of us ;)

[nyatbinary-81]

@vulpixisananimal sifstem art jumpscare!! more specifically i got bored and decided to mess around with sif and mal's outfits.

[shiningliive]

Live Emotion Game Introduction 5 - Emotional Pieces

Lets have a look at Emotional Pieces:

As described on the official twitter account: When you cultivate the fragments of the idol's feelings - their 'emotional pieces' - you'll gain access to things like special outfits, and piece stories. You can also see a new side of the idols by awakening them.

Further Analysis below:

As expected, 'Emotional Pieces' seem to be the equivalent to cards/photos in Shining Live. In this video, we get our first look at what I assume is the initial set of SR (super rare) Pieces titled 'Be Elegant!'. The art on the Pieces is 2d, and likely ties into the main story at the beginning of the game as seen in the previous Story gameplay preview with the same background. The four diamonds to the right of the 'Be Elegant!' title likely either representing the cards rarity as an SR, or the amount that is has been awakened (diamonds could fill with colour to indicate awakening).

Screen 1 - Piece Levelling

In this clip we see Masato's 'Be Elegant!' SR Piece levelled up from 1-11 with the use of two EXP Score (S), and two EXP Score (M). The number above the area to select how many EXP Scores to use shows how many of each item you own. EXP Score (S) earns 100 EXP EXP Score (M) earns 1,000 EXP EXP Score (L) earns 10,000 EXP

We can also see there there are three categories of Pieces. Sing, Dance, and Charm. It's likely that each idol can be different categories depending on the Piece (Eg, one Masato SR could be Charm type as seen in this video, and another could be Dance type). Levelling up the Piece adds slightly more to the Piece's assigned type than the others (Masato's Sing and Dance points get an additional 100 points, and his Charm gets an additional 104.

Each Piece has also has an assigned 'Life' value, assumedly similar to stamina in Shining Live. In this case likely each cards 'Life' value being added together to give you a value for your stamina bar.

Under the Life value on the left shows the level of the Pieces Skills. Main Skill, Idol Skill, and Guest Skill.

The buttons at the bottom read (from left to right): Reset, Omakase (Auto?), Confirm, and 'Piece Board'.

Screen 2-3 - Piece Board

This looks to be the various unlockables for each Piece.

The Top tree is unlockables for Story , the middle tree for Skills, and the bottom tree for Costume/Voicelines. Each also had additional unlocks for extra Charm, Dance, Sing, and Life points. They are levelled up with the pink gems seen in the popup screen. It seems each unlock will reward you 2 of the rainbow gems which are likely used for the Piece Gacha.

The outfit unlocked for Van is titled "Formal Wear'.

[marsbotz]

not going to lie i do find it quite upsetting that so many ppl think that animals that arent immediately relatable to humans are completely incapable of thought or feeling. and thats the only thing that matters when it comes to animal rights arguments a lot of the time

[mummer]

also idk why i wanna cry my eyes out every time kirk starts waxing poetic (or sad) about Being A Captain and the responsibility and loneliness of it and him comparing himself to a sea captain and being like In the old days i wouldve felt the waves under my feet and the wind at my back etc etc…. the stars to steer by…. And the stars are still there bones!!!!!!!

[caffeinatedopossum]

Conversation I just had with the person scheduling my therapy (it's at a place that offers disability services so they were asking about that):

Person: oh you're disabled? Were you in a car accident or something?

Me: ah, no, I have a genetic condition that makes my skeleton fall apart

Person: oh geez okay. Do you have to use any mobility aids? Like can you walk?

Me: uhh?? Sometimes? I can walk but not reliably. I can't do anything reliably which is like the whole problem because people don't think of disabilities as being so variable.

Person: wow I don't even think I'd be able to get out of bed, not knowing wether I'd be able to walk or not that day...

