#and i guess technically its true

[the-apocalypse-is-upon-us]

Mukuro Ikusaba,they could never make me hate you

[thanatika]

yeah i agree with your point about survival mechanics and i feel the same way about the lack of combat mechanics. "why would an educated city doctor need a weapon" because shit is hitting the fan in every way impossible and pretty much everyone is walking around armed... also why am i supposed to believe the the fact that he's a man of intellect will somehow provide him with food? i don't think anyone is going to be too eager to share food during an outbreak intellectual or not...

+ follow up for the previous ask but actually my favorite quest from the original pathologic is the day 11 bachelor quest that involves shooting down soldiers. i think it really drives the point home about how this random fuckass guy who is supposed to be battling a plague doesn't even have the time to do that anymore because the people in charge are asking completely irrelevant things of him now and he's at a position where he cannot refuse what is being asked of him. like i think it was good storytelling that even as the guy who lowkey wants to deal with the plague and solve its mystery you still have other, more pressing, less interesting and or pleasant tasks to complete

i agree! honestly, i feel this way about the combat mechanics even more than i do about the physical survival (food, health, illness, sleep) mechanics. because sure, i can see how it makes sense for daniil's position of authority to mean that his basic needs are somewhat provided for -- although i don't think it makes more sense than what we got in the original game. i've never seen anyone bring up "isn't it kind of unrealistic that the bachelor isn't given lots of food during a massive food shortage?" as a plothole that needed to be resolved. the townspeople generally don't like him much, and most of the people with power don't either, except for the kains. sure, maybe it's kind of weird that you can go see the kains while broke and on the verge of keeling over from hunger, and they won't do anything to help you, but... the kains are pretty self-centered, and they're so goddamn weird that maybe they forget that you need to eat food to live anyway. and it's half-implied that the powers that be are ultimately giving daniil this role as a convenient way to kill him, so it makes sense that they would put no pressure on the town authorities to keep him alive.

(and honestly, artemy is taken under the olgimsky's auspices as much as the kains take daniil's under theirs! which is to say, selfishly, with ulterior motives that are more important to them than the well-being of their healer, but... the olgimskys are set up as the wealthiest of the 3 families financially, as well as the ones with the most access to food, given their control over the meat industry. so if anything it's "weirder" that artemy isn't more materially provided for, though to be clear i don't think there's an actual plothole there either way.)

but anyway, you could handwave it and say that daniil's position of privilege and authority gives him more perks than he got in the original game, but the amount of fighting you have to do to get through town is... kind of an unavoidable physical reality? like you're given so many sidequests that you often wind up walking around town after dark, and that's when the bandits come out. is the idea that the bandits would be too scared to attack him because he's so important? because that doesn't make a lot of sense to me, and even pathologic 2 establishes that he's seen as a valuable target by the bandits:

and then there's the quests where combat plays a more direct role in the story itself, like getting involved in saving andrey from the firing squad, or killing guards to break artemy out of prison, or the quest where you have to kill var in attempt to stop the arsonists (which i include on the same tier as the other ones because i really like the quest journal entry he has if you complete it where he blames himself for willow's death. it's a good character moment.)

hell, even in pathologic 2 itself, one of the biggest Bachelor Moments is on day 11, when you have that big dramatic convo with him after he killed a soldier for the papers he was delivering. plus one of bad grief's idle dialogues in patho 2 is commentary on the bachelor being "quick on the draw" and that he "already shot someone". like he just straight up is not living a combat-free existence. and overall, combat isn't just a good tool from a mechanical perspective, heightening the stakes and placing pressure on the player (though it is), it's also pretty important for him on a thematic level imo, almost as important as artemy and his "rivers of blood". in patho classic, daniil has this early interaction with the inquisitor:

