#very excited to see the end of the bats arg

[flutteringfable]

finally found the time to watch generation loss and oh??? my gosh!????? i love ranboo’s stuff and i already had high expectations from hearing all the buzz about it but this totally blew me out of the park in a way i didn’t expect at all.

go watch it, even if you aren’t into ranboo it’s a great thing on its own. it starts a little slow but that’s on purpose!! just trust the process, as they say <3 (i’m using that in the wrong context i know but shhhhh)

anyway time to scream about it in an essay long post because i’m so incredibly normal about this series and not being a horror/arg nerd about it at all nope no way why would you think that ahaha.

[spoilers ahead! there’s only three episodes, all up on their vod channel and about an hour each! it’s so worth a watch!!]

okay, so, episode one was nothing like what i was expecting right off the bat.

i’ve seen the stuff on the actual genloss channel, and i figured it would all be sort of that vibe. imagine my surprise upon seeing ranboo sneeg and charlie being a little bit silly in a cabin in the woods (and also christian hell? for some reason?). i stuck through it, though, no matter how taken aback i was. it was so worth it in the end, but i’ll get to that later teehee <3

the cyoa aspect was cool! i wish i had been there to see it live, because i’m the biggest sucker for choice based stories and arg-style games.

not much more to say abt ep1, to be honest. just know that it’s definitely a completely different vibe than what you’ll probably expect (ranboo said this was on purpose!!). oh also i love squiggles he is everything to me. a little guy. a blorbo even. even if he uh, did turn out to be evil like i originally suspected.

ep 2! this one was almost equally silly in nature, but you can see the “cracks” begin to show a lot more in this one. (“why is cracks in quotes?” you may ask. well, iykyk, and if you don’t, watch episode three.)

the puzzler was great, i think it was hilarious that the mask was basically just how he looked anyway. the beginning was a good hook, i genuinely thought we were getting into the juicy stuff when ranboo was locked in the chair.

when he found charlie, i’m ashamed to admit that i didn’t expect charlie’s guts to be slime. that’s his thing. he’s a goopy gushy guy. i should’ve known. anyway. the part where the “illusion” starts to break and the slime turns to blood for a moment?? DELICIOUS. SO GOOD. MWAH.

NIKKI’S SUDDEN SWITCH IN HER INTRO ON THE CAROUSEL????? so good. everyone’s acting was incredible tbh especially in ep 3, i’m so happy. the silly death dialogue from ethan was great (until it wasn’t. iykyk, i’ll get to it), too. THE HAT BIT??? WHERE THEY REPROGRAMMED SNEEG??? AAA?????? so in love with this episode, it was the perfect transition to the hell that is ep 3.

okay so. ep 3. where do i start omg. i guess at the beginning, that makes sense.

i was really excited to finally have a name for hatch! honestly, even though my villain-senses were sounding off all sorts of alarms in my head, i was fooled for a short while as he was guiding ranboo. learning about the drones was interesting, too. lots of good lore built around the company and those guys! very cool ^^

WHEN RANBOO WENT AGAINST THE AUDIENCE AND CHOSE THE YELLOW CODE. IM RUNNING OUT OF WAYS TO EXPRESS MY EXCITEMENT AND AWE,,,,, UHHHH YIPPEEE???? I GUESS????? that was the thing that really set me off about hatch being maybe not so great. good stuff!!!!

ranboo finding the streamers pretty much locked in those mall restaurants!! AND CHARLIE DOING AN ACTUAL STREAM DURING IT!!!!!! gah, this series is so cool!!!!!! them constantly on the run from the drones and security (TERRIFYING monster, btw, i love when evil dystopian corporations have monsters as security <3) was so wild to watch. i don’t think i’ve been that anxious for the main characters of a series for quite some time.

them seeing the cabin set. ohhhhh my gosh. and then charlie dying (? presumably) at the hands of security before ranboo hits the button to stop everything. graaagh i ate that UP. again i’m running out of ways to express my love for this series lmaoo.

