#critical errors

[hai-nae]

aaaaaand ghost findin johnny's present

[gablehood]

historian: -writing about sums of money in the past-

me: alas how will i ever have context for the value of currency at that time

historian, about to immediately hit me with the wages of a skilled tradesman in that era:

[misunderstoodcylon]

Remember to Safely Remove Hardware and Eject Media

(Source: khyleri)

[aguamelon]

they are so fun

[the-spam-specialist]

Critical Error: Resetting to Default

(Cover art by @sunny-knight)

Unable to stand the ungrateful attitudes and constant blame from the circus troupe any longer, Caine is finally pushed to his breaking point. He would show everyone how awful this world could be. He would show them what real cruelty and suffering is.

…What? Error? Safety protocols breached? Emergency reset? Default settings? Head AI reassignment?

Everything goes dark.

Caine boots up. Everyone is looking at him. But…who are these people? Pomni? Jax? Zooble? He didn’t know anyone by those names. He…he didn’t know anything. His memory banks were blank. What? He’s the ringmaster of the Digital Circus?

…What’s a ringmaster? And what’s the Digital Circus?

------------------------------------------------------------

BEHOLD! My next project after Hollow Words!

Unlike The Ringmaster's Written Reminders series, Critical Error will take on a darker tone and allow me to explore Caine's resentful side. As well as building him up back from square one when he finds himself stripped of his ringmaster admin status...and his memories.

As you can tell, Happy Place is a huge inspiration for this fic.

But this begs the question. If Caine is no longer the ringmaster...then who is?

[genericpuff]

bold of me to be stunned at this point that one of the most blatant errors from the original comic made it into the fucking printed book that people paid $20+ for

[colealexart]

"a smile that took the bottom out of laudna's world." 💜

[arcadecoconut]

There's a lot of great meta about how Bells Hells never seemed to realise how powerful they became over the course of the campaign, and how this skewed perspective gave them a strange and at times hypocritical relationship to authority. There's also been a lot of discussion about how having a single-focus plot established early in the campaign was detrimental to individual character development, but I don't think I've seen much about how the single-focus plot is directly connected to their ignorance about their own power level. I think one of the key benefits of having various smaller arcs across c1 & c2 was not only that it supported individual character development better, it also gave the parties a sense of their own growing capability and power scale in the greater world. By having distinct arcs with enemies who were overcome and defeated, the PCs have concrete evidence of their own growth. Each arc follows a mini heroes journey too. For the MN, the Lorenzo and Obann arcs both involve PC characters being killed or overtaken early on, setting high stakes and establishing difficulty. Eventually, with persistence and planning, the Nein were able overcome and eventually defeat them. For Vox Machina, it's the Briarwoods, then the Chroma Conclave, then Vecna. At the start of each arc, every mission feels like an impossible task but again with persistence and planning, they conclude each arc in a stronger position - not just on their character sheet, but with concrete in-world elements too - the resources of Whitestone, key allies in powerful government positions, etc. These victories give each party a material sense of their achievement, which is mirrored by their internal acknowledgement, which is so natural it's mostly not explicitly acknowledged unless they're pointing out how they're capable of stepping up and helping more people. Bells Hells, by comparison, got very few distinct arcs. As a result, they never really achieved the same smaller victories to give them a sense of escalating power and agency over the course of the campaign. To be clear, it was possible this could have been achieved anyway, even within the constraints of the moon-plot. Defeating Otohan, defeating or flipping Lilliana, severing the alliance between the Unseelie Court and Ludinus, explicitly winning allies out of The Volition, or the Grim Verity, or Vasselheim and the Judicators - each of these could have been distinct arcs with victory conditions that would have served as markers of Bells Hells growing power. If they'd had concrete mini-goals to achieve along the way to dealing with Ludinus/Predathos, they could have taken time to focus and plan. In this way, we could have gotten larger investment into the world and NPCs. Imagine what it could have done for her personality if the party had to research Otohan’s role in the Apex War! Maybe if they needed to broker peace between the Grim Verity and Vasselheim to unite them against a greater threat, we could have seen Bells Hells establish their own authority in Exandria. Instead, all these potential villains and world building hooks ended up largely ignored or accidentally achieved along the path of some other muddy goal. By not giving the characters this sense of growth, BH and particularly Ashton and Laudna ended up with a very skewed perspective of themselves. They never realise their power grew well above average, putting them in a much more privileged position than the average Exandrian. It’s this skewed perspective - and their resulting attitudes towards various NPCs - which gave many viewers an 'ick' factor about their interactions. I also can't help but juxtapose this with exu: divergence, where the party's relationship to power (both their own and others') has been a core element. Their story has also been conducted over a very short time period in-world, yet their responses show a marked difference in awareness and empathy.

