#which isn’t bad but maybe a level higher than my normal tolerance

[miss-floral-thief]

Surprised bro got sushi when mom was uptight last time about it being in the fridge

[lizzy-frizzle]

I’m going to start this by saying, I have bias. Everyone does. I do not intend for this to come off as “the thing you like is bad”, but moreso “the corporation that controls the thing you like is manipulative”.

My background; I am a 26 year old trans mom, I have a history with addiction, particularly gambling, and spend most of my time playing video games. I have gone to college for about 3 years for my psychology degree, and while I do not have my degree, I have been studying psychology for roughly 12 years. This is to say, my views will reflect this background. Just because I present this information like I do, does not inherently mean I’m right, though it also doesn’t mean I’m wrong. Try to view things with a critical mind, and know that most topics have nuance.

Ok, so lootboxes, booster packs, gacha games, all of these are gambling. This is not really an argument. You are putting money into a service of sorts, and receiving a randomized result. Be that a fancy new gun, that same boring legendary you have 5 of, or that final hero you’ve been trying to collect. You don’t know the outcome before you give your money. As defined by the merriam-webster dictionary: “Gambling; the practice of risking money or other stakes in a game or bet”

You are risking your money in not getting an item you want. There are ways this is handled acceptably, and ways this is handled poorly. Gambling is also illegal to people under 21 in a lot of places, but places online aren’t quick to tell you why. I don’t have any sources because every source requires a paywall to get any information, but pulling from my own personal experience and what I learned in college, it’s because children are very impressionable. I say “I like pokemon” and suddenly my 2-year old can’t go anywhere without her pikachu. I remember distinctly playing poker with my mom and her friends when I was 12. When you normalize gambling, what it does is lower the risk aversion of gambling. You are less likely to see a threat in playing that card game, because when you are that young you have no concept of money. You don’t know what a dollar is, so why not throw it away so you can have fun. This is...I hesitate to call it fine, but it’s mostly harmless. The issue is with children and their lack of knowledge of money. When I grew up and got a job, it’s a lot harder to tell my brain, “hey, don’t spend that money, you won’t get it back and you won’t get what you want.” Because my brain just acknowledges the potential for what I want. I want to buy the booster pack so I can have the potential to get that masterpiece misty rainforest. I want to buy that diamond pack so I have the chance to get the cute hero. I want to buy that lootbox so I can get the battle rifle that does a cool effect. These are harmless concepts, but very dangerous.

Make no mistake, companies know how psychology works, and will use it to their advantage. MatPat from game theory states that companies have even go so far as to have systems in place that change the odds as you’re losing, and monitor your skill level to put you up against harder opponents, to see the better weapons and go, “Oh I want that!” and entice you to buy more lootboxes. As it turns out I found an article covering what he was talking about, Activision had actually acquired a patent to arrange matchmaking to do just that [x], and the article says it’s not in place, but my trust in companies is not high enough to actually believe them.(honestly, matpat made a 2-part video series about lootboxes, and I’d recommend watching them)

So, companies are trying to manipulate you to buy more gambling products. There’s proof of it. It’s also more blatantly obvious in games like Magic the Gathering, where they release fancier versions of cards at rarer probabilities. To better explain it, from a collector’s standpoint, you want the fancy card cause it has value, it has value because it’s rare, rarer than the other versions, so if you’re on the lower end of the income ladder you buy a pack, or two. After all, you could get lucky and get it. On the higher end of the income ladder, you buy the card outright and hoard it. Maybe sell it off later if you notice the price goes down. From a player perspective, you see a card is being used by tournament players, you want to win more games, so you want those cards, which encourages you to buy products and try to get those cards. That’s predatory behavior. It’s predatory from the company’s perspective because that poor person might not be able to afford the card outright, but $5-$10 isn’t much, plus they always entice you with that Chance. They also further this desire for the cards by making it limited runs, such as the secret lair packs, if there’s a low amount purchased and it’s made to order, or worse, if they limit the order capabilities themselves, that drives up the value, and provides further incentive to buy the cards and packs. This not only creates an impossible barrier between the poor and the rich, but also heavily encourages people buy their gambling pack than people would have in other conditions.

For the record, I love magic the gathering, I’m not saying the game itself is bad, this is just a VERY predatory marketing tactic.

Let’s switch gears. Gacha games. I play AFKArena, because like I said, I have a gambling addiction and cannot stop myself. In AFKArena, you collect heroes, and battle with them in various ways. If you collect more of similar heroes you can rank them up. If I’m to believe what I’ve heard, it sounds like this is pretty common for gacha games. So what makes it bad. In AFKArena you use diamonds to summon heroes, now, you can acquire diamonds by beating specific story chapters, logging in every day, random limited time events, or paying for them with real money. AFKArena hero drops don’t seem that bad compared to the free diamond amount they dish out, which has resulted in me not spending all that much money on it, all things considered ($20 over 2 years). I believe that for a mobile game like this, that’s fair. I get way more enjoyment out of the game than I do most $60 games, so it balances out. However, this isn’t the case for every gacha game, and my trust in companies, as previously stated, is very low. The issue lies in them making the rates for good heroes so low that you HAVE to spend money on the game to really get over a roadblock of sorts. I do think that there is this issue in my game and I just didn’t notice it, someone with a lower tolerance or patience might absolutely have the incentive to drop hundreds of dollars on the game over a month. There are people of all different flavours, and it’s important to keep that in mind when discussing these topics, just because a marketing technique doesn’t work on you, does not mean it doesn’t work on anyone. After all, they have those $100 packs for a reason, you might not be that reason but someone is. That’s predatory.

I feel like I’ve gotten off track, let’s get back on the rails. Where was...gambling...predatory…ah, kids. So my biggest issue, is that Magic the Gathering is marketed towards 13 year olds. Not directly, but the packs say 13+. AFKArena and any mobile game for that matter, can be downloaded by anyone with a phone for free, with minimal mention that there’s microtransactions. AAA title games like Destiny 2, Overwatch, Fortnite, etc. are probably the worst offenders. A kid spent $16,000 of his parents money on fortnite in-game purchases, and that’s not the only time this has happened [x] [x] . More often than not, what happens is, the kid wants to play a video game, like halo on xbox, or destiny, or something, they ask their mom for their credit card, and the system saves it. I mentioned before that kids do not have a concept of money or its value, so giving kids unlimited access to the credit card is going to result in this kind of thing happening. I’m not blaming the parents for not being hypervigilant, sometimes you are really busy, or disabled, or whatever the reason, and you don’t notice the system just saved your card. I’m not blaming the kids cause their brains are literally underdeveloped. I blame the corporations, because they make the process as easy as possible to prey on kids and people with gambling addictions. (as a personal anecdote, I found that if I want a magic card in MtG:O, I’m way less likely to try and buy it if I have to get up and get my card, I’d recommend not saving your card if you suffer from gambling/addiction problems)

So after all of this evidence, how can anyone still view these things as anything but predatory? The answer is simple. You’re told they aren’t. Businesses spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on really good marketing, and public relations. I tried to google why gambling is illegal for people under 21, and got nothing, I got a couple forums asking the question, and a couple religious sites saying it’ll make them degenerates. I try looking up sources to prove the psychology behind these concepts, but they are locked behind paywall after paywall after paywall. Businesses and capitalism has made it so incredibly hard to discover the truth and get information you need, and it’s on purpose. They want you to trust that that booster pack is a good idea. They want you to spend money on lootboxes (look at all the youtubers that shill out for raid shadow legends, or other gambling games to their super young fanbase [x]). They want you to lower your guard and go, “well, it’s a video game, how can it be predatory?” “it’s a card game with cute creatures on it, surely it’s not that bad”

But it is. So why did I make this post? I dunno, my brain really latched onto the topic, I see so many people enjoying gacha games, but I’m worried that it’s going to ruin lives...I just want everyone to be informed and critical of what is going on.

[popculturebuffet]

Ducktales Reviews: How Santa Stole Christmas! or Scrooge is kind of a dick

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays everybody! Christmas begins on this blog with the last new Ducktales of the season! Time to break out some eggnog, presents and warmth of good family, i’ve got a bushel of Christmas reviews planned for the season, and this one is just the start of htem. As you can probably tell by my enthusasim I love this holiday. Oh sure it has it’s bad sides, paticuarlly several jackasses making huge deals out of the fact some people say happy holidays because “there’s a war on christmas” when really their just petty morons who can’t accept theirs more than one holiday in the month and not everyone likes christmas. I do, but I know not everyone does, and that’s fine. But overall it’s a fine holiday with warmth, cheer, family, generosity and of course, what brings us here today, really damn good episodes and specials of television. It’s just a really warm and cheerful time that , whlie it can bring out the absolute worst in people.. can also bring out the best more often than not. And that’s why I love this holiday. If you don’t that’s just fine, but it’s my blog, I can love what I want. And I love this holiday.. and I loved this episode, a good end to a great run of episodes. So let’s rock around the Christmas tree and find out why Scrooge hates santa, this is How Santa Claus Stole Christmas!

We open with the classic night before Christmas poem.. only naturally since Della is reading it to the boys, it’s Scrooge’s version involving barbed wire and calling the man a traitor because what honestly did you expect. Though I find it ironic a man introduced in a Christmas story has a one-sided blood feud with Santa. The boys are annoyed with this and just want free presents and the presecne of a jolly fat man and don’t get why Scrooge hates him. And yeah.. all of that tracks. They were raised by Donald who, while he clearly spent several years at Scrooges tolerating this feud, likely figured the Feud was just some personal gripe of scrooges and that Santa had done nothing that terrible. Which given Scrooge isn’t personable on the best of days and the episode goes out of it’s way to point out Scrooge has no friends, is entirely accurate and Donald was, as always the sane one in this situation. Plus he was already mad at Scrooge, this was just another way to tell him to go fuck himself. 

The boys hear what they think is Santa on the roof but turns out to be Scrooge, in full Scottish war garb manning traps with webby.. in full chimney camo... putting a knife to Dewey’s throat for siding with santa.. well okay pointing at his throat but still god damn. Every now in then i’m reminded how ready Webby is to murder someone. It never gets easier or less disturbing. The boys.. continue to make a good point: Scrooge says he’s the richest duck in the world and can provide them whatever.. but being Scrooge just gives them itchy hats made of cheap fabric, and bemoans them wanting a trampoline, a new electronic game, and a new phone. And while Scrooge can give them whatever he wants, it’s his money, he also could’ve put some actual thought into it and clearly views the holiday more as a transaction and less for hte acutal sentmient. Instead of giving them personal mementos, or making them personal mementos, or even just simply building them a sled or something, a simpler toy than what they want but still something nice that comes from the heart.. he just gave them the cheapest hat he could find and tries to guilt them for not liking his thoughtless present he probably bought in bulk for everyone in the manor and his employ because he’s kind of a dick sometimes. IT’s good storytelling though as it sets up that Scrooge.. can possibly be int he wrong, so when the main plot comes to his front door, quite literally, there’s some doubt as to wither he or santa is in the wrong. Speaking of which Santa is at the door. So cue the credits and cue the cut for the rest of the plot as is usual. Full spoilers, and full plot under the cut. Ho ho ho. 

First a quick comment on the Holiday version of the theme, the same one from Last Christmas! IT’s really good, a really nice frank sinatra style verison of the theme. Good stuff. My only real complaint is like last time.. there’s nothing unique about it, it’s just the normal season 3 intro but with snowflakes. And that’s.. more on Disney than the creators. If Frank and Matt had the option they would likely do an entirely original intro.. it’s just Disney can be cheap when it comes to intros, see how possesed ludo stayed in the star vs intro long after that plot point was resolved, and only affords one a season. That being said they still have one up on most networks, who, with the exception of Netfix with she ra, never really let intros change more than once, if at all. I mean I get it, budgets are higher here than with anime, they can’t do a new song and intro every half a season.. BUUUT it wouldn’t kill more stuidos to do this more often and do a complete intro overhaul, as it adds freshness, and you can still use the same old theme, just over a new set of pretty images. Most just allow a few swap outs, Disney included, and while I get intros are expensive, this is something you can use for a whole season, or more, why are you like this? 

Anyways one theme song and me complaning about an animation trend I don’t like later, we’re inside the Manor with none of the other adults present because this season hates me. I do actually get it this go round: Besides Della, Donald and Launchpad getting a full subplot in the other holiday episode, they aren’t really needed. In fact most of the episode’s present day is a framing device for the tale of how Scrooge and Santa met and why Scrooge hates him, so for once the minmal use of the supporting cast.. is actually done well. The focus is on Scrooge and Santa, a feud that’s had four years build up in real time, and two years in series and a bunch of months. So yeah, i’m okay with sidelining everyone for once, because this story really needed all of the space and there was no real place for them aside from the climax. This is Scrooge and Santa’s story, with Webby there as an impartial-ish observer. We’ll get to that in a moment.  Also if your curious where in the fuck this episode fits on the series massively warped time scale.. i’m going with this and “The Trickining!” taking place before season 3, since “Astro Boyd” takes place in march, and “Forbidden Fountain” takes place in probably late april, huge thanks to a friend on discord for help with the timeline. Otherwise it just makes no sense whatsover and while it dosen’t TECHINCALLY need to, I prefer the series timeline at least making some rational sense. The world dosen’t have to but time still does. So the boys are at least 12, possibly turning 13. Congrats. Or maybe they just don’t age. I dunno. 

Now time and plot concerns aside, Santa gladly gives the boys their gifts which is.. everything they listed: A mini tramp for Dewey, Legends of Legend-Quest 2 for Huey, and another phone for Louie, which Scrooge dosen’t get. But Louie gets it on 2 levels: One, the one he asked for is probably a nicer model and as someone who just got a very marginally nicer model on insurance, I get it, even if like Scrooge i’m fine as long as mine works, it’s still nice to have more space to do shit. And two, he plans to sell the old one and keep the money. So yeah the boys already loved Santa but now they have every reason to since, you know, Santa actually gave them what they asked for and Scrooge gave them itchy hats because he’s cheap not because he put the slighest thought into it. And no i’m ont letting him get away with that: Again, off list, perfectly fine. Right behind me on my sprawl of book shelves is Weird Al’s biography, a really fun, really intresting book with photos on his career. I did not ask for it, but my mom rightly knew I would love it and got it for me for my birthday, which is very close to christmas, the 16th if you were curious, anyway, and I’ve treasured it since.. and really need to re-read it. My point is you CAN get someone something they didn’t ask for and still have it be something they LIKE. I did that for most of my christmas gifts this year. Scrooge just, as I went on about above, didn’t give a shit and was a bit callous about it so yeah, Santa wins this round.  But Santa naturally needs Scrooge’s help to save Christmas because his ankle’s sprained and he’s out of options. Scrooge.. naturally refuses because, as i’ve made clear this and past episodes, he can be kind of a dick and Santa is one of his worst enemies in his mind. Why help him? So Santa, reluctantly, offers Scrooge the one thing you can get for the man who has everything: An agreement to leave his house alone. The boys aren’t happy about it, but Scrooge reluctantly agrees to the deal. They prepare to mount up though the boys aren’t invited, as Scrooge thinks their too far in the Santa camp and Scrooge does not trust him. Which again is both accurate and fair on their parts as again, he gave them things with well meaning and love, he gave them hats he fished out of the dollar store clearance bin. I mean at least go for the dvd’s and blu rays man. Yeesh. Santa does lightly buy them off by offering them another present if their good boys. Though honestly given Santa in this universe, he probably was going to anyway and this is his nice way of getting them to stay behind to make Scrooge happy. 

So as they take off, while Webby is wary of Santa, she is curious what happened, especially since earlier Scrooge actually did finally voice his gripe, if without any full length explination: Santa took Christmas From him. And Della might know that, Scrooge likely didn’t tell her or Donald the full story and Donald rightly didn’t buy it was that one sided. And it isn’t as we’ll see. Since the episodes divided up into two storylines, i’m once again splitting the difference. This time though I would like to mention the story is beautifully woven in, with both complementing each other: there’s some legit suspense as we wonder if Santa did something really that bad or if he’s lying to webby, or if Scrooge being Scrooge was just exaggerating or holding onto a grudge that was partly his fault. It’s genuinely well done to build up the story and helps really flesh Santa out as a character in both stories. i’m only not doing that because my short term memory, while good enough to hold the story for now can be spotty, and this is a lot less taxing on it. Also parts of this segment happen before the boys leave, but it’s easier this way. Sooooo... 

Times Past: Santa’s Worst Christmas Some time ago... seriously I don’t know. Scrooge was born in the 1800′s and Christmas well existed by then, to the point there’s actually a story starring young scrooge published over seas. Granted the Duck’s are no stranger to christmas, as I already covered Christmas on Bear Mountain for Scrooge’s birthday, and will be covering “A Christmas for Shacktown’ sometime this December. It’s just something worth noting. But given this universe can do whatever it wants, having it invited sometime in the early 1900′s or late 1800s is fine just fine. 