the “ending.” oh my goodness the fakeout “ending.” i was so thrilled, so happy for ranboo i let my guard down and was like “yes!!!! evil bad guys stopped woohoo!!! get this guy some rest and therapy!!!”

and then they bowed.

when i tell you i GASPED. like it was my fault for not checking the time on the video and having my guard down but i GASPED.

hatch letting the audience choose if ranboo lived or died. hearing ranboo scream and beg to be set free, and then beg to die…. i genuinely teared up. despite the rather grim choice to have them die, i think it was for the best. though i do wonder what would have happened if the votes stayed 50/50….. if anyone knows if ranboo has talked about that anywhere, do let me know! if not, i’ll shoot them an ask about it, because i’m sure it would’ve been interesting.

anyway, this series was so much cooler than i ever could’ve imagined. i was already invested in the stuff on the genloss channel, like i mentioned, but seeing the project for myself and getting to watch this incredible series was breathtaking. i’m a huge nerd for dystopias and horror, and ranboo somehow nailed combining them both with great comedy and a great story.

and i’ve heard it’s been nominated for an emmy? or something???? that’s literally so cool!!!! i wish ranboo the best of luck in future projects, genloss was a fantastic watch and i can’t recommend it enough <3

[ct-multifandom]

AINI predictions 2

Because I keep making editing and making additions to the first one

Mizuki’s gonna accidentally call Date dad and then try to deny it and act all tsundere

Please?

The Masked Woman is either Amame or Kizuna

Looking back on the box art, I think those designs at the bottom might be the Mizuki-time ones. Amame and Kizuna, who are teens in Ryuki-time, look different, like Kizuna is missing her hat for example and Amame seems to have her hair down instead of pigtails. Interesting that that Masked Woman isn’t on the box art as her own character. Implying that she’s one of the people already there, perhaps?

the purpose of the Hidden Bats experiment is probably to test bugs in the “simulation”.

Tokiko and Naix believe in the simulation theory and want to escape the matrix. We already know they’re associated with Sunaiku and the Bats videos. One of the secret messages in the ARG talks about how superhuman abilities are considered glitches in The Simulation, so they could be testing the subjects’ SHIFT abilities to locate and break that “seam” Tokiko wants to find.

About the timeline thing from the last post

Okay so I saw on another post and in an official game preview video that there is a no-spoiler mode in the game for people getting into the games through the sequel (which is a silly thing to do but,,,) it seems like AINI is a direct sequel from the true ending of AITSF, but all the promotional material is on no-spoiler mode, which makes Date look different and removes references to the last game, for obvious reasons. This would mean that Iris got her tumor removed, Date is actually in his own Yagyuu body, and Saito and his victims are dead.

Hidden Bats, like AI and ZE, has branching paths, but as normal people in real life, not SHIFTers, we can only experience one route

This one is kinda crack and stretchy, but I can’t get over the Phia Hanadate asset. Maybe it means literally nothing and I sound like the person who thinks actual trash in an escape room is a clue, but someone got paid to sit down and draw that portrait. If she was replaced by Iris at the last minute, she must’ve had a story prepared. Maybe she was the one who hit Kairo while driving recklessly or under the influence or something, and then later coincidentally became a victim of whatever criminal activity he was involved in? Some people think Uchi was trolling dataminers, but would he really make a whole character just to surprise the few people who have the skills to find her?

Maybe each experiment of HB changed based on the decision we made in the previous round. This is just me spitballing ideas, but maybe if we saved Aine and Binato or just Binato then the second experiment would have been different somehow, or if we saved either Lumina or Mariha the third would be affected. For example, maybe if Binato wasn’t removed, Phia would’ve been in Iris’s place, or if Lumina and Mariha didn’t tie, Kairo would’ve been replaced with an AI character as well. Who knows.

Date is in a polycule with all his coworkers

This is obviously already canon so idk why I’m even adding it to the post

The game will end with a group dance sequence set to Duality by Slipknot

Nah but I do predict that there will be a new dance to a new song. Iris, Amame, and Kizuna do dance together so that might lead in to a new number. I was thinking of making a post analyzing the lyrics to Invincible Rainbow Arrow because I noticed that some of the ominous words from that song seem more relevant now than they were in the first game, especially with the involvement of Naix and new lore about Iris’s tumor.

