#the people who say this game is easy must not have found this area

[blazescompendium]

Blaze's Compendium Entry #8:Explaining the Origin of ShikiOuji

Note: This post was originally published in April 2024. However, since it is a complete research and dive into this monster, I figured out i could just repost it as a Compendium entry.

As always:

Warning: Faith and religion are important real life topics, that tackles the culture and way of life of millions of real life people. It is a cultural expression, and must be respected by all means. Here, we use a video-game ( some times) and other media series only to ignite the flame of learning about the matter, using its art when well depicted, but we do this with all due respect to the cultures we talk here, grounded by real life sources, cultures and people. And i mean this with respect. Hope you all enjoy.

I am sure that, if you played any Megaten game in the last 20 years or so, you ended up seeing this paper dude. His name is always stated as Shiki-Ouji, and he once shared the same design with the Demon called Shikigami.

The weird thing is that when researching Shikigami on my studies, I never found anything about this one so i put some detective work to find out about the origins of Shikiouji, the (yet another) dude who often repels physical damage in Megaten.

The creature is described in many of the series compendium as a powerful Shikigami, that only the most powerful Onmyoji could summon, and they have a vicious temperament.

When we talk about Shikigami, the first thing that comes to mind are paper dolls. This is no surprise, since Shikigami are summons Onmyoji binds to paper dolls or talismans, so they could interact with the physical world. This is also because paper is a very easy material to destroy, if things go south. Onmyoji are the equivalent of western sorcerer, that followed the Onmyōdō, a esoteric cosmology. It started in the 6th century in Japan as a divination practice, and evolved from there. I won't go into detail, because this is meant to be a short post. But materials about this practice are abundant on the internet.

The main concept concerning us here is the Shikigami. These are basically some kind of familiar, a spirit or demon if you want, the sorcerer could conjure to protect him or do his biding. The Cultural Alliance Brazil- Japan, which i already mentioned in other posts, states that:

''Shikigami can be Oni or demons, that should serve and protect an Onmyoji. Your abilities would be determined by the abilities of his master.

A Shikigami could assume the form of small animals, birds, etc... One Shikigami from a powerful Onmyoji could possess and control one animal. But only a real powerful Shikigami could possess a person.

When an Onmyoji is fighting another Onmyoji, they employ the use of their Shikigami. Some Onmyoji could spot the enemy Shikigami beforehand, and try to convert it to his side with magical powers. In this game, the converted Shikigami would come back to the old master, and attack with double the force. This pratice was called Shikigami Gaeshi.

Abe no Seimei is said to be the most powerful Onmyoji to ever exist. Some rumors say he had twelve Shikigami, while regular Onmyoji would rarely have more than one Shikigami at the same time.''

So, that is a rough definition of what a Shikigami is.

But, when researching this creature you would not be able to regularly find Shiki-ouji. The fastest method for him to appear, was the English Wikipedia article about Shikigami, which weirdly had this part about Shiki-ouji, but offered no source to it:

Having the kanji to Shikiouji, and some keywords, i found someone at Tumblr who asked the same question 6 years ago, in Eirikr's blog.

From there, Eirikr offered a link to a blog post writing about Izanagi Ryu Shikoku. Ryu Shikoku is an ancient folk religion and pratices from the Kochi prefecture. It is still practiced in the area to this day!

In this belief system there is the tradition of the Shiki-kui masks. Which.. bear a very uncanny resemblance to our paper guy, subject to this post:

These masks would be hang above the place the ceremonies of the Izanagi Ryu take place. They would have magical powers that could repel evil spirits, and non believers from coming to the ceremony and disturbing it. They would also serve as talismans, or paper dolls, in a simmilar vein the regular Shikigami pop image you have in mind.

Since they are used to summon spirits, bind them, and as talismans, these creatures can be, technically called a Shikigami.

With this knowledge in hands, i went to the Japanese web. And sure enough, i found this site: The Nippon Foundation Library. It has an article detailing the paper talismans used by Izanagi No Ryu Onmyoji, and their meanings, powers, and also explained a bit about Shiki-Ouji!

Here is what they have to say: (Please be warned that i do not speak Japanese, and used machine translation. Any corrections are Welcome!)

Shikē Ōji is a spiritual entity invoked by the taisa during prayers for the sick and the "toriwake" ritual to expel evil spirits causing illness or calamity. Its birth is described as abnormal, and due to its excessively violent power, it has no place to reside. Usually, it is sunk in the pond of Tendō-nanta, and summoned only when needed to guard ceremonies, to pray as the guardian deity of ceremonies, or as a prayer deity of Jumon no hakase. There seem to be several types of Shikē Ōji depending on their purpose, such as Takata no Ōji for toriwake, Gotai no Ōji for prayers for the sick, and Ōtaka-shiki for insect prayers. Additionally, talismans such as Sangoku Arashiki, Chimura San Ōji, and Sakago no Ōji are handed down, and it is inferred that they were used according to the content of the prayers, although many details of their usage are unknown.

Using the powerful Shikē Ōji against humans becomes a curse. In Kochi Prefecture, "hitting a ceremony" is widely used to curse people. Many people use this term without understanding its original meaning. "Hitting a ceremony" refers to attacking someone using Shikē Ōji. While Shikē Ōji can benefit people if used for good, it can harm them if used for evil. Talismans of Shikē Ōji, possessing such terrifying power, often have several incisions on them, each containing twelve notches, giving them a rough impression. However, unlike talismans found in mountains and rivers, they do not seem to have incisions for eyes or mouths. In this regard, they are closer to the cutting style of talismans for house gods and sacred gods. Here, one can sense the emphasis on the powerful nature of Shikē Ōji's talismans while also distinguishing them from strange monsters.

So, as you can see there is some key information about the creature here. But the most important ones:

1- It is bind to a talisman, just like other Shikigami. The text here explains it is a paper talisman with notches, just like regular ones used in religious ceremonies.

2-It has a powerful and violent nature, just like the compendium often indicates in Megaten games. It seems hard to tame and use properly without getting hurt.

3-Shiki-Ouji can be powerful and violent, but it seems they dislike being used to hurt people. Instead, they are better employed to use their magic to other deeds. However if you still use them in that regard, they will most likely curse you.

4-Their talismans have twelve notches, no incision for eyes and mouth due to their aggressive nature. This would help to control their interaction with the material world.

I am sure that, if we follow this trail we will find many more sources. Going by key words i found in this text, i found many other sites and books, but since i have no time now to fall a rabbit hole, nor do i speak Japanese... That is it, i think this is a satisfactory answer to where this Megaten Demon came from!

The real forms of Shiki-Ouji

The last thing in want to talk about, is Shiki-Ouji real appearance. Since we have a seemingly wrong impression of they in Megaten, since Kaneko took some artistic freedoms.

First and foremost: From the few things i studies about Shikigami, we know they do not have a real physical form. The paper talismans are just a way to give them physical form. But it was incredibly hard to find a Shiki-Ouji talisman, which was weird because it was so distinguishable. The main reason being that: Shiki-Ouji seems not to be believed to be easy or safe to summon, and also their talismans would be destroyed asap after use.

But with the description i got, it would be this one that matches it the most:

No eyes, or mouth. Twelve Notches, six from each side, and some incisions. Very similar to a regular talisman found in other types of ceremony. Just as the text suggested.

I got this picture from this book:

Tosa, Monobe Village: Shapes of the Gods

Monoba being the village where most of these rituals came from. The book is from 1999, and contains many pictures of actual talismans.

You can see that, aside from the head shape, Kaneko took some freedom with this design. The sources state that Shikiouji talismans should not have a face, nor limbs, since it was too powerful, and should have 12 notches. For some reason, Kaneko drew it in a human-like form, but the face still resembled the Shiki-kui masks. The earlier design of the demon was even more closely resembling the masks:

Shiki-ouji earlier design from Devil Summoner (1996). It was later repurposed as the demon Shikigami. It is almost an exact match to this talisman. I can not however identify the original source.

Shiki-Ouji current design by itself could have been based on this one talisman in specific, at least some parts of it like the head with horned-shaped appendages:

By the looks of it, its face could turn inside out, just like the Megaten Demon can do.

It was sourced by the National Museum of Japanese History, but the post went down. The low quality image of the talisman can still be seen on google, but the link is dead, unfortunately. It seems that this item is still in possession of the Museum in Japan. Kaneko could have seen it in pictures, or in person. This one seems NOT to be displaying a Shiki-Ouji thought.

Maybe the Kaneko take is that Shiki-Ouji was summoned with limbs, and facial features and became much more stronger as a result? We may never know...

And finally there is also an occult book that i found in Amazon Japan that is called: Exploring Izanagi No Ryu: ShikiOuji.

It is supposedly a manual on how to practice Izanagi no Ryu, and magics. I could not find the book online, just the summary. But it mentioned nothing about Shiki-Ouji. Probably has some sort of tutorial to summon it, in fact i was able to find many of those tutorials on the Japanese web.

Now, that is it. I think this puts to rest a little bit of mystery involving the origins of this specific demon. Kaneko sure took some freedoms, but it is still one of the more popular and recognizable characters in the series.

Final considerations:

This most likely is the answer to its origin, but i am not some sort of owner of all truths, so feel free to correct me in anything i said wrong. I am still an amateur scholar, and even if i do know a lot about mythology and ancient religions because i read many books and study a lot of hours of my days, i am by no means a specialist in Japanese Mythology specifically, specially Shikigami practices. The reason is that, i find it very difficult and time consuming to research Japanese sources, since i do not speak Japanese. I will one day, try my best since there are a lot of good Yokai to cover in future Scientific Papers.

I can, however, guarantee that i did my best possible effort in a deep search!

And i have spent a lot of time looking through pictures of Shikigami talismans, and i found some really cute. Like this one. What a whimsical little fella...