Scrooge is a coal salesman, selling people what they need but getting no shelter as he’s, again, an ass. But in the depths he finds Santa, whose having trouble puling his sleigh, and gets them in the previously closed door with kindess and saying he’s with me. We now get an idea of who Santa truly is: a kind, selfless soul who thinks nothing of himself, and is happy to offer a gift in exchange for something, but does so only in the most well meaning, warmest way possible. In short this Santa really is.. what Santa is at his best in stories; a kind, generous man who just wants to make people happy. He just gave a gift not because he wanted to bribe his way in, but because he was genuinely hoping for some shelter and wanted to be greatful. It also shows that clearly, even if something did happen.. Santa probably isn’t evil. A twist still could’ve come.. but spoilers.. it dosen’t. Santa is genuinely this kind and self sacrificing and noble. He’s just a good person.. and that would ultimately be the problem but we’ve got a lot of subplot to cover.  So Santa parties with what are clearly going to be his elves, and turn out indeed to be elves at the end when the fire goes out and Scrooge is suddenly in buisness.. and he and Santa make a great team, as Santa talks him up and says he can deliver a whole year’s worth of coal all over the world by Christmas Morning, so Christmas DOES exist here, it’s just Santa didn’t which kind of tracks. Well played. I’ll keep my earlier mistake in there though. Keeps me fresh. But Santa offers to help.. after all what are friends for? And Scrooge says their not friends.. their partners. 

And Santa says why not both. And a friendship is forged. And it makes sense.. while i’ts not as tight as it will be, Santa is a warm generous guy who helped Scrooge multiple times just to be kind: He helped him find shelter to repay his kindness helping him.. then helped him sell his coal, when he didn’t have to and while he upsold him on what he could do, did so not out of malice, but so his friend could sell MORE and with eveyr intention of helping. And this friend is someone he just met, is kind of cranky and rude.. but as we all know is a good person underneath and to Santa.. that’s what he sees.. the kind young man who helped him pull his sleigh when he didn’t have to and was already cold and miserable. And that.. that just warms my heart a lot.  But Scrooge being Scrooge has a mystic artifact that could help: The Feliz Navidiamond, a mystic artifact that can seemingly control time he got off a  spanish sailor needing coal. The two head in but encounter it’s guardians. The Magic reindeer! And that’s part of what I love about this episode: besides really getting christmas, we’ll get to that, it has a creative and intresting Santa origin baked into the show’s mythology that also shows off an intresting part of Scrooge’s past. Santa manages to pacify them with jingle bells and our heroes head inside.  In the cavern they find a Giant Snowman.. because this show is fucking awesome and Santa’s attempt to be nice bacfires but Scrooge’s natural paranoia and gumption pull through. It shows off why they make a good team: Santa’s niceties helped them with the reindeer, and netted them future transportation, while Scrooge’s natural grumpus tendencies help when nice just won’t do it. They work well together: one’s a showman and the other hasn’t learned how yet, one is nice the other naughty. It’s easy to see why they worked so well together.. in both senses. They make it past the Snowman and find that the diamond slows down time running on “christmas time!”.. seriously a great pun and one of many this episode. This show had a chance to go all out on holiday puns this go round and they did not blow it. 

But... sadly... and obviously the good times can’t roll forever and when we next return to the story it’s a year later. McDuck and Klaus coal is a MASSIVE concern, and Scrooge is eager to get started... but Santa.. wants to just give gifts instead. To do something Generous. Buisness just isn’t in him and he just wants to do something kind. It’s.. not a bad goal.. i’ts just not Scrooge. To Scrooge it’s a betryal of all he stands for: foreswearing profit to give something for nothing for seemingly no reason and to a younger even meaner scrooge.. it’s an utter betryal.. and a breaking point. Either his daft presents idea.. or Scrooge. And why yes this episode is dripping with ho yay and why yes this does resemble his painful breakups with goldie. And why yes is glorious.. Imean I wasn’t shipping Scrooge with santa before but now? Hot damn. But yeah the two have come to a parting of ways, and Scrooge bitterly leaves, while the elves reveal themselves. And my heart hurts “The Empire Builder from Callisota” bad so thank you and fuck you show.  It also probably shows why Scrooge has exactly one friend, who also works with him so it’s complicated, in present day: He just dosen’t want to let people in... and now we know WHY. The first genuine friend he made, the first person he let into his heart.. betrayed him. It’s no wonder it took decades for Beakly, then the kids to get into his heart again: the guy’s been betrayed by goldie, in his mind betrayed by santa and as we’ve seen his own dad turned against him eventually. He had no one for so long, he built a wall all around him but the wall was too tall and it blocked out all the birds and the son. But this .. is a really damn good story that fleshes Scrooge out and explains his hardness. In the comics it was Glomgold.. here.. it’s much more personal and cuts much deeper. And I absolutely love it. This story could’ve neatly fit into life and times if it made any sense in Rosa’s timeline, and it would be just perfect there. 

PRESENT DAY: Concentrated Awwww

The present day plot is a lot simplier but still fantsatic: Webby slowly warms up to Santa depsite herself.. despite Scrooge clealry seeing she is.. she sees the man is just.. nice. He gives her a new crossbow, a really nice one she probably didn’t even expect to get given you know, everything and knowing scrooge, and appricates the sentiment and slowly sees the man isn’t some monster, but just a jolly old fat man who wants to give presents. Even Scrooge seemingly warms up a little.  We also get tons of cameos during delivery, as they visit tons of supporting cast.. sadly no Darkwing.. but this one was clearly meant to go anywhere and is clealry set before “Let’s Get Dangerous”, but tons of other great bits: We get the Drake recidence with Boyd getting a present.. and somehow also doofus whose filled his stocking full of.. something. I don’t want to know and you can’t make me ask. You can make me ask why the fuck Doofus gets a present, but it could be filled with bees or maybe Santa truly thinks theirs good in him.. which .. yeah tracks. I mean not their being good in him.. I think dr. loomis said it best.. I mean it was about micheal meyers but.. same diffrence minus the patricide?

I mean points for trying though Santa, you mean well you loveable bear in both senses of the word you. But anyways other cameos include Fenton, alsleep with his armor strewn about, aww, with the gizmo armor set to hit people with fruit cake. Thought that was against the geneva convetion but alright. Scrooge’s been hit with worse. We also get them visiting the boat and giving Donald and Della presents, awww. And of course I saved the cameo I put up top for last as Webby visits her closest friend and her gilfriend and gives both an adorable cheek kiss. Though only Lena reacts.. probably because this isn’t the first time Webby’s snuck into their bedroom at night but probably the first time it hasn’t been accidently creepy because she’s still learning boundaries. Also i did not realized they shared a room. Aww. Also it’s the first time we’ve seen their room, which as you’d image from a sorceress and a magical researcher/bookworm, it’s a massive sprawling library from what we see with a skull with a candle in it, a picture of a house, and a calender. IN short it’s perfect and i’m glad we finally saw their room. 

So yeah things are going well and Webby finally realizes “Shit Scrooge is the bad guy in this scenario” at the end of the story, realizing Santa was just as hurt by the split as Scrooge was and that he had to make the harder choihce for the right reasons. Unfortunately, as i’ve said a lot this review, SCrooge is a dick and only coperated, as he wasn’t using the magical present sack, but his own filled with Coal to teach people about responsiblity. Thankfully, Scrooge realizes he’s been a dick to the globe when he happens upon little Jeniffer, a small pig girl who mistakes him from santa and takes his coal, meant to warm her fires.. and makes it into a doll. And resists his attempts to take “Coalette away”... Scrooge then rants and .. we actually get a good reason for why he’s being such a douche... as a kid he had nothing, and a gift of coal for his fires would’ve been welcmoed. He simply just.. dosen’t get the frivolity. He gets the warmth and joy of the season but not the gift part. And it’s only seeing this small, innocent child, play with a doll, he realizes “A warm heart can keep you going through the coldest nights”. And it’s then he finally realizes why his old friend did what he did.. because as i’ve been saying the real gift.. is in the giving.. of giving someone something that makes their memories glow and their heart warm. Even a lump of coal can do that in the right hands... a toy can get someone through the roughest times and it’s the WARMTH of the gift you remember, not the gift itself. I remember that book I mentioned proudly.. as do I remmeber the copy of the art of the venture brothers right next to me, or the copy of the people’s doonesbury my best friend mike bought me, and so on.. not because of the book itself... but because of the thought and warmth of someone getitng something for you because they care, not for their own reward, but just to make you feel nice this holiday season. That’s the true spirit of christmas.  Naturally realizing the errror of his ways in true christmas story fashion, Scrooge is devistated by his own actions. And Santa is PISSED.. but Scrooge is now regretful.. if also pissed because Santa stormed in there and it turns out this was all a ploy to get his friend back... which destroys Scrooge’s anger as he realizes just how much his old friend missed him and how many years he wasted lashing out at him when , in the end, Santa was right. So with only so much Diamond power left, and time running out, what can they do to right this? Simple, Scrooge suggests splitting resources. 

So we get a glorious shot of the three boys, and the twins riding  the reindeer. Also we get Launchpad! 

Who naturally wonders if he can crash a reindeer while Beakly thankfully stops him from murdering Dasher. So Christmas is saved and Scrooge and Santa exchange gifts: For Scrooge, a set of bells with their old company name.. and for Santa? a garage door opener. While Santa’s confused turns out.. it’s to turn off the traps. He’s welcome any time.. just use the front door. Cue a big hug, and Webby narrating us out as Scrooge wishes everyone a merry christmas once again letting people into his heart.  I have.. the approirate response to that. 

Final Thoughts: Excellent, easily one of the best of the season, the series and possibly of chirstmas show episodes all together, we shall see when I put together my list. And given how utterly excellent Last Christmas already is, it was hard to top.. but they did it. This was a warm, wonderful special that gets to the heart of christmas.. and really why I LIKE santa so much. For all the comercailsim around him.. he’ s a kind generous man who gets kids to belivie in magic for a while, wants nothing in return , with the offering of cookies just there to be nice and thank him for being a good person, and just wants best for people. He’s what’s best about christmas rolled into a person. And the series gets that and makes him the kindest guy around. It ends up being a story abotu Scrooge learning the meaning of christmas, an irony that’s not lost on me, but in a way that’s diffrent and unique from last time and works just as well. It’s just a warm wonderful epsiode with plenty of great gags and adventure and a beautiful, unique story at it’s core that could only be told here with tihs cast and this version of scrooge and that’s what makes it so damn magical. Easily a fantastic note to go out on.  Next time on Ducktales: I don’t know! Next time this blog covers ducktales: We’re going back a few seasons to the only episode i’ve never seen, not even a little bit. It’s the treacherous summit of mt neverest!  Until then, if you liked this review, reblog and all that good stuff, follow for more ducks, and if there’s an episode of any show you want me to cover, my cyber monday sale is still going till midnight central, and even past that if you get in a liittle past it, so you can comission a review of any episode for just 3 bucks right now, 5 if you get to this review after monday. So spend if you have it.. and if you don’t.. happy holidays to you anyway. Have a wonderful season. 

[apex-academy]

Chapter 5: Caring Is a Hazard to Your Health (#30)

The small amount of takedown in the gym gives us a little time to cool off next door. I’m nursing a glass of apple juice at an empty table when Kanagi hops on top of it without warning.

“Why.”

She twists to offer me a hand.

“Yo, come up here, too.”

“No.”

“C’mon, it’s just for a second.”

“I wasn’t particularly worried I’d be stranded up there for ages.”

“C’monnnnn... You, like, really oughta...”

“...”

On the plus side, Kanagi jumping on tables isn’t abnormal enough for her to have gotten everyone’s attention for long. So if I do do this... for some freaking reason...

“........”

I’m trying to be a team player today, I guess. I push my glass well out of the way and step on up. Weird how different the cafeteria feels just looking at it from a few feet higher.

“YO, DUDES!!”

That’s enough to easily cut through the fledgling conversations around the room. All eyes turn to us, and I get the distinct urge to sit back down. I’m guessing that’s not what Kanagi had in mind. If she had anything in mind besides very vaguely embarrassing me. Though, all things considered, I’ve suffered enough secondhand embarrassment in this place to have a decent tolerance built up.

“We ready to get hyped for the next event?”

“Absolutely!”

“I’m sure it will be of at least a little amusement.”

“Oh boy oh yeah, I’m super hyped!!”

“So what are we doing?”

“Tell ‘em, Kakumi!”

I drop my voice. “How am I supposed to know??”

“Like, take a wild flippin’ guess, dude. I didn’t just grab you ‘cuz we’re friends.”

“Uh.”

“...Oh.”

I forgot I’d even suggested it.

“I’m going to assume pool of some sort.”

“Heck yeah!”

“And, like, not the swimming kind.”

That is not something I needed clarification on.

“So! I totally have no idea how that’s supposed to work for, like, a buncha people, so that’ll be up to Kakumi!”

“Thanks.”

There are certainly a few ways I could frame it. Not to mention there are several tables in my study hall, anyway. Hmm...

“We can announce, like, the specific stuff when we get there.”

“Just wanted to let everybody know first!”

“Including me...”

The rest of our little water break is sufficient time to get things planned out.

“Arright! Everything good to go, dude? Got your key and junk?”

“Yeah. Upstairs we go, then?”

“Figuratively speaking, I hope.”

“Yeah. Up-elevators we go?”

The group moves out. It may be for our safety, and there’s plenty of room, but... it’s uncomfortable, loading everyone into the elevator at once. Every other time that happens, it’s because someone else is dead.

“...”

At least Monochap didn’t hop in. We must be a lot easier to keep an eye on this way, huh? For friend and foe alike. Speaking of which, I still wonder...

As the elevator dings to let us out on the third floor, I slink back to where Aidan sits. I seize the wheelchair handles, mostly to have a good excuse to be there. I still drop my voice once the others hang back to let us go out first.

“By the way... What ‘measures’ exactly did you take to keep track of people trying to leave the dorms?”

“I believe I stated I was not going to tell anyone the details.”

“Well, yeah, but... You trust me, right? I know how to keep my mouth shut, too.”

“Unfortunately, that isn’t the issue.”

“Even if I...”

“...”

“Er, even if I trust you not to try anything nefarious or enable someone else to do so, it wouldn’t be safe to share. After all, if someone wants to kill without getting caught, overcoming my mysterious ‘measures’ should be a top priority. Hopefully it’s nothing anyone’s been able to figure out yet, nor will they be able to.”

“In which case the would-be killer’s safest option would be to target anyone who might know the trick to it. Whether it’s only trying to find it out, or specifically targeting the source so he or she doesn’t have to worry about cracking it at all.”

“So if I give anyone reason to believe I’ve told you, or Mister Attenborough, or anyone else, that would only be worsening matters.”

His voice rises a bit, though still not quite back to normal volume.

“So no, Miss Kogamino, I won’t even be telling you.”

“That makes enough sense, but...”

“By that logic, doesn’t that make it extremely dangerous for you specifically? If there are no other sources for that information, you’re the only one left to target.”

“Well, yes, of course.”

“But frankly, in my condition I’m an easy target to start with, and at some point stacking the deck against me gives diminishing enough returns it doesn’t make much difference anymore.”

Well. Can’t argue with that, seeing as I already almost...

Anyway.

“Hey guyyyys!”

I look up to see Ichiriki, near the west wing door, waving aggressively.

“You’re coming, right?”

“Of course we’re coming!! Sports Day would be cancelled otherwise!”

He attempts to crane his neck towards me but eventually gives up.

“Since you’re apparently escorting me at the moment, do you mind?”

“Right. Sorry.”

We catch up with the others, head into the wing, and I get my study hall door open. Strictly speaking, there’s enough room for everyone in here, but it’ll start feeling crowded pretty fast if we’re all circling tables at the same time.

“All right, dude! How’re we doin’ this?”

“Let’s see...”

Eventually I set up more of a trick shot contest than a proper game, but at least it lets everyone take turns. We can transition to something more reminiscent of a real match once we’ve whittled down the competition.

Maybe it’s just because I’m in my wheelhouse, but this is much more entertaining to watch than the gym contests. Kaichi’s not a bad shot, though you can tell his leg injury’s jacked up his balance. Kanagi manages to not actually put a hole through the wall when a jumpshot goes horribly wrong. Mahavir has a special talent for lining up shots beautifully and then spinning them out of line at the last possible second. Aidan... tries. That’s about all I can say for that. Setting up a bridge just doesn’t make up for having one arm in a sling. But I get the feeling he wasn’t great at this to start with, anyway. No big loss.

Tsunyasha can’t seem to get a grip on how we’re playing this game, and even I can’t gauge her skill level that well when she’d rather wield the cue like a weapon than an implement. Yuki is still as bad as the last time she tried, but she seems like she’s having fun. I think. Ichiriki, meanwhile, is surprisingly decent, but at the cost of smacking someone with his backstroke every single time despite our best efforts to avoid it.

All of two people actually pass my little “qualifier,” but in the interest of hosting more than one game, I give Mahavir and Yuki the go-ahead, anyway. They’re at least not threats to public safety.

“Huh, but then wait!”

“Aren’t you gonna try it, Kakumi?”

“I don’t really need to take this shot to know I’d make it, so.”

“Oho. But if that doesn’t sound like an excuse.”

“Are you serious.” I realize too late I’m asking this of Tsunyasha. Never mind, then.

“Hey, spectators are totes important to sports, too!”

“So you should, like, let us spectate, right?”

Is that how that works? “I guess? It just seemed like a waste of time.”

“Isn’t the point of all this to waste time?”

“Touché.”

I rifle through the ball return and set up a few stripes in the same places I did for the others.

Looking at this setup when I’m going to do it makes it feel like way too small a challenge now. Yet it still took out most of the others. Well, whatever. If they want me to show off, I can show off. 