Me: oh well I have this pro gamer strategy where laying in bed hurts more the longer I lay there so eventually it will get so painful that I HAVE to get up haha 🙃

[rxttenfish]

Omg what DOES Aaravi do as a monster slayer?

the short answer is that it varies with how much of my own stuff im willing to bring in, im afraid

mostly im waffling back and forth on this point right now because if i was a little closer to monster prom canon i might be able to have more fun with it and include a wider variety of situations and it wouldnt be such a downer as it would be in the other case...

mostly, the thing that monster slayers are in the redesign universe is a hate group, plain and simple. a particularly violent and nasty one too, at that - they're focused primarily out of human-majority societies and cultures that have much smaller minorities of other sophonts and/or that contact with those sophonts is new and recent, hence why there's such a strong sorting between "humans" and "monsters". "monsters" isn't a real category in any sense of the word, it's just a social marker for an out-group that is seen as particularly dangerous and frightening and, thus, "not normal". this is also why it doesn't really specify between monsters that are sophonts and monsters that are just normal animals...

primarily this hate group arose out of existing environmental/hunting groups, semi similar to things like forest rangers, and has even common ancestry with witches (or, one of the definitions of "witch"... witch can refer to a human with some innate workable magic, witch can refer to anyone who works with/studies magic as a job, or witch can refer to a supernatural concept/creature which is basically just the trope we have of the witch, as any malignant supernatural person who uses that supernatural prowess for evil. this is different from magic, because magic in this universe is just... another Thing That Exists, not necessarily any different from, say, engineering as a job or study, and belief in the impossible and supernatural is of course going to exist unrelated to that).

as in, there's a fairly universal need in most communities to be able to manage magic somehow. usually there's wildlife or plants that have their own innate pools of workable magic, and those need to be treated and handled differently as a different form of danger in the world, or there's magical aquifers locally, which means that all of that magic is just available as free energy to be used by anyone who has the chance to grab it, and if workable pools of magic aren't regularly maintained to recycle the magic that makes it up, then it can build up wild magic and tends to explode particularly dangerously... so you need someone who has learned how to deal with all of that, and so you get the origins of witches, and the origins of other people specializing to deal in magic and magic-heavy things, and from that you get people specialized in hunting or otherwise managing animals that utilize magic in their biology in some way.

(which, to be fair, nearly everything on this alternate earth is, in some way. magic really is just... free energy for anyone who can grab a little of it, and most life will be able to at least do a little bit of that. humans are a prime example, since even non-innate magic users will still hold and maintain very small pools of magic internally, utilized primarily for metabolism and to offer a slight boost to the immune system and other such things. this is even what souls and ghosts are - just the pools of magic inside of a person that can get shaken loose through particularly traumatic events, although the systems that lead to ghosts are poorly understood (and also different from a soul, the animating supernatural concept... theres a lot of confusing terminology in this universe, and i do that on purpose). it's just that species that either live in or around magical aquifers or are uniquely adapted for it that are magic specialists, where it makes up a much larger part of their biology, and who cannot live without that magic. a human without magic might just be slightly immunocompromised, a demon without magic is dead!)

this is where you get monster slayers, though. because they were a specific movement within this larger group of people who focus on magical life, where they particularly focused on the danger posed by magic specialist wildlife during a time when nonhuman sophonts were being introduced to and "challenging" the dominant culture where they came from, and ended up connecting the two. it's a purposefully very messy grouping without a lot in common other than this specific group targeting them, and their primary goals might be similar to creating and enforcing a human-only community devoid of large, dangerous wildlife around that area that could possibly injure someone. the fact that this also ends up targeting a lot of disabled humans (vampires, zombies, etc, they're just humans who have a specific magic-derived "virus". there's very few benefits to this, it really is just a disability) isn't seen as a problem either in their eyes, mostly because they're also often stereotyped as being dangerous or endangering other people by their sheer presence, so they get sorted in with the other targeted groups as well.

there's also a lot of people and things that we have in real life that would get labelled "monsters" in this specific line of belief, even if i haven't gone into that as much, mostly because i worry that people will think that because i'm writing aaravi as sympathetic that i'm supporting her beliefs or the beliefs of monster slayers too - or that, again, i'm still just in the awkward middle ground where i'm not sure how much i want to go into this and REALLY kill the mood.