[drawcupidsbow]

Hi i made a post on instagram about the top five games i played for the first time this year and thought id share it here! none of these are in any particular order. except the last one. my favorit....

first up is oneshot! it took me wayyyy too long to play this game. oneshot feels kinda like one of the staple rpg maker games, yet i went into it pretty much completely blind, "finished it" in one sitting, found out there was over half the game left, played the rest, and cried real hard. such a good game that breaks the fourth wall in really interesting ways. and also it has niko who doesnt love little fella niko

♡

second is halope! this is a game i had never heard of before my friend ángel (@raccoonlover333) told me to play it and i feel like i still dont really see people talk about it? it has a very unique style i think and each of the areas have their own atmosphere and feel to them (aside from the fact that all of them have distinct color palettes lol). very lovely game i enjoyed it a lot. also one of the first times i played a game with multiple endings and felt satisfied not going out of my way getting any i missed ? i enjoyed what it had to offer and didnt feel the need to pry for more (good thing)

♡

hard shift from story based rpgmaker games but next is webfishing. webfishing is good. its so good youve probably heard a lot of people say this by now but its just so fun and calming to sit around with friends and fish for hours. theres something special about the kinds of online games where theres a physical space you share with people, especially those you havent met in person. makes you feel like youre there with them. and also you can get a man i love fishing shirt whats not to love

♡

o yea baby farming sim. this game is so charming and has a lot of quality of life features that i feel are missed in other farming sims. it is still in early access so i cant be too harsh on it, but i will admit that the characters feel a bit too flat currently. a lot of nothing burger dialogue which isnt always a bad thing but when 20 characters tell you Hey this weather huh? must be good for farming! its hard to differentiate their personalities in your mind lol. im sure thatll be added to in the future though like i said its still ea and only has enough content to last you about a year in game. what it does have is very fun though and i would recommend it

♡

You knew it was coming be honest. where do i even start. technically i Did play isat for the first time last year, however, it was for like one hour and then i didnt pick it up again for half a year. so it counts to me. and also i take any excuse i can to talk about this game

in stars and time is a game that portrays characters and relationships in such a realistic light to a degree ive never seen in any other game. it makes it so easy to immediately become attached to this group of friends despite knowing them for less than ten minutes. its a very emotion heavy game. and who can forget the time loop Ohhh yes the time loop. siffrins slow decent into hopelessness and anguish after failing to escape time and time again is something rarely shown in time loop media i feel. at least to this degree. madoka magica comes pretty damn close though lol. also looping in time and zoning out through dialogue (and doing so having consequences) is such a cool game mechanic

while im talking about isat im slipping its prequel game in too, start again start again start again a prologue (or just start again). this one, though much shorter and more of a proof of concept, feels much more harrowing in the ways it pulls it off, especially without a certain characters presence. but i wont say more than that as to not spoil it teehee

this game changed my life for the better. and has been causing me psychic damage every day for 8 months. heart ♡

♡

and thats some of my favorite games i played this year! there were more but not enough for it to be 10 and 5 was a nicer number than like 7 lol. happy new year! i hope this year treats you all well and i cant wait to draw one million fanarts as i have been doing for the past 5 years. Yayyy

[nirikeehan]

wip wednesday??

okay I haven't done this in a thousand years but @theluckywizard tagged me... and I recently went insane after playing the game Road 96 and decided I needed to write a 12k long deep dive on the character Jarod.

...If you know, you know.

Anyway, it's called A Small Victorious War and the first chapter is already on AO3. Here is a bit from chapter 2, where he's looking for his missing teenage daughter, Lola, after she ran away to join a terrorist group.

Tagging: @ar-lath-ma-cully | @oxygenforthewicked | @rowanisawriter | @carnalapples | @exalted-dawn-drabbles | @monocytogenes | whoever wants to do it!!

---

He made a few calls and knocked on a few doors. He learned Mr. Winters had also left town, which set the familiar fury simmering in his gut. A group of these Brigade members were headed deep into the south, in Petria’s vast desert region. Aside from the oil fields, the area was mostly undeveloped, which meant they would be difficult to track.

And then there was the note. Please don’t look for me. He’d pursued people who didn’t want to be found before, and the rocks one had to overturn were usually unpleasant for everyone involved. He’d walked away from some of those with regrets. 

“This is our daughter, Jarod,” Maria said over the phone. “It’s different. How could you not want her home safe?” 

He didn’t say they should respect her wishes, exactly. He was less articulate, angrier, perhaps a bit accusatory about why Lola might choose to run away from her mother’s residence, where she spent most of her time. 

“Don’t you dare try to blame me for this,” his ex-wife said. “She’s sixteen years old. She’s too young to know what’s in her own best interest. You were always too easy on her. You let her do whatever she wanted, and look what’s happened.” 

Jarod hung up on her then, because otherwise he would start screaming. No, he never would have encouraged Lola to join a terrorist group. But he had, looking back on it, encouraged her to think for herself, which was maybe just as bad.

He imagined finding whatever compound the Brigades had taken her to, and dragging her out by the arm, kicking up dust as they went, the hatred bright in her eyes. I’ll never forgive you, she spat, and wrenched away from him when he got her into the cab, his fingerprints on her skin already beginning to bruise. It was this image he couldn’t shake, no matter how hard he tried. And he remembered how passionate she was about the idea that conditions in Petria could improve. She truly seemed to think it possible. 

So he stopped looking. 

His apartment was quiet that summer, and so was he, saying little more than the rote script required of him in his daily life. So where we headed today with Happy Taxi? And when Maria called he would tell her he’d let her know if he made any progress and she would ask him if he was drunk, and he would hang up again, angry, because his speech wasn’t that slurred. 

Then, as summer melted into September, he received mail from Lola. 

He called Maria immediately, the words blurring on the page, his mind racing too fast to properly absorb them. “I got the letter,” he said when she picked up, to which Maria said, “What letter?” and Jarod became very quiet. 

Lola had, apparently, only written to him. 

He had assumed that Lola would, as a matter of course, write to both parents. As he stood there, at the side table by the door of his apartment, reading the letter by the light of the streetlamp outside, he tried to ascertain why it was him she chose. He gripped the phone tighter in his hand and breathed slowly. 

“She’s all right,” he said, because at least that much seemed accurate.

“Where is she?” Maria demanded. “Is she coming home?” 

“Doesn’t say,” he said. The letter was dated the fifth of September, postmarked the sixth. Today was the eighth, meaning it must have been mailed somewhere within a hundred miles, to be delivered with such swiftness. So she was likely back in the north. The return address was a P.O. Box, but listed a town he didn’t recognize and suspected to be fabricated.

“Jarod, what does it say?” Maria asked. 

A few other things, including something “big” that would “change everything” in four days. Given the date on the letter, that meant tomorrow. This was, he suspected, why she wrote to him and not her mother. The promise of results. That her actions weren’t only frivolity. That she’d been right that day in his living room, grasping his arm, full of fervent hope. 

And she’d also signed it, in her signature way, All my love, except it was encased in a word bubble and spoken by a cartoon dinosaur that she had drawn, which made him think perhaps she had forgiven him for the plastic dinosaur incident. He wanted desperately to write her back and tell her it wasn’t too late, that she could still walk away from this, still go to university and study paleontology, he would help her, he would do anything. 

“She says she loves us,” Jarod lied, “and that she’ll be in touch again soon.” 

[tillichan]

🐉 I don't know of there was an ask game specifically for this question before but I can't find anything related to it so I figured I'd ask here!! What was your first impression of me?

My first impression of you well... To be honest I didn't think people as kindhearted as you are existed outside of fiction. You remind me SO much of tohru from fruba that when I was brainstorming for the (now changed) fruba exchange, I was like "how do I differentiate her from tohru...😰". You know when people say "there must be flowers that grow wherever you walk"? I genuinely mean it for you lol.

Mutuals send me a 🐉 and ask me any question. Nothing too personal please, but something about likes, dislikes, selfships, favorite fandoms, self-inserts is good! You also can ask me about how I write my stories, why I chose a character as your match etc.

FELI!!! OMG, you are too sweet! ૮꒰ ྀི >⸝⸝⸝< ྀི꒱ა

I feel like my lovely moots decided to make me cry! x) Thank you very much, my dear! I was soo happy to read your message!

When it comes to you, I think that you are very cute, sweet and adorable! It's so easy to talk to you, so fun and interesting too! I'm not as poetic as you are (you are so talented in many areas omg), but just know that I truly adore you, my dear!

Aaand! As soon as you sent me the info about you I found my new favorite mutual x (character) OTP! You already know who I'm talking about, but the two of you are a perfect match made in heaven and I'm so excited to write about you two! I'm always so happy to find new favorite ships for my friends! ( ˃̵ᴗ˂̵) ♡

Also when it comes to the character you remind me of it's your fav and your ship, lmao. Lemme know If I can mention his name in my public posts. Your personalities and likes are so similar yet different. x)

Thank you for joining my silly event! Have an amazing day! ♡♡♡

[afriendlywizard]

My review of a warehouse I found on Earth's Moon in the video game Starfield

I work at a cidery in the PNW. We have a pretty hefty canning line that can handle what I like to call a Solid Chunk of Volumetric Output. Our fulfillment and warehouse team touches several hundred pallets a day. We handle ingredients that come in drums, plastic IBC totes, 5 gallon buckets, and raw ingredients off the back of people’s Ford Raptors. We have pipes and valves and connectors. We talk about glycol and peracetic acid a lot. We have standard 4 level pallet racks, as well as push-back pallet racking and back-load pallet racking that maintains a First In First Out order.

I manage our Quality Assurance team, which means I spend most of my team at a desk or in a lab. I have driven our forklifts and our scissor lifts. I’ve blended our ingredients into our batching tanks. I verify our sanitation practices, and I help solve problems as needed. I spend a lot of my day staring at stainless steel pipes and mumbling about dissolved oxygen to myself.

That’s all to say, I’m not an expert. I would call myself a warehouse hobbyist and enthusiast. Not out loud to anyone, but when I play a video game that has a warehouse in it, I like to spend my time looking at how the warehouse is put together.

In addition to this, a note on Forklift Certification: It’s largely made up. There are some machines that require special licenses, and OSHA has classes you can take that probably look good on a resume, but if you look at the language that OSHA uses to define who is allowed to drive a forklift it only has two requirements. “Trained operators must know how to do the job properly and do it safely as demonstrated by workplace evaluation.” It’s up to the employer how that’s interpreted. My employer had me watch a forty five minute video and then someone watched as I drove around for thirty minutes saying “oh fuck oh fuck okay okay okay don’t hit anyone.”

I took my character, Dr. FLIPJUMP DARKSWALLOW, to the moon. I brought my companion Sarah with me, she said she wouldn’t mind a detour so that we could finally live out our shared dream of owning a pair of moon boots, so down we went to explore a seemingly abandoned lunar station. It seemed to be some kind of staging facility for receiving shipments, landing dock, staff kitchen and common area, but as far as I could tell there wasn’t anywhere within a kilometer or two to send the shipments once they arrived. Typical supply chain issues, major distro hub with nothing in site to distro to. But it did have a small on-site warehouse so Sarah and I both agreed to put a pause on our moon boots dream and explore.

This is called an IBC tote. You can fill these up through a big screw-top hole on the top, super easy to use, cheap ($275 new), universal. The most common versions I’ve seen have a galvanized steel cage and a galvanized steel pallet attached to the bottom so it can be universally picked up by a forklift. They typically have a 2” drain valve with a butterfly and a camlock. This is a pretty good example of an IBC tote! You can see how the galvanized steel was welded together at each intersection, bent into place and held there. The butterfly at the bottom has a cap in place, it has a pressure valve that’s clearly labeled. This looks pretty good!

This is a pallet jack. On Earth in the present day, you roll it into the slats on a pallet, squeeze on a hand lever in the handle, and pump the handle bar up and down as it lifts. On the Moon in the future, it looks like it’s been upgraded for use in space with what I assume is probably some electric battery type of deal. Otherwise it’s very similar to a normal pallet jack! It even has the double wheels in the front, a detail I was very excited about. There doesn’t seem to be the hand lever though, or any buttons anywhere. I assume that’s because this model has a voice assistant like an Alexa in it.