This was supposed to take two or three hits to sink everything, but I could do it in one. It’ll take some serious spin, though...

I pick out a cue stick and circle the table before setting up my shot. Pok-pok-pok-pok, a brief clatter as each ball sinks, and then the low rumble as they make their way back to the ball return.

Ichiriki applauds, quickly joined by Yuki, who can’t help but sound a little sarcastic at her pace.

“There, I qualify.”

The applause sporadically catches on with the others in the room and then drops off.

“One! More! Time!″

“Oh yeah, yeah! Can you do it with one more of the number ones?”

“Well, of course, depending on where I put it.”

“Go on, then. Amuse us.”

“......” 

It’s not like I mind the request, just the attitude. Good luck getting that to change, though.

Another round of rifling for the stripes, then setup. Another round of clacks to trim the table down to a lonely cue ball once again.

“Did, uh, anyone else want to try this number, or?”

“I’m content to watch at this point, if that’s acceptable.”

“Uh-huh, uh-huh! It’s cool!”

“Yeah, dude, you totally gotta go for one more now!”

“Like, general sports rules, y’know?”

“I don’t, but sure, why not.”

More shots, more choruses of requests. At some point it ends up being more of an experiment as to where I should place everything for the best odds. It’s an interesting combination of strategizing and, of course, actually hitting the cue the way I need to. Neither of which is a problem for me, but still, there are only so many ricochets you can get before friction grinds all motion to a halt. Only so hard you can hit the cue ball, too.

Once we’re up to seven, it starts getting hairy. Still, even when I finally leave an extra ball on the table, it’s close enough to the pocket I just get demands to try it again. It takes a few tries, but finally I manage to sink them all.

Even with so few people around the table, the cheers seem extra raucous in this small space. It’s stupid, but I guess I’m a little caught up in the moment—I thonk the butt of the cue stick on the floor and blow on the other end like it’s a smoking gun. Traces of chalk drifting off enhance the effect.

“How’s that?”

“NICE!!”

“Ahahaha...”

“That... was kind of a weird laugh.”

“Oh, sorry. I just think...”

“...that’s the first time I’ve seen you smile since...”

“...”

“...in a while.”

“Is this, like, not counting the ‘I’m totally surrounded by morons’ smile, or.”

“Does that one count as a smile? It’s not super smiley.”

“..........”

“ ‘f that’s th’ one, seems off t’ me.”

“Thanks for making smiling awkward now I guess???”

“Sorry...!”

“It was... just nice.”

“...Yes.”

I don’t know how I’m supposed to respond at this point. “Sssso, do we want to move on to the semifinals?”

“Sure, dude.”

I get Mahavir and Yuki set up and step aside. It’s quickly made clear that that is going to be a very long game, so I go ahead and put Kaichi and Ichiriki at another table. Hopefully they don’t do too much damage.

Safely out of the way, I take a deep breath and try not to lean too hard against the wall. The rest of the room fades into the familiar blur of other players going about their business. Speech, clacks, rumbles. I could almost doze off.

If I wasn’t still dying of awkward over here.

It’s been that long since anyone’s seen me smile, huh? I’d believe it. There hasn’t been much to smile about.

Though it’s kind of hard to say that right now. With all of us together, cooperating, having fun... despite everything...

I don’t know how to feel about it. Glad that we have this much? Mournful for those who don’t get to share it with us now? Sickened that one of us here is probably going to ruin it all over again?

“...”

At this point, most of us are friends, aren’t we? I can’t say I trust all of these people, but... If the rest of us can stick together, there’s not much the young master can do, right?

Unless they pull another motive like the second...

But they can’t do that. We already have a motive. Right? I'm sure we’ll be hit with another if we can withstand this one, but that gives us more time. Time for someone out there to realize we’ve been taken, or time for us to make our own way out.

If that’s what working together can get us... I’ll just have to be sure not to waste it.

[BACK] [NEXT]

[wordsbywenz]

If this is your first time breastfeeding/pumping or your experiencing nipple tenderness, I'd go with the Lansinoh, it is gentler. I think this is because each pump on the Medela is directly connected to the motor by its own independent tubing. The Lansinoh is one tube out of the motor which splits into two after about 18". Full suction on the L is about 40% suction on the M. I've turned the Medela up a little higher a couple of times but always turned it back down! I think the Medela would have just caused more pain when I was first starting to pump. I like the Ls let down cycle more than the Ms. The L also has a better visual representation of the suction where Ms is a dial I find somewhat difficult to read with sleep deprived eyes in the wee hours of the morning. The Lansinoh is also easily battery powered by normal batteries in a built in compartment. You have to buy a separate battery adaptor for the Medela. The Lansinoh is just a touch easier to disassemble for cleaning though it has slightly more parts. The Lansinoh also has a built in timer which I really like.

The Medela has it's pros too. Mine is just the pump, not the pump built into a bag, so it is just a little cube, with small Cary handle and side net pockets for the tubing and power adaptor so it's a very neat and tidy little package. I find the Medela easier to use if I'm only going to be pumping one side. The M also has noticeable longer tubing so if your pumping hands free you have more wiggle room in mobility. The biggest benefit to the Medela is being able to use the 2.5oz bottles to pump into instead of the 5oz size. The bigger bottles are just plain discouraging when you just start out pumping or your pumping after a feeding. 1-2 oz in the little bottles just feels like more and more worthwhile or successful than the same volume in the big bottles where it barely makes it to the first measurement markings. I'm glad I have both pumps. I mostly use the Medela to pump once each morning. I use the Lansinoh when I'm going to be away, like pumping in my car in a parking lot. When I was gone for a three day weekend and had to pump exclusively I took both pumps, used the Medela for the first day and a half, then the Lansinoh. I had similar output using both pumps and as I said, I think the Lansinoh is gentler. The other big difference is that the Lansinoh allows the user to adjust the suction pattern independently from the suction force. It's hard to explain, better to hear but: the L has three settings in addition to the letdown. The letdown is suck/suck/suck with no pause but you can adjust the suction force from low to high. The. There are three pumping levels. Suck..suck..suck..suck again you can adjust the force from low to high. A medium which is more Suuck...Suuck...Suuck...low to high force adjustable. And a high which is more Suuuuck...Suuuuuck...Suuuuuck also adjustable force. Basically how long the suck is held before release. The slight pause between sucks stays the same. On the Medela, the suck pattern is directly linked to the force, so if you have it on high it's gonna have lots of force and hold the suck for longer, low will have less force and hold the suck hardly at all. The Medela also has a letdown pattern which is a rapid suck and it's force is slightly adjustable, though I find it more difficult to do. I don't use either the Lansinoh or Medela bottles for feeding. We use the Kiinde Twist bags/bottles which I absolutely love! And they do have an adaptor for this newer large mouth Lansinoh but as of now you'll need to contact them directly to get it, it's not in their kits yet.Read less702 people found this helpfulHelpfulComment Report abuseHamburger1.0 out of 5 stars Like being in a bad relationshipReviewed in the United States on March 13, 2018Style: Pump with Tote Bag and Pumping EssentialsI hate this thing with a passion. And because I exclusively pump and have to use it 6-8 times a day, it's like being in a bad relationship. My main complaint is that it leaks. It leaks from the flanges, unless you bend almost completely over. It leaks from the top if you turn it even slightly sideways. And it doesn't have to be full -- it leaks as you pump so it can leak from the first drop.

Today was the final straw that made me write this review (I review most of my Amazon buys, but I got this pump via a company that supplies them through private health insurance. But you people have to know before you buy). This morning while I pumped, I turned toward my son next to me on the couch to practice smiles. After 20 minutes I noticed I didn't have much in my right bottle. After doing this for months, I'm pretty familiar with my output. And then I saw a little puddle on my blanket. No big deal, there's usually one every time I use this piece of crap. But still, I had twice as much milk in my left bottle so I kept investigating. The puddle went on and on. It soaked the entire top half of the blanket, through to most of the bottom half of my shirt and the top half of my shorts. As most pumping moms know, loss of milk is HEARTBREAKING. Especially since we usually pump for heartbreaking reasons -- premature babies, babies with mouth issues, sick babies, irregular breasts, low supply...even a few drops lost is upsetting, but when you lose ounces...there is a reason we call it liquid gold and why we have all literally cried over spilled milk. I don't cry anymore, now I get infuriated. Usually my first morning pump yields 8-9 oz. Today I got 6. So at least 2 oz leaked silently into my blanket and clothes while I smiled at my baby. And let me tell you, the leaking is the only thing silent about this monstrosity. It's so loud that my husband has to jack up the TV volume which isn't the best thing at 10 o'clock at night when there's a baby finally sleeping in the next room, or at 2 am when everyone but me is sleeping. Let me get back to the leaks. There are leaks from the flanges too, unless you bend over. The neck has to be at a 45 degree angle or more with the floor, or what you pump drips right back out of the mouth of the flange. I don't even know how this is physically possible with the suction but it is. I have not tried a hands-free bra with this pump for this very reason. You have to sit and hold the flanges in a very specific way or all the milk just comes back out the front. I don't think a bra could achieve the finesse it took me weeks to develop. And there are still leaks. They're just smaller and have become tolerable. And there will be more leaks and drips when you remove the breasts from the flanges, due to all the milk that has accumulated around the mouth while pumping, regardless of how you sit. How you sit just prevents it leaking out. It's going to accumulate at the mouth of the flange no matter what. Now, the flanges. Besides the leaks, there could potentially be a sizing issue. They apparently only make 2 sizes, standard and large. I knew the standard ones weren't really comfortable for me, and from my research I didn't think bigger ones were the answer, but I had to try. No, they weren't. I know now I need smaller ones, but they don't make them. So my whole nipple plus some of my areola gets sucked in and wrung mercilessly for 40 minutes at a time, 6-8 times a day. The nipples are fine, this is what they're made for. But I now have a semi permanent (I hope semi, maybe it will turn out to be permanent after a year. Who am I kidding, I'm not going to make it a year like this). red, distended ring around the very inside of my areola, outside the nipple. It's like a pre-nipple. No longer areola, but not part of the nipple. My breasts are like those collapsible camping cups. And it's sore. Not the nipples or the areolas, just this one area that gets sucked into the flange neck that shouldn't. What else...oh the tubing. I got this pump because it's a closed system, which I naively thought meant milk couldn't get sucked back into the tubing. Apparently that only means that, once it does, it can't be reintroduced to the main system and collection bottles. That's great because my tubing is full of old dried milk (that's where it goes when it doesn't leak out all over you). I had read horror stories of mold growing in non closed systems which is what I wanted to avoid. And honestly, in this Southeast Texas climate where humidity hovers constantly around 70+%, I'm not sure how mine hasn't turned moldy. But if/when it does, it will have to be replaced because it's impossible to clean. The best case scenario is just to let it dry and hope for the best. I'd like to say a little more about positioning. Besides the leaks, it's hard on the body. Hardest right after birth. I can't speak to standard delivery but I had a c section and hunching over to prevent leaks was not comfortable. It still isn't, but less so with an 8 inch wound in your abdomen. It's also hard on the back, more so if you have pain from your epidural because that's right where you have to bend to prevent leaks. And even after you're recovered, the acrobatics still take their toll. I get what I call my "pumping headaches" about every day, sometimes multiple times a day, because of the head and neck strain of hunching over the collection bottles.

Finally, it's overall poor quality. The printing on the buttons started to come off with the first use and now is completely gone after 2 months of use. Thankfully there aren't many buttons and I know what they do. But what crap...you don't make a product FOR breastmilk and then make buttons with icons that can be erased by breastmilk. I would get another, different pump tomorrow (I would have gotten one 2 months ago) if I knew which one to get. But all the reviews are similar. The next time this one leaks half a feeding all over me and I chuck it into the street, I'll probably rent a hopital grade pump instead, because I had no issues pumping at the hospital and they're like $2k to buy.

[wavemaker9]

wanted to address details of depressed diego, there’s a main focus on suicidal thoughts + like a very brief mention of self harm so careful as needed

The more i think about it, though, the more i just feel like the only reason diego’s even still around is taking rosa in? Like i think i already touched on her being the reason he cleans his life up even slightly from where he was when younger, but it can’t just be that. he’s a depressed guy with little energy, not much going on in his life, and no real motivation to get it to any place that’s sustainable long term. When he was in his late teens/early 20s he knew he had a whole life still to go and a lot of expectations placed on him to do something with it and no want to do that. Like my depression first started in late high school when I was expected to start looking for colleges to go to and it built back up after i graduated college and had to start looking for a job because i was so worried of having to go into a stressful retail job or something that i knew i wouldn’t be able to handle. This kid’s more lazy and worse at socializing than even I am and he’s doing those stressful retail/food jobs like pizza delivery literally just because money is needed to live. and like. I don’t think he was ever actively planning on doing anything, but he definitely had at least a few of those ‘hmm i could just step out into the street right now and not have to worry about this shit anymore’ moments. 

suicidal humor probably was (and likely still is) a big crutch to him to a point. “You know what would be better than [minor effort]? Death.” is probably a joke he mentally has/does make a /lot/, and might even slip out to friends he trusted not to get all weird about it. ‘(Diego tapping the side of his head) Don’t have to go to work to make money to live if you’re dead.’ One of the occasional jokes he’ll fall back on when asked why he sleeps so much is def ‘It’s the closest I can get to death’ if he thinks it won’t cause a big thing. I don’t think he’s to the level of Kyle in a day to day basis of almost inviting death, the real diego would probably pass up several opportunities to die. Diego doesn’t have the energy to live the reckless lifestyle Kyle does and I also don’t think he’s one for just general self harm like Kyle often can be. Might be related to the blood issues, either the cause of them or them being the cause of this, but even if not related, that’s a concrete thing I think, diego having no interest in self harm actions. The reverse of Kyle, he wants to keep his pain only sexual, please. 

But I also do think that, also unlike kyle, if /actually/ faced with death, he wouldn’t suddenly realize he’s not as cool with it as he thought he was. If anything, maybe realizes he’s way more okay with it than he expected? Assumed it would be a ‘but if really faced with it I wouldn’t be as chill about it’ scenario but has since come to terms with ‘okay but maybe i would?’. But then he had to take Rosa in and that gave him a more concrete reason to have to do these things, to have to stay alive, because Rosa needed someone to help look out for her. I think that also factoring into why she still lives with him. Not just afraid to move out because Extra Responsibility + Diego might slump back down into terrible living conditions, but also like. If that’s how he felt at a young age with his whole life ahead of him, imagine how he’d feel now getting older. But on the other hand, I think even with her living with him, he’s starting to see she’s still maturing into a more capable adult. It’s slow, but he’s starting to believe she could manage without him again. Again, he’s not actively considering taking any drastic actions, but i think he has a lower resistant to them as time goes on when the thoughts do come to him, + his self-preservation is also relatively low, just thankfully without the extreme recklessness kyle adds onto it for himself. Also, want to clarify Rosa’s not specifically living a dependent life for him to help make him feel like he needs to stay alive for her, it really is just in her nature to be like that, but it has this added bonus of helping him out which also kind of does the opposite of encourage her to fix her own flaws. 

I’ll also say, like. I don’t think having people around he’s close to, even with Rosa to a point, makes those feelings specifically /lessen/ in favorability. Like there’s less of a want to because need to be around to help Rosa, but death /does/ always seem easier to him than not. Kyle, in contrast, largely thanks to his BPD, always tends to do a bit better on average when having a good support network and people he can recognize even a little care about him, and he’s way less likely to deal with any suicidal thoughts/quite such risky behavior/etc when he feels like he has more friends/family/etc because then he’d be losing them and they’re everything that means anything to him so doesn’t wanna do that. 

That doesn’t mean much for Diego, though. Having friends like Will, Marion, and Sergey around don’t make that feeling any less because A, he’s very detached from his feelings anyway so even if he likes having them around, their emotional impact on him still feels low. B, he’s pretty sure each of them could easily manage without him so like that’s whatever. thinks might be doing them a favor if he wasn’t around because then they don’t have to deal with his shit. C, having them around doesn’t fix the issues in his life. It does for Kyle because while not all of his problem are relationship based, the biggest ones are and so if he knows he has a shit ton of love and approval that can fix a lot for him or at least make the mood dips more tolerable. For Diego, his main complaints in life are the efforts, not the relays. He’s fine at any point in his life where he doesn’t have a lot of friends or whatever. It’s the realization that he’s going to be working in some shitty job(s) he hates probably forever since there’s no way he’ll make enough to get a good retirement situation, until he fucking dies of old age just being even more tired than he normally is. Why not cut out the fucking middle man, yknow? 

Also! As Kyle gets older, his mood swings tend to mellow out slightly and he has a bit of an easier time handling shit, but I think the depression for Diego only worsens as he gets older because again, the only way his problems get better as he gets older is literally just “I mean at this point I’ll probably only have to work 20 more years until my shitty health probably kills me instead of 40.” Like beyond just fucking marrying a sugar daddy or some shit so he never has to work again, there isn’t much that’s going to help him as he gets older and even like. Again, sorry to keep drawing back to Kyle but he’s the only other kid whose depression is that bad. If Kyle were talked into going to talk to a psychologist or something, eventually he’d feel more comfortable with it and take more of an active effort to go on his own and embrace the help more. 

