#veebs rants

[vibratoryblurriness]

Something's been bugging me for the past couple hours. I wasn't sure if I wanted to go through the trouble of doing something about it, but eventually I noticed the more I thought about it the more I was clenching my jaw, so probably there's something that needs to get out. It wasn't prompted by any particular person or event or anything, and I already forget what got me on the topic, but it's something that's bugged me for a while...

It's a bit of a controversial opinion (or in some circles will get you insta-cancelled), but I would like everyone to acknowledge that people are people, not inhuman monsters, no matter what they think or do. I've seen it come up this year in at least a few discussions of what defunding the police or prison abolition would look like in the grand scheme of things, how we have to acknowledge that the people in question are people. If we write them (or any other group) off as not human, whether literally or just implied through the way we talk about and frame things, it become really easy to not have to think about their experiences or beliefs and how that led to them doing whatever it is we don't approve of, or to address the situations that lead to those experiences and beliefs. I was mostly thinking of the prevailing US attitude toward people we've labeled criminals while writing that, but it happens with all sorts of groups in all sorts of situations.

The specific thing that prompted this though is the way what feels like the majority of people treat certain "dark" things, whether it's certain tropes in fiction, especially fanfic, or certain kinks, or things like that. Whichever one makes you personally the most uncomfortable, that's what I'm referring to. The ones where it's easy to find tons of people arguing that anyone who writes or reads or even thinks about that kind of stuff is irredeemably a terrible person, no exceptions. And I'm going to need you to stop that if you're one of those people.

I rarely talk about it, but I've been through some terrible things when I was younger and have plenty of trauma to show for it. That doesn't make me unique or special, because sadly far too many other people have too, but hopefully even without getting into any details I can get my point across. Unless you're one of the couple of people I've ever told any of it to, you'll just have to use your imagination. You probably won't actually guess the right thing, but just think of it as whatever the previous paragraph made you think of, with me on the receiving end of it.

Do you know why it took me so many years to talk to anyone about any of it, why I've still hardly told anyone, and why I'm still afraid to tell anyone? Because of that shitty absolutist attitude that anyone who dares even think about the wrong things is themself a Wrong Person. Sure, there are some people who are drawn to those things because they want to do those things for real, and that's its own problem, but you know who a lot of the people involved are? People just trying to understand themselves in some way.

It took me a while to even acknowledge that words like "trauma" or "abuse" could apply to me in any way or that things that have happened to me actually were those things. I spent several years basically not having emotions because I got that good at repressing them. And yet I still sought out things that reminded me of what had happened, because I had no other way to even begin to attempt to process it. And I felt incredibly guilty about it, because everything everywhere constantly told me that made me a bad person. Imagine if I could've spent all that time actually understanding what had happened to me and recovering from it and being the semi-functional person I am now while I was still a kid in school, instead of not even getting started on it until the past few years after I was already an adult and had spent all that time dead inside and not really able to do anything with my life because I wasn't even capable of caring.

And then think about how the same thing applies to millions of other people, not just me, and far more than that when you apply the same ideas to broader ideas like I mentioned at the beginning. You don't have to like people who do things you don't agree with, or be ok with them, or understand them, but I'd really appreciate it if you could approach these things with a little nuance. People are weird and complicated, but they're still people, and there's a reason for the things they do. It might not be a good reason in some cases, and some of them may choose to do Bad Things as a result, but most of the time it's more complex than "thing bad".

If we really want to improve people's lives and the world we live in, we're going to have to put in the effort to figure out how those things ended up the way they did, and not just on a superficial level. The good news is that it'll probably also help you understand people who are different from you, understand and advocate for your own beliefs better, and be better eqiupped to actually make the changes that need to happen. So, let's get to work.

[veebs-hates-video-games]

I guess let's start with what I was grumbling about that inspired this in the first place. I've been catching up on some older games and am finally playing the Theatrhythm games. I played through all the songs in the original and messed around in the other modes a bit, but now I've moved onto Curtain Call because it has almost everything from the original plus a whole lot more.