Komeji and Shoma are gonna have a wholesome yet unrelated-to-the-case subplot like the Matsushitas did. I’m actually putting a minor spoiler warning on this one because I’m so sure of it.

I think I accidentally figured out their arc from everything that’s available to us rn. Also, someone, don’t remember who, said in an interview that Komeji is one of their faves, which is interesting. Komeji is divorced and Shoma is his son. Following the game’s theme of having two halves, Komeji has two metaphorical halves, his comedian self who wears the block head, which I imagine is fake (?), and his self outside of work. If it is fake, he literally has two faces. He can’t balance these two sides at first and is always playing the comedian role, causing his wife to leave him and his son to resent him, but later on, he learns to pay more attention to his home life as well. He mends his relationship with Shoma, allowing his two halves to exist in equilibrium.

[blindrapture]

a union-mandated break post

(okay, let’s see if I can type this all over again after losing the post. gotta remember how it all went.)

Hey there, the few mutuals who Like all of my posts, the lurkers who occasionally make their presence known, the lurkers who I also hope are there, and all you folks who come across this post naturally before scrolling on (that’s fine too, please have a nice day! remember to take a deep breath and unclench!). I wanted to make a post giving a casual update.

Things have been going. You know how it is. Time proceeds onwards at a pace that is a crawl to some and fleeting to others, depending on relative perspective. The average of all these observations may be Objective Truth, a hazy mythical and abstract prospect which to this day no living human has ever known (due to the nature of perspective). We still try to know it for some reason, an endeavour which may be “a good thing” or “a condemnation of our species,” but that’s relative too. See above. Still, it is possible to take an approximation of what we figure this average to be and find ourselves (mis)balanced on a knife-edge in between all perspectives. This narrow path, the knife-edge between fast and slow, between good and bad, between ecstasy and despair, seems precarious at times, yet at other times is like a garden, wide and spacious enough to sit awhile. Our perspectives cover this garden from us with the shrubbery of Can’ts and Shouldn’ts, and the way to the garden is fraught with the misty cloud of Look-Like. And yet, ultimately, these shrubs and mists are but prismatic scenery colouring our time on this Earth, a perspective which is easy to see from within the garden. The Earth is brown and grey and immortal, though wearing an impermanent coat of blue and green. One day, we will slip out of our perspectives and return to the Earth, join her mounding’s mass, and that will be death.

So that’s the weather. Sometimes cold, sometimes mild, sometimes wet, sometimes dry, sometimes bothersome and sometimes the only backdrop I could ever want. I’ve been up to the usual, cycling between interests like a bat between haunts.

- The other day I got around to playing Smile For Me, an experience which took me about three hours to more-or-less complete 100%. Really cute game, I fell in love with all the characters, and the budding horror elements made me excited to see where it’d go.

- Currently I’m playing A Monster’s Expedition Through Puzzling Exhibitions, a game often cited in the same breath as Baba Is You and Stephen’s Sausage Roll. I think those two games are puzzle masterpieces, and A Monster’s Expedition is hitting me in the right spot. It frequently fills me with awe, which is impressive considering the game is just a long series of oblong block-pushing puzzles. It has scope, though, and it has the guts to hide that scope from you until you’re able to discover it for yourself. I’ve played for about 10 hours so far, beaten over 200 islands, and yet I feel I’m only getting further away from the end goal. Hard to describe. It’s a good game.

- When I’m done with that game, next I’ll be checking out Spelunky 2. I’ve wanted to try the original for a long time but never got around to it; I picked up the sequel. I know very little about the games (with a rough idea of what gameplay is like), and I intend to keep it that way for as long as I can. I like games that rely on discovery.