That’s fucking effort and work and time that probably eats up what little bit of free time Diego has outside of his job(s) and whatever, though, and you can pry that from his cold dead hands. He’d have to be made to go every single time, he’d be more resistant as the effort to fix his behavior got higher, and the moment he can get away with not going anymore, he starts skipping appointments fast. Listen, minus the suicidal factors, I’m just basing his depression/health awareness off mine and I need ya’ll know that 90% of the reason I don’t do things like go find a psychologist or take a more active role in fixing my poor health is that that would eat up my free time and I don’t wanna /do/ that. My free time is important to me and I’d rather just be unhealthy than lose some chill time, especially given the whole ‘depression makes the fun things you do less enjoyable’ factor. those are my shitty terrible priorities, and they’d also be diego’s. + I also know I’m resistant to any effort to change behavior I don’t already feel like changing because despite being a low-energy, emotionally detached disaster adult, I’ve also reached the highest point of self-confidence i’ve ever had in my life so i can recognize i have problems i could easily fix but i’m chill with where i am for once so it feels unnecessary anyway. Same for him, although less from high self-confidence and more from exceptionally low standards for himself. 

Like, he’s not itching to change and his coping mechanism of just not having to deal with any of his mental health issues while he’s asleep is working well enough atm, don’t worry about it. he can sleep more if he’s not wasting that time going to see a therapist or whatever + doesn’t have to leave the house for that so like. Why not just sleep??? Diego ‘Why be healthy when you can nap?’ Andrés. Also like as if he had Go to a Therapist money anyway.

[atrainernamedradish]

Starter Tier List

This concept was done by a Poketuber by the name of Aura Guardian. I liked the idea of it so much that I did my own version of a few weeks ago while I was “watching” the video.

While most tier lists are based off of skill this one is based off of pure opinion. It will be ranked like your typical American grading system of A-F while adding in SSS Rank like you find in a lot of Japanese games using rank.

Rank F - Sceptile

This is the weakest Gen 3 starter for me. There is nothing I like about it., well maybe except its shiny. I don’t find Treeko cute/cool, despite my fondness for The Mystery Dungeon series I don’t like Grovyle’s design, and Sceptile (nor Mega Sceptile) appeals to me. There are better grass starters.

Emboar

Tepig is cute. That’s the ONLY reason this line is higher than the previous one.

Greninja

(I am about to get SO much backlash for this!)

I am going to have to go with Ace Trainer Liam here and say that Frogadier looks so much better than Greninja. Not only is Greninja so awkward looking but I hate its level up moveset! Originally I thought it had no business being a dark type, but honestly I’m feeling this way towards its water typing. You can argue this for its dark typing, but the ONLY reason it’s a water type is because it’s a frog (and maybe it being blue...). And unless you’re running a Protean ability Greninja than the damn thing is not that good! In my playthrough of Y with Greninja (I like to play with a starter to give it a chance) it was the weakest member on my team! My Aromatisse was far more viable and it’s not even on a competitive radar!

Charizard

Charmander is cute. I have fond memories of the anime with the entire line. I can understand why Charizard is a fan favorite. But I don’t like the way Charmeleon looks, and there are better fire starters. Sorry Charizard. Nice shiny though!

Rank D - Chesnaught

Generation 6 had some of the weakest starter designs I’ve ever seen. While Chesnaught appeals to me... the rest of the line not so much. Ironically Chespin was my reluctant pick for Gen 6, and I say this because the first evolutions are underwhelming, but a certain unnamed starter from this trio took its place.

Meganium

This starter line is okay. That’s the only reason why it is where it is on the list. I have nothing bad nor good to say about it. It’s not my favorite or despised either.

Infernape

Infernape looks pretty badass. It’s pre-evolutions I honestly don’t care for. Plus it has better competition in this trio.

Rank C - Feraligatr

Totodile is cute. Feraligatr is pretty badass. Croconaw... dear God that thing is ugly lol! It’s resonates better than the Meganium line and that;s why it’s higher on the list.

Swampert

It has a solid design and typing. It’s am automatic secondary pick for the trio it’s in.

Incineroar

This starter has come a loooong way! I initially despised this entire line! But after bonding with it I have a new found perspective of it. Unfortunately Litten is still unappealing to me, but I blame the 3D model. I though Torrecat was pretty damn ugly upon its reveal, but Pokemon Refresher showed how cute it was~ I also adore its sassy personality~ Incineroar grew on me as well. I used to find its design horrendous but then I figured out what about it I loathed, and that my friends... is its hands! They look cartoony being way too big on the Pokemon and it looks like it had all fingers instead of fingers and a thumb. Other than that... it has great charisma and I’m glad I gave the line a chance~!

Blastoise

There are not enough good middle stage evolutions for starters, and by God Wartortle is sooo adorable~! The ears just slay me~ But aside from my gushing Blastoise has a well designed water starter line. It;s not my favorite but I have nothing bad to say about it.

Rank B - Samurott

Oshawott was an easy choice for me among the Gen 5 starters. It was adorable and it won my heart instantaneously~! The final evolution in the form of Samurott wasn’t my favorite at first, but it’s grown on me~ Just wish the move pool was a little better... (Also! It should have had fighting not Goddamn Emboar! D<)

Serperior

Sassy and cute things are my weakness and Snivy was no exception to that rule. While I’m not a big fan of the middle evolution in this line, it doesn’t waver its place on this list. At some point I will use a Serperior to better appreciate this Pokemon.

Torterra

While I have not officially used one in the official Pokemon games I never realized how badly I needed the dual typing of grass and ground. Grotle was a God send in Pokemon Glazed for that stupidly overpowered first gym! (The game was great but for fuck sake the beginning of it was a pain in the ass for no reason other than that dumb idea that harder = challenging!) Torterra is a beast and one day I will finally add it to an official playthrough~

Empoleon

While I love the unique typing this final evolution has... sonavabitch do I hate the fact that it’s weak to a type it should be able to take out...! To be honest I’m not a fan of the middle evolution. It looks super awkward and doesn’t fit in with the cuteness of Piplup and the regalness of Empoleon. But in generation 4 there isn’t a contest for starters when you have such an adorable little starter who becomes something that classy and badass!

Rank A - Delphox

Fennekin was my least favorite of the first evolutions for the Gen 6 trio. While it’s still not my favorite in design, in fact, all the Gen 6 starters are unappealing to me, I adore what it becomes. Just like Torterra the unique typing of fire and psychic is desirable combination I didn’t realize I wanted (I know Victini has it but I don’t use legendaries)~ While I have used one in Pokemon X my official introduction to this Pokemon was in a fanmade game called Pokemon Insurgence (it is an amazing game which I highly recommend to any Pokemon fan), which may it and the other Delphox R.I.P. since they both perished in my egglocke 3;= While Braixen is the best designed out of the line Delphox isn’t half-bad~ That model cry though... *shudders*

Primarina

Popplio was kinda cute when first revealed. When Primarina was leaked I instantly fell in love with it~ ...Brionne... well... I hate it initially. I thought it was goofy looking upon its reveal. HOWEVER, Pokemon Refresher changed my mind so fast on that! Brionne is still awkward looking but in an adorable way now. It makes my heart melt~ I simply love Primarina and he was the star of my Ultra Moon playthrough~!

Venusaur

That’s right ya’ll, I’m a Bulbasaur fan! I chose easy mode and ain’t lookin’ back! What can I say about this dinosaur plant thing...? It’s just so cute~! And grass types are in my top 5 favorite types. While Ivysaur is a bit meh for me I can tolerate it better than other middle starter evolutions. Venusaur is just a huge more mature Bulbasaur with a big of toad in him now and sometimes all you need is for the little guy to just get a bit bigger, ya know?

SSS Rank - Blaziken

There’s no competition when it comes to playing Hoenn for your’s truly. I picked Torchic in my first playthrough of Ruby and I did the same when I picked up Omega Ruby. The only reason this starter choice is on the low end of the top is because of Combusken. I don’t hate the design but I don’t love it. To be honest I prefer Mega Blaziken’s design to normal Blaziken, but Blaziken is love none the less~<3

Decidueye

It took me FOREVER to pronounce this little shits name! But despite that lol, I simply adore this entire line~! I was Team Rowlet the moment I saw the little guy~<3! It is just so insidiously adorable, and the anime has not helped (need to actually watch it, but thanks to screen shots/GIFs none the less lol)! I don’t care what anyone says I love Dartrix~! He’s so cute and sassy and oh my God his freaking out over his hair just... *bemoans*! I love it...! Decidueye was the other starter leak I fell in love with. It’s just so cool looking and it fits with the rest of the line~ The entire line is just cute and cool and Gen 7 really had some good starter designs~ But even something so cute and cool as the Rowlet line was still beaten in the end...

TYPHLOSION

Cyndaquil is my favorite starter of all times. Pokemon Silver to this day, and that includes awesome remakes, is my favorite Pokemon game! And when I initially got the game as a pre-teen up to when the games were ported to the virtual console Cyndaquil was always my choice for a starter in Johto. Sadly I had fallen out of Pokemon for a brief time so I missed out on Heart Gold & Soul Silver (ROMs don’t count dammit lol!)... Cyndaquil is just the cutest thing while Quilava is both cute and cool with Typhlosion just being such a BAMF! The entire line proves that you can be simplistic and still have a good design. All Cyndaquil did was get bigger and meaner and it works~! And that’s why it’s on the top~! ^v^

[theboardwalkbody]

OK So I wanted to add some personal experience to these images in the last post I reblogged but did not want to clog up that thread SO I am reposting them here.

IMAGE ONE:

Right out the gate, as it was mentioned in the original post: Chronic pain/illness will ABSOLUTELY raise not only your PAIN TOLERANCE (ie some people can tolerate a 2, some people a 4, some people an 8) and also raise your PAIN THRESHOLD which is what your body recognizes as pain to begin with (ie some people perceive pain as a rubber band snap on the wrist, some do not). 

These scales are professional use. Because there needed to be a way to generalize pain in order for it to be managed/treated.

And I wish I knew that sooner.

I do struggle with chronic pain. I do struggle with mental illness. I do struggle with fatigue as a side effect of those two things. THEREFORE my pain threshold and tolerance are HIGHER than some others (note there is NO NORMAL just so everyone knows - pain is SUBJECTIVE, meaning it IS what YOU say it IS). 

Couple THAT with the fact that I was raised by a mother who was CONSTANTLY hiding her pain due to spousal abuse.This woman had TWO COMPLETELY SHATTERED FEET and WALKED ON THEM FOR YEARS before it was discovered that they had been broken at all via Xray that showed they had healed all messed up. This is also the woman who told stories about her childhood where she had her heel sliced off and then WALKED 6 miles home. Who stepped on improperly discarded hot charcoal and ripped it off her foot herself. 

Obviously I have some issues about growing up and equating pain with weakness. Issues about feeling the need to Be Strong by Ignoring it or Walking It Off. Only SOLIDIFIED by the fact that once as a kid I had an injury where I LITERALLY had a HOLE in my kneecap that exposed BONE and my “”treatment”” was “Walk it off and go sit in the bathtub until it stops bleeding” (about a 5 yard walk and a trek up some stairs). I was back at school the next day - no doctors involved.

Those things in combination are a Disaster.

Even as a healthcare professional I do not use this scale FOR MYSELF. I forget it exists entirely when it comes to me. Or feel like it does not apply. Looking at it RIGHT NOW. A normal day that went pretty well. I’m at a 4-5 on a DAILY basis. 

Clearly THAT IS WHY when I had severe pain AND COULD NOT BREATHE I drove MYSELF to the hospital. The first time so badly my pulse ox (measures the percent of oxygen in your blood and SHOULD be 95-100 in a healthy person -lower gets oxygen slapped on you-) was an 89. OOP. 

Clearly THAT IS WHY when I was in SEVERE pain DUE TO A KIDNEY STONE which according to certain people is equal to or worse than CHILDBIRTH I told the nurse in the ER my pain was “about a 7″ because:

1. I didn’t want to seem like a “baby” 2. I didn’t want to seem like I was complaining 3. I didn’t want to seem like I was acting for attention 4. I somehow CONVINCED MYSELF that “I guess it could be worse - I’m not ripped open or impaled or shot or something” 5. I was COMPARING PAIN to an IMAGINED situation instead of DESCRIBING HOW I FELT.

How bad was it? At home I collapsed on to the floor. In the car I was balled up in my seat. I couldn’t walk. According to the above scale that’s a 10. But according to MY BRAIN’S DEFINITION of Pain and it’s hangups about it - eh. A 7. (and “eh, a 7″ is NOT in any way a good way of thinking either. Pain is Pain and Pain = Bad and Pain = A Medical Intervention is Necessary EVEN IF THAT PAIN IS A 1). 

I honestly feel like I should carry that image around with me when I visit doctors so I can POINT TO WHICH LEVEL I am at instead of relying on my lying brain.

IMAGE TWO:

This one I did not know existed. So I really had NO way of gauging the Fatigue passed “idk im tired”

I know I am always tired. I know people think I am lazy or unmotivated. But I did not know how bad it was.

How are you doing today - IDK i’m tired.

When I say “Tired” the number on the chart that it corresponds to is a 7.  On a “normal” day - I’m a 5.  On a GOOD day - 4. 

This would be a SUPER USEFUL tool to share with my doctors and psychiatry team (if I could afford to go lolololol)

I just didn’t realize that on a numbered scale... it’s not as benign as I assumed.

IMAGE THREE

I want to start this section off by saying: THIS SHOULD BE IN EVERY MENTAL HEALTH PROFESSIONALS OFFICE. PERIOD.

Much like the Physical Pain Scale there is such a disconnect between How It Is and How It Is Described. FOR THE SAME REASONS AS THE PHYSICAL PAIN SCALE. !AND! SOCIETIES STIGMA ONLY MAKES IT WORSE.

Example: I will tell my therapist: Oh - I’m doing OK. I’m trying to stay positive and I am aware of how I am feeling lately. I’m tired but I don’t want to die or anything. hahaha

But what does that MEAN?

If someone said that to ME I would throw a dart at that chart and it - being given only that line of response - would probably choose a number between a 2 and a 5. 

Notice how DRASTIC of a gap that is.

That is a LITERAL THING I have said to my ACTUAL THERAPIST.  Do you want to know which number I AM THINKING OF ON THIS CHART WHEN I SAY THAT? 

a fucking 8. 

I function, on a daily basis, at a LEVEL EIGHT. 

Why? Dunno. 

I have BEEN at level 9 FREQUENTLY and I have BEEN at level 10 SEVERAL TIMES.

I think that is why it’s warped.

I learned something about myself due to UNSAFE medication experimentation:

WITHOUT MY MEDS I AM AT A 9 TO 10.  

WITH MY MEDS I AM AT AN 8.

To me that is an IMPROVEMENT.

Meanwhile my health care team could think I’m chilling at a cool 4 or maybe sitting on a 5 at worst. 

I am NOT goodt at ABSTRACT concepts of PAIN (mental, physical or otherwise). I don’t think the majority of people are. Pain Scales are usually in hospitals but WITHOUT a description. How does that help me? It doesn’t. Level 10 Face is Crying. I’m not Crying. Therefore I am a Face that ISNT Crying - oh a 4? Cool I’m that. It’s done for simplicity. But pain isn’t simple.

Mental health is even more complicated. That scale should ABSOLUTELY be plastered on every surface. 

[theflamingnymph]

My first anon hate! Do I get a prize? Have I graduated to some higher level of social media? If you’re going to attack me, please use your name. I was brave enough to put my name to my accusations, you could do the same. I’m just going to go through the “points” you made one by one. 

1.  You called out my friends post for her drawing looking "white" firstly it wasn't inconsistent with the characters skin color in the game because I watched her pull the colors from the developers character creation sheet.

I searched for a post that made the rounds about a year back with the proper skin tones taken right from the tool kit. I can’t find it now, but that original post I reblogged and commented on? Isabela’s skin was no where near her actual in game skin color. This post here has her skin from DAO and a screenshot from DA2 and the original artwork is no where near either of them 

2.  Also you're white so idk who you think you are to tell her she's racist.

I didn’t realize being white made me automatically disqualified from recognizing racism? Probably because it doesn’t. All white people are inherently racist, whether we like it or not. It’s in the way we’re raised and the institutions that are in place today. The only way to combat that is to do better, recognize it in yourself and others, and correct yourself and others along the way. It’s a constant battle. This is me doing my part. I didn’t used to. I used to just correct it in myself. But it’s not up to my black and POC friends to do the heavy lifting. I’m doing it now, when I can. 

If this is in reference to the tags I used, because I never outright said she was racist, if you spent more than two seconds on my blog, you’d realize everything that pertains to white privilege, racism, whitewashing, and everything else related to that is under my “racism” tag, just like specific fandom related incidents are under “fandom fuckery”. 

3.  You're quick to judgement and ignorant.

I believe all I said was “Isabela is not a white woman. Why does she look like one here?” That’s a statement and a question. No judgement, not yet. I was waiting on a reply from the artist. I’m not sure how that makes me ignorant either. I’m trying to open a dialogue there, which is a lot nicer than I should have been given the rampant whitewashing and fuckery in this fandom. 

4.  Maybe you should find something better to do than attack artists that don't make everything just three shades darker for peole who don't understand color theory.

Something better to do than attack artists? I believe in the past week I’ve only actively commented on two pieces, both of which were whitewashed, and I didn’t “attack” either. With your friend, as stated above, I was opening a dialogue. The other, I posted a comparison of their art with the subject in question, because all too often I see the excuse of lighting. 