On the plus side there's a whole bunch of good music in it, lots of fun characters from the main games and spinoffs, and the round little versions of the characters are surprisingly cute, especially when they're running around on the title screen excitedly and suddenly faceplant. I'm a big fan of them adding button controls and not just the stylus ones, which my hands and wrists are very thankful for.

That said, the more I play the more disillusioned I get with the higher difficulty note charts. They get to be kind of annoying and feel like I'm fighting the controls instead of a fun challenge. I just don't like the directional arrow notes with buttons or the stylus because they're always the least reliable inputs and keep ruining my streaks when they don't register.

I still think my favorite note charts in a music/rhythm game are the Neversoft Guitar Hero ones. Harmonix made slightly better charts that were slightly more accurate to the actual music (which isn't surprising because there are a bunch of musicians working there), but the timing on them was way more unforgiving and felt bad to me. As a musician the looser and more forgiving timing in the Neversoft games felt a little more like actually playing music with other people instead of it requiring me to be a robot.

Theatrhythm definitely takes the more Japanese approach Konami used (back when they still made games), like the Bemani games like DDR and Beatmania, which is fine and a lot of people like it, but it always slightly annoys me. I had a roommate who worked at Harmonix who also liked stuff like that, so I got to play some of the older and less well known stuff like Beatmania, which was kinda neat, even if it's less my thing.

Anyway, I'm also really sick of rank inflation...it's worse than grade inflation at Harvard. An A in Theatrhythm is mediocre at best, S is decent, and actually good is SS or SSS. Score inflation is also a serious problem too. It's basically impossible to successfully finish a song and not end up in the high seven digits, which is just too big a number to meaningfully convey much information. You don't need the kind of granularity that gives you when every button press gives you tens of thousands of points. It's just big numbers for the sake of big numbers, and since they don't use round numbers for scores you end up with like 9274572 points and it's much more annoying at a glance to compare that to your other scores than if it were just like 9274 or something.

In conclusion, drop the ranks by like 2-3 letter grades, truncate the last three digits off the scores, and throw out the actual input mechanics entirely and replace them with something that feels more consistent and reliable.

This has been today's episode of veebs hates video games, expanded from a rant on Discord this morning. I would grumble about how much I don't like Melody of Memory or Cadence of Hyrule, but this has gone on long enough already...

[chaoticpanenergy]

god. god. okay. so. im in a dnd campaign. yes? yes. im going to rant about my character's plotline. the campaign's theme (vaguely) is political intrigue. also fair warning there are going to be a number of sex mentions because the players are all horny college students (except technically i just graduated). also lots of morally questionable and straight up morally bad choices from various characters, all done in the name of entertainment.

relevant characters to what im abt to talk about:

kaede kipling (pc) (ze/hir, fae/they/she): my character, heir apparent (second heir in line) to House Kipling, an extremely rich and powerful family of professional assassins.

min (pc) (she/they/fae): played by one of the humans who i make out with (M, any pronouns); is a changeling (shapeshifter) noble seeking to form political alliances to benefit her family.

kenneth kipling (npc) (he/him): kaede’s uncle, heir to House Kipling (first in line), extremely cruel and also extremely hot and flamboyant; is. like. a vampire weeb (veeb) and has body modded fangs (is actually a half elf); seduces all his victims before killing them; decided kaede was his arch nemesis when kaede was about six (and he was like 22) and has personally made faer life a living hell since then.

santino (npc) (he/him i think? or he/any, most npcs use a variety): an aasimar (angel) healer who has a preexisting political alliance and close personal friendship with min

yersis (npc) (she/her or she/they i think): a powerful political leader in the country we live in (although not at the top of the government hierarchy). very hot. a lot of "yes mommy" jokes get made ooc anytime she does anything. vaguely allied with min, mostly because min wants to ally faerself with her and yersis doesn't object to this. tolerates but dislikes kenneth.