It has a spring in the back as well, another neat little detail. I’d be curious to see how this works in action, there’s a decent number of mechanical parts on it for how futuristic it looks. There’s also two small… baskets, I guess? For paperwork maybe? On either end of the handle shaft. I made up the term handle shaft.

Here is what I assume is a future-forklift. And Sarah. Please ignore Sarah. I was required to take her on a mission early on, but she keeps saying things like “that’s not yours!” and “we should not break the law,” which has been definitely cramping Dr. DARKSWALLOW’s style. Anyway, this forklift is a far cry from the kinds we have in present day. Barely recognizable.

My best guess is that you stand on this platform to operate it. But there’s no buttons or levers again, no key ignition. Presumably this turns on somehow and that panel is a touchscreen, or maybe it’s another Alexa operated device. This whole thing seems pretty dangerous. There’s no roll cage. I guess maybe there’s no OSHA in the future? Or maybe this thing has a lot of safety tech built into it to protect the operator from making mistakes. Maybe it follows Asimov’s rules of robotics and can’t allow a human to come to harm, through action or inaction. But that seems like a lot of liability to pack into programming, and it seems expensive to attach a positronic brain to a forklift. I don’t know how it would anticipate other drivers doing things badly, knocking over pallets? It seems dicey.

I do like that the cabling looks like it’s painter’s taped onto the frame so it doesn’t get caught anywhere. That’s a great little detail, very much something a maintenance team might do in a pinch. A “short term hold” as they “work with supply chain details to implement a long term repair.”

I climbed up onto a pile of boxes to get this picture. It looks like they redesigned the forks in the future, kind of a high-heeled shoe thing going on at the ends there. And this forklift seems like it has reduced functionality from what forklifts here on Earth can do. Forklifts can usually do three things with the forks: lift up and down, pitch the forks back and forth, and spread the forks wider or narrower. I think this can only lift the forks up and down. There also seems to be a large orange ball on the bottom, but I don’t know what that’s used for. My best guess, given the short cylinder above it, is that the forks can control their yaw and rotate on a horizontal access? But they’re right up against the axle so I’m not sure how that would work. Maybe if you lift the forks up it’s able to rotate? But I don’t see much of an engine to ballast the center of gravity anywhere. Maybe the entire body is made with a very dense metal, it does seem to be pretty flush with the ground.

My biggest complaint is that this forklift doesn’t have any headlights or taillights. It’s important for forklifts to have a horn and bright lights to let other workers know there’s a forklift around, especially reverse lights. These might be taillights, if I’m giving some benefit here, but they’re so low to the ground I’m not sure how other drivers are going to be able to see them. But I’m not an expert in future light bulbs, maybe these work just fine.

These look like future pallets! Pallets come in different materials, with wood or plastic as the most common, but they also come in standard sizes. But these pallets look like they’re way too small for the forklift to pick up. Maybe they’re just for the pallet jack? And big note here: I really hope for the sake of the warehouse manager in this facility that OSHA doesn’t exist, because each one of those pallets standing up on its side is going to be its own fine. Overall these pallets look pretty good, if small. And this disaster of a pile seems pretty true to form with how pallets are stored, no matter how many @everyone pings on Microsoft Teams you see get sent out about stacking pallets correctly.

I suspect everyone in the warehouse crew here hates their coworkers. They have four of these pallets in a square but are stacking things randomly on top of them. None of these things are strapped down, this black cube is on a pallet that’s a different size than the pallets underneath it. Just a bizarre move. I hope everyone’s doing okay.

And then on the other side is this: … Why? Why would anyone do this? You can’t pick those rolls up, the rest will roll right off the pallet. They’re not centered on the pallet so even if you did pick it up, you couldn’t put this onto pallet racking anywhere, it’s hanging off the edge.

This is pallet racking. It seems bolted together for some reason. I haven’t seen that before on this style of racking. It seems counter-intuitive; the whole point of this type is that it’s easy to put together, it’s modular. But if you bolt it together, it’s not modular anymore. Normally you just slot the pieces in, they fall into place and don’t require additional parts. Just welded steel with drop slots.

Oof. A dead body. I’m a little surprised there aren’t more of these here. It does feel a bit dangerous.

Here’s another pallet jack, but they aren’t using it correctly. The pallet goes into the forks, why did they put a pallet on top of the forks? Ridiculous. Now they’re just lifting things for no reason. A forklift put the pallet on, now a forklift has to take the pallet off? Why use the pallet jack at all?

And lastly: a propane cage! There’s no locks on it, the maintenance team is probably screaming at everyone to make sure they Lock Out/Tag Out their equipment, but I’ll give the benefit of the doubt and sign off on it because there’s no propane tanks inside the cage so maybe the locks just aren’t necessary. Hopefully it’s just in someone’s pocket while they’re going to refill the tanks.

Overall, this is a pretty dangerous looking facility but probably usable. I’d say they ought to start working towards shoring up some safety gaps here, maybe making more intentional decisions about purchases for a while so they have the equipment they need for their process flow instead of all this equipment that requires rework and multiple touches to get anything done. But a growing business sometimes has to take what’s available! Kudos to them for getting things up and running on the moon, not an easy feat.

[lulu2992]

Deleted dialog from Far Cry 3’s main story

In this series of posts, I’m sharing all the unreleased content (minus a few duplicates) I found in the oasisstrings text file, even when it wasn’t very interesting, so we have a comprehensive list of the lines that were cut in each Far Cry 3 story mission.

On a side note, the document never says which character is speaking, so every time you see names, it’s either because the corresponding audio files were available and I know who the speaker is, or because the context made it easy to guess their identity.

Part 3: Down in Amanaki Town

The mission opens with this line, which isn’t in the game:

Let's take him to Amanaki.

Upon waking up and seeing Dennis, who’s tattooing him, Jason had one more question for him:

What did you do to me?

The rest of the lines are unchanged.

The two men then go outside, and Dennis briefly shows Jason around the village before giving him money so he can buy a gun. Before this, he would say:

Enough talk, you must learn the ways of the island if you are going to survive.

Jason goes to the store to do as instructed, and there was more dialog here too. I’m not sure who is speaking, but my guess is it was Jason (to the shop owner who probably shook their head as an answer), Jason again, and Dennis:

Don't I need some kind of background check?

Okay. Thanks.

That is much better than a knife! Any time you need weapons,  visit a store. That make sense?

The conversation that follows used to be longer as well. Here is the full version (with the unreleased lines bolded):

Okay. I’m ready to go.

Be patient. If you go after your friends now, you will never survive. You must first become a warrior.

Every night the warriors go deep into the jungle.

I hear there are others who live there and were never captured. Who still know the old ways.

Citra.

Is she real?

Here, the power comes from the Jungle, from the Island. You must learn the terrain. Know where to stand at all times.

Vaas uses the towers to map the island and to locate his men. Scramblers block access. Our people have no use for devices such as these, but you, you will learn valuable information from them.

So taking out the scramblers will help find my friends?

Yes! The scramblers are at the top. Each tower covers a limited area. Climb them all and you will reveal the entire map.

Got it.

Jason then makes his way to the radio tower to climb it and destroy the scrambler. He had more dialog in this sequence too (bolded lines):

Guys, I'm coming for you.

That must be the radio tower.

Ugh! Snake.

Don't look down.

Shit.

Not getting back down that way.

This looks like the scrambler.

Yes! The map's working.

He then comes back to Dennis who tells him he must master the jungle. This conversation is identical to the in-game version.

[ralphlanyon]

TC tag game

Tagged by @spudodell!

Rules: Answer the questions and tag other TC fans!

1. "He would not fucking say that" only they did and it's canon. When/who?

Not that they're necessarily out of character, but whenever Renault is clearly projecting her own internalized misogyny onto the characters (e.g. Laurie calling Nurse Adrian a "silly little dumbbell" at one point or the narrative voice commenting on Aunt Olive's lack of makeup), I am like

(Granted, her other contemporary novels that actually feature female protagonists are even worse about this… 🫠)

2. Did they kiss in the study? Yes/no + why you are 100% correct about this.

Yes, absolutely! I previously wrote this meta about why I think so here. But here are a few more reasons:

"Over and over, during those first months, Laurie had relived the scene in the study, guarding it with fierce secrecy as a savage guards a magic word." It would be quite odd for Laurie to constantly relive that last meeting with Ralph and guard it with "fierce secrecy," if Ralph had done nothing more than chastise him, give him an old book, and turn him out of his study. So something intimate must have happened there that Laurie still obsessively thinks about.

The infamous ellipsis after "Come here a moment" was deliberately added to the 1959 edition (one of the only additions Renault makes, rather than subtractions), which I think is probably to help clarify the significance of that pause.

Laurie's proprietary behavior towards Ralph at the party, especially him staking claim of Ralph in front of Bim (and frankly a lot of about Laurie's behavior towards Ralph in general), makes a lot more sense if they had a "moment" together in the past and both of them never got over it or each other. It would help explain why Laurie instinctively feels he does have a claim over Ralph (as the Odysseus to Ralph's Penelope, to use Bim's analogy), as well as why Ralph continues to carry a torch for him after seven years and countless other relationships.

3. Mandatory question about Ralph's alleged tattoos.

To be honest I don't think he has any tattoos yet (or at least any in areas that would be normally exposed to the public), or else Laurie would have commented on them like he comments on just about everything else about Ralph's appearance. I could see him getting some in the future though, maybe some nautical-themed ones and probably at least one related to Laurie because he's sentimental like that.

4. 53 vs 59 edition: quote a line or paragraph that is better in the edition you like the least.

I generally prefer reading the '53 edition mainly for the extra bits, but there are several stylistic writing choices I do prefer in the '59 edition. One of them is Ralph telling Laurie, "I didn't think you had that much bitchery in you." He says "cattiness" in the '53 edition, but Laurie is very bitchy (and Ralph likes that about him!).

5. Which TC character would feel right at home here on tumblr dot com?

Bim or Sandy! They would be bringing the tea. ☕️

6. Tag yourself at Alec's birthday party.

Probably part of the couple holding hands in dead silence, lol.

7. Post a TC meme.

I have a lot of memes in my TC tag, but here's one I made a while ago:

8. Easy to talk about who deserved better. Who deserved worse?

Dave because he bores me (the worst thing a literary character can do). Also Ralph's parents and Jeepers.

9. You can break the fourth wall (at any point in the novel) and say a single sentence to our protagonist, Laurie Odell. What do you say?

"You are intensely afraid of abandonment which is why you keep trying to leave people before they can leave you. (Please go to therapy.)"

10. What's a question you have about TC? One you haven't found an answer for yet.

What do Laurie and Ralph do for their post-war careers? There have been several excellent ideas in post-canon fics, but I haven’t quite settled on my own headcanon for them.

Tagging: not sure who hasn’t been tagged yet, but feel free to nab if you see this!