As for not understanding color theory, once upon a time I was an art major before life and circumstance forced me to switch majors and take a hiatus from school, so I understand color theory quite well. Not that you actually have to understand it to realize a character is a lot lighter than they should be. 

5.  Like Jesus fucking Christ she's a person with a very stressful life who just wants to escape sometimes and draw. Like leave her alone. 

That’s all well and good. Did you ever consider perhaps that my life is stressful before you attacked me? Did you even check my blog to see what kind of person I am before accusing me of not considering what kind of person your friend is or how their life is going? Cause buddy, I just found out I have polycystic ovaries and something about an insulin tolerance and I’m waiting two weeks to figure out what the seven vials of blood I had to give today tell them. I mean if you even scrolled a little you’d see some of my real life posts. I got a stressful life too. That’s not an excuse.

As for escaping, don’t you think black people and POC want to escape into the same things? They enjoy these games too, and to constantly have white washing be thrust into their face while searching the tag of their favorite character is not only jarring, but is very unwelcoming. They don’t get to have the escape they deserve and sorely need because “Oh, it’s just the lighting, don’t be so sensitive” or “I can draw what I want” or “Don’t like, don’t look!”. It’s shifting the responsibility off the privileged on onto the oppressed and that’s not right, no matter how you spin it. We need to do better. 

6.  I'm brown btw before you accuse me of being racist or toxic.

First of all, I’m not going to dispute whether you’re actually brown or not.

That said, being brown doesn’t mean you can’t be racist or toxic, just like my being white doesn’t mean I can’t recognize racism in others. It’s all about self awareness. I’m sorry you haven’t reached that level of self awareness.

If you are a brown person and white washing doesn’t effect you in any harmful way, I’m glad for you. But that isn’t the case with everyone. And just because one brown person says it’s okay, doesn’t actually make it so. This is still harming real people. This art was brought to my attention by my girlfriend, who is actually does hurt. You don’t get to tell her, or anyone else that it doesn’t hurt them. 

Gif for emphasis. 

7.  You're the one stressing my girl out when you were too ignorant and miseducated to figure it out.

If she’s that stressed about it, then she needs to fix it. Do better. I saw the reblog, I saw the corrected image, but that needs to be fixed before someone has to draw attention to it. And if she posted the correction and then the original started circulating, then it’s up to her to make sure people see the correction, reblog it onto the original so it shows in the notes. Don’t make others have to call you on your crap, and don’t put it on the hurt to search for the half asses apology. Because that’s what it was, she told me to go looking through her other work. Sorry, doing better in the past still doesn’t change what happened now. And the fact of the matter is, I didn’t attack her. I asked her why she looked white. I asked for an explanation. 

And as for being ignorant or miseducated? That has nothing to do with looking at a work and figuring out it’s whitewashed. And honestly, I don’t know where you even draw that conclusion about me from, as we’ve established you spent less time on my blog than I spent on hers before you sent this. 

8.  Which is probably why blogs that you call out have 9x the follower count because you're just a whistle blower with no life having a right fit over video games. Think about how YOU effect nice people.

What does follower count have to do with anything? Like, I’m not doing this for a boost in followers, or to chip away at her follower count. I did it because it was the proper thing to do. Whitewashing needs to stop happening, it needs to stop being normalized.

Alright, I suppose that one fits, but you said it like it was a bad thing. 

And who’s having a right fit? You’ve attacked me longer and harder than I “attacked” her. I made a statement, I asked a question, I moved on. And it’s not over video games, but racism hiding behind the cover of video game escapism. 

And think about how I effect nice people? Only if you do the same. 

As for this: how do you know he sent me anything on anon unless you were over his shoulder watching? It’s not like sending asks leaves a trace on your end, especially via anon. So whatever.

Honestly, this entire thing stunk of more shit than the diaper I changed while typing this up. 

[imherebecausemymomdoesntloveme]

HummingBird (part 2/?)

Peter Parker X Reader

Summary: readers first official day at school and first crime

word count: 2090

Part One

The first class of my day was pretty uneventful. I had precalculus with Mr. Evans which was fun. Who are you kidding dude you took calculus last summer. It’s not like I was gonna say that? I don’t wanna be that show off kid that knows all of the answers. Yeah well not participating makes you have conversations with yourself so sucks to be you nerd.

Jeez I really was having a conversation with myself. I was that bored with APUSH that I was arguing, with myself. Of course I loved US history, but the whole class made me miss Mr. Star Spangled Banner. Maybe I could just check my phone for any alerts of crime in the city.

“Ms. Carter,” Mr. Jameson said, catching my adrift attention, “Could you tell me about the Maryland Colony?”

I heard a few snickers come from behind me, clearly thinking I didn’t know a thing about history and unaware that Steve used to read history books to me at night instead of story books.

“The Maryland Colony was founded in 1634 by Lord Baltimore. It was to be a place for persecuted Catholics to find refuge, a safe haven. Made as an act of toleration.”

“Very nice Ms. Carter,” he continued. I turned back to find the boy who had laughed at me and gave him a real, genuine smile which really threw him off guard.

The rest of the class went well and before I knew it was lunch time. I was honestly surprised that for the first two classes, no one really thought to introduce me or guide me anywhere and as much as I didn’t need it, I did need to make friends. It was already lunch and I had nowhere to sit, or rather, no one to sit with. I scanned over the cafeteria, looking for a place to sit when I found a relatively empty table.

“Thats a lot of food you’ve got there,” the girl adjacent to me commented, “not like it’s a bad thing. You should be able to eat as much as you’d like.”

“Oh no it’s fine,” I laughed, “I just have a condition.”

“Diabetes?” She asked, probably feeling worse about her comment. She seemed like a nice girl.

“No-no, I just have like,” I paused, thinking about a lie, “A really abnormally high metabolism. If i burn more calories than I eat I pass out.” Well, I guess that was only half a lie. My powers entailed that I needed to consume more sugar than regular so I don’t black out. It wasn’t pretty. “Anyways, I’m Aurelie, but my friends call me Bird. What’s your name?”

“Michelle, and I don’t have any friends” She responded. I was going to say something back but by the time I figured out what to say enough time had passed that a response would just be awkward and sad. Lunch soon ended.

Physics was my next class, I sat next to this kid named Ned. He was pretty cool actually, we were lab partners and I helped him with the worksheets.

“So what school are you transferring from?” He asked, scribbling down some notes.

“Oh, I was homeschooled. Parents thought I ought to be socialized or something.” I responded with a chuckle.

“Like in meangirls?” He asked.

“What?-”

“Nothing.”

My last class of the day was P.E. with that same kid who had made fun of me in APUSH. Apparently his name was flash or something? LAmE. It appears that me totally owning him earlier on in the day wasn’t enough for him and so he decided to try and own me on a physical level as well.

“Twenty bucks that new kid drops out of the pacer before it hits twenty,” he announced, the teacher either not knowing or not caring.

“Four hundred bucks said that the new kid is gonna be the last person still going,” I childed, another genuine smile flashed at him. He and most others burst out in laughter.

“What are you doing?” Ned asked me (He was in this class too.), “this is a mixed class, seniors regularly score over the hundreds.”

“Oi Ned, chill dude. Trust me.” I put my hair up into a ponytail, the kids that had made it a point to beat me were showing real game by doing pushups and sit ups. Some of the girls had began to do stretches too to show off.

“Maybe you should.. Um.. show off too,” he suggested. I shot him a look. “I mean look at them! They’re practically asking for it!”

“And who am I to give those meanies what they want,” I chirped.

“Are you even sure you can do this? Four hundred dollars is a lot of money…” Ned gulped. I only gave him a knowing look.

“The FitnessGram™ Pacer Test is a multistage aerobic capacity test that progressively gets more difficult as it continues. The 20 meter pacer test will begin in 30 seconds. Line up at the start. The running speed starts slowly, but gets faster each minute after you hear this signal. [beep] A single lap should be completed each time you hear this sound. [ding] Remember to run in a straight line, and run as long as possible. The second time you fail to complete a lap before the sound, your test is over. The test will begin on the word start. On your mark, get ready, start.” I began to run to the beat of the weird elevator torture music and one by one people began to drop out. When Ned left (around 23) the group cheered and encouraged me to follow my friend. I gave him a look that said I will avenge you and I hope he got that message. By the time we hit one hundred and thirty two, the last of them had basically dragged themselves off the floor, giving me wicked glares as I lightly jogged across the way, a small smile on my face. Flash had dropped out around one hundred and twenty seven, and I was pretty sure that Ned was recording me. I was pretty sure the teacher was going to turn off the tape but he didn’t and I began to think that he had heard my little bet with Flash.

As the numbers increased the other students got angrier and angrier and eventually the tape stopped. I had ran all 21 levels, all 247 laps.

I walked off the court over to Flash, a cheerful grin on my face. I was sorta out of breath and definitely sweating more than I’d like but hey, it wasn’t that awful.

“Hey Flash” I greeted with a friendly smile. He handed me the four hundred.

“This isn’t over, Carter,” he spat, a grimace on his face as the teacher gave a blind eye to us.

“Hey, it’s okay,” I comforted in a sickly sweet voice, “What really counts, is that you tried! You did your best. Did you break your own record today?” he nodded, “See! There we go. With the right motivation you can do anything.” I booped his nose with the tip of my finger.

With that, I walked over to Ned, handing him the four hundred. “Here you go sir, four hundred dollars.”

“What? I can’t take it from you!” He exclaimed, clumsily trying to give it back.

“Dude, I have a lot of money, I don’t need it. Just use the money to make something cool and then show it to me.” I reassured him.

“A-are you sure?” He asked, still wary of accepting such a large quantity of money.

“Positive.”

-

After school I busted through the doors and down the street as quickly as possible, people looked at me weird because my hair was still wet from my post pacer shower but I didn’t care. I was ready to fite™ some crime. The only other person who was out of school by now was that kid that ned sat with at lunch.

I went into an allyway and began to strip, which was something that probably came out of a bad porno. I put pulled on my suit that Tony had made and hid my backpack in an empty garbage can. The suit matched my alter-ego The Hummingbird™ with its dark iridescent fabric. The fabric was also very lightweight and feather like in texture. I had my own AI built in that I named Orzo. I pushed off the floor and flew up into the sky at high speed, shaking my head like a dog to dry off my hair. Hopefully the local vigilante wouldn’t mind some company here on the streets.

I flew higher into the sky, hoping to get a good scope of whatever was going on. This was my first chance at action since, well, ever. Tony never let me help him whatsoever (though he knows I am fully capable.) He didn’t even let me help him in Germany! He let Spiderman, a vigilante he’d never even met join but not the girl that he practically raised! Not only that, but I didn’t even get to meet him. I’ve only ever heard about him through the news and other media. Anyways sorry I got a little bit heated.

Though I expected New York to be just busting with crime 24/7 it honestly was pretty calm. There wasn’t much to do for a while. Very minor things to do. A couple of people stealing purses, I helped a homeless person move to a different street?? Ralph now lived on 22 and third. By seven o’clock not only had I done nothing that day, but I also hadn’t even encountered the spiderkid! Then, almost like the world was answering my prayer (not saying that I wished for crime and anarchy but I was bored) I heard a crash come from not more than down the block. Fresh crime, crime so fresh that my police tracker app hadn’t even gone off yet. I took flight, zooming across the city, trying to stay out of sight. The, yet darkened, streets were filled with life and pedestrians, some checking to see what the commotion was and many fleeing in the other direction.

I entered the store that was currently being robbed. It looked to be some type of antique jewelry store raided by the average thieves.

“Pals, I don’t think they’re open. Maybe you should come back later,” I said to the men, making them aware of my presence. They were taken aback by my appearance and probably my voice as well. By vibration my vocal chords at a different frequency, I could modify my voice to sound louder and have a similar reverb to that of a hum (at normal human pitch).

“And who are you? Spiderkids protege?” One of them snickered.

“I’d hardly say that,” I seethed bumping my head on the ceiling. I silently cursed myself. When I get excited or really invested into something I begin to hover which isn’t that helpful.

Two of the three men charged at me while the other one tried to grab their belongings and leave. I used my speed to use their strength against them, quickly finishing the job and knocking them out. I grabbed onto one of the feather/scales of my suit and pulled it out which transformed it to a larger, sharp feather which I used to pin them both to the floor. I darted out of the store and into the alleyway that the third thief had escaped.

“You come any closer and I’ll have to stab you!” He bellowed, pointing his knife at me. Wow, dude didn’t even think to bring a gun. I put my hands in the air and began to sob.

“Oh my god, you found my one fear, small knives.” I hung my head claiming defeat.

“Wait really” He asked, a look of genuine surprise on his face. I pulled out another feather and threw it, pinning his sleeve to the wall.

“No,” I chuckled out in disbelief, “anyways, I’ms sure when the cops get here you’ll have had enough time to figure out a reason why you’re stuck in an alleyway with lots of fun jewels in your bag, good day sir.”

I flew back into the sky just to see the one and only spiderkid zooming towards the shop.

“Hey dude! I already got it, you’re good. See ya” I hollered, waving good bye and flying around a bit to ward off any arachnids if I needed to. Maybe I shoulda talked to him? 

TAGS: @sushidoesntneedtoknow (comment if you wanna be tagged) 

[ciathyzareposts]

Pimax 5K+ Impressions – The First of the Second Generation of VR

In case you haven’t figured it out, I am a Virtual Reality enthusiast. I’ve been looking forward to the coming of consumer-level Virtual Reality since the early 90s. I expected it a lot sooner than it got here, to be honest, but I’m glad it’s here now. I love that I get to work with it as part of my day job. Anyway, I have been willing to sink a bit of cash into it this hobby… to the extent that I pre-ordered a Pimax 5K+. Offering about the highest resolution out there and 170+ degrees of field-of-view, it seemed like a game-changer for PC-based VR.

My headset arrived a few weeks ago. Due to crazy work hours, I haven’t had as much time to play with it as I’d like, but I thought I’d share my impressions so far. The company and the PiTool software are still kind of young, so there’s plenty of room for both to grow. In fact, that’s probably the first alarm bell you should be hearing: There’s always a chance that one big disruption could cause the company and all its support of this product to disappear tomorrow. It’s no longer a “boutique” product, IMO, and has been growing to meet demand. My pre-order took months to arrive, but I understand that lately people have been getting their orders within 3-4 weeks. So… it’s improving.

Since it arrived, there have been a ton of announcements of new and impressive VR headsets for 2019. I’m going to state for the record that I’m calling this the second generation of VR hardware. Yes, annoyed pundits have their own list of demands for second-generation hardware, a bunch of revolutionary changes, but I call tough toenails. It is what it is, and the latest stuff coming out is definitely pretty exciting. I count the new Pimax headsets to be the first of this new generation. For the next couple of years, you’ll be able to treat yourself to much higher resolution, bigger field of view, inside-out tracking without the need of external sensors, untethered (or standalone) use, lighter weights, foveated rendering with eye-tracking, and improved frame rates for cleaner tracking. The problem is… I don’t know of any system coming out that will give you all of the above (or even a significant subset of the above), at least not at a consumer price-point.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to describe a VR experience. You can’t even show videos, really, that capture the experience properly. All I can do is offer comparisons and hope that it works.

Construction / Appearance: Construction feels a little more rugged than the Oculus Rift, but not as solid as the Vive / Vive Pro. It’s lightweight, though, in spite of its wide size and beefy lenses – less than the original Vive, I think. Anyway, I dig the LED Cylon-looking thing across the front. Maybe it makes me look less dorky or less like a hammerhead shark when I’m wearing it, but honestly, I don’t care. While it looks weird, it works. All is good.

Fit / Comfort: The strap that comes with the Pimax 5K+ is… well, functional. Kinda like the strap that shipped with the original Vive. I ordered some 3D-printed adapters for less than $10 that allowed me to hook up my Vive Deluxe Audio Strap to my Pimax, and it worked GREAT. I mean, really…. it feels like it belongs there. Pimax is coming out with their own version of the DAS for the Pimax, but I have a tough time imagining that it’ll be any better than this. I keep saying the Deluxe Audio Strap is a “must buy” for the original Vive, and it holds true here, too. With the strap, the Pimax is plenty comfy.

Some caveats, however: If you wear glasses in VR, you’ll need some thicker padding and adjustments to make it work right. Also, it seems to me that you really need to dial in your inter-pupillary distance (IPD) pretty closely… it’s not as tolerant as most headsets to being off by a couple of millimeters. If you don’t do this, you’ll probably see double and feel some eye strain after a while.

I’ve played for up to 90 minutes at a time with no significant feeling of eye strain or discomfort.

Setup: Getting things working with my computer is always a little bit of a chore, requiring software installation, reboots, etc. However, once it was set up, everything worked and kept working. Sometimes VR is finicky. The Pimax (currently) requires Lighthouse base stations (for position tracking) and controllers only available from HTC, which is great for an upgrade from the Vive, but not so great for new owners. However, Pimax is supposed to have both available really soon now, if they aren’t already.

Image Quality: Okay, here’s the biggest part – how are the visuals? In a word, fantastic. But you probably want more. Compared to the early 1st generation headsets, they are amazing. Compared to, say, the Vive Pro (which I have available for comparison), I think they aren’t quite as good. The LED display isn’t quite as bright and vivid, and the vertical resolution is about 10% smaller (1440 instead of the Vive Pro’s 1600). The horizontal resolution for the nearest 110 degrees (the standard FOV of headsets today, including the Vive Pro) is as good or better. The images do seem a little bit sharper than on the Vive Pro, and the screen door effect is hardly noticeable for me.