also!! the dm (R, they/them) is the other human i make out with, and is dating min’s player. they are both so cool :)

okay okay okay SO. M and i are the two players who are the most deeply invested in the Complicated Plot part of the campaign (the whole campaign was actually a birthday present for M from R, it was rlly cute). so M and i have a ton of lore that we've created together. and a ton of plot. in this post i am mostly talking about just the plot that directly impacts my character. there is a ton more i am not touching on in this post. here we go, buckle up:

so! the whole party met each other upon being summoned by a deity of chaos and anarchy to do some quest that he won't actually tell us the details of. we were sent to a party, which we are given to understand various important political things are happening at, and we each have different goals in attending. however, before gaining entrance to said party, we had to pass a series of tests. while working on these tests, min came up with the bright idea of barganing with the deity who summoned us all (we refer to him as Sexy Deity, since we do not yet know his name and R makes all the npcs so hot. it's amazing. we're all super gay.)

so min bargained with the deity. she came up with a proposal to sell him the souls of the rest of our party in exchange for herself becoming a warlock (and the more souls from the party she gets for him, the more additional perks she gets). she can keep her soul under this bargain also. it's very much a ton of perks for faer at the expense of the rest of the party. we refer to this bargain, and her attempts to deliver on it, as Min's Villain Arc. the party is not thrilled when she suggests we should all sell our souls, so she drops it for a while and we keep doing our fancy magical tests.

now. kaede's backstory is that they went to assassin school in their late teens, and had an extremely codependent relationship with their roommate, sorra, a changeling who used he/she/they pronouns. they had 0 boundaries with each other, never defined what their relationship was, and also had a lot of sex. it was very unhealthy. neither of them was aware of any of these many issues. after graduating, kaede panicked over the fact that she missed sorra (not being used to caring about other people this much), had an identity crisis, and ran away from home. kaede's parents hired sorra to go after kaede and bring them back, and kaede panicked again and killed sorra. this was about 2 weeks before the campaign started, and kaede has been dealing with significant amounts of trauma, grief, and guilt since then.

that context established, skipping back to the plot of the campaign! min goes through kaede's belongings (for reasons that actually were not super nefarious and did make sense at the time) and finds a locket with a portrait of sorra. curious about this, she shapeshifts into sorra and lures kaede off to a separate room. they proceed to sleep together, even though kaede knows this is some kind of ruse and not the real sorra. afterwards, kaede starts crying and traumadumps to min about having killed sorra and regretting it.

min has a bright idea. fae suggests to kaede that fae have the ability to take kaede's grief and pain away. kaede, who is not fully out of subspace at this point, and who has just experienced Having Some Serotonin And Endorphins for the first time in several months and associates min as being the cause of this, is distinctly more suggestible and open to this than ze would normally be. ze probably is not in a state where ze can truly consent to things. min is not fully aware of this fact, and also is on her villain arc, so continues with her proposal. (all of the really horrifying aspects of this situation were my idea btw, i enjoy traumatizing kaede. M helped me make it worse and more fun, but it was not her idea to do all the really horrible questionable parts of this lol.)

min explains that if kaede agrees to sell min their soul, for min to then immediately transfer to Sexy Deity, min would be willing to temporarily erase all of kaede's traumatic memories about killing sorra, with the goal of getting kaede into therapy and then slowly giving the memories back as kaede becomes better able to process and healthily deal with them. kaede, due to their extremely suggestible state and the fact that they are so tired of hurting so much all the time, agrees to this, and promptly signs away faer soul to min. min passes the soul on to Sexy Deity and gains her first level in warlock. kaede forgets all about killing sorra, for the time being, and switches their alignment from chaotic evil to neutral evil.

the problem with this bargain, that neither kaede nor min anticipated, is that kaede traumadumping about killing sorra to min directly before the "selling their soul" conversation made their memory of selling min their soul one of the memories that gets temporarily erased as part of this deal. due to this, kaede now 1) doesn't know they don't have a soul anymore 2) falsely believes that sorra is alive, and most importantly 3) believes that min is sorra in disguise.

min does not know this miscommunication has taken place. we continue on with our magical tests, pass them all, and gain entrance to the political event; it's a masquerade ball.

now!! we need the info about the npcs that i mentioned up at the top of this post. remember them? they're important now. they're all attending the ball.