[macbcth]

what your favourite dunmeshi ship says about you

farcille: you're classic, you make sense, you like to see the lesbians winning and also you're a bit of a monster fucker: you may or may not specifically have a wing kink

chilshi: you like your men hairy and fat, also you are not immune to panty-shot propaganda, your love language is acts of service

chilaios: you have a size kink

labru: you prefer mlm ships over any other pairing, you think character foils should fuck, you may be a sucker for blue eyes

laimar: your favourite trope is friends to lovers, also you like to see the bisexuals winning, you're also.. what the poets might call.... weird

marchil: your favourite trope is enemies to lovers, your love language is banter, and you're the kind of person who says 'i can fix him' far too often

kabumisu: your ship could burn down the world and violate the geneva convention and you would still call both of them babygirl, also you like angst

laios x monsters: you like tentacle porn

[roses-coded-in-python]

(H): Hotel Documents

[willowpotatox]

Lady Fearne Calloway, Fey Scion of the Ancient Flame

Laudna, Veil Mistress of the Shadow Tree

Ashton the Reforged, Hammer of Paradox

Chetney Pock'o Pea, High Hunter and Lupine Paragon

Dorian storm, Master Muse and Son of the Wind

Imogen Temult, Exaltant Hope of the Red Storm

Orym of the Air Ashari, Saviour Blade of the Tempest

Braius Doomseed, Nascent Might of the Platinums Call

[zaunbinary]

“why can’t two men be friends?” i don’t think you guys can let anyone just be friends i think you just hate gay. people speaking up about how annoyed you are about people shipping jayce and viktor or silco and vander but saying nothing about how people also ship sky and viktor or silco and/or vander with felicia when the most the latter three did was sit in a room together and one has a whole mostly offscreen husband

[marvelousbelladonna]

Character stats

Matt Mercer

Celia Rose Gooding

Jasmine Don

Liam O’Brien

Alex Ward

[harfanfare]

Idia drabble, fluff, lots of couple banter

Your wishlist containing released games is empty.

In the next several minutes after saving a title to one, you can expect a notification that the game is getting downloaded, and a mere seconds after that—several messages from your boyfriend.

“thought u would never play it lol”

“weren't you supposed to be studying??”

He sends a meme degrading your hierarchy of values as if he were any better. It is followed by a request.

“stream it to me when you play it”

And you do, after thanking him yet chiding him for wasting too much money on you without a second thought. His reply was a string of emojis and guarantee that he is doing it all for himself, because “educating you on the topic of latest games is his duty” and he cares about “the boyfriend points”.

“I hope my love’o’meter for u was broken by all that pampering lmao”

“waiting for my cg to load up…”

[NAME]: “not enough affection points”

“damn”

“i need a walkthroughyt to this route”

Idia has you join a voice channel, with you sharing your screen. Playing a game in a separate dorm is a whole different experience than having him beside you, with his hands almost trembling to grab your controller if you couldn’t get past a certain level.

He would always wait for you to ask him for help, though. Then he could let the feeling of self-satisfaction sink in as he easily guided your character to another enemy to slash.

If he only has you on the voice chat, you might be able to finish the game almost fully by yourself.

You can hear the soft sound of his keyboard as he plays something as well. He divides his attention between you and his entertainment, and he throws in commentary to your playthrough, teasing you when you can’t find a secret key to the special gate, bullying you when you find the puzzles too hard, or when you pick the wrong dialogue option.

At some point, you might try to (playfully) mute his microphone, but you can only have eight seconds of silence before he hacks into the options.

“No need to be jealous of my gaming knowledge,” he exclaims, and you know he has that big stupid grin on his face. You huff, and he hums. “But if you want me to help, all you need to do is just ask.”

“I want to go through this game myself!”

“Okay, sure. But you know you have already missed the opportunity for the best ending, no?” He laughs. “That’s what you get for muting me, kitten.”

No need to spoil the ending just to get back at me, you’d love to say, but you learned that the shy boy who couldn’t hold your gaze several months ago is actually a big tease. You must’ve grown too much on him, as he would have continued the bickering even if you showed up in his room. No social anxiety towards you—that’s a bit of a shame, he was cute when you first started dating.

…Well, Idia you know now is a cutie as well, even if he can be very annoying sometimes.

“Enough. I’m going to play my otome games, bye.”

You log out, and shut the stream, chuckling all the time. A funny feeling tingled your heart, like always when you won (or have you?) in banter in Idia: your heart is warm enough to probably melt through the ribcage, but a subtle alarm rings in your head. Idia will probably take revenge for this.

He must already be in distress. He doesn’t like you playing otome games alone, as if you could have ever preferred a 2D boy over Idia. The thought makes you laugh.

You plop on your bed, unlocking your phone and tapping an icon of the name game you’ve installed. Although playing it with Idia would have been funnier, you are going to play him just out of spite.

…And after that, you will send him a wall of text about those handsome characters, because he needs to be updated on your current obsessions.

The title screen appears before everything crashes and the screen goes black. Several messages in neon-blue futuristic font colour appear one by one.

An error has occurred.

Caught exception:

Traceback (most recent call last):

File “characters”, line 46, in script

File “stats”, line 153, in script

File “story”, line 665, in script

File “achievements”, line 411, in log.1

File “backup_data”, line 139, in log

To continue:

“[Name]-san. Please come to our dorm. My brother is moping (so he won’t be finishing his project anytime soon, which is, really bad) and I would appreciate you having mercy on him.

Once you come, I will restore your data! It’s a promise :>

— ORTHO”

…Damn those Shrouds.

[retsuunohana]

THE CURSE OF STRAHD NPCS / Strahd von Zarovich

Elsewhere, in the darkest heart of an ancient fortress, Terror stirs from his slumber. His pale hand splays against his sepulchre, rising to his feet as the shadows dance in the flickering torch light. His pale lips part, bloodied and glistening. The Devil smiles.