Of course, the selling point of the Pimax 5K+ is the wide field-of-view (FOV). It does not disappoint. The software allows three display modes: Small, Normal, and Large. Small FOV is about the usual 110 degrees that other headsets offer. If your game is having a really tough time running at higher resolutions at a decent frame rate, try this. “Normal” offers about 150 degrees of horizontal FOV, and it’s fantastic. “Large” opens up an extra 10 degrees on either side, giving you 170 degrees of horizontal FOV (they advertise 200 degrees “diagonal” FOV, which is a bizarre way to measure it that only marketing schmucks could come up with). Honestly, the difference between “Normal” and “Large” is hardly noticeable, and that last sliver is a little distorted by the lenses anyway. It’s really just good for catching stuff in the extremes of your peripheral vision. However, I didn’t notice a big difference in frame-rate for the large FOV, either, running on an RTX 2080Ti. So… YMMV. I may switch to “Large” mode in the future, but right now I’m extremely happy with Normal mode.

Normal Mode captures most of what your eyes see. You no longer feel like you are wearing blinders.  It’s more like ski goggles than scuba goggles. This makes it much easier to “check six” in a flight simulator, or to catch a glimpse of bad guys attacking you from the sides in a shooter. Some people say they can’t go back after experiencing the wider FOV for a while. I don’t have that problem, but it really is nice.  The higher resolution and sharp image quality make it easier to read the instrument panel in a flight sim, or to spot the details in Skyrim VR.

Looking at hard numbers: The original Vive and Oculus Rift offer 1080 x 1200 resolution per eye. The Vive Pro offers 1440 x 1600 resolution per eye… about a 75% improvement in resolution. The Pimax 5K+ has up to 2560 x 1440 resolution per eye – 184% better resolution than the original Rift and Vive, and about 60% larger than the Vive Pro… but it’s also spread out over a 55% wider field of view.

Software / Tuning: The Pimax 5K+ is compatible with SteamVR. I haven’t found anything that doesn’t work yet. However, you do need to run support software called “PiTool”. There are a lot of things to tweak here, in addition to the options inside SteamVR, in order to get the performance optimal for your tastes. Tweaking stuff in PiTool requires a restart of SteamVR for many of the changes to take effect. One of the most annoying issues is that a lot of older VR programs require the “Compatible with Parallel Projection” option to be activated.  This forces a slower rendering system to avoid seeing double, and it’s a significant hit to performance. Unity games and the newest Unreal games don’t require this option (and, happily, neither does DCS). Sadly, IL-2 Sturmovik does require this option, and I can’t get a solid 90 fps anymore in this game. Still, I’m generally ranging near 80, so it’s not terrible.

Other options include changing the field of view, modifying the brightness of the display, enabling their own version of Motion Smoothing (“Smart Smoothing,” which I don’t like as much as the one for the Vive), allowing “hidden areas” to be left unrendered (which can sometimes be noticed in the periphery of your version, but increases performance), changing the frame rate target (to sacrifice max FPS for a smoother frame rate… very important) and a bit more.  One size might not fit all games — particularly with Smart Smoothing and parallel projection compatibility. However, I like that they enable so many options to try and get the optimum performance / quality balance.

Overall: The VR landscape is about to get a bit more complicated, but as of right now, I’d say the Pimax is an excellent upgrade to the original Vive, if you have a machine beefy enough to keep up. You can keep your Lighthouse sensors and your controllers, and even keep your Deluxe Audio Strap if you have one. Put the original Vive in a box to remember it fondly, and rock on to the new, higher-resolution, wide-FOV new world. I consider it an upgrade over the Vive Pro, but not nearly as significant. The positives and negatives in the differences in visual quality probably balance each other out. The Pro has a wireless adapter allowing untethered gaming, but the wide FOV of the Pimax is a huge improvement.

If you do not already own the Vive “Lighthouse” base stations and controllers, it is a far more expensive system (even before you consider the costs of the PC). Pretty much the cost of a Vive Pro.

Is  the high resolution and wide FOV a game-changer? Not exactly, but for some games it really makes a tremendous difference (especially flight sims). I think foveated rendering doesn’t make much sense until you go outside the 110 degree FOV window. It’s a big enough deal that my next VR upgrade a few years down the road will have to offer a similarly wide FOV. Nothing announced so far is giving me any semblance of buyer’s remorse. If I didn’t already own the Pimax, I might be looking very closely at the upcoming HP Reverb or the Vive Cosmos. Then, I still might choose the Pimax.

  I think it probably represents the hardware limits of graphics cards for the next few years, and unless you really MUST have an untethered experience or the absolute bear minimum of Screen Door Effect, I think this headset looks like something that will grow with me for several years.

  source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/pimax-5k-impressions-the-first-of-the-second-generation-of-vr/

[nakateleeli]

Welgaea asks

A summation of all the asks I’ve gotten about Welgaea since the last one of these I’d put together. It’s been a while! I notice a lot of these are anonymous. A bit sad I had to turn off anon asks a while back due to some hate. I’ll turn it back on for a bit if anybody wants to send some anon asks in!

rapture-inside-of-me asked: Are beastia limited to just mammals, or are their beastia that resemble reptiles with scales or even birds with feathers?

Just mammals, or at the very least no scales or feathers or wings or anything. I’m sure there are a few things they can do that don’t fall into typical mammalian form, and I’m also sure there are some weird mammals out there that do stuff bestia can’t, so even mammalian isn’t completely correct, but it at least gives an idea. 

hikarufire64 asked: About the Beastia, can more Human like beastia like the male on the right turn more beastia like the female on the left. Something like a half Were wolf human turning into an actual werewolf on command to handle a situation.  Also, are there male beastia the look like the female on the left?

Bestia can not change form, no, they are how they were at birth. And to the second part, yes! Maybe I wasn’t as clear about it, but both males and females can both be more human-like or more beastly. 

aoshakozain asked: Hey! Now that you posted Muffin here, I found your Welgaea character sheets again. So I'm thinking of making one or two of my own. But for one of them, I'd need to ask: Are there / have there been dragons or something similar in Welgaea? And if so, what are they like? (general strength, intelligence and magic competency) One idea of mine is tangentially related, and I'd just like to know the background, so I don't come up with anything immediately contradictory.

Dragons do exist, though rare. They’re generally much more monstrous. Move about on all four with two wings. Fully grown they’d be quite large, as big as a house, but you don’t get to the insanely powerful levels ancient dragons get in D&D. They’re as powerful as you’d expect something as big as a house to be and just as tough. No definite weaknesses, though not unkillable. Dragons aren’t malevolent, though they live mostly by their own morals. They can be very intelligent, but not in the way humans are intelligent. They can plan and out-think and their memory is quite good. They can not speak. They can breathe fire, and I’m undecided if I would want other elements for dragons, or even other kinds like the longer Chinese dragon. At the end of the day they’re still monsters.

There are other creatures, like high elementals, that act as the spirit of the land and can take the form of a dragon with all the ability and intellect of a human, and even speak clearly, but high elementals are even more rare and a dragon’s form isn’t necessarily their permanent form.

Anonymous asked: Regarding Miss Naka and friends (and foes), how musically inclined are they? Do they play an instrument (or many), or do they prefer to simply listen to someone else play or sing?  What style and instrument(s) music do they prefer? And, on that note, how is music in general handled in Welgaea (conventions, types of instruments, melodies, artists, genres and so on)? I know this is a very, very broad subject. Tackle however much of it you would like, sir. (Apologies if this gets double-asked).

I imagine some of the more complex instruments to manufacture wouldn’t exist, though perhaps a simpler version would. Something like a flute would be a nightmare to create in their world, though something closer to a recorder may be more reasonable. There aren’t a lot of wind instruments. Those that do exist are much simpler to create. Music as a professional art form is more reserved for the higher class, which is fairly small, as only they would have the free time and money to spend on it.

That said, of course the more common person would still be interested in listening to and creating music. Everybody does. Though you would see it in a  more casual way. People humming or singing to themselves, or perhaps a person or two on an instrument for a town celebration or a festival. I imagine percussion, string, and vocals would be the most common.

Miss Naka’s not terribly musically inclined, though she’s not tone-deaf. If she practiced and maybe had some tutoring she could probably be an average singer. She doesn’t have much interest in playing any instruments. Ysami would probably be best at percussion, taking the raw hitting over the finesse of a string. She’d probably be acceptable, but not great. Ogre would be more inclined to play a wind instrument, especially since he’d probably had some training in them. Yuki… She wouldn’t make your ears bleed, but I don’t imagine she’d be terribly good at anything. Kentra would likely be pretty good at everything, though I imagine her singing wouldn’t be terribly normal, it would still be quite good. I can see Kharon, Morgana, and Lucienna all being fairly good at string instruments, though different kinds. Kharon would be inclined to pluck, Lucienna would be inclined to strum, and Morgana would be good with a bow. Kharon would play very traditionally, inspired by the thousands of years she’s seen. Lucienna and Morgana would be more formally trained. Kharon would probably be very good, in a sort of otherworldly way. Lucienna and Morgana would both be good, but not enough to do it professionally.

As to the kinds of music in the world, I feel like the very formal aside, it would all have a little more tribal and earthy feel to it. Just a little. Mostly because of how close to the land everyone lives. I could imagine some Chinese or Japanese styled music existing in some smaller cultures, though I don’t know if I can see country or western existing at all. I’d have a hard time feeling like something Russian would exist as strongly as it is, but perhaps a version more a mix of that and something more multi-cultural. To be honest I don’t know enough about cultural music to say much more than that.

As to the kinds of music they’re interested in, I know Miss Naka likes something happy and energetic, something with a solid beat. She’s far more interested in music than songs, only really liking singing when the voice is used more as an instrument than to get a message or story across. Ysami would like festival music, something that doesn’t really stand out and isn’t very unique, but fills the air with energy and happiness. Yuki would like something calm and pleasant, maybe a bit rustic. Ogre would like something closer to the mood of rock, and would be interested in the story and message the vocals are bringing. Kharon would be interested in something very simple and cultural. Something slow with perhaps just one instrument, no singing. Kentra would enjoy something calming and soft but nondescript. More mood music than anything. Morgana would like something hard and fast, but not harsh. Something with perhaps the sentiment of a little metal, but not metal-metal. Probably something about the intensity of Baby Metal? Lucienna would listen to something much more elegant, though with a little bit of energy I suppose, something pleasant.

phantom-form asked: So does the cast in Welgaea have favorite food/food they can tolerate the most?  If so, what would that be for everyone?

General-audience food is usually the most preferable. I think Miss Naka prefers it the most, actually, The kind of food that doesn’t stand out as being too cultural or anything and would generally be acceptable to anybody. She is fond of cheesy pastas though. As to the others, it’s hard to say. Ogre I’m sure would like good home-cooked meals. Not intentionally fatty or bad for you, but the kind that doesn’t necessarily try to be healthy. Ysami is a fan of more basic foods, not overprepared. Perhaps due to her time taking care of herself in the forest she generally ate simple cooked meats and some unprepared fruits and such, so she’d likely prefer that over an elaborately prepared meal. Yuki’s used to pretty basic stuff like simple sandwiches for lunch and maybe some cooked chicken breast for dinner. Anything beyond that she’d think is really fancy and special, not that she wouldn’t like it. I imagine she wouldn’t be too picky once it got to that. Kentra doesn’t eat. Kharon doesn’t need to eat, so if she did it would be just for the sensation. Probably simple stuff like riceballs or pork buns. Finger foods, but not messy. Morgana and Lucienna would be rather similar. They’d probably be used to eating very formally prepared meals like steaks and such. 

kuipernebula asked: So, I'm sorry to bother you about this, but I was curious if you had any specific sprite references of the Project Welgaea sprite style? I really enjoyed the style and, since i'm like 200% better at doing sprites than proper artwork, I starting doodling a sprite in the style based on Miss Naka and Ogre's sprites. (I'm sure I'll get around to making use of those stat blocks eventually, too...) Also, if there are any pallette references - like, rules on color limits and stuff.

I don’t have a base around anywhere, and I’ve changed them over time to suit my own purposes, but they were inspired by the characters in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7shivXGY00

But you can see what sprites I have made on the character sheets on my DeviantArt page, if you wanted to study them: http://nakate.deviantart.com/gallery/

As to palette preferences, I don’t limit myself too much. I limit myself to each base color only taking two colors, itself and a darker shaded color. I try not to have too many different colors. Even in the base, not-sprite design I’ll try to unify like colors and not have too many. Also on the DeviantArt character sheets you can see all the colors used and their shading. Miss Naka is the worst offender with quite a few colors, though I don’t feel I would want to do any more color unifying on her base design. On the sprite I did combine some of the silvers and pinks.

Anonymous asked: A Hypothetical (due to the rarity of ascended ability users): if Miss Naka and friends were to fight against someone/thing who uses danmaku, how would each of them go about the endeavour, sir? I imagine miss Ysami would go about it like Erina does (up-close and personal DPS, dodging and moving away only when absolutely necessary; drawing many parallels to FFXIV's monk), while Miss Naka would go a bit more strategically, etc.. Feel free to include characters like miss Passione, or Kentra, here.

Thinking about it in terms of Rabi-Ribi helps me a lot here. Most characters are melee, so many would very much go at it like Erina without Ribbon. Hang back and dodge until there’s an opening and rush in for a blow. Ysami would be fairly aggressive, likely squeezing in the most blows while taking minimal damage. Ogre would likely do the most damage, but he’d also take a good few hits. He’d have the most HP though and would block a lot. Miss Naka would likely be the most defensive, making sure to get hit as little as possible, only squeezing in hits when it’s very safe. She’d take the longest, but take the least damage.

Yuki would fight a bit more like someone who focused on Ribbon. She doesn’t have a melee, so she’d hang back and play it just as safe as Naka, chipping away with ranged attacks. Kharon… wouldn’t fight at all. She’d just phase out of reality and go do something else. Kentra and Morgana are both magical powerhouses. They’d be the ones doing the danmaku. Morgana would rely on larger more powerful attacks, but still keep her distance. She may get hit now and then, but not often. Kentra would fight as a mix of Erina and Ribbon, spewing a lot of bullets when afar, and getting in close for some heavy-hitting melee when available. She’d take more hits than Morgana, but she’d have more HP to just eat it. Finally Lucienna, who would likely fight much like Kentra, but with stronger melee and weaker range. She’d likely have very few ranged attacks, but they’d be stronger than a single of Kentra’s.

Anonymous asked: According to Miss Naka's questionnaire from a while back, she got her bayonets custom-made as a reward for a job she completed. Assuming the answer is not highly plot-relevant to the games (meaning no spoilers are present), could you elaborate on the events pertaining to the job in question, sir? And maybe why she chose bayonets (if she had a choice on what she could have had made for her)?

Interesting! Truth be told, I tend not to think too much on each individual job she does, but this was likely a bigger one. I wanted to say something about dwarves, but I remembered there weren’t any dwarves in Welgaea. Maybe there should be dwarves. Either way it was likely a town known for its forging that ran into a bit of a brick wall when someone who was supposed to bring a special gem or something didn’t arrive. No gem no festival, and it’s super culturally important, like wrath of the gods and all that to them. They weren’t even remotely prepared to go searching, or getting, another gem, and they were desperate. Naka had shown up to see the festival and they hired her to go track it down (honestly they would have hired anybody who said they’d try, but didn’t really have any expectations of success). So Miss Naka rushed across the land, backtracking and detectiving to figure out where the guy was, what happened, and how to get the gem back. Ended up some semi-intelligent monsters had raided the traveler, taken the gem, and had destroyed it by the time Naka got there in order to use for their own rituals and weapons and jewelry. So Miss Naka got to fight her way to the dangerous place where the gem was originally found, hope there was another one, get a new one, and heft it back to the festival in time for it to start. Honestly it’s a pretty standard tale of a large group being in a super tight spot, and someone going above and beyond to help them.

They rewarded her with her weapons, forged by some of the best smiths around, and given a light enchantment for durability and to keep its edge. Not a crazy enchantment or anything, but they’re pretty darn nice weapons. As to why she uses bayonets, she did use them before this, just a much less nice pair. She was taught to fight by her father with bayonets. Likely it was just whatever he had laying around and she adapted to them pretty quick. She was taught the generals of fighting moreso than a specific medium, but it was done through bayonets as a medium, so she’s most comfortable and experienced with them. I imagine she used the pair he gave her up until the current set, and they were nearing the end of their lifetimes by then. She likely went to the festival in the first place to look at a way to either repair them or get a new set made.

Anonymous asked: Given that Miss Naka and friends will likely find adventure all across Welgaea, I assume that, they would occasionally hold sparring sessions among themselves, to keep their skills sharp. With that in mind, sir, how would each individual hold his/her own against the others? (For instance, Naka vs Ysami, Ysami vs Ogre, and Naka vs Ogre. In the case of these three, I assume miss Naka would not use her bayonets, since the other two focus on martial arts. Feel free to include other characters here.)