[samieree]

Dawn of the North || Game of Thrones

Robb Stark x OC

(masterlists in the end) -> Prologue + description

Chapter I ''Beginning''

Since they ran away from home, they planned to save enough money to sail by ship to Essos and settle there, in one of the Free Cities. Their plans changed when it turned out that earning money was not that easy. Especially when you feel guilty when you rob someone.

When Amalthea thought about the situation that took place two years ago and their stay in the North, she would not have thought that her and Ryledia's lives would take this direction. She didn't think they would return to the North, it seemed to her that they would be best off in the lands of the Reach or the Riverlands. After all, they grew up in the Reach, this was the area they knew best. But after two years they found themselves back in the Kingdom of the North, and quite far in it. Okay, earlier, they had gone further, to some village between Winterfell and Dreadfort, but then they told themselves that they would not want to come here ever again. It was cold, they had to buy warmer coats and shoes, stay in inns at night... It was simply unprofitable.

But something brought them back here. More specifically, just south of Moat Cailin. They began their journey there when they learned of King Robert's death and that the North had called the bannermen and declared war on the Lannisters.

"We should buy some good wine from Dorne and have some fun." that's what Ryledia told her when they heard about the change on the throne.

After all, King Robert had always been the greatest threat to Amalthea's life - although his death didn't mean she would suddenly be completely safe. She had no doubt that there were still plenty of people who hated Targaryens and it made sense to hide her true identity.

It would certainly be easier if they were able to go to another continent. No one would have paid attention there if Amalthea hadn't put on her dark red wig and just let her silver waves down. In fact, their story would have gone in this direction if Ryledia had agreed to Amalthea's proposal. Namely, it was about selling hair. Long, silver, light curls would be very expensive. The girl wanted to cut it as high as possible - she was wearing a wig anyway - and sell it for at least enough to get them both across the sea. But then she heard:

"No. You will not sell yourself."

Amalthea didn't see it that way. For her, it was just her hair, a beautiful but at the same time annoying part of her appearance. Especially since the longer they were, the harder it was to stuff them under the wig.

Apart from this argument, Ryledia added that it would not be easy for them to find a buyer, and if they found one, he would definitely ask them where they got the hair from. And then what? Would they say they were lying on the ground? And if they admitted that they belonged to Amalthea, they would risk that the merchant would discover their secret.

Returning to their current situation, Amalthea began to become suspicious as to why they had returned. While they were sitting in one of the inns, a few soldiers, rather high-born, came there. Of course, they were looking for the comfort of a normal bed, which they left at home when they went to war. Or women, one of the two. Anyway, this time no one was bothering them - and even if someone was, after politely refusing, he left them alone (unless he was drunk, in which case he needed a little help in the form of a push towards his friends) - it was rather... other way around. Ryledia did so, to be precise.

Amalthea didn't know the true nature of her friend's behavior as she sat and talked with the military men, laughing and drinking with them. Sometimes she kept Amalthea next to her, and sometimes she left her at another table - but then she looked at her discreetly almost every moment to make sure that she was in no danger, that no one was bothering her. The silver-haired girl finally thought that her close friend must have fallen in love. Or more precisely, what pushed her to this conclusion was that when one of the men suggested that they travel with them, from camp to camp - of course not to fight, gods forbid, they were women. It was just about... keeping company. Besides, they knew a bit about tending wounds and cooking, so they could always be useful. Especially since they had their own horses, so traveling wouldn't be a problem for them.

And that's how they ended up in the middle of a war camp. She was sitting next to Ryledia on a tree trunk by a fire over which rabbits were roasting. She didn't feel very comfortable here, much less as comfortable as Ryledia. She wondered if she felt the eyes of others on her as she did and wondered what all these men were thinking. After all, they left their wives - if they had them - at home... She wanted to broach the subject with Ryledia, but firstly: she didn't want to interrupt the conversation, and secondly: she didn't seem like she had the same thoughts. Maybe she hid it well, or maybe she didn't have any at all. After all, some blood divides them.

She sat and stared at her fingers, playing with them until she got tired of it. The conversation didn't interest her either, it didn't seem to be about any topics she could comment on, so she stayed silent almost the entire time.

She sighed and looked around. She didn't expect to see any familiar face, although deep down she hoped that she would see the boy who, together with his father, saved her and Ryledia two years ago. After all, he was the one who called the bannermen and led the army, so he had to be around here somewhere. But the camp with about twenty thousand people is huge. The chance of seeing him somewhere was-

She noticed a woman entering a tent. She did it immediately, after all, she didn't expect many more women to be in the camp. Especially since this one looked much older than her. She leaned a little in her seat, but she still couldn't see anything that was happening in the tent she entered. But now her attention was finally focused on something other than twiddling her fingers and listening to the boring conversation. She stared at the tent for a long time until her suspicions were finally confirmed: the woman she noticed was Lady Stark. She was the first to leave after a dozen or so minutes - yes, all this time Amalthea was staring at one and the same tent - and some time later her eldest son came out accompanied by someone else, his age or at most five years older. She recognized him immediately, even from this distance - and they were about a dozen meters away.

He didn't change much, except he had a beard now. His hair still curled into small curls,  had blue eyes, a warm, thick coat, and the silver direwolf pin adorned the clasp of the coat.

Their eyes met for a moment, completely unexpectedly. She mentally cursed that he happened to look in her direction and notice her, but there was only a faint blush on her face as she quickly turned back to the fire. She rested her elbows on her thighs and placed her hands on her cheeks to hide the pinkness before anyone noticed.

After all, she was what, seventeen? And she had just seen once again the boy for whom her heart had fluttered once before, and whom she had spoken about to Ryledia for so long that she had almost tortured her to death. Now she felt her heart racing again, but quickly calmed down.

At least for a while.

"My Lady?" she almost jumped when she heard his voice behind her. She should have expected it, after all the conversation had died down until Robb nodded and smiled that it was okay, they may talk freely, he came here for only one person. "What an unexpected meeting."

He was only a year older than her, not even a whole year, and he kept reliving that moment when his eyes fell on a beautiful girl and lingered on her a little too long. Then, at the inn, he did everything he could to hide it, but his father still teased him a bit about it later. Of course he noticed. Nothing was as embarrassing for Robb, although now he would give everything to have his father back, even if he had to argue with him that he had absolutely never been seriously attracted to any woman. He could at best discuss this with Theon, although he would prefer to keep it to himself. He would never start such a conversation himself, his feelings were his alone.

But now he decided to approach her. He could have ignored it, thought that he was just imagining it, that it definitely wasn't her. After all, he didn't even know her name. Neither her nor her companion. But he couldn't let go, he never could.

"Unfortunately, not in better circumstances than last time."

"I heard that two women joined in, but I regret that I didn't ask for their name right away. Although I haven't even had a chance to learn it yet." yes, none of them introduced themselves when they had the pleasure of meeting at the inn. "Could I?"

"Amalthea." she replied, smiling gently.

"I'm Robb Stark."

She wanted to say that she knew his name - after all, she was educated, or at least enough to know everything important about the world around her and the most important houses of Westeros, but her voice got stuck in her throat. Why? Because Robb took her hand and brought it to his lips, kissing the back of it. Maybe it was just an innocent, polite gesture, but her heart sped up, threatening to make her face blush.

"And your friend?" he asked, looking behind her at the brunette who was still busy talking with the soldiers.

She hesitated for a moment before answering, thinking about how his lips had just placed a gentle kiss on her hand, about the warmth of his gentle embrace when he was holding her hand for this short time.

"Ryledia." she also looked at her, but only for a moment, because she definitely preferred to look at the boy who touched her girlish heart than at the friend she was with every day.

"I hope you haven't had any unpleasant experiences in these two years like at that inn." he really wanted it to be that way, even though the chances were slim. After all, women traveling alone are unfortunately often harassed. But they didn't look like they were in bad shape.

If it weren't for traveling alone, he would assume they had family somewhere nearby they could stay with - at least one of them. They didn't look like they could be sisters, but anything was possible. He assumed that since Amalthea hadn't introduced them that way, they didn't have a bond deeper than friendship. Still - ladies traveling alone was like asking for trouble. For that reason, he was glad that they would stay with them, at least for a while. That wasn't the only reason, of course, but he didn't want to admit it yet. For now, he wanted to... get to know her. Just like that.

He couldn't deny it, she was pretty - he had eyes, after all. Who wouldn't like a slim girl with a visible waistline, fanciable breasts, amber eyes and long wine-colored hair? That's why he went so far with politeness as to kiss her hand while introducing himself. A gesture of respect, but at the same time he hoped that he had impressed her and that Amalthea would reciprocate his desire to get to know each other.

It is true that he has his duties, he leads people to war, he wants to save his father, but during the day he also has long moments when he is alone with his thoughts. He would gladly fill it with her, if she agreed to it, of course.

And if not, he would have to try harder than just kissing her hand while looking her straight in the eyes.

"Fortunately, no." it was a small lie on her part, because her and Ryledia's life had never been easy, even before they ran away from home.

Amalthea had always had the same fear as her father: being recognized. Over time, she got used to it and was less careful, no longer touching the edges of the wig to make sure her hair wasn't sticking out - and asking Ryledia about it every now and then, whenever she could do it discreetly...

They were both aware of the dangers their journey entailed, but they didn't feel like they had any other choice now. They could stay somewhere longer and settle down, but it's more complicated than it seems, fitting into a community that already knows each other well and you are a stranger. Traveling gave them freedom, even if it meant risking their health or even lives from time to time.

That's why Amalthea was surprised by Ryledia's quick agreement to the idea of ​​joining the moving army.

"If you don't mind... I'd like to have a few words with you from time to time, my Lady. It's very... relaxing to be able to talk about something other than the current situation."

"Why 'my Lady'? Maybe I'm not of noble birth? After all, I travel from city to city without staying anywhere for long."

"It's obvious." he nodded at her and looked at her from her feet to the top of her head. "The way you talk, how you carry yourself, the way you look. A woman from a humble home is not like that."

"Be careful, my Lord, maybe it will turn out that I am a lost princess?" she said jokingly, laughing with him. She ignored the way she felt Ryledia lightly tugging her skirt from behind to be careful not to say too much. But these are just jokes! He wouldn't take her seriously, anyone would laugh if they heard something like that while talking with her.

"Then I would have to call the Maester to remind me of all the rules of etiquette regarding behavior in the presence of the princess." he replied in an equally light tone.

They continued their banter completely unaware of two things: First of all: Yes, Ryledia, who was sitting on a trunk practically behind Amalthea's back, may have continued her conversation with the soldiers, but at the same time she was listening carefully to her friend's conversation with Robb. Secondly: Catelyn noticed them too, or more precisely, that her son was suddenly interested in some woman - where did she even come from? On the one hand, she was happy because he finally didn't look all tense, but she didn't know her, this probably wasn't a good match for him in any way, and she immediately thought of everything that could go wrong if her son will be reckless.

And that's how he'll be like if he becomes infatuated with her.