which, thinking about it from a doylist perspective, was probably the writers' attempt to make it sound more plausible that this random medical researcher from the big city was competent with multiple types of guns. and i appreciate them coming up with that hint of backstory to cover their bases a bit, but with those bases covered, i think the fact that daniil ultimately spends more time shooting people than he does prescribing medicines for them actually does a lot for him thematically? i mean, if his whole thing is that he's this "tempted destroyer", someone who frames his career as a combative battle with death rather than a quest to save people's lives, whose "default" solution is to raze the town with artillery because he's too limited by his rationalist worldview and military upbringing (and bitterness over being manipulated and sabotaged) to come up with a solution that saves the any remaining infected survivors on his own. plus the way that clara frames artemy and daniil as two sides of the same coin in being violent destroyers and killers, who without player intervention will immediately devolve to running around chasing each other down in what's either an insanely dedicated tom and jerry LARP or some really elaborate foreplay. imo, that whole dichotomy (which is pretty core to the game, as the idea of dichotomies are core to it in general) works so much better with the way they're both presented in classic, stalking around with gun/scalpel in hand. hell, not to mention the effect that spending 12 in-game days trying not to starve and getting killed by bandits or guards or worms or soldiers every day would have on the player, and the way it would make them feel about the town and their natural projection of those feelings onto dankovsky, who is a perfectly fitting vessel for them as the avatar actually undergoing those virtual experiences.

ultimately i think they are mainly going this direction out of a desire to do something more creative and original, which is fine... it just seems a bit silly to me that they keep saying "well obviously that doesn't really work for the bachelor's scenario", when, well... even as recently as patho 2 in 2019, they seemed to think it fit his narrative pretty well! i'm also guessing that a lack of combat won't be that bandits are just no longer roaming the streets at night. it sounds more like pathologic 3 is set to be more of a nonlinear experience, where you'll probably fast travel from place to place instead of having to walk across town so much? so you'll be avoiding bandits just in the sense that the gameplay will be avoiding them. i guess i'm hoping that at the very least, there's still the implication of the crunch of not getting enough sleep or food and the threat of being stabbed to death while trying to get through town occurring to dankovsky in the background, even if those mechanics are deemphasized in favor of more macro-level town resource management, time control, and sherlock holmes fruit ninja or whatever the hell they were on about back in 2022 lmao.

[premamelody]

more utypyrt doodles but we're getting real and suzy is there

also theoretical utpyrt flowey deltarune design. i think every theoretical flowey deltarune dark world design should be a farmer that is secretly a reaper. like yeah im just tillin the grounds, the grounds of the buried ones. or at least a reaper.

oh yeah also random flower buddy bc since he's technically both an object and a monster it would be cool if his flower part become a separate darkner. they're annoying. that's it. they serve as the actual health point/actual thing to damage. but they're so obnoxious that they're the target anyways.

[skogsdotter-draws]

Ok but, regarding TMAGP 27, I can't stop thinking about Jonah writing, after sending Archibald to a certain death, "It is done, and I am surprised to find how little remorse I feel." It reminds me of his statement in MAG 160:

"The discovery, not simply of the dark and horrible reality of the world in which you live, but that you would quite willingly doom that world and confine the billions in it to an eternity of terror and suffering, all to ensure your own happiness, to place yourself beyond pain and death and fear. (...) It is an awful thing to know about yourself."

I will never get tired of little details about his life being revealed (regardless of the timeline/dimension) because the parallel between his discovery of the supernatural world and the discovery of his own true self and the things he's capable of is so interesting and compelling to me.

Along with the knowledge of the horrors that exist in his world comes the horror of the realization that he might be capable of anything to stop feeling scared and vulnerable, to put himself over everybody else if necessary. Every time curiosity leads him into a new experiment, a new sacrifice in the name of knowledge, he lets go a little bit of himself and his morality. And then, as it happened with Archibald, and as it happened with Barnabas in another world, he feels surprised of how easy it was. Of how he doesn't feel regret or grief, how at most he finds himself thinking that it was all a pity. So it becomes even easier each time, he finds freedom in it, as he also mentions in MAG 160— and one sacrifice after another, it all becomes incredibly simple. There is no fear of losing himself, only the fear of death and pain remains, and only after that process of two hundreds years can one condemn the world for his own sake.

The progressive descent into evil of Jonah Magnus, slowly exposed through statements and letters, will never stop being one of the more interesting parts of this podcast imo.

[xxplastic-cubexx]

ignoring the fact that the new x men comics exist honestly every comic after fall of x has been fanfiction to me, old comics are peak i’m eating those up!

when it comes to x-men specifically i feel like i havent heard anything super good.... oops....

