#the befuckening

[thepariahcontinuum]

The 23rd of December, Christmas Adam.....It is of course that time of year where the Befuckening of my writing schedule and workout routine begins.

[bitchfitch]

new painting compilation post bc I just realized how ancient the old one is

anyways titles in order: Floral Befuckening, Burning Rash x Damp Spot, Homoerotic Mentor Stabbing, littleshit.jpeg, It's Not a Sin If God Can't See, Monochromacy vs Aposematism

[crimeronan]

the biggest advantage of making a ref for AU vee's humansona is that now i have a face to put to the amnesia timeline "SAY ONE WORD ABOUT MY SISTER AND I'LL RIP YOUR DICK OFF" bit. it's one thing to Say that vee is very nice popular and sunshine incarnate, but it's another to actually See her cheerful smile n go, "oh, WOW. wow. i do NOT want to see you angry."

[magpiesbones]

I hope the fish I put in the rice cooker won’t explode

[wiratomkinder]

I need to finish playing elden ring but also I basically still only care about caelid

[izzy-b-hands]

I may be on day two of being stuck in bed thanks to some of the ✨worst back pain I've ever had in my life✨, but the neighbours are outside grilling, the window is open a bit, and it smells so fucking good. I'm not even hungry rn, but I am v much enjoying the second hand good food smells.

[newvegascowboy]

I gave my dm permission to pilot Sly if it becomes necessary, because hes been haunting the narrative recently and i have an intense hatred for playing 2 characters at once, and we talked some story stuff over yesterday and he mentioned that we would find, but be unable to take, a holy avenger. I was like i get that because we're level 8, but knowing us we probably wouldn't even use it, but it would be a great pawn

[hasmashdoneanythingwrong]

[marzipanandminutiae]

you know, searching for Victorian houses here in Boston on Zillow is depressing for an entirely different reason than I expected

the houses are like $1.5 million and up

but moreover they have all lost several interior walls and doors, been painted entirely white inside, had can lighting installed, caught the Exposed Brick Plague...

[chiropteracupola]

also I think lady kiely and doña juanita should kiss lesbianly

[theradioghost]

for real though I guess I haven't talked about it here but. so there's a song called "The World Is Saved" about the feeling of finishing video games and it is associated with MANY memories for me and I often tear up while watching it but most recently it makes me think about how i went completely over the fucking deep end for monster hunter world.

i'm adhd/asd, i'm disabled, and I spend a lot of time sitting around doing fuckall because it's what i'm capable of, so when I saw this thing with interesting creature design at #1 on a youtube video literally titled something like "10 video games for people with too much time on their hands," i went okay, sign me up, i already owned it because of a previous encounter with the feral madness of the steam summer sale, i just got a laptop specifically to handle games and it runs planet zoo so it'll run anything, let's go

and then. the thing is i don't mostly play games with real time combat. the first game i ever felt like i had meaningfully gained skill at a non-insignificant combat system was breath of the wild. and mhw is like "here's 17 different weapons good luck" and i panicked and googled best beginner weapon and that's why I main s&s. but i've never mained ANYTHING before!!!! i did the first fights and did badly but went 'holy shit, i like this? it feels good?' so i kept doing it! i paid attention! i learned combos! i fell in love with the gorgeous atmosphere of this game, the music, the characters, the world, the design, feeling myself getting to know each environment and each individual monster and getting better at them. wiring a whole new portion of my brain with instincts for this game. it was fucking exhilarating.

and i'm still not Good at it! there are so many systems I still don't understand and i've put over 300 hours into it! i haven't touched any of the other weapons! I am nowhere even CLOSE to done with the endgame content! the only people i've ever played multiplayer with are my siblings! but holy shit. that night where I sat down to do the Namielle quest and it turned out to be one of my absolute favorite fights and monsters, where the sound design and the way she moved just blew me away, and I was so excited I decided to go straight into the end of the story. i ran the ruiner nergigante fight down to the fucking wire and i was exhausted. it was midnight and i am 100% not in any way used to fifty. straight. minutes. of nonstop need-to-be-the-best-i-am-capable-of video game combat. but i did it.