(also, because it does kind of miff me when people write fantasy settings but provide some kind of distinction between real wildlife and fantasy monsters in a way that shouldn't actually exist in that fiction. lions and tigers and bears should be considered just as dangerous and frightening as any speculative creatures you put in your work, especially when there's not any one unique feature that tidily separates the world into "animals" and "wildlife". hell this is even what i try to get at with my merfolk, since they really aren't any different from humans, as just another naturally formed sapient animal species.)

and, to be clear, i WANT this to be upsetting. it shouldn't be something comfortable or easy to talk about, let alone witness. it's something that also has to be seen and judged and understood in order to understand aaravi herself, just as much as how you can't understand miranda unless you understand what it actually means for her to be a genocidal monarch who expresses ultimate control over anyone who happens to be under her and is willing to do anything to maintain control in the groups of her equals. for both of them, they're supposed to equally be representative of those who suffer by and under the system they are a part of (aaravi is not allowed to leave the monster slayers even if she wanted to, her being discovered as half-human would mean her potentially being targeted and killed and her family potentially also targeted for association, having her entire self worth tied to her ability to lose her own personhood and perpetuate violence that no one else is capable of or wants to do, or else be blamed as the reason why innocent people get hurt and killed), while also actively perpetuating it (both have a vitriolic hatred of anyone who either "can't do their job correctly" or "isn't hard enough to withstand the pressures of their job", aaravi especially targets and is quick to punish other slayers to try and cover her also being "part monster", she upholds and feels incredibly defensive over her family name and how great her family was at being slayers, she hunts and kills a lot of other people just for them not being human that makes them even more guarded and scared of humans and more likely to retaliate in order to try and keep themselves safe, which also means its harder for anyone else to stop being a monster slayer because even more taboo gets connected to them or being one).

a prime example is actually her grandma, who is still around. aaravi's from a line of monster slayers, which is to say her family was already in this hate group, they were born into it, and aaravi was just the latest in the long line of it all. her mom did work on trying to get out, did meet aaravi's dad and left to where no one else in the group knew where she was, where she could try to start anew and they wouldn't be able to find her, to have a family with someone who she had been taught to view as nothing but dangerous and frightening and not someone to be trusted... and then he turned out to be a garden variety asshole who just... left. never really was very interested in aaravi or salil, got bored with aaravi's mom once she tried settling down after getting out, didn't really do much to support her in trying to remake her life from a brand new foundation, and just left one day without a note or saying anything or anything at all, really.

all of which served as mundane trauma that pushed aaravi's mom back into the monster slayers even harder. it just confirmed a lot of old beliefs that she had burned into her mind after not really helping her to undo or confront them, and she had very little else left to go back to, and she had two kids now that if anyone else learned were the result of her having a tyst with a monster would get hurt and killed as much as she would, serving as a representation of the mistake that had just been confirmed in her mind as such.

it's why it came down on salil so much harder than aaravi, and why aaravi looking so nearly human is so important for the way the story functions. aaravi got pushed harder and harder to both try and make up for her mother's mistake, pushed to become another monster slayer and pushed even harder to be a GOOD one that would be great enough to make up for all that her mother had done while still living up to the legacy that her mom could only think of herself as having ruined, to shove all her monster parts into a deep dark little box that she would never tell anyone else about, who was told over and over how dangerous it was and what would happen if this got out. but salil... salil is much more obviously inhuman, much more obviously something that she can't hide or obscure, and so salil kind of...

well, already their mom was reverting hard onto "all monsters are dangerous and cannot be trusted and NONE of them are EVER going to be good, only lie about it to hurt you even worse", and there was a lot harder... fear, from her, that he picked up on. really, both of them picked up on it, and still aaravi doesn't know and is terrified of the possibility that their mom was scared of them, or thought that they would hurt her, or even outright hated them for being monsters. and because salil was much more obvious about it, a lot more got targeted and felt by salil, a lot more their mom tried a lot less with him, a lot more she just tried to hide him in the house and not tell anyone about him or that he existed. its why when he ran away one night, it was very easy for her to come to the conclusion that he had been found and killed by monsters, and it was very easy for that belief to be passed onto aaravi.