I don’t imagine a lot of sparring would happen. If they did, Naka wouldn’t use her bayonets since it’s hard to not do more lasting damage with a blade, where as you can pull punches. But as for Naka v Ysami, if Naka even tried to convince Ysami to, I’m sure Ysami would grapple her pretty quickly and start making out with her. Ogre is Naka’s friend and sees Ysami as Naka’s girlfriend, and that’s not something you mess with, so he’d actively avoid sparring with Ysami. If they did, theoretically, I imagine it’d be a pretty good spar since they both fight hand-to-hand and likely couldn’t out-muscle each other easily. Naka and Ogre I also don’t feel like would happen. Though fighting is centric to their lives, when there’s downtime they prefer relax and be happy they don’t have to fight, enjoying other things. Besides, a Naka v Ogre fight would be the kind of stuff an anime arc would end with as the fight we’ve all known was coming for 200 episodes, and finally arrives and ends in the most dramatic way possible. Like Goku v Vegeta.

The only other travel companions I can think of are Yuki, who let’s be honest isn’t going to fight anybody, and Sha’la. Everything I’ve got of Sha’la right now is effectively obsolete, and I haven’t had the chance to pull new information from Ogre’s brain yet. So literally everything about her is up in the air, and I couldn’t speak one way or the other. If I had to guess, I imagine she’d either be adamantly against sparring with anybody, or maybe her and Ysami would (maybe her and Ogre? If her and Naka sparred it’d be a one-time thing she had to talk Naka into), though Ysami would see it more as a game than sparring. She’s not really interested in improving her fighting ability for the sake of it.

phantom-form asked: Has PapaTeleeli ever met Miss Naka's companions? If so, what are his opinions on them?

He’s a pretty jovial guy and hard to bring down. And he loves his daughter enough she could honestly bring just about anybody back and he’d be pleased as can be for her. That said, she doesn’t often go home. She’s just not in the area. But she certainly does when she gets the chance.

I don’t imagine he knows, or at least thinks much about, Naka being a lesbian. He tends not to define people, letting anybody be anything (really only going out of his way to do so if they go out of their way to ask him to define them) and is very accepting of pretty much everything. If she brought back both Ogre and Ysami, he’d probably assume at first that Ogre is her boyfriend. He’d say something obvious pretty much on first seeing him, complimenting him and saying something like that Naka found a fine man. Naka’d correct her father that Ogre’s just a friend (If Ogre didn’t beat her to it) and Ysami is actually her girlfriend and he’d just skip over to complimenting Ysami without missing a beat, saying something like that Naka found a fine woman.

That said, I imagine he’d find a lot in common with both Ogre and Ysami, as they’re all dorks and they’d both be willing to flex-off with him I’m sure; and Ysami is very playful and generally solves her problems by brute-forcing them, much like Naka’s father.

Anonymous asked: Given what we've been told of Miss Naka, it can be said that her fighting style is comprised of swift, agile maneuvers and acrobatics, not unlike a dangerous dance. I imagine that, to a bystander, it would make for a rather impressive display. With that in mind, sir, would Miss Naka ever take to publicly exhibit her skills (like street performing, or in social events, et cetera), if need be (monetary or otherwise)? If so, would she use her bayonets, or would she go unarmed, and simply dance?

I’d say from her own work she has the physical and mental capability to dance quite well, but fighting is very much goal-oriented action and reaction. You attack to hit an opening as it appears, you bend and weave to get out of the way of attacks that come at you. Without those goals she didn’t really put together how to dance from what she knows. It takes some legitimate training to learn how to apply her capabilities.

That said, she’s worked quite a few different jobs, and I’m sure somewhere along the way she took up a dancing job. Probably among a group to replace someone who couldn’t make a show. So the other dancers gave her some instruction for the show and she took to it quite well. She doesn’t have professional-level experience, but she learned a lot about how to apply her capabilities to it, and is quite adept at it. She’d probably do something akin to a not-slow-paced ballet, something with a lot of broad leg movement, but I don’t know much about dancing.

phantom-form asked: So... in Welgaea is there magic?   If so, does that mean Miss Naka's father casts magic by posing, if he were so inclined?

There is indeed magic! And most people are capable of very small magic, however any real “spells” can only be cast by studied magicians/wizards/etc. When the world uses magic instead of any other power source, it needs to be used even to, say, light up the room, and most people are capable of recharging the device that does that. Magic is more a manipulation of energy than it is spellcasting. Miss Naka’s father, however, wasn’t exactly magically inclined. He could recharge that light emitter, but he’d struggle.

justice-duwang asked: Does Miss Naka shout out any of her special attacks, if she has any?  Do any other characters do that?

I’m sure plenty of characters do. Miss Naka doesn’t, but mostly because she doesn’t really have any. Her one major attack (for now, anyway) doesn’t really show until game three, and she does shout the name of it. I’m sure she’s dorky enough to do it, but she also hates naming things that are mostly insignificant, so it’s got to be an actual real special move.

[lewdladylily]

Those top 5 asks always get lots of great replies from you, it seems. So let me ask another one: Top 5 ways to be hurt.

Ooh, fun~

So I am finally getting around to writing this, sorry for taking a few days, I have been busy. Again, I am going to start at 5th and go up.

5. Rice kneeling - Kneeling is a fun submissive play, and putting dry rice under your knees is a great way to make it excruciatingly painful. This is a great type of play for self administered punishment or just something particularly submissive. I also fear it and hate it, in that submissive “oh god please don’t make me kneel on rice but fuck it would be hot if you did.” sort of way. Recently Owner has been experimenting with making me get off my knees then eventually go back to kneeling, which is horribly painful because your knees are irritated from the rice but no longer numbed from kneeling. Safe, effective, and very submissive by nature. A solid choice for any dominant looking to punish a submissive :)

4. Impact play - Impact play is a very wide category, so to narrow it down I prefer tools that give a stingier, sharper type of pain than a heavy thuddier pain. The appeal here isn’t too hard to explain, it is fantastic for discipline play and if done correctly leaves wonderful marks on the skin. It also leaves this light burning pain behind from the irritated skin that is a wonderful reminder of the fun, and the irritated skin can be soothed for one of the most pleasurable sensations in the world with either something very soft like silk or a cloth wet with warm water.

I prefer being struck on my breasts or ass in most cases, but other areas are fun as well. I’ve seen an idea for punishment where the submissive is instructed to hold a hand up flat for striking so they have to participate in their punishment actively. I’ve always wanted to try that as a punishment, it looks terrifying.

Most of my experience in impact play is with a riding crop, belt, or leather paddle. I would love to try a proper cane and a good flogger. Also a single tail whip in the hands of someone who knows what they are doing so they don’t injure me, but that is honestly quite frightening.

Spanking I think of in its own category for impact play. It is fun, but there really is a limit to how hard someone can spank you without hurting their hand as much as they are hurting you. It is a more sexual, sensual type of impact play, fantastic foreplay. I used to have a sort of standing arrangement with a guy where we could just call each other up out of the blue if we were horny for some quick play. He would tie my wrists and spank me, I would give him a blow job, and then we would cuddle after and usually talk about video games. It was nice fun, and he had a *great* cock.

As a final note, a dull knife run over irritated skin is fucking terrifying, and a great form of fear play. It feels like you are being cut without actually hurting too much or actually cutting you, and the psychological aspect is overwhelming. Great stuff.

3. Cigar/cigarette burns - I have always loved burns. There is something messed up in how my brain is wired, and in many cases burns literally feel pleasurable to me on top of the pain. This has been happening literally my whole life. Anyway, of the different types of hot pain cigars and cigarette burns are my favorite. There is a strong anticipation aspect of seeing your dominant heat the ashes getting ready to burn you, the idea of combining bdsm and pain with something pleasurable for the dominant is also fun and interesting, and there is a built in submissive aspect if you want the sub to hold the ashes from the cigar. Very demeaning, very painful, very sexy. The problem is that cigar and cigarette burns are very unsanitary by nature and need careful post play care over weeks or it will become infected and leave a scar. The burns are also quite painful as they heal, and not in a good way. For me in particular my tolerance for burns means I have to be burned quite badly to really get the pain high off of it. For all these reasons I have decided that cigar and cigarette burns are something I just can’t realistically indulge in.

Hot wax is fun too, though I have not really had a good opportunity to do it in a long time. I want to give it a proper shot, maybe with some slightly higher temperature candles and someone who really knows what they are doing, and see if I can get a good burn high off of it. I know there is at least one guy at my local bdsm club who just loves being the top in hot wax scenes, I might ask him when the club starts holding parties again.

2. Stress Bondage - Most people don’t think of this sort of thing in terms of pain, but if you have experienced stress bondage (a tight hogtie, for example) it can be extremely painful in a unique and interesting way. It is more like discomfort and aching amplified to the point where you cannot stand it any more. Unfortunately most stress bondage positions are hard to set up yourself and you need to either have a spotter or have an extremely well planned out escape plan *and* a back up to come save you if it doesn’t work out. I typically use my cuffs without a lock and in a position where I can remove them easily. I love stress bondage because it also combines an element of physical exhaustion and inherently has some predicament elements - almost always shifting position helps relieve some of the strain temporarily, so you will end up shifting often trying to find a bearable position.

1. Nipple Clamps - Probably my absolute favorite. Very versatile, allows for a wide range of pain depending on the tool used and how it is used, I find the pain inherently erotic, and it is very easy and safe to use for self bondage or bondage directed by my Owner. Also great for predicament setups! The pain is typically a duller type of pain, not very sharp or stingy which is different from most options for torturing your breasts/nipples, and after a while gets a good throbbing pain. It also has some fun options for removing them - if you are very careful and remove them very slowly it wont hurt, but if you remove them fast it hurts really bad, and if you are very cruel just ripping them off is excruciating. I used to be able to pull off my clover clamps like that but I have not practiced handling this kind of pain as much lately. I bet I could do that easily enough with normal clamps, clover clamps are just evil. The biggest negative is you can’t do it too often because you need time to recover, and during that recovery time the pain from clamps is amplified horribly.

Honorable mentions, because I am indecisive:

Electricity: This is fun and has a unique flavor of pain, but I have not had enough experience with it yet. I want to get (or make) an over the internet control electric toy if possible.

tickling: Not actually pain but I really struggle to handle it. For a long time it was even on my list of limits! Also you better secure me really well because I will thrash around and try to stop you.

Breath play: I have not had much chance to experiment with this, but we actually did a bit of this with Raven directing me last night! You have to be super careful with this, or do it in such a way that the sub is never actually prevented breathing (that is what we did last night) and is doing it out of obedience to their owner/master. Great for fear, very unique type of distress and the last few seconds before getting relief is agonizing.

Rubber bands on my feet: Also great for self administered pain, it is easy, convenient, and very easy to adjust the pain level. This has been growing on me lately as Raven has been using it to punish me (”why is it always my feet...”) and I have learned to do it better and more mercilessly to myself. Almost made my 5th spot, and a very effective way of punishing me.

Thank you for the ask!

[anthonystopscom]

3 Unusual Breathing Techniques to Supercharge Your Workout

There is a serious chance that I would skip this article if I stumbled across it on the internet.

When people speak about breathing, I get a weird image in my head.

I picture being stuck at a “spiritual breathing awakening retreat”. A place where people make uncomfortably long eye contact when you meet them and have names like Essence or Divinity.

… and one of our instructors is a skinny heavily bearded guy sitting on the grass with legs crossed in the lotus position with his eyes closed.

The air smells of patchouli oil.

We are his students and he is teaching us something like how to breathe in the good energy with every breath and how to exhale away our inner demons.

There is incense and bell ringing involved too.

In my nightmare, out of the dozens of people at this retreat, I’m the only one NOT buying it.

I also have a strong sense that this is soon going to involve awkward nudity.

I’m 99% certain that all of these retreats end the same way: Sitting in a yurt… naked, in a circle, holding hands and crying.

I don’t want to wind up in a naked in a yurt!

We won’t be doing that here.

We are going to talk about breathing without being exposed to strange body hair patterns of others.

I honestly haven’t paid too much attention to breathing while working out.

Typically the fitness advice is to breathe in when lowering a weight and breath out when doing the positive portion.

This isn’t terrible advice, but…

There are ways to breathe that will deliver more oxygen to the muscles and give you greater performance (strength, endurance, fat loss, etc.)

Here’s what is interesting…

The way to accomplish this is completely counterintuitive:

You will want to breathe LESS, in a strategic way, to greatly improve oxygen delivery to your muscles.

I’ll talk about that in a sec right after a short music break (I always like a music theme in my articles to break up the text into bite-sized chunks).

The music theme for this post is live indie electropop performances from the studio of my local radio station, KEXP.

Most of these are better than the original album recordings.

Let’s talk about breathing less.

I kind of feel like I’m late to the party on this one. Friends of mine have been telling me that I need to read a book called The Oxygen Advantage, since 2015 when it was released.

I picked up the Kindle version and it quickly hooked me in.

It goes deep into breathing, but I want to talk specifically about breathing during exercise.

Here’s are some quick bullets.

The primary stimulus to breathe is to get rid of CO2 (carbon dioxide) NOT take in more oxygen.

The blood is almost always fully saturated with oxygen.

Carbon dioxide plays a key role in releasing oxygen from your blood to reach your muscles.

When you breathe too much, carbon dioxide gets released from the body too quickly to do its job, so your issues, organs, and brain don’t get adequate oxygen.

As explained in detail in the book, most of us are chronic overbreathers.

Our vital organs, muscles, and brain aren’t getting as much oxygen as is optimal.

I was slightly skeptical when I read all of this, but the author points out that this CO2 and oxygenation of the tissues in the body is explained by the Bohr Effect.

I thought about this some more.

You can hardly notice a fit person breathe when they are walking or doing a light activity, while the breathing of an out-of-shape person is almost always noticeable.

If a person is breathing hard at walking speed, they most likely aren’t as efficient with their breathing as a fit person who isn’t challenged.

Light breathing is key to performance.

Again, I know that this all seems counterintuitive.

I wasn’t a believer until I tried some of the breathing techniques we will go over.

The key to lighter breathing during ANY activity is to build up your tolerance to carbon dioxide (CO2).

Remember…

When you hold your breath, the thing that makes you eventually breathe is the need to get rid of CO2.

Excessive breathing during exercise or at rest is caused by:

A low VO2 MAX (Aerobic Capacity). Here’s an article I wrote on increasing your aerobic capacity.

Having a low tolerance for CO2. Your body’s reflex to breathe out happens too quickly.

Note: These are correlated. Studies have shown that athletic performance, during increased carbon dioxide and reduced oxygen pressure, can improve VO2 Max.

The 3 methods I’m going to discuss here are all about building up your tolerance to CO2 while simultaneously delivering more oxygen to your muscles.

Let’s get to it.

Breathing Technique 1: Breathe Through Your Nose as Much as Possible During Your Workout

I first read about the benefits of nasal breathing in Joe LoGalbo’s course, Anabolic Running.

We really were meant to breathe through our noses and doing so gives you several advantages.

When you breathe through your nose, air reaches the deepest part of your lungs. Breathing through the mouth activates your upper chest and the air typically just reaches the top part of your lungs.

Nasal breathing removes a significant amount of the germs and bacteria from the air you breathe in.

Nasal breathing keeps the mouth hydrated. Mouth breathing dries the mouth which causes bad breath as well as an increase in the occurrence of cavities and gum disease.

Nitric Oxide is released from the nasal passage into the deep parts of the lungs where it reaches the blood and can positively affect the body.

Exhaling through the nose takes longer than through the mouth, so CO2 has more time to do its job of oxygenating your muscles.

In nature when an animal is breathing through its mouth it is a sign of sickness.

I have a beautiful cat named Violet.

I would take her to the veterinarian immediately if I noticed that she was breathing through her mouth.

(Warning: This house is protected by an attack cat.)

If you can get in the habit of breathing through your nose when working out, you will build up your tolerance to CO2.

Over time this will allow your muscles to perform at a higher level while simultaneously increasing your aerobic capacity (VO2 Max).

You have to gradually work your way into this.

Don’t force yourself to breathe through the nose for your entire workout, when you first attempt this.

Just maybe start out with nasal breathing on your easy sets.

As you adjust, you can add this to you more intense sets.

I’m to the point now where I do about 75% of my sets while breathing through my nose.

What I noticed at first…

My nasal passage was getting irritated.

This was because I will still breathing too hard, which leads me to the next tip.

Breathing Technique 2: Breathe as Lightly as Possible as You Increase the Intensity of Your Training.

As you improve your tolerance to carbon dioxide you will be able to calmly breathe even under intense efforts.

This makes a lot of sense.

I live at the bottom of a steep hill and I have no problem walking to the top without getting out-of-breath. I have seen others who are breathing so hard that they can’t even talk after reaching the top.

I think some of this is VO2 Max.

I also believe that people who don’t do a lot of cardio training typically are too sensitive to CO2.

Their bodies are accustomed to breathing hard at the first sign of any physical effort.

If you can master the ability to take in a little less air than is comfortable, you will quickly improve your CO2 tolerance.

What you will find is that by doing this, you will breathe in a much slower and more relaxed manner while at rest.

Things like slow walking won’t even begin to challenge you.

This is a quick hack to feel like you are in better shape… and it happens quickly.

The final tip takes this to the next level.

Breathing Technique 3: Practice This Nose Unblocking Breath-Holding Exercise During Light Cardio.

I became more of a mouth breather after having allergies that lead to nasal congestion.

