#that's such fucking bad user interface design

[starstruckpurpledragon]

So there I was checking through my music on Amazon because the app wasn't downloading one of the Up Here songs for some reason so I was just gonna download it through the browser. Which was a chore in a half to get it to download because the Amazon Music browser experience is shit.

And then there's an ad for Amazon Music Unlimited that loads after I'd already clicked something on the page. Now I went to click the close button but I'm not sure I actually did before the damn thing is redirecting away (possibly having captured my click on the page for something other than what I was actually clicking) to what I thought was some kind of sign up page and not a congrats you have a fucking subscription you did not actually agree to page. I went back, downloaded my music, thought everything was fine.

Until I got an email a few minutes later congratulating me on my subscription that I had not actually agreed to in any way shape or fucking form. So guess who is now on hold with Amazon's customer service to get a refund on a subscription that I did not fucking agree to in the first place. It's been a long day, I'm tired, I do not have the patience for this shit but I'm trying really hard to be polite to the customer service rep because it's not her fault the Amazon website is so fucking predatory and customer hostile. And fucking illegal, I'm pretty sure that was not a legal move there on their part by having a pop up ad on a random page of the music part of their website act as confirmation for a subscription instead of taking you to the actual purchase screen and confirming it there.

It looks like I should receive a refund in a few days since, you know, refunds are processed based on business days and shit. My money can be spent without my permission easy, but not refunded as quickly. >_< And then there's like... seven bucks in promotional funds that I've asked if I can also get back because, hey, I was gonna buy books with that and then this predatory, unethical, (probably illegal) subscription thing ate them.

Anyway, moral of the story is... don't use Amazon Music to buy music anymore I guess. Admittedly, I've had the Up Here album for a while so it's not like this was a new purchase that suddenly bit me. Just noticed it was a song short and the app just... would not download it for me. Kept hitting some random error. So, hey, browser should be an easy alternative to access the shit I've already purchased right?

Pretty sure I'm just... not gonna buy music through Amazon at all after this.

(Okay, so she was able to get me the promotional credits back. So big kudos to her.)

[groovy-rat-man]

Okay so i've played the Date Everything demo like.. a lot, and I wanted to share my thoughts on the characters ive met so far! Fair warning this is gonna be a long LONG post so be warned.

Also im including pictures of the characters (courtesy of the fandom wiki) and the images are fucking huge.

- - - -

Skylar Specs

She works well as a helper and tutorial guide. I really wanna know more about her because she is the personification of the MAIN MECHANIC IN THE GAME so I feel like theres gotta be something deeper, especially with the throwaway "I'm sad inside!" line that I dont think a lot of people have talked about. Also I love all the hearts in her design and how much she loves love <33

Dorian

Aro🤝Ace Solidarity, hell yeah!! But in all seriousness he's one of if not my favorite character I think. I can't wait until I can play the full game so we can be besties <3. Also I like how all the doors have slightly different Dorians. Like the front door has a more serious looking Front Dorian and the tiny door in the kitchen has a Small Dorian standing on a stool and Back Dorian is facing away from you and sounds muffled and if you talk to him during the tutorial he actually mentions that. It's all just really cool!

Phoenicia

She's really fun and I like her personality! I'm not sure if I have much more to say about her tho. Also I didn't know you weren't supposed to leave your phone plugged in over night, I've been doing that for like years. Sorry Phoenicia...

Maggie

Oh hey, that's my aunt's name. I like her whole detective shtick and how she calls you gumshoe I think it's cute.

Betty

I love her. She's big and cozy and sensual and amazing, BUT she looks SO MUCH LIKE ME. I asked my own god damn mother if we looked similar (without telling her the context of the game) and she said yes. I physically cannot look at her without thinking "this is just me if I tried to be sexy." It also makes it weird seeing people thirst for her lol.

Amir

Ohhhh Amir... My darling Amir..... God I love him, I need him, I need him so bad for reals. He makes me so giddy any time he's talking..... (Or maybe I'm just susceptible to pretty men with pretty hair complimenting me.)