~

-> Chapter II ''Two worlds'' -> general masterlist -> Game of Thrones/House of the Dragon masterlist

[beautifulterriblequeen]

Hello!! This is kind of a stupid question but do you understand who the Moonshadow assassins kill and why? At first I assumed it was just human rulers/generals from all kingdoms but when Viren was talking about how they were a threat in season 2 the other rulers didn’t seem to think it was as big of an emergency and I was a little confused. I hope you have a great day!!

I actually love questions like this! There's some nuance in the answer, and also some uncertainty, but I'll share my take for ya:

The Moonshadow assassins don't seem to pick their own targets, they accept assignments from the Dragon Throne. The full nature of that relationship hasn't been explained in any detail, so it's a tricky, complicated area of lore for the moment.

Basically, we don't have any information on how the Dragon Throne chooses the targets it passes on to the Moonshadow assassins for taking, aside from the one that happened just before the show's plot began, with Zubeia sending Runaan and his team to kill Harrow and Ezran. All we know is that these targets are supposed to be so threatening to Xadia that the world would be better off if they were no longer in it.

It's not impossible to imagine Avizandum telling his assassins to take out someone who didn't actually deserve it. It's relatively easy actually, knowing how he liked to stomp on humans, and how long he lived. It's probably happened. The only question is: how often? (angst)

I would guess - because again, we don't really know this for sure yet - that Avizandum generally chose actual threats, or people who could easily become threats in a war. But when you're a long-lived dragon, maybe you see different patterns in the mortal lives and cultures of humans. And Runaan and all the assassins before him wouldn't live long enough to recognize those patterns themselves, so they probably had to accept their targets out of either trust or duty. (more angst)

Some of them would definitely be military type targets: generals; shining young hero types with a chip on their shoulder; stealthy human assassins; dark mages if they dared risk it; and etc.

But a dragon might see strange harmless patterns beginning to form and decide to nip them in the bud before they led to anything truly threatening: a craftsman who just had a design breakthrough with a prototype ballista; a baker who just invented hardtack that could keep an army on the move for weeks; an armorer who just made a much safer design; a clever miner who found a rare and valuable source of iron.

People like that aren't dangerous on their own. But the knowledge they might share among the humans during a long drawn-out war with Xadia could be devastating in a decade or five. A dragon who already doesn't like humans would probably have no trouble sending his best assassin to snipe unsuspecting ordinary people like that.

We're still not sure if assassins must take an assignment, or if it's just dishonorable or something not to take it. But Runaan's a pretty regimented guy, and he's not fond of humans either. Between his trust issues and his protective instincts, I don't think he'd look too hard at his assignments these days even if he had a choice - he'd believe he was doing the right thing for his people, and then he'd stop thinking and go shoot someone.

I think sometimes Runaan definitely was doing the right thing by killing someone. But it's impossible to say which missions were and which weren't the right thing. Life is way too complicated for clear-cut answers like that.

Okay, onward!

The other part of this answer is about the Pentarchy itself. I think their hesitance to commit right away, and the reason Aanya got so much time to smack Viren with her sass, happened partly because Viren lives in a border realm like she does, and the other three rulers have a nice safe buffer between them and the brunt of the war efforts.

Basically, Del Bar, Neolandia, and Evenere don't have any skin in the border game.

They don't have big standing armies, and the only threats they deal with are small incursions - either assassins from other human realms or occasionally Moonshadow assassins.

Which is the topic at hand! But when Viren tries to convince Harrow to do the switching spell in S1, he claims that Moonshadow elves are an unstoppable force. Almost a force of nature, kind of vibe. If they come for you, you're just gonna die about it. Harrow even agrees with him! It's common knowledge how deadly the Moonshadow assassins are. And that's what happened despite all of Viren's plans - he still lost his king because Moonshadow assassins are scary good at their job.

So it's plausible that the other rulers didn't see any point in committing resources to an unsolvable issue - if Moonshadow assassins were coming for them, then they'd die. Why risk anyone else? Anyone in the assassins' way would die too. (Which they did in Katolis)

Another option is that Viren has been wrong before, and the other royals did commit resources to deal with the threat he claimed was coming, only to have time and money and forces wasted. If Viren had brought them costly mistakes, they could've been hedging their bets this time around.

There's a funnier possibility though: maybe they just didn't like Viren. People in power sometimes say polite things to an underling or a petitioner, and then have no intention of ever following through with it. They might've all been blowing smoke here, telling Viren "oh yeah sure if we're all in, let's totally do war, bro" and absolutely never meaning it even a little bit because they simply did not like the messenger.

Which is mean. But: royals.

tldr:

there's a few things affecting the Pentarchy scene all at once. We don't know all the factors involved yet, and the Pentarchy probably doesn't either. But at the end of the day the Pentarchy chose to hesitate, and that left Viren on his own.

[creepypasta-boy]

Fallout 3: Numbers Station

Fallout 3 contains several in-game radio stations. The most diverse and important is Galaxy News Radio. Many players of the evil persuasion know that you can kill Three Dog, the station's host, and he will be replaced by the technician Margaret. She is not a charismatic person and has very little to say, seeming to not enjoy her new announcing duties. She also never appears in person, and therefore cannot be killed. Once Three Dog is dead, you're stuck with Margaret.

What most players do NOT know is that under certain circumstances, GNR will become a "numbers station". A numbers station is one that broadcasts an unusual coded message. Many of these exist in real life; some hypothesize that they are a nuclear retaliation control network. You can check Wikipedia for more information about these odd broadcasts as they relate to the real world.

No one is really sure which actions are needed to hear the numbers station in Fallout 3. It appears that you must kill Three Dog, because no one has reported hearing the numbers station with him still alive. It also appears that you have to skip over the quest "Galaxy News Radio", where you help boost the station's signal so that it can be broadcast further than just the immediate DC area. This is easy enough to do with either a speech check or by using the Fallout Wiki to look up where to go next and advance the main plot. Finally, you definitely have to destroy Raven Rock. This is the actual trigger to turn GNR into a numbers station, and will remain such for the rest of the game. However, the vast majority of players who perform these three actions still continue to hear the standard GNR broadcasts, so there must be several more requirements the community has yet to isolate.

If you're lucky enough to have hit upon the right set of circumstances, just after destroying Raven Rock, you will get the message, "Radio signal lost", and a few seconds later, "Radio signal found". You cannot, however, actually listen to GNR just yet, because you didn't boost the signal and are out of range of the broadcast at the exit of Raven Rock. Luckily, Raven Rock is situated in the mountains, near one of the few places outside DC that you can get high enough to catch the signal. So far, the confirmed locations to hear the GNR numbers signal are:

Within the immediate DC area, obviously... this is true for the regular GNR throughout the game.

At the top of the ferris wheel at Point Lookout.

On the tops of some of the satcom arrays you can climb in the northwestern map area.

On the roof of Tenpenny Tower, though this may be within normal broadcast range anyway. Feel free to playtest and get back to me on this.

On the highest point of the broken bridge around Arefu... again, may be within broadcast range anyway.

On some of the highest points of the mountaintops in the area near Raven Rock. This is obviously your easiest chance to first listen to the numbers station.

When you tune in, you will hear an old, familiar voice... Three Dog, despite the fact that you killed him earlier. However, you will quickly notice that he does not seem to be "in character". So I guess it's not technically Three Dog, but the voice actor, Erik Dellums. He reads a series of numbers in a monotone, depressed-sounding voice. He always recites a list of single digits between 9 and 12 characters long. For example, "nine-three-seven-nine-one-seven-two-zero-three-four". He never uses a multi-digit number like "eleven" or "forty". These numbers are followed by widely-varying lengths of Morse code. This is then followed by the song, "I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire". All other music tracks seem to be inactive at the numbers station.

The Morse code was the easiest part of the mystery to crack, as it was widely available and many people actually know it off by heart. We quickly had a list of a great number of messages in English. Some sounded completely mundane and even comical, such as "Washed the car today, maybe Chinese for dinner," or "Have you watched my YouTube video yet? I uploaded myself kicking bums in the nuts."

You may be saying, "but wait, YouTube doesn't exist in the Fallout universe," and you are right. As far as we could tell, all of the messages sounded like they were based in our reality, somewhere near present-day.

Some of the messages are quite sinister. For example: "The Queen has died today. The world mourns, as on days like these, we are all Brits," or "I can't believe they've actually done it. Not long left. The noise. I can't take the noise anymore. I have a pistol in the attic."

Just recently, a player on the wiki forums noticed something that brought to light the meaning of the messages. He was reading a thread that collected all known ones, transposed from Morse to English, and saw the line, "one-two-zero-five-five-two-eight-two-zero-one-zero. What are you talkin' about? You'll be missed." He discovered this referred to the recent death of Gary Coleman, and then quickly realized the numbers were the relevant date and time it occurred.

He immediately scanned through the messages to try and find more examples of this apparent future-telling by a game that was more than a year old. The next message he read shocked him, and pushed him to enlist the aid of others to decipher the codes. It was "nine-four-five-four-two-zero-two-zero-one-zero. Accident in the gulf, several dead. Oil spill apparently averted." He realized this was the BP explosion, and the erroneous day one assessment that the well was not leaking.

From this point on, all numbers will be transcribed as times and dates. All times were given in-game in military format and remain so in this document.

Numerous members of the Fallout Wiki message board began looking over the messages to see what else could be learned. We quickly found that most of the dates were from after the game had been released, yet oddly, some were from the past. "22:15, April 15th, 1865. He's dead, and blame will probably be placed on that actor, Booth. Johnson better not cheat me out of the payment." This shed new doubt on the official version of the Lincoln assassination.

As the community quickly started piling up interpretations of the messages, the mods of the site summarily banned everyone who had posted in or even read the thread. All reference to the numbers station was removed from the Fallout Wiki, and filtering software was put in place to prevent the reposting of any relevant information.

A few people, however, are trading emails, slowly finishing the translation of the remaining messages and putting dates to the existing ones:

"The Queen has died today. The world mourns, as on days like these, we are all Brits." 14:21, March 19th, 2014.

"Have you watched my YouTube video yet? I uploaded myself kicking bums in the nuts." 24:16, December 24th, 2012.

"I can't believe Britney's actually won an Oscar!" 21:33, February 27th, 2023.

"I can't believe they've actually done it. Not long left. They were warned, but they just had to keep pushing the boundaries of science. The noise. I can't take the noise anymore. And the light, dear God! The Universe is slowly unraveling around us. I'm not going to wait for death. I have a pistol in the attic." This is actually the only message not preceded by a string of numbers.

It may be worth noting that the latest date on any of the messages is 01:27, July 6th, 2027.

[bookmuseum]

[REVIEW] Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

4/5 stars (★★★★)

"[T]here could only be a few winners and a lot of losers. And yet we played on. because we had hope that we might be the lucky ones. How could you get angry at the ones who wanted to be in the game? [She] had failed in this important way -- she had not taught her children to hope, to believe in the perhaps-absurd possibility that they might win. Pachinko was a foolish game, but life was not."

This review was difficult to write since the book's content and themes were very close to home as a first-generation immigrant who is also still dealing with the aftereffects of Japan's Pan-Asianist regime. Even looking back at all this now, I know I failed immensely in conveying my true feelings about Lee's book, but it's the best I can do for now.