- Book-wise, I’m, y’know, reading Finnegans Wake as I fall asleep, occasionally inching through other books too, but my main reading focus at the moment is The Familiar. I went and picked up a new copy of Volume 5, and I found the Volume 3 I had kinda lost for a while, so now I have the full Season 1 again. And it’s been long enough since I read any of them that it’s finally time to reread them. As a unit this time. I am... so happy to be in their headspace. I’m currently in the second act of Volume 1, taking in a lot more details this time (and I do still remember a sense of where the whole plot goes), really cherishing the commitment to physicality and aesthetic. There’s not many authors out there like Danielewski. House of Leaves kickstarted my book obsession, y’know. And The Familiar is about as grand as a project can be. It’s supposed to be 27 volumes, each one 900 pages long, and the design of these books is goddamn sublime. The publisher only let him do the first 5 volumes, which is sad, but luckily those 5 volumes make up a “Season,” so they’re still a whole thing, a complete story arc for each of the nine protagonists, and plenty of secrets and details that give a good sense of the true scope. And did I mention the series is fucking scary? Profoundly so, each new volume weaving you deeper into its conspiratorial web of eldritch coincidences and patterns. The story is full of cats, immortal cats, God-cats. There’s a scientist who keeps a freaky magic orb and is known as Wizard. There’s an Armenian taxi driver who’s one of my favourite characters. And you can probably get all the volumes Used for fairly cheap on Amazon now. ........please, somebody join me in loving this series.

- Creative-wise, I’m working on music as always, putting notes next to each other until I get a result I can do something with. There is one piece that’s definitely done, a collaboration between Lindsay and I, but it’s going into Nine Is God so you won’t hear it just yet. Speaking of, that’s coming along. I haven’t even started making any codes or cool connections yet; I want to finish the... Core of this update first. Let’s be deceptive and call it the Main Blog. I have proven to myself that I definitely can do this; I keep stumbling on new mechanisms I can add, and I have a pretty vivid idea of what the whole thing will look like. It’s gonna be maybe a decent size for a Blog, all told, but it’s the form of the thing that mandates a lot of care. Luckily I have made Viceking’s Graab, so this isn’t the first time I’ve done something this mechanically ambitious. ...look, just. Of course I’m excited to Actually Talk about this thing, but like with the Graab, its nature requires me to keep it secret until players finally discover it for themselves. I like making that kind of thing, I want the sense of discovery, of climbing up a hill only to reach the summit and see an even bigger mountain looming over you that you hadn’t realized was there. Like Frog Fractions, or its sequel, even if you know there will be more than meets the eye you still get surprised and filled with delight. This concept fits neatly into an ARG format.

- Oh, also, I’m super excited for the Braid remake. It’s gonna have a comically thorough amount of developer commentary, and that’s all I want from this world. It’s even coming to Switch!

Media can be used as a tool to assist with the experience of life, and that is the way I want to approach things. I have spent time adapting myself to feel comfortable in these boring aesthetics (of understated puzzle games, thoughtful pretty books, blogs as art) because this means I am less susceptible to getting burned out during contemplation and self-examination. It may seem like a matter of taste, but taste is relative too; it’s not hard-wired, it can be adjusted, it does adjust all the time under the hood. ...I don’t know where to go with this one, other than that I should be careful not to condescend. I am not above anyone, I am confused too. I just.. like confusion and mazes, and I try to speak these aesthetics in an approximation of how I see others talk about theirs.

Right. I think that’s the bulk of it, that’s what I wanted to say today. I hope you are holding on, reader. It’s a wild and lonely world out there, and it’s our world; it’s yours just as much as it’s anyone else’s. You are important to it.

I leave you, mysteriously, with an old Genesis song. It’s called “Can-Utility and the Coastliners,” which is a silly way of saying it’s a song about the myth of King Canute. Sick of flatterers claiming he was equal to God, he went to the sea shore and said “If I truly am equal to God, then let the waves halt at my feet!” They didn’t. An astute demonstration, but it just prompted his flatterers to praise his ingenuity. “But he forced a smile, even though his hopes lay dashed where offerings fell.” I’m not really sure how the story ends. But it’s a wonderful song, starts off very folks-y but quickly takes a left turn down Mystery and Beauty. And it’s freaking Genesis.

See ya.