and then i wanted to go to bed. but then fucking shara ishvalda shows up and i think fuck yes i'm going to bed this is a tomorrow problem. but then the fucking anime-ass characters point out how far i've come, all that i've done, and my brain goes FUCK IT. WE BALL.

i have tried shara ishvalda multiple times since then and i have run out of time, every single time. i don't fucking know how i did it then, i haven't found anything saying it has less health in Paean of Guidance or anything. I think i had about 90 seconds left and fuck me, that thing's second phase actually freaked me out (it was 1 AM! i was tired and wired!) not helped by the fuckin. Exorcist music. but i did it, and then i walked around in circles in the dark for half an hour.

every time i listen to the soundtrack it all comes back. i put some mhw music on last night and sent myself into a frenzy. i've had some fucking powerful, emotional experiences with games but none that made me feel powerful in quite that way. I'm dabbling with the Iceborne endgame content a lot more slowly; I haven't touched Rise, but I did play Stories 1 on iOS and then snag Tri and Generations Ultimate, and I'm definitely in for the long haul with this series now. but shit, man. i guess this is a recommendation for monster hunter world, if you've got a fuck ton of time to spend.

[irregularjohnnywiggins]

So, started playing King Arthur: Knight's Tale.

Gotta admit, the portrayal of the Battle of Camlann is badass, and as someone who devoted a not-insubstantial amount of his time to their previous King Arthur games as a kid, I'm really excited to see what this one does.

[bitchfitch]

I don't know if this counts as a floral befuckening or just a fuck ton of florals

Anyways I'm really liking this piece bc it's very "Yay! bright pretty colors and lots of flowers!" but the flowers are:

Tansy (yellow): declaration of war

Calendula (orange): Nature/sorrow

Briar roses (pink): divine love

Peach flowers (peach): alliances

Yarrow (red): War

Greek valerian (blue): it's war again.

anyways grey version is included bc that's what I'm going to be looking at for the next million hours while I render out all those flowers,

[spider-man-2o99]

gonna get real obnoxious rq abt Comic Book Writing and what i take away from a certain series from the early 90s because my brain’s In A Certain Kind Of Way and this is my house so if u see what im abt to post and think it’s absolute dogshit please just grit your teeth and smile the pain away. thanks <:)

[the-winds-of-kushala]

I wonder how ome might reasonably explain the Skyrim horses being able to report you to the guards for your crimes

The thing I like about the Blood Moon mechanic in Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom is how it affords game-mechanical transparency to the player.

Like, we all know the reason it exists is because, like any complex open-world game, BotW and TotK periodically need to hit the reset button on all non-trivial changes to the world state; in games that don't, your save file has unbounded growth due to the need to keep track of every little thing you've ever done, and eventually the system runs out of memory, save/load performance goes to shit, or both. It's basic software engineering constraints dictating the shape of play.

The thing is, most open world games try to do this subtly, perhaps by setting individual timers for the consequences of different actions to expire, or by linking world-state cleanup to proximity to the player character, but in practice it never works – trying to be sneaky about it paradoxically makes it more obtrusive to the player by rendering it opaque and unpredictable, often prompting the development of superstitious gameplay rituals to work around it.

BotW and TotK take precisely the opposite tack and make it 100% transparent and 100% predictable. Once a week, at exactly the same time of day, there's a spooky cutscene and an evil wizard undoes every change you've made to the world that doesn't have an associated quest log entry. Why everything at once, and always on the same schedule? A wizard did it. Why exactly and only those changes that don't have quest logs attached? See again: a wizard did it.

And this isn't just a gameplay conceit. Everybody knows about the evil wizard! The fact that the evil wizard keeps resetting everybody's efforts to fix the befuckening of the world is a central plot point. There are organisations whose chartered purpose is to go around redoing stuff that's been undone by the wizard.

It makes me wonder what other potential synergies between fantasy worldbuilding and mechanical transparency are going unexploited.

[catgirl-rose]

Hm. Probably not great how there's just. A whole school district. That faces a greater threat of nuclear annihilation than other school districts. And we face that threat blithely.