Pachinko reminded me a lot of other Asian immigrant/diaspora literature like Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeliene Thien. In terms of writing style, I would say these two books are very similar. Like DNSWHN, Pachinko effectively broke my heart. When Lee said, "It was stupid to wish for kindness," whilst still sustaining the courageous hope throughout her book, was magnificent.

I'm seeing a handful of negative reviews on Pachinko, but a lot of them are written by white reviewers who are critiquing the book as an intellectualized object and not a testament to Korean resilience against Japan's colonial regime. Their complaints about the novel fall even shorter once they self-admit they knew virtually nothing about Korean and Japanese sociopolitics and how the Pacific War to the mid-20th century in particular has devastated Asia. White people are saying, "Oh, I had no idea this happened!" and "The historical context was very informative," as if Pachinko is meant to be a history textbook and not a fictionalized tribute of all the suffering and endurance a colonized people have gone through, as shown through the matriarch character Sunja's life experiences. The opening line is literally, "History has failed us, but no matter." Lee is telling you that the novel isn't about educating your ignorance or covering all of 20th century Korean history for your consumption; that is something you must do yourself and you shouldn't depend on this novel to hold your hand and tell you how to care, because how can you not care?

I cringe at the white people saying this book is "bad" or that it fails in so many areas as a piece of literature while at the same time emphasizing how extremely little they know about the context that informs the book, as well as the real-life impact such contexts have had on the author herself. You can tell Lee did a lot of research and soul-searching to even make this book possible, and that in itself is a triumph. The attention to detail, her ability to switch between several languages (even their slang!), and the vivid depiction of a time she did not grow up in but managed to capture on paper so astonishingly are signs of a true master writer. I think most of the (white) people who disliked this book completely missed the mark with these types of nitpicks. I saw someone whining about all the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean terms that Lee included sans translation. As someone who isn't fluent in any of those languages, I took those moments when I had to look up the word online (which is insanely easy, by the way; imagine reading this book and all you had were Chinese to Japanese to Korean to English dictionaries to go off of) as times to reflect on how so many cultures, histories, and languages inform this book. It truly is a saga in its own way, even though the farthest we go from the beginning setting of Gohyang is New York. Even though we mainly stayed within East Asia, the individual inward journeys that all the characters experienced were quietly epic. Pachinko may be dominantly written in English, but those moments that incorporate different terms, ideas, traditions, and specialized words were so meaningful. (I found even Lee's incorporation of the changing fashion and food styles to be very impressive!) It really genuinely is not that hard to just look things up and do a bit of reading on what something means. Lee didn't just use basic translations either; she used concepts and ideas that required deeper context to really grasp what was being said, which I thought was brilliant in its subtly humble decolonization. As a reader, you are forced to make sense of the kaleidoscope of different languages, cultures, histories, and overlapping stories; it gives you a glimpse of what it must've been like to actually live in these times, which I choose to see as a true honor, rather an inconvenience.

Pachinko's strength goes beyond just the text though. Lee's characters are painfully human and reminded me a lot of my own relatives, especially Yangjin, Yoseb, and Hansu. Save for Sunja, who was Pachinko's glittering protagonist, these three characters were very evocative for me, especially when they each had scene(s) that depicted their ugly weaknesses and vulnerability. For Yangjin, she seemed like such a selfless, strong, and reserved mother throughout the book, but then there's that final scene before [she passes away when she confronts Sunja for her "neglect." For the first and only time, Yangjin speaks her mind and lets out the words she had been "protecting" from her daughter all this time; she no longer has the energy to keep them to herself. She's dying and is becoming senile, and it's in that moment that she allows herself to be selfish. I'm not saying I totally agree with what Yangjin said (Sunja suffered so much -- in ways her mother never had to see), but I sympathized with her loneliness. I liked that Lee didn't explicitly show us the exact moment of her death but moved on in the next chapter immediately to her funeral, because the physical death doesn't matter so much as the spiritial one that Yangjin just experienced: She can no longer keep lying to her daughter and keep her regrets silent; now that she has been able to voice them, she's free.

Lee's treatment of Yangjin's character paralleled well with Yoseb, who was supposed to be the "man of the house" and prided himself on providing for his family and Kyunghee; he was very old-fashioned, and I understand [that his struggles, his getting burnt in Nagasaki, and his eventual death symbolized how that type of "patriarchal" man can no longer exist, but I never felt like Lee looked down on him or dismissed how he was feeling. She took great care to emphasize how everything he did was for love and his family, which made me understand why everyone was so accommodating and felt so much pain when they saw Yoseb suffering after he got burnt.  I know what it's like to keep forgiving someone who's turned nasty and intolerable, because you can't help but remember the person they used to be before all the turmoil and heartache. [Yoseb shined the most during that confrontation scene with Hansu: "Though he shouldn't, Yoseb hated this man -- his expensive clothes, flashy shoes, his unchecked confidence, reeking of a devilish invulnerability. He hated him for not being in pain." That scene was so brilliant: the image of a tall, white-clad, and domineering Hansu fancying himself the hero who saved everyone's lives looking down on a crippled, scarred, and bitter Yoseb tucked into the haystacked ground, still defiant and seeing right through his cruelty anyway, was so haunting. As the story progressed and Yoseb grew more helpless, I could understand and feel for him, even when he started to grow violent, cynical, and frustrating. Like Yangjin, Yoseb was so painfully human and raw as a character. When he muses, "This life had too much loss . . . The stupid heart could not help but hope," I felt my heart collapse for him.

And finally, Lee's depiction of Hansu impressed me greatly because I just really didn't like him, but I knew where he was coming from every step of the way. When he was explaining his background to Sunja during the days when they first met (growing up Korean in Japan, trying his best to keep him and his abusive father alive, living through a loveless marriage, etc.), I could follow the line of logic he clung onto to make sense of the world. And even though I didn't agree with most of the things he did or said, I knew Lee was presenting me with a real person born of flesh and sinew -- not just a two-dimensional character in a book trying to get sympathy points from its audience. His twisted yet still devoted love for Sanju and Noa were heartbreaking, although I am very, very firm in that I do not like him. He never sat well with me; I agreed with Yangjin that he had always been trouble. That being said, I can see how Sunja fell in love with him and how "he had loved her with a kind of gratitude." I wish I had the capacity to speak more on how much I appreciate and marvel at these complex, multifaceted characters, but this review must go on! (I will say, though, that dear God, I wanted to sob like a child when [that scene with Isak begging God -- or anybody -- for his life to continue happened. I knew he was going to die, and he knew it too, but it was so tragic. He wanted to live, he wanted to see his boys grow up, and he was so sorry for making Sunja's life so difficult). I honestly think Isak and Sunja were my favorite characters. I loved that Lee decided to end the novel with [Sunja visiting her husband's grave and talking to him. It was the first and last time she called him "Yobo," which was bittersweet and made me smile. 

Circling back, a common issue I see (white) people having with Pachinko that there were "too many characters" to the point that they "never felt connected" to anyone in particular. There were too many time jumps, switches in point of view, and scenes that seemed narratively significant like Isak's death are brushed over. I find that "critique" very flaccid. While others found Lee's style -- especially in Book 3 when everything did start to shift very helter-skelter with the POV switches and new character introductions -- irritating or confusing, I found it quite realistic and representative of what life is like as an immigrant, especially in terms of how time passes: "It was easy to recall a time when there was no money for tea and a time when there was none to buy." I understand what it's like living through a period when everything is falling apart, -- it would be better to just give up and die -- and then suddenly it's five, ten, twenty years later, you can have all the white rice you want, there's money to set apart for handbags and toys, and you have no idea how you got from Point A to Point B. It's true Lee doesn't offer much explanation as to why we gyrate from character to character, especially near the end when she introduces people like Hana and Etsuko, but that disorienting feeling of, "What about x? When will I see that person again? Was that the last time they'll be mentioned?" is reminiscent of real life. You don't know when goodbye means goodbye. You keep hoping they'll return, like how to the very last page I really wanted Kim to come back, or even the two sisters that Sanju and Yangjin took in, but most of the time, you never get your closure. You just get curt summaries -- perhaps a decade later -- like "He died" or "Killed in action," and you're meant to move on and get up the next day. I can understand how this type of narration is frustrating to follow -- maybe even unsatisfying and surface-level -- but I admire Lee for handling it like that. That is what it's like living as an immigrant haunted by intergenerational trauma. That is what it's like to carry on. That said, I will admit that my interest did eventually teeter off near the end of the book, especially once we started to focus more on Solomon. I didn't like him or found his arguments for "hey, there are bad Koreans and there are bad Japanese, and vice versa, can't we all just get along?" very charming. It annoyed me and I found myself having to slog through the last 100 pages. But even with Solomon, I understood where he was coming from and how he got to where he was. It's difficult to explain, but so natural to understand.

Lee writes, "For people like us, home doesn't exist." Pachinko really captured that feeling of both exile and disconnect, that feeling of never belonging anywhere yet still yearning for a "home" that never truly existed or can ever exist. I like that the first section Book 1 Gohyang/Hometown 1910-1933 was hyper-realistic and the most straightforward narrative out of them all because that is how we as first-generation immigrants remember the past before we left our home country; we remember the sensual details, the defining moments that changed our lives forever, and we can recite the story and trace the lines of our ancestors like tree branches. Book 1 was immersive, powerful, and spell-binding. I was genuinely hooked, I didn't want to put the book down for the first 200 pages. Many tend to think Pachinko is, at best, a four-generation family saga, -- starting with Sanju and ending with Solomon, her grandchild -- but that fails to account for Hoonie and his peasant parents, as well as Yangjin's father and three unmarriageable sisters. I think Lee deliberately didn't include as much "backstory" about Hoonie and Yangjin, as well as the generation before them, because there really isn't much documentation about peasant fishermen at the turn of the century in rural Korea. I mourn for how little is remembered of them and all the people they represent. I've certainly read about the upper classes and aristocrats in Korea at that time -- their legacies are assured, but even with very little to go off of, Lee managed to create vignettes of unknown characters that were all too human. Hoonie and his parents stuck with me throughout the whole book, as they must have with Sunja and Yangjin even to the final page. I can't imagine not caring about Hoonie, the disabled but kindhearted man who didn't even think he was worthy enough to get married and died loving his wife and daughter. I agree that Sunja is the nucleus of Pachinko's whole story, but the threads and connections she has with everyone -- even minor characters -- were gut-wrenchingly human; I love that Lee didn't just rely on her "main" Korean characters to develop her main themes. For example, when Sunja conversed with the women at the market:

"Sunja-ya, a woman's life is endless work and suffering. There is suffering and then more suffering. It's better to expect it, you know. You're becoming a woman now, so you should be told this. For a woman, the man you marry will determine the quality of your life completely. A good man is a decent life, and a bad man is a cursed life -- but no matter what, always expect suffering, and just keep working hard. No one will take care of a poor woman -- just ourselves."