midway through the ball, kenneth attempts to assassinate yersis (although he does not do this personally, instead sending some goons to do it for him, and is likely using the assassination attempt as cover to perform other nefarious deeds while everyone is distracted with yersis almost dying). yersis survives, thanks to magical healing from various sources (remember santino? he is here; he can restore anyone to full health regardless of injury level), but it does appear that people with various political agendas are attempting to do different things under the cover of the chaos.

because of the assassination attempt, the palace that we are all in is put on magical lockdown, with a magical barrier surrounding it to prevent any of us from leaving until Things Have Been Gotten To The Bottom Of. around this point, due to a conversation with yersis, min officially ends her Villain Arc, because yersis reveals that she does not trust Sexy Deity and does not believe he should be allowed to own more souls. and again, yersis is hot, so most of the pcs want to do what she says, including min.

kaede and kenneth run into each other. kenneth insults kaede and then orders them to do another assassination for him. kaede tries to blackmail their way out of this, threatening to tell their grandmother (his mother and the head of the family) about a time he killed someone off the family's Do Not Kill list. he counter-blackmails kaede with a piece of information kaede didn't know he knew about them. kaede grumblingly agrees to do the job for him. he gives them some poison to coat their knives in and tells them to kill santino; he then goes off to distract min (the only party member both powerful enough to stop kaede and politically savvy enough to notice what kaede is doing in time to stop it) by having an orgy with min and several other party members (kenneth is aware kaede believes min is sorra, although he is also aware that min is not actually sorra, so he makes sure kaede knows about the orgy, because of the thing where he enjoys viciously tormenting kaede). (side note: earlier during the masquerade ball, min figured out that kaede thinks fae is sorra, and has been silently panicking over what to do about that since then.)

kaede, fuming and devastated, goes off to kill santino. NOW. a relevant piece of information here is that kaede is kalashtar; ze has a little bit of essentially angel ancestry, and this ancestor has a spiritual connection to them (which kaede mostly attempts to ignore) and is supposed to guide them in the pursuit of good deeds. (kaede was adopted on purpose because of this, to give faer parents a power trip about overcoming the influence of this celestial being by raising kaede to very much Not Pursue Good Deeds.) (none of kaede's family are good people lol.)

so!! kaede gets santino (the angel) alone by claiming to have been stabbed and need to be healed, and implying that it was kenneth and that ze is very scared and innocent and needs help escaping from him. (all of which is a ruse.) kaede then proceeds to stab santino several times with the poisoned knives, saying "it's not personal" (which kaede believes is the "no homo" of killing people ajksdhksfh). in between getting stabbed, santino starts crying and apologizes for "not being able to save kaede," presumably meaning save kaede from kaede's own family, presumably relating to him being an aasimar and kaede being kalashtar. he also hints at kaede not having their soul (although not outright saying so) and says he hopes they get it back someday. he then sends a magical cry for help to some of the other pcs, but he also tells them "it's not kaede's fault" (which. lmao yes it is my guy, you are actively being murdered on purpose by kaede at this exact second). (he had a lot of hp, it took several stabs to kill him, so he had time to say/do all this lol.) then he dies and i steal his cool magic angel sword to keep. >:)

however! some of the other pcs show up, because of santino's call for help, in time to cast Revivify on him and bring him back to life. this is Not Good News for kaede, since she wasn't killing him for her own goals, but rather for kenneth, and so now ze is in trouble with kenneth. especially because the newly-alive santino got immediately rushed to a safe house to hide so that he will be safe from future assassination attempts, so now kenneth cannot just go kill him himself.

kenneth immediately denies all involvement in any of this, but, to protect the family reputation, begins negotiating with yersis on kaede's behalf. he manages to finagle out an agreement that kaede will be tried for murder under the laws of House Kipling, who are powerful enough to count as a city-state, and not under the laws of the city-state we are currently physically in. this is good news for me since yknow i have the funniest feeling the laws of House Kipling, The Famous Assassins, will not be particularly unfriendly to me doing murder, and will be deeply in my favor since i am a prized member of the family and my grandmother's favorite. in the meantime, though, yersis does arrest me. (which i am deeply offended by; how dare she act like she has any authority over me just because she is a government authority of the country i live in?? how dare she try and impose consequences on me for my actions????? this is just insulting.)