it's also why aaravi's grandma has such a... particular situation. she was also such a prominent monster slayer within that community and group for so long, and so many of the leaders within the community think back fondly of her, but its this very same reason that she can't talk about the amount of doubt she's also felt about it, the mounting regrets and guilt that has built up, the knowledge of what happened to her daughter and to her grandkids, and the knowledge that she can't really DO anything to help it either, even AS someone who holds such an esteemed position and even BECAUSE of it. she's effectively just built up more and more distance from the community over time, isolated herself more and more from these old friends of hers, gone quietly silent in her old age, but its also why shes never been able to fully shake it, and why that connection STILL exists and shes STILL expected to uphold it when it does. she's older than she used to be, more vulnerable, and she has a granddaughter who doesn't have a mom or a dad anymore to look after her, who is at least part of what monster slayers want to exterminate, and there's a lot at stake here that she just can't make herself risk.

so, yeah... i hope this provides a little bit of clarity as to what aaravi in the full redesign verse being a monster hunter MEANS and what she does, because it's not... very pretty, really.

if i write it, i'll likely end up focusing more on the animal side of it, least of all because i can't see aaravi taking miranda on a hunt for a person, but also because it adds in more layers of aaravi feeling disingenuous and doubting herself. she feels like she's lying to miranda, making it more palatable, more acceptable, than it really is, not showing her the full thing and letting herself be judged as is, but also aaravi is ABSOLUTELY not prepared for that conversation and doesn't know how to breach the subject of "i'm basically a serial killer for hire" with miranda, and is equally as scared by the thought of what if miranda actually DOESN'T have a problem with that and doesn't react. but it's also just close enough to still hit that uncomfortable realm with aaravi, just close enough to killing a person that she keeps seeing herself in the eyes of the wildlife, doesn't know which end of the gun she's more scared of being on and doesn't know how to handle any of it.

[3416]

hockey rhetoric has to be some of the dumbest shit on this earth... seeing people say our teams becoming more 'blue collar' im fkjhdsijfklsdjhfijks. like i know what it means but also. what the fuck does that even mean... people perceive some lack of effort and work ethic on the toronto maple leafs and it drives me BATSHIT. they've been stuck between skill and grit for quite a few years now, like how are you identifying THAT as the problem. such a fake annoying narrative, my god

[icewindandboringhorror]

Recent game related things .. hrmm...

[bunilet]

ʚso, butsutaji doing 69, you said?ɞ

click the link above to view the full artwork ˗ˏˋ ★ ˎˊ˗

[sunnykeysmash]

something we have discussed is how dennis was the only one who could understand mac and that's great but can we also discuss how it must feel for mac that no one can understand him

this seems to be accentuated by how off he keeps being about things (offering of war/dennis being shot being "awesome"/being unable to read subtext both with dennis ["figure of speech"] and donald) and how much he's looking for a sense of meaning that he used to find in his identity until s15 made him realize how pointless it was (in a way that reminds me of his crisis in goes to hell 2...), but legacy, history, money and prizes are worth nothing if your heart is not in it.

and in a way I think dennis is coming to the same conclusion which is why he's the only one who can understand mac.

dennis "you're just being honest about how you feel" reynolds, so concerned with authenticity and upset by the perceived lies when it's just his own denial making it that way. that's building the biggest lie of all.

if we're looking for the Point, then the point is to have fun and embrace feelings. Big Mo already showed this.

it's interesting to me how it seems that mac and dennis are working off of each other in the way sunny works as a whole. because if mac is the structure and the text, and dennis is the subtext and the jokes (it's how he's trying to communicate in inflates but it's also the whole reason he comes with mac in madbu), they kinda NEED to be working together for the show to work... they need to find their harmonies, they can't just one or the other lead, they gotta have each other's back.

and also like, a small coda. this season deals so much with nostalgia vs how the past really was, there's so many flashbacks.

becoming aware of denial and reality can feel really upsetting but ultimately it's a positive development.

if "the hair is a lie" chopping off the head isn't the answer, that was the old way of doing things (in times of war... murder, betrayal, beheadings... "we figured out what works a long time ago"), but now we're looking for peace. basically, death isn't the answer. building your legacy doesn't have to be like pulling teeth. "this doesn't have to be a scam"

it's a good thing if we start seeing things for what they actually are, because it means less denial.

[kkkindered]

Onyx/Antares for @astra-stellaris

MOODBOARD MEME.

Read the tags. I worked hard on them lol