Since my nose was blocked, I wound up breathing through my mouth.

What I have come to find out is that the nasal congestion becomes worse the longer you breathe through your mouth.

The author of The Oxygen Advantage has helped countless people overcome even pretty severe cases of nasal blockage by gradually introducing this nose unblocking exercise.

How to do the nose unblocking exercise:

Take a small, silent breath in and a small, silent breath out through your nose.

Walk as many paces as possible with your breath held to create a strong air shortage (without overdoing it).

When you resume breathing, use only your nose and calm your breathing immediately.

Your first breath will be a bit bigger than normal, but make sure and calm your breathing by your second or third breath.

If you can’t recover your breath in 2 to 3 breaths, you have held your breath too long.

Wait for about one minute and repeat… do this for 5 to 6 times with one-minute normal nasal breathing in between.

I actually like to start my cardio like this now. I walk for about 10 minutes and do this exercise.

Not only does it open up the nasal passage, it really helps build a tolerance to CO2.

I typically just do these every other workout and in just that short time have found that this has drastically improved my ability to breathe through my nose.

Ideally I would recommend picking up The Oxygen Advantage if you want more details on how and why this works.

Summary:

Ideally the goal is to breathe through your nose as much as possible.

When you do this, your breathing is deeper, in that the air reaches the lowest part of your lungs (unlike mouth breathing).

When efforts are intense…

Your natural instinct will be to breathe hard through your mouth. If you can purposely breath in a calm way and through your nose, your body and workouts will benefit.

I’ve only been using these methods for the past few weeks and already noticing benefits.

The calm nose breathing during intense training opens up the airways and makes nose breathing during rest automatic.

Mouth breathing is bad for your breath, teeth, and body.

These 3 breathing techniques will improve your workout performance and turn you into a natural nose breather.

Give them a shot.

Cheers,

-Rusty

As a former fitness coach to fashion models, I can teach you how to increase muscle definition without adding size.

Click Here to check out my premium courses.

The post 3 Unusual Breathing Techniques to Supercharge Your Workout appeared first on Visual Impact Fitness.

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[visualimpactfitnessco]

3 Unusual Breathing Techniques to Supercharge Your Workout

There is a serious chance that I would skip this article if I stumbled across it on the internet.

When people speak about breathing, I get a weird image in my head.

I picture being stuck at a “spiritual breathing awakening retreat”. A place where people make uncomfortably long eye contact when you meet them and have names like Essence or Divinity.

… and one of our instructors is a skinny heavily bearded guy sitting on the grass with legs crossed in the lotus position with his eyes closed.

The air smells of patchouli oil.

We are his students and he is teaching us something like how to breathe in the good energy with every breath and how to exhale away our inner demons.

There is incense and bell ringing involved too.

In my nightmare, out of the dozens of people at this retreat, I’m the only one NOT buying it.

I also have a strong sense that this is soon going to involve awkward nudity.

I’m 99% certain that all of these retreats end the same way: Sitting in a yurt… naked, in a circle, holding hands and crying.

I don’t want to wind up in a naked in a yurt!

We won’t be doing that here.

We are going to talk about breathing without being exposed to strange body hair patterns of others.

I honestly haven’t paid too much attention to breathing while working out.

Typically the fitness advice is to breathe in when lowering a weight and breath out when doing the positive portion.

This isn’t terrible advice, but…

There are ways to breathe that will deliver more oxygen to the muscles and give you greater performance (strength, endurance, fat loss, etc.)

Here’s what is interesting…

The way to accomplish this is completely counterintuitive:

You will want to breathe LESS, in a strategic way, to greatly improve oxygen delivery to your muscles.

I’ll talk about that in a sec right after a short music break (I always like a music theme in my articles to break up the text into bite-sized chunks).

The music theme for this post is live indie electropop performances from the studio of my local radio station, KEXP.

Most of these are better than the original album recordings.

Let’s talk about breathing less.

I kind of feel like I’m late to the party on this one. Friends of mine have been telling me that I need to read a book called The Oxygen Advantage, since 2015 when it was released.

I picked up the Kindle version and it quickly hooked me in.

It goes deep into breathing, but I want to talk specifically about breathing during exercise.

Here’s are some quick bullets.

The primary stimulus to breathe is to get rid of CO2 (carbon dioxide) NOT take in more oxygen.

The blood is almost always fully saturated with oxygen.

Carbon dioxide plays a key role in releasing oxygen from your blood to reach your muscles.

When you breathe too much, carbon dioxide gets released from the body too quickly to do its job, so your issues, organs, and brain don’t get adequate oxygen.

As explained in detail in the book, most of us are chronic overbreathers.

Our vital organs, muscles, and brain aren’t getting as much oxygen as is optimal.

I was slightly skeptical when I read all of this, but the author points out that this CO2 and oxygenation of the tissues in the body is explained by the Bohr Effect.

I thought about this some more.

You can hardly notice a fit person breathe when they are walking or doing a light activity, while the breathing of an out-of-shape person is almost always noticeable.

If a person is breathing hard at walking speed, they most likely aren’t as efficient with their breathing as a fit person who isn’t challenged.

Light breathing is key to performance.

Again, I know that this all seems counterintuitive.

I wasn’t a believer until I tried some of the breathing techniques we will go over.

The key to lighter breathing during ANY activity is to build up your tolerance to carbon dioxide (CO2).

Remember…

When you hold your breath, the thing that makes you eventually breathe is the need to get rid of CO2.

Excessive breathing during exercise or at rest is caused by:

A low VO2 MAX (Aerobic Capacity). Here’s an article I wrote on increasing your aerobic capacity.

Having a low tolerance for CO2. Your body’s reflex to breathe out happens too quickly.

Note: These are correlated. Studies have shown that athletic performance, during increased carbon dioxide and reduced oxygen pressure, can improve VO2 Max.

The 3 methods I’m going to discuss here are all about building up your tolerance to CO2 while simultaneously delivering more oxygen to your muscles.

Let’s get to it.

Breathing Technique 1: Breathe Through Your Nose as Much as Possible During Your Workout

I first read about the benefits of nasal breathing in Joe LoGalbo’s course, Anabolic Running.

We really were meant to breathe through our noses and doing so gives you several advantages.

When you breathe through your nose, air reaches the deepest part of your lungs. Breathing through the mouth activates your upper chest and the air typically just reaches the top part of your lungs.

Nasal breathing removes a significant amount of the germs and bacteria from the air you breathe in.

Nasal breathing keeps the mouth hydrated. Mouth breathing dries the mouth which causes bad breath as well as an increase in the occurrence of cavities and gum disease.

Nitric Oxide is released from the nasal passage into the deep parts of the lungs where it reaches the blood and can positively affect the body.

Exhaling through the nose takes longer than through the mouth, so CO2 has more time to do its job of oxygenating your muscles.

In nature when an animal is breathing through its mouth it is a sign of sickness.

I have a beautiful cat named Violet.

I would take her to the veterinarian immediately if I noticed that she was breathing through her mouth.

(Warning: This house is protected by an attack cat.)

If you can get in the habit of breathing through your nose when working out, you will build up your tolerance to CO2.

Over time this will allow your muscles to perform at a higher level while simultaneously increasing your aerobic capacity (VO2 Max).

You have to gradually work your way into this.

Don’t force yourself to breathe through the nose for your entire workout, when you first attempt this.

Just maybe start out with nasal breathing on your easy sets.

As you adjust, you can add this to you more intense sets.

I’m to the point now where I do about 75% of my sets while breathing through my nose.

What I noticed at first…

My nasal passage was getting irritated.

This was because I will still breathing too hard, which leads me to the next tip.

Breathing Technique 2: Breathe as Lightly as Possible as You Increase the Intensity of Your Training.

As you improve your tolerance to carbon dioxide you will be able to calmly breathe even under intense efforts.

This makes a lot of sense.

I live at the bottom of a steep hill and I have no problem walking to the top without getting out-of-breath. I have seen others who are breathing so hard that they can’t even talk after reaching the top.

I think some of this is VO2 Max.

I also believe that people who don’t do a lot of cardio training typically are too sensitive to CO2.

Their bodies are accustomed to breathing hard at the first sign of any physical effort.

If you can master the ability to take in a little less air than is comfortable, you will quickly improve your CO2 tolerance.

What you will find is that by doing this, you will breathe in a much slower and more relaxed manner while at rest.

Things like slow walking won’t even begin to challenge you.

This is a quick hack to feel like you are in better shape… and it happens quickly.

The final tip takes this to the next level.

Breathing Technique 3: Practice This Nose Unblocking Breath-Holding Exercise During Light Cardio.

I became more of a mouth breather after having allergies that lead to nasal congestion.

Since my nose was blocked, I wound up breathing through my mouth.

What I have come to find out is that the nasal congestion becomes worse the longer you breathe through your mouth.

The author of The Oxygen Advantage has helped countless people overcome even pretty severe cases of nasal blockage by gradually introducing this nose unblocking exercise.

How to do the nose unblocking exercise:

Take a small, silent breath in and a small, silent breath out through your nose.

Walk as many paces as possible with your breath held to create a strong air shortage (without overdoing it).

When you resume breathing, use only your nose and calm your breathing immediately.

Your first breath will be a bit bigger than normal, but make sure and calm your breathing by your second or third breath.

If you can’t recover your breath in 2 to 3 breaths, you have held your breath too long.

Wait for about one minute and repeat… do this for 5 to 6 times with one-minute normal nasal breathing in between.

I actually like to start my cardio like this now. I walk for about 10 minutes and do this exercise.

Not only does it open up the nasal passage, it really helps build a tolerance to CO2.

I typically just do these every other workout and in just that short time have found that this has drastically improved my ability to breathe through my nose.

Ideally I would recommend picking up The Oxygen Advantage if you want more details on how and why this works.

Summary:

Ideally the goal is to breathe through your nose as much as possible.

When you do this, your breathing is deeper, in that the air reaches the lowest part of your lungs (unlike mouth breathing).

When efforts are intense…

Your natural instinct will be to breathe hard through your mouth. If you can purposely breath in a calm way and through your nose, your body and workouts will benefit.

I’ve only been using these methods for the past few weeks and already noticing benefits.

The calm nose breathing during intense training opens up the airways and makes nose breathing during rest automatic.

Mouth breathing is bad for your breath, teeth, and body.

These 3 breathing techniques will improve your workout performance and turn you into a natural nose breather.

Give them a shot.

Cheers,

-Rusty

As a former fitness coach to fashion models, I can teach you how to increase muscle definition without adding size.

Click Here to check out my premium courses.

The post 3 Unusual Breathing Techniques to Supercharge Your Workout appeared first on Visual Impact Fitness.

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[ruthellisneda]

{#TransparentTuesday} Purposefulness vs Suffering

There I was, probably 100 feet from the top of the final peak, when my mom looked at me and asked if I wanted to take a break.

I meant to say no, that I didn’t want to hold her back, but instead I just collapsed to the rocks.

As I lay there (in the same crumpled body position you see when a cartoon character goes SPLAT on the sidewalk) I listened to the horrible wheezy-rhaspy sound my lunges had been making for the last hour. It was like a panting dog, if the dog had severe asthma and was having a panic attack.

The funny thing was that even as I lay there making involuntary animal sounds, my heart racing and my head woozy, I felt… fine.

I had been physically s-t-r-u-g-g-l-i-n-g with this last peak, since it was both the third high peak we climbed that day, and also the highest elevation. Somehow though, I felt curiously unbothered by my own pain and struggle. It was almost like I watched my body fighting this battle from some serene place inside myself, a place where despite the hideous sound I was making and the fact that my legs had collapsed unbidden onto the rocks, I knew there was nothing actually wrong.

Throughout the trip I had many of these moments, noticing my own physical struggle while maintaining a deep inner sense of calm.

At one point earlier on in the day, while hiking to the trailhead for our second peak, I had sat down and uncontrollably wept for a while.

It was as natural as taking a break for water when you’re thirsty. I sat down and the tears simply flowed until they were done. I wasn’t upset exactly, I just needed to cry. We’d been going since before the sun came up, and the terrain was extremely mentally and physically demanding.

When my mom’s husband heard I’d taken a crying-break, he recommended I skip the next peak and just rest. I was surprised, because despite the fact that I still had dirty tear-streaks down my cheeks, I knew nothing was wrong and I would absolutely be able to finish all the peaks. My feeling was that of an unshakeable calm, a steadfast serenity.

While my actual discomfort level was much higher than normal, my anxiety was much lower, and I find that fascinating.

I’ve reflected a lot on this trip and the fierce calm that underpinned the whole experience. What caused this anxiety-free state? Is it always available for me to tap into? Can I purposefully create more of it in my life? Where did this inner calm comes from?

Here’s what I’ve come up with:

1. Confidence in my own capacity to handle hard shit

I’ve done some terrifying, painful, and challenging shit in my life, so I know that until I’m faced with a new challenge, even I don’t know what I’m capable of. It’s pretty empowering to know I’m carrying around an untapped well of strength and courage inside me all the time, and it certainly comes in handy when I’m trying some new kind of challenge.

Plus, at a basic level… so far, I’ve survived 100% of those moments. I knew I would survive this one too.

2. Purposefulness

My purpose for this trip was always crystal clear, highly motivating, and aligned with my highest values. It never wavered through all the six weeks of training, or four days in the woods: my purpose was to be there for my mom as she finished this enormous accomplishment.

Not just physically there though, but emotionally there too; present; clear; light. (Aka not being irritable, grouchy, whining, or complaining.)

Having a strong sense of purpose— a super strong “why”–  is hands down the most important factor when it comes to accessing that state of clear-headed calm.

Had I been struggling that much for no reason, or for a worthless reason like a miscommunication or bad planning, I would have absolutely been throwing dramatic temper tantrums in my head the whole time, like WTF why do people do this shit?!?!

I know this because throwing internal (and sometimes external) temper tantrums is something I’ve done a lot of in my life. Being asked to suffer for a reason that isn’t important to me makes me absolutely, childishly livid.

What’s purposeful or meaningful for one person is completely different than for another though. I don’t like being inconvenienced or uncomfortable to save money for example, because saving money isn’t a value of mine. (You can’t take it with you when you die, y’all.)  But I’ll gladly endure all manner of pain and discomfort in service of my work, or spending quality time with loved ones.

Note: This is why I used to think I was lazy and anxious, but it turns out I just didn’t like getting out of bed to do random meaningless shit. Now that my career is linked to my purpose, I’m happy doing everything from IT issues to billing problems to program launches to endless emails. It’s also why a lot of people think they lack “willpower” when it comes to getting in shape, when really what they lack is a strong sense of purposefulness. It seems counter-intuitive, but losing weight and looking good naked just don’t often tap into a person’s core values or sense of meaning.

Which brings me to an interesting insight about the relationship between purposefulness and a general feeling of “resistance.”

3. Lack of resistance

In my day-to-day life, I often have resistance to stuff. Resistance is that feeling when something goes wrong or you’re like no it shouldn’t be like that!! Resistance is the cause of a lot of human suffering, because it creates a feeling of internal conflict that is both exhausting and unpleasant.

Think about resistance this way: if someone punched you in the face, you’d probably be pretty upset, right? But if for some reason you really wanted someone to punch you in the face, then despite the fact that it would still hurt, you’d feel happy or satisfied if someone did it.

In short, we only feel resistance when there is a discrepancy between what is happening and what we think should be happening.

This also explains the difference between pain and suffering. Pain is a mandatory part of life. If someone punches you, it’s gonna hurt. But suffering is optional; suffering is the resistance you have to being in pain. You only suffer when you’ve decided that this pain shouldn’t be happening: which is where purposefulness comes in.

* Pain in service of a “why” that makes you feel purposeful is extremely empowering! * Pain in service of nothing whatsoever is infuriating and humiliating.

I was struggling in those mountains, yes, but I wanted to be struggling. I was empowered by my own struggle because it was in service of a “why” that felt pure and right. I never felt any resistance to it or labeled it “a problem” to solve, because I had signed up to struggle in this way.

Without resisting it, the presence of pain and discomfort only served to make me feel more proud and determined as we went on.

4. I’ve learned how to safely feel my feelings

Over the years of doing self-acceptance and embodiment work, I’ve purposefully cultivated a tolerance for my own feelings. (Check out the self-study course I created on feelings to learn more about how!)

It’s amazing how much less anxiety I have now that I can feel my feelings without freaking out.

I had asthma as a kid, and I used to get panic attacks. Doing cardio always used to make me feel like that — like I couldn’t get enough air, like I was going to die. That kind of fear led to panic attacks. I’d feel the initial discomfort, get anxious about the discomfort, panic about my anxiety, panic about my panic, and them BOOM: full blown panic attack.

Being able to tolerate the first stages of physical discomfort— to stay present, and loose, and keep breathing no matter what I’m feeling (aka to not experience resistance to my own feelings)— changes the whole pattern.

Despite all my purposefulness and confidence, fear is a powerful force. If I hadn’t learned to tolerate my fear safely, it might have hijacked the whole show and ruined my trip.

Whew. These were some powerful lessons packed into an intense experience.

Given this experience, the topic of staying constantly connected to meaning/purpose has just become a whole lot more interesting to me!

Can this be the key to feeling inner peace even when life is hard AF? Or maybe these together are the four keys— did I miss anything?

The post {#TransparentTuesday} Purposefulness vs Suffering appeared first on Jessi Kneeland.

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