also! kenneth tells kaede that min is not sorra, and helps them realize that some of hir memories are missing. he does not tell them that sorra is dead, or that they killed sorra, or that they sold their soul to min, even though all of this is information he has. meanwhile, min confesses everything about the "kaede's soul" debacle to yersis, who is horrified for many reasons.

min is also now giving kaede a cold shoulder, because of the thing where she has a preexisting close friendship with santino, and is therefore very angry that kaede would try to kill him (even though kaede has disavowed all personal responsibility in this many times by saying that 1) it wasn't personal and 2) kenneth made them. so kaede is very annoyed that everyone is still for some reason blaming them for being a grown adult who attempted murder).

this is approximately where we are currently in the campaign. kaede has been observing min's behavior, and has satisfied themself that kenneth was telling the truth when he said min wasn't sorra, but kaede hasn't realized how significant what's going on actually is; kaede's current theory is that min somehow found out about kaede's relationship with sorra, and intentionally tricked kaede into thinking she is sorra in order to be able to utilize kaede's assassin services without paying them. kaede has no idea how many of their memories are missing, or that sorra is dead, or that their soul is gone.

now. the thing is. next session. i want to confront min over this. and confuse her very much because she will have no idea what i'm talking about when i'm all "why are you so mad over me killing someone for kenneth when you literally were going to do the exact same thing as he did" because yknow. she had no intention of doing the same thing. because i am Incorrect about what is happening. all of which will be very fun. HOWEVER. it would be super in character for kaede to bluff and say "kenneth told me Everything" while saying all this. BUT if i do that i am Almost Certain that min would take it at face value, go "oh cool, so i don't need to figure out how to break it to you that i took your soul and memories" and proceed to immediately give back all my memories of killing sorra. which would be Very Bad because kaede would 1) have a huge breakdown and 2) want min dead, and both try to kill her themself and also sic kenneth on them (which would be Very Very Very Bad because kenneth is 6 levels above us, and has a blackrazor sword, which kills you dead and eats your soul when he stabs you with it). so probably i should not say that even though it would be super in character.

so the goal rn for me personally is for kaede to Not Yet figure out that ze sold hir soul to min, or that sorra is dead, for at least another few sessions. ideally not finding any of it out before kaede's Going On Trial For Murder arc concludes. which will be Difficult because min has already almost given back all my memories Twice and will definitely do so if given the Slightest actual reason to. but as soon as she does, kaede will try and kill her, which is. not ideal since we are both player characters and need to remain on non-murdery terms in the long term lol. so. all of this is going to be So entertaining but also will take a lot of figuring out as we get closer and closer to everything about kaede and min's soul deal exploding in our faces (which we have known was coming for a long time and have been looking forward to, lol). i don't yet know how all of this is going to resolve but i do know i am going to have a Great time.

okay. rant concluded for the time being. i love this campaign so much. it's incredibly chaotic and every single time i have a bad (read: extremely entertaining) idea, R lets me add it in, and it's the best thing ever.

[foiblepnoteworthy]

Veeb i wholly want a full on Veeb rant please tell us all your secrets knowledge will res377 give me hope?

heh so if I was writing a novel and made up a world and system of international public law for that world in which the only institution that could make binding decisions and legally mandate the use of armed force was controlled by 5 out of nearly 200 states and was not representative of the world’s citizens but instead still reflected the power structures as they were after the last big war over 70 years ago and where these states were also the only states which are by law allowed to have nuclear weapons, and where it finally would also be impossible to change that system without the agreement of those 5 states….would you find that to be a kind of messed up system? because that is like….our system 

[vibratoryblurriness]

Because I am terminally incapable of tagging things or organizing anything on here in any way, have some side blogs (in chronological order of creation):

@musical-veebs: where I occasionally ramble about music or things music makes me think about

@veebs-hates-video-games: where I try to remember to rant about games as I play them

@veebs-says: where I will attempt to collect actual things I write that usually get lost in the mess of memes and cat videos I reblog