[lokh]

it turns out even a rudimentary understanding of another language is enough to read something technical in your field

[wackywatchdotcom]

heres my weird fringe theory about tadc anyway:

the amazing digital circus, as a game, doesnt exist and never did, because its a cartoon

idk if this makes any sense but im gonna try to word it. basically the idea is that the show is operating on whats gonna be a double-fakeout. we all know the characters are trapped in a game. and thats true enough for the characters. but they werent ever technically actually outside of it. because they are cartoon characters. and their backstory IS being humans. theyre not npcs (who are characterss in the cartoon that were also created within the fake game itself) and theyre still alive- but its not a game theyre trapped in, its a show

theyre all trapped in a show about being trapped in a video game, basically. they still technically 'were' humans in the sense that they have backstories built into them that they remember

my main 'evidence' for this (if you can call it that) is 2 things: gummigoo, and the shows official description

gummigoo as a character, in my theory, is going to mirror pomni. pomni does not know she is not real. but not npc not-real, which would be two layers of not real. shes just one layer of not-real. and her having gotten to know gummigoo serves as foreshadowing to her finding that out about herself

and then, theres the description of the offical tadc episode playlist:

"The Amazing Digital Circus is a psychological dark comedy about cute cartoon characters who hate their lives and want to leave 🎪😀"

basically, the theory just takes this INCREDIBLY literally. that the characters really are... just cartoon characters. and i guess 'trapped in a cartoon' isnt 100% fitting bc w this theory its less that theyre stuck in a cartoon and more that theyve always been a part of it. its just their life

that said the lore in-universe still exists- the game operates in this or that way, the only difference is that its not really a game doing that- just a cartoon based on games

and if this were the case, i dont think any of them know, not even caine. except jax

caine responds to an audience because he assumes theres a person on the other side of the computer. and maybe there is, if the cartoon included one. but jax, somehow, gained the knowledge that this was all a cartoon, and has decided to embrace it. he knows theres viewers, and doesnt care about hiding that

pomni just happens to be the 'newest character.' but in this theory im not actually sure if the show truly existed before she joined. maybe for like 51.5 seconds. or for trailers. but thats it. shes just the newest in their backstories and nothing more

[lovmura]

alright im back to queuing a bunch of art again woooooo 🩷🩷🩷

[muirneach]

how do you guys on sportsblr surivive in the offseasons without a second sport to watch. the finals end and half the blogs on here go dormant until the next season. i would go insane without my second sport

[nonuggetshere]

So they didn't become void, they were "born" that way

In FaaF there are different species and kinds of higher beings (still a MASSIVE work in progress tbh, trying to figure out how these cunts work, but for now I'm thinking they're extremely rare species with far greater abilities and lifespans than a normal bug's that have a chance to ascend to true godhood (but even if they don't ascend that doesn't stop mortals from worshipping them as they're already very god-like from a normal bug's perspective)), "pale beings" being one of these kinds/mutations.

Well, there was also a different kind once, "void beings", but they all went extinct a very long time ago by the beginning of the story. Shade Lord was one, and last, of them and it lost its life in a fight with Radiance - the same fight that drove her to make her permanent residence in the dream realm out of her new-found fear of death (which backfired spectacularly ngl). Its body was buried in the Abyss, where it broke apart and decayed, or decayed as much as a non-living thing can, before it was unearthed many ages later by the pale wyrm.

Not much is known about them since they've been gone for so long, and the vessels are the only void beings remaining, but since they're not "pure" void beings it'd be foolish of anyone to assume that the ancient extinct species behaved the same way as these ones do. But they were generally greatly feared thanks to the void's freaky, dangerous properties, which partly lead to their extinction as some of the other higher beings purposefully attacked and killed them whenever they stumbled across one out of fear. Now the only thing remaining of them are the rare void sources, where their former bodies still refuse to fully die.

Shade Lord does get accidentally resurrected in the story bc of all the tomfoolery happening with its body before almost immediately getting killed again by Ghost who inherits its title and reign. Don't ask me how that works, haven't figured that out yet. Magic god shit or something idk LMAO

[jgnico]

the 'lost fight = bum" thing with powerscalers is SOOOO ANNOYING. Rn with Kashimo, and I saw similar w gojo when 236 dropped where dudebros saying shit like "he got low diff'd trash character" in the comments of stuff not even about powerscaling. Powerscalers act like it's illegal to enjoy a character after they lose a fight. The way they switch up on characters over exclusively loss/wins is such a painfully shallow and bland way to approach the story (and kind of ironic considering how strength is treated in the narrative...)💀

The thing that annoys me the most is that they refuse to think of anything happening in the story that leads to a character losing. Like even ignoring the elephant in the room of Kashimo because Gege practically gave us nothing when it comes to scaling his released form (I would have liked something, but I can also accept that him losing the way he did speaks more toward Sukuna's ability than it does Kashimo's), you have characters like Jogo that they'll call weak, when in reality he's incredibly powerful but had the misfortune of fighting the two strongest characters in the verse as his only showing. Does that mean he couldn't have mopped the floor with most of the characters in the series at the time? Absolutely not, but you'd never get that from the vacuum that most powerscalers seem to operate in.