This scene happens very early in the book, but the nameless woman's words are echoed later on when the same sentiment is repeated again: "A woman's lot is to suffer." And it all culminates at the end when Sunja recollects these words after Noa has died:

"All her life, Sunja had heard this sentiment from other women, that they must suffer -- suffer as a girl, suffer as a wife, suffer as a mother -- die suffering. Go-saeng -- the word made her sick. What else was there besides this? . . . Should she have taught her son to suffer the humiliation that she'd drunk like water? . . . Did mothers fail by not telling their sons that suffering would come?"

Lee's treatment of the themes of womanhood and motherhood were the most striking to me, although I am biased since I myself am a woman of color born of immigrant parents. I think this novel is in every definition a triumph. However, my final word on this is that, despite the first block quote I included here, I don't think Pachinko was the perfect title for this book. The subject of actual pachinko playing and its use as an explicit metaphor doesn't come up until at least Book 2. Lee's themes of "there could only be a few winners and a lot of winners" was definitely well-established by that time, but she didn't connect it to pachinko the game specifically until it was too late, I believe. I appreciate it as a metaphor and I certainly think it fits, but I don't think it encapsulates the entire 500 pages, especially Book 1 when there was zero trace of pachinko at all.

Overall, a very magnificent read. I am glad that I chose Pachinko as one of the last books to read for 2024. Thank you Min Jin Lee!

[amplexadversary]

Man I think the thing that annoys me the most about Genshin is that there is genuinely a great open-world adventure RPG game underneath its many many many flaws.

Cut because I have a lot to fucking say apparently.

Are there problems with the character designs? Absolutely. Rather than having truly unique characters the game uses the way 3D models work as a crutch and an excuse. But at the end of the day, it's still a bunch of weird little guys in minxy outfits, and in an ideal version of the game, you would only really need a handful of them to really speak to you.

The overworld and all the various places you can go are genuinely beautiful, and the climbing and gliding mechanics scratch a particular itch in my brain; there is a freedom to approaching the terrain howeverthefuck you want because you can climb damn near everything, and while there is always an "easy" route to get anywhere, there is also endless potential for self-imposed challenges like "climbing the fuck up a mostly sheer wall meant as a one-way shortcut, because there *are* some very hard to find footholds there where you can regain stamina," or "shut up, story, Mountain is talking, and I want to see just how many places I can get to before I'm actually meant to go there." This is held back by the fact that it is not a central mechanic, and I found as I moved into newer areas, there were a lot more exceptions to the "can climb anything" rule. Another frustration of mine that might not be relevant anymore was that at the point where I quit, the newest areas had a lot of flat areas with only occasional verticality that were just not as fun to screw around in.

But no, the things that REALLY frustrate me about this game and, imo, hold it back from being truly excellent are the monetization and the over-reliance on timers to create difficulty.

Look. Gatchas are predatory monetization schemes that foster gambling addictions and add perverse incentives to gameplay, like a mandatory Power Creep to always make it feel necessary to pull for the New Characters. This intertwines a lot with the over-use of timed fights; the goal of these is to make the player over-rely on DPS as their main goal, which is the easiest way to ensure that your power creep strategy works.

Reworking these two infuriating fucking elements would do the bulk of the work that would turn this game from a decent one to a uniquely great one and I am not even fucking joking. Remove the timers? Players now have more freedom to choose their play style, whether it's to create the most efficient DPS teams possible for a challenge, to play defensively and rely on their resource management, built healers, and general not-getting-hit skills to win them fights, or to create the most crackpot builds and party combinations that let them, at a steeper challenge, win with their favorites.

Then, heavily tweaking and adding variety to the gatcha system for another gated, but fairer progression. There honestly could still remain an element of chance, an option for a player to buy the chance to gamble (which, I DON"T LIKE but serves as a big ol' COMPROMISE to the counterargument "but what about the money???"), AND the potential to roughly tie character acquisition to game progress, while still allowing some flexibility for people who REALLY REALLY want a specific little doll in a flashy getup.

The solution? Make all the banners for the big "5*" characters available tied to whether you've completed certain quests, that would make sense for them to join your party after. You could even do this in chunks where you have a variety of possible recruits per banner. Tweak the pity system to be like the weapon banners, where after your guarantees for *a* powerful character/weapon, you are guaranteed *the* powerful character/weapon you *want.*

If you must, change the drop rates of the 4* and 5* each month; it adds a little element of planning and waiting for the perfect moment to strike to get the highest chance of getting someone you want.

Do the same for the weapon acquisition banners. Also, add an option where the player can forego the exp the shit weapons can give and instead trade them for more rolls. Also also, if the player rolls a constellation for a character who already has all their special shit unlocked, make it so that if the player uses it, it transforms into a constellation for a random character. Just because it would be funny, make it so that this may or may not be for a character they actually own. In order to use it they have to unlock the character. (What? Just because I want games to foster a healthy relationship with the player doesn't mean I'm not evil.)

Again, this preserves the personalized element of the current game's balance between working with the randos you get and going after a specific one you want. (Which I think is both funny and the only redeeming element of the gatcha system; I spent like half the time I played the game without an effective healer and had to make do with incidental ones and I think that is fucking hilarious. Also I ended up really liking a gal I got early on who I probably wouldn't have considered otherwise.)

Instead of tailored challenges for the what is it fucking called abyss, have a pool of possible challenges that are randomly rolled each month per player, and make the number of "floors" available tied to where they are in the story. This replicates the incentive to get new characters to address new challenges, but makes it less *mandatory.* Increase the timer for the challenges by like 50% and add another level of reward for speed. Make this one of the only timed challenges in the game. Add "survival" challenges to the pool, where rewards are given based on how many waves of enemies are defeated before a party wipe. This creates a system where players ARE rewarded for building new characters and creating effective builds, while rewarding multiple playstyles, and gives the option to either try for the maximum amount of currency per cycle or to save up (by playing the game over all at a slower pace).

Make events permanently available, unlocked via a system similar to the quest keys. Have a menu to activate events that works like the quest system in Warframe. Make these replayable, but only refresh the rewards (ie, you can replay the event, but get nothing until the refresh) on relevant calendar days. This provides incentive for players to play an event when it's "in season," and gives them something to look forward to, but removes the toxic FOMO element.

Hell, make the "refresh" rewards from events different than the initial ones, by giving currency for the whatsitcalled shop where you can straight up buy characters/constellations. That way there's incentive to play both new *and* old events.

Speaking of the shop, keep the monthly rotations of purchasable characters, but increase the number of slots based on story progression, and add one (1) "5*" character and like, three (3) "4*" slots that are determined randomly from the characters the player has met in-story. Increase the random 4* slots by like one for every major story chapter the player completes, and increase the 5* slots by one for every 2 or 3 chapters. This creates a system that I think math nerds and guide writers would love, trying to sus out the precisely perfect story progression to have the best chance to get every specific character, which would probably drive engagement as these nerds talk about it, while balancing the incentive to get later-game characters with the penalty of having a larger pool which is less likely to give the guy (gender neutral) you want.

Add an identical system for weapons.

Also, let people climb shit and sequence break in the dungeon areas like the gremlins we are; just don't let us actually get the rewards until we complete the various challenges. People will find stupid fucking ways to accomplish these things, you add some sweet bait to get the kind of player who loves going out-of-bounds, and also to the kind of player who loves looking for unexpected tactical advantages to give themselves.

Honestly a lot of this shit largely fixes the irritating artifact/equipment system as well without even touching it, because removing the timers makes it possible for players to largely settle for "good enough" random equipment rather than "perfect" equipment (and the nerds who want perfect equipment can still grind for it. Maybe add a pity system where you sacrifice one of every piece of a set to reroll either the main or sub stats of a chosen piece. (full 5* set of equipment for the main stat, full 4* set for a substat, maybe a full 3* and below set to juice up the specific gains on one substat to a higher number in the possible range)

Anyway TL;DR this game could be so much better, greatly lower the incentive to develop an gambling addiction and still have the opportunity to make money* and it drives me fucking batty

tl;dr yes I want this game to be more like Warframe, shoot me.

*(pay to unlock certain banners out of sequence, pay to get more currency for rolls or for the shop instead of saving up and choosing purchases carefully, pay to refresh rewards or get more chances to get equipment, but none of it is strictly necessary. It kind of mimics Warframe in that it becomes "pay to skip grinding")

[jcmarchi]

A Web Designer’s Secrets to Longevity

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/a-web-designers-secrets-to-longevity/

A Web Designer’s Secrets to Longevity

The web has been around for 30+ years. And we’ve reached a point where “old timers” exist within the industry. In this case, let’s define it as anyone with more than 15 years of experience.

My web design career began in 1996. That was right about the time when the web was becoming mainstream. More people were coming online. Organizations began to see the value in having a website.

So much has changed. We’ve gone from static HTML to content management systems (CMS). The industry has adopted many standards and best practices. Most impressive is that we can take the web with us. Mobile devices have been a game changer.

Truthfully, I couldn’t foresee any of this when I started. Nor did I know that I’d still be working on the web. Things just turned out that way.

Or did they? There must be some secret formula for sticking around this long.

I’ve thought about what it takes to achieve longevity in web design. Here’s what I found.

You Need Enthusiasm for Your Work

Enthusiasm is a key to longevity. And it applies to every career path. Staying on course is difficult when you’re not having fun.

But sometimes we get the wrong impression. Enthusiasm isn’t a 24/7 feeling. It can leave us for days, weeks, or more.

And there are numerous causes. A particularly stressful project can sap your energy. A difficult client can make you dread going to work. Plus, this work is just plain hard. Things don’t always go according to plan.

So, where does enthusiasm come from? Some find it in the creative process. Others may find it in solving complex problems. Helping a client achieve their goals is also a goldmine of good vibes.

Being filled with endless joy isn’t the point. That’s not a realistic expectation for any of us. It’s about finding bits and pieces that excite and motivate you. And you can adjust your workflow to experience more of these moments.

These are the things you can hold onto during tough times. And they’ll give you the energy to take on the next challenge.

Be Willing to Adapt to New Tech

Very little stays the same in this industry. Fundamental technologies like HTML and CSS remain. But even they have evolved. As they say, change is the only constant.

Adapting to change is difficult. As is understanding when to make a change. There are no easy or universal answers.

New technologies arrive daily. But not all of them will be worth your time. How will you know when it’s time to adapt?

So much depends on your niche. Look for tools that will add value to your skill set. Find technologies that will help you better serve client needs. These are areas where change makes sense.

The benefits of something new aren’t always apparent. You may need to experiment to find them. Finding the right one can provide a boost for your career.

You don’t have to jump on every new thing that comes along. But a willingness to try can make a difference. You’re investing in yourself and your future.

Work for Something Bigger Than Yourself

Web design is just another job at the end of the day. There are positives and negatives. And not everyone has the desire to stay in the industry.

Those of us who stay seem to have a common thread. We want to become involved in the web design community.

This involvement takes many forms. It could be contributing to an open-source project like WordPress. Or you might advocate for important causes like security or accessibility.