As someone who enjoys deep diving into fights and the details of the power system, I find it incredibly boring and annoying to not consider any external factors when talking about a fight. There's so many seemingly little things that can lead to a character winning a fight that they shouldn't have from a purely ability-based perspective. Did they prep beforehand? How does their ability interact with their opponents? Are they getting help from another character or a tool? Are they being buffed or nerfed by anything prior to the fight? Are they injured? Were they caught by surprise? Etc, etc.

Take Toji, for example, who powerscalers love to hold up as a powerhouse probably more than he deserves. (Which isn't me saying he's weak, he isn't, but I feel like some people do overestimate him in terms of ability, despite how much the power ceiling has been raised since Shibuya.) Toji planned so much for his mission to kill Riko and his fight against Gojo. He used other sorcerers to wear Gojo out for three days straight before he felt comfortable to step in and still used cursed tools and curses on top of it. Does that mean he couldn't have done anything if Gojo was fresh at the time of their fight? No, but it certainly made it easier. Toji doesn't blow through Gojo as easy as he does without prep, but people will look at their fight without any additional info and use that as a definitive scale of where Toji is compared to everyone else in the verse.

I don't know, I have a lot (and I mean, a LOT) of issues with how a majority of the fandom talks about JJK that isn't just the issue of powerscaling, but at a point it becomes me beating my head against a wall with nothing to show for it but a headache. Like, if anyone wanted to read me rant for a couple thousand words, bring up the fandoms general perception of Sukuna being a bum despite the heaps of info that we have to the contrary. Even the most recent chapter highlighted how ridiculous he is in terms of strength and understanding of cursed energy and sheer ability, but people are still saying he only won because of Mahoraga.

At what point is it not worth it to argue with that? Cause there's always gonna be someone that's wrong and loud about it, but when that becomes the majority of fans about multiple aspects of the series, it starts to kill the enjoyment of the series for me. I don't like being in a state of seeing bullshit takes every time I try to engage with the fandom. It's tiring.

[thepandalion]

when you accidentally refer to yourself with a new pronoun but it's too late at night to reflect on it

[supahstarrr]

today has been the first day in like days i havent gone to sleep in the afternoon then continuously force myself to sleep throughout the night

[rbtlvr]

hey. you are trying to kill me, personally?

tonight i am feeling unwell about [spins a wheel] [throws a dart] the fact that loop went and talked to the party in act 5. like realistically, at that point they had no reason to think siffrin wouldnt loop back when they died or reached the end. they could have just sat there and waited. i mean sif wouldve been fucked if they had because of mdp but loop didnt know about that at the time obviously

so like. with the knowledge they had at that point, it would be entirely reasonable for them to just wait and try to get through to sif again next loop. and yet. and yet and yet and yet. they went and talked to siffrins party. guided them through the house. to save siffrin. after the last thing siffrin said to them was curse you, loop

even knowing the party didnt recognize them. having to stay on the line with the people they loved more than anything, enough to trap themself in a time loop for years, people who didn't remember them, didn't remember any of the times theyd shared, any of the things that happened, people who didnt know them anymore

as painful as it must have been. they still did it. for siffrin. to save siffrin. even though they mustve thought it wouldnt change anything, wouldnt break the loops, wouldnt fix siffrins mental state. they still tried. to give him even just one more loop

and then at the end of it all they didnt even think that was worth thanking them for. even the smallest amount of gratitude they couldnt believe theyd be showed. for putting themself through that. for siffrin. i feel ill :thumbsup:

[cinnabeat]

augh english version of tcf novel is going to release soon...............i know theyre gonna call him alver.......must prepare myself for the psychic damage

[jinxed-fates]

honestly whenever i do remember my past i feel so disconnected from myself that its gard to believe those are my memories