But you don’t have to focus on making change at the highest level. It’s also possible to impact others on a one-to-one basis. Activities like mentorship help bring others into the industry. It may make someone else’s journey that much more rewarding.

Paying it forward gives you a reason to stay in web design. It doesn’t have to be anything time-consuming or difficult. Even small contributions provide a sense of purpose.

Stay around as Long as You Like

Being a web designer for 25+ years is hard to fathom. The job description has changed dramatically. And yet here I am.

I’m far from the only “old timer” out there. Other talented and dedicated folks have made it this long. Some have even come full circle and retired.

If you’re hoping for similar longevity, think about the items above. Find a niche that you’re enthusiastic about. Don’t be afraid to try new things. And give back in a way that suits you.

Each of these items will help you establish roots in web design. They’ll open you up to a world of opportunity and support. You’ll need them to survive the challenges and changes.

You may make it longer than me! And who knows what the web will look like then?

Related Topics

[stastnesova]

When I get super bored sometimes I download one of those dumb clickbait mobile games. You know, where you build a kingdom with little factories and then train an army, and once you hit a certain level, you go “open world” and can join guilds and fight other guilds, against real people.

A few years ago, I had someone keep attacking my city over and over, wiping me out and taking all of my resources repeatedly, until there was nothing to even make it worth it anymore. I don’t remember exactly how the conversation went, but I must have messaged them like “hey man come on wtf” and he came back with the “it’s a game dude if you don’t like it don’t play it” blah blah blah. Eventually he started to say certain things, including sending me a selfie!!, that made me step back and think to myself “this seems like a teenage boy who has no concept of internet safety whatsoever.” By that point I’d given up on the original objective of “please stop wiping me out for fun,” and I told him “Hey, just so you know. You shouldn’t send strangers your picture or name or any other personal information. You have no idea who I am and I could use that to find you if I had bad intentions.”

Well. He said “bet” and sent me three pictures, confidant I was blowing smoke.

And I’d also like to point out that I have no training in computers, data mining, coding, investigation, absolutely nothing. I’m just someone who was born in that gray area of millennial to zoomer, and has casually been on tumblr for almost 15 years.

So he sent me three photos: one was selfie. The other was a picture of a couple of teenagers, obviously having a day out (maybe a hike), with a covered bridge in the background. The final one looked like a homecoming football game photo, of a kid in his uniform next to a girl (either in a cheerleader uniform or dress).

And when I tell you HOW easy this was. The bridge had a name on one end of, so I googled it and immediately found the name of the town. I searched for the local high schools until I found the one with the same school colors as his football jersey. And then I just looked up the previous year’s roster, found his number, and thus his name. Less than 10 minutes, and I knew his name, face, town, and school.

Moral of the story is: be careful of what you put online. Not everybody has good intentions.

Just putting this out there to let people know to watch what they post because you can be found and if you think that the government can't do this ...

Well, you better think again!!

[leonsrightlations]

The Earth is Online Chapter 3.2

Tang Mo tightly clenched his teeth and suppressed to the bottom of his heart his growing desire to beat this little girl to death with a stick.

“Brother [1], have you seen my book?”

Although the little girl’s voice was melodious and pleasant, looking at the face, Tang Mo only felt his hair stand on end. With a cold face, he watched her unwaveringly. He had no answer.

The little girl asked once again, “Brother, have you seen my book?”

This little girl seemed very weak. It should have been extremely easy for Tang Mo to overwhelm her. But considering that this area was extraordinarily strange, and that she had a mosaic for a face and was clearly not a real person, Tang Mo didn’t dare move carelessly. He could only play along.

He pursed his lips. After a moment, he tried to put on a good-natured smile.

“Little friend, what book of yours has disappeared?”

“Brother, your smile is so ugly.“

Tang Mo: “...”

The little girl said, “My book disappeared, brother. Can you help me find it? My mom is so hateful. Even though I hate reading books, she bought a lot of them for me. Those books are so hard to read, but if I lose them, my mom will definitely be really mad. If I don’t have that book, she’ll kill me. Brother, can you help me find my book?”

Tang Mo didn’t try to fake a smile anymore.

“Who is your mom?”

“My mom is my mom. Brother, you’re so strange.”

From behind Tang Mo, the spiritual weirdo spoke in a trembling voice, “If you don’t find the book, your mom…your mom will kill you?”

“That’s right, my mom will be very mad. My mom is really scary when she’s angry.”

The spiritual weirdo also said, “She’d really murder you?”

The little girl cocked her head, the ponytail on her right side dropping down and falling onto that mosaic face. He didn’t know why, but Tang Mo thought that if it weren’t for this mosaic, she ought to be smiling right now.

With a pair of black painted-lacquer eyes, she looked at Tang Mo and the spiritual weirdo, and then said, “Hee hee hee…but if brother doesn’t help me find the book, I will also kill brother!”

It was as if he had been doused in ice water from head to foot.

Tang Mo pursed his lips. After staring at the mosaic little girl for a short moment, he indifferently asked, “Do you remember what book? I will help you search.”

“En…”

The little girl shook her head, her ponytails swaying left and right, as if she were trying hard to think.

She “en”d for a long time, then said, “I can’t remember!”

Tang Mo had already guessed this was probably the answer.

All of a sudden, the little girl anxiously said, “Ah, I have to go to school. If I’m late, the teacher will kill me. I’ll go first, brother. You must properly help me find my book, okay?”

Saying so, she carried her small book bag on her back and once more ran off into the bookshelves. When she was no longer visible, the strange game officially began.

Tang Mo and the spiritual weirdo had been standing by the service desk, avoiding getting close to the little girl. The moment she disappeared, the computer on the desk suddenly began to glow. The two of them approached.

On the computer’s blue background, a paragraph had appeared. It was clearly from a diary.

Tang Mo read aloud, “November 15th. The weather is clear. I lost the book my mom bought! Mom will kill me!”

The spiritual weirdo said, “It changed! The words changed! November 16th. Overcast. I hid from my mom that I don’t know where the book is. Where is it? Where is it? Mom really will kill me!”

The words on the computer screen once again transformed.

Tang Mo read, “November 17th. Overcast. It seems like my mom found out. Does she know or not?” The words changed and he continued to read, ”November 18th. Rain. Hee hee hee…Mom will really kill me!”

Tang Mo and the spiritual weirdo both fell silent.

“...Will we really die?” the spiritual weirdo mumbled to himself.

Tang Mo looked at him.

Working at the city library was very boring, and every day they welcomed all kinds of people. During break time, they occasionally chatted about the strange people they had seen that day. 

The spiritual weirdo didn’t seem to have a job. He came every day to read books and they were always about abnormal things. Xiao Zhao said that the spiritual weirdo was probably dumped by a previous girlfriend, had his mentality twisted, and became the way he is now.

In the minds of the employees, the spiritual weirdo was just a very strange person, both ridiculous and pitiful.

Tang Mo’s expression as he looked at the spiritual weirdo right then truly was pitying. 

Tang Mo looked at his frightened appearance. Actually, Tang Mo was also scared, but this was a time when they needed to not be frightened.

Tang Mo thought about it, but still honestly replied, “It might be that we really will die.”

The spiritual weirdo stared at him with despair in his wide eyes.

Tang Mo said, “Hang on. The words on the computer changed again. 'An obedient and sensible little girl, Mosaic…'” Tang Mo’s expression distorted. He continued to read, “Mosaic only has one shortcoming - she doesn’t like to read books. Her mom most hates little girls who don’t like to read and particularly hates little girls who throw away books and yet lie to others and say that they were stolen. What her mom doesn’t know is that Mosaic isn’t lying. She didn’t throw the book away. A demon stole it.”

Looking at the word ‘demon,’ Tang Mo knit his eyebrows.

“Demons most hate books. Demons are all illiterate. Why would anyone want to read? Only those winged fuckers read, okay? Unluckily, when the angel discovered that the demon had stolen the book, the demon hadn’t yet burned that evil thing. He took the book and secretly hid it within the city library. However, the bookshelves in the library are all exactly the same. After the angel left, the stupid demon was stunned. He let out an angry roar - these damned books!”

When Tang Mo finished reading these words, a clear and bright childlike voice suddenly sounded in the city library -

[Ding dong! The confrontation game, ‘Who Stole My Book?’ has officially begun. During the game:

Violence is prohibited.

During the day, the angel may obtain one piece of information about the book.

During the night, the demon may burn down any one bookshelf.

Oh clever and kind angel, after three days, Mosaic will be killed by her angry mom. Do you have the heart to watch this cute little girl die?]

Tang Mo: “...”

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Translation Notes:

[1] For anyone who doesn't know, the 'brother' here is 'gege.' It's a way to call boys/young men and doesn't necessarily indicate a literal family relationship. In the future I might leave some 'gege's or 'ge's untranslated because it sometimes sounds weird in English (like Xiao), but I'll add another translation note if I do.

ALSO: I've been thinking about changing 'spiritual weirdo' to 'Fanatic.' It sounds closer 神棍 rhythmically although it doesn't necessarily convey the same meaning (but nothing does...). Please let me know what you think.

[rushescapegameme]

Escape To Thrills: Embarking On The Best Escape Room Games

The best escape room Melbourne games are those that make you feel like you've stepped into a movie, book, or video game. You'll need to work together as a team and solve puzzles while trying not to get killed by bad guys.

These games can be played either solo or with friends, so if you're looking for something fun and different then look no further.

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Escape room games are a type of puzzle game that involves solving puzzles to escape from a locked room. The puzzles in an escape room game are designed to be difficult, but solvable.

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As you plan your escape room experience, it's important to think about the criteria that make for a great escape room game. There are many factors to consider:

Fun:

The best games offer an immersive experience that is engaging and entertaining. They should be challenging but also fun. In addition to this, they must have variety in their puzzles and challenges so that players can't predict what will happen next.

Challenging:

The more difficult the escape room challenge is, the better. This means no easy solutions or cheap tricks only real skills required from both participants and facilitators alike.

Interactive:

Interactive elements are especially important if you want people who may not be familiar with gaming culture or technology (i.e., younger ones) participating in an activity together.

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The best escape room Melbourne rooms you may have to solve a puzzle by using your hands or feet to manipulate objects around you.

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Variety and Complexity of Puzzles

The variety and complexity of puzzles in an escape room game can be an important factor in determining how much enjoyment you will get out of it. The difficulty level of each puzzle is variable, so you might be able to solve one fairly easily while someone else may find themselves stumped.

This is because each player's skill level will influence how difficult each individual puzzle should be for them. In other words, if all your friends say they're really good at solving puzzles but one particular challenge seems impossible for them (or any other reason), then don't worry about it. You might have just found yourself some new friends who love doing things their own way.

Conclusion

So, if you're looking for some fun and exciting escape games in your area head over to the best escape room Melbourne game to thrills and find a game that suits your style. The staff is friendly and helpful, the games are interactive, challenging but not frustrating. And if you need any additional help or advice during gameplay then there's always someone at their desk ready for it.