Freddy Yeti

I will NOT make a Freddy Fivebears reference, I will NOT! But seriously, I love him too. I don't think it's in a romantic way yet, I'm just a sucker for a big, kind, fun person who loves keeping me fed. I think we could be buddies! (perhaps more, we'll see)

Arma

She's the first character I met that had Skylar's content warning. Let me tell you, as fellow hottie with trauma around fire she is just... relatable. I totally get it, Arma, but at least let me get you some new batteries. Please?

Wilhelmina Work

Willi I am going to be 100% honest with you, you are stressing me the hell out. I do hope she gets back on her feet tho.

THE HANKS!!!!! WOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!

I fucking love these guys! I love their energy!! I love their designs!!! I love how each of their little icons in the user interface is a different hanger!!!! I love how they all shit on Hank #3 that one time!!!!! They are my all-time favorite five-man himbo hivemind!!!!!!

Penelope

I really don't have much to say about her other than I like the googily eyes on her skirt and I really wanna know what went on when she went off with that viking treadmil guy.

Ben-Hwa

They're cool i just.. it's just... Like holy shit, right? I do love having a very sex-positive character like this, it's just wild that we were fucking on Betty at 9 in the god damn morning.

Rebel

I'm gonna be real, it took me way to long to get the "rebel ducky" pun. I really do not know how I feel about this design. I love it, I just kinda wish it was more ducky ya know? I also love how much they hate my ducking guts it's really funny. (I also like to imagine me and Amir doting on eachother in the bathroom mirror and they're just sitting on the edge of the tub yelling at us to shut the duck up, I need to draw that...)

Diana

I saw her when skimming the wiki before playing the game and I really liked her Mad Hatter sorta look (also this is probably a coincidence but Dinah was also the name of Alice's cat). I was NOT prepared for when I first talked to her like holy shit. It makes you wonder what's going on with the player character, she is YOUR diary after all.

Duncan "Dunk" Shuttlecock

I like his silly intro and his fun, cocky, sweet attitude. I also like how he's so dedicated to sports being fun for everybody and not pushing yourself. Can't get over that fuckass outfit tho.

Teddy

God I love him. Not like romantically but I love him so so much. He makes me feel safe. That story he told literally make me cry. I was all snuggled up under my weighted blanket with my laptop and earbuds crying like a bitch. It was like 1-2am when I was playing too, so it really was a bedtime story for me! And speaking of bedtime, of COURSE i moved him to the bed. I hope him and Betty get along. I like to think that they're old friends, I bet he's the little spoon.

Captain Jacques Pierrot

I know I've been saying this a lot but I love this guy. He's tiny and angy and talks funny and has pretty hair. Idk how big he's supposed to be but I've been imagining him being about the size of a medium rat. Also I didn't realize that his name was a play on Jack Sparrow until he said it out loud and it pissed me off when I realized lol. I wanna hold him in the palm of my hand and kiss his little face over and over again while he's all grumpy~~ (should I be saying that on the main blog?)

Dishy

☹ /̵͇̿̿/’̿’̿ ̿ ̿̿ ̿̿ ̿̿

The Sassy Chap

Holy shit you can fuck the credits. But seriously, I loved the quiz thingy with all the developers even tho it took me like an hour. Sassy loved it too so that was fun!

Dasha

Hhhhholy shit,, big strong kind lady with pretty Slavic accent lift me up high and teach me how flirt...... w o a g..

Daisuke Dishware

I'm gonna be real, it was late at night (both irl and in game) and I thought "screw it, I'm fucking the knives" and I fully expected to get a Big Scary Knifeplay Guy but what I got instead.... He's wonderful. Serious, dedicated, mysterious? so so so beautiful, catches me when I fall. God I adore him, I need more. Daisuke, I am SO SORRY I chipped you on accident even though I'm not entirely sure what that means. Ough,, I also love his hair, it's gorgeous I swear the two most attractive features a man can have is pretty eyes and long beautiful hair.... Also I'm only learning this now but apparently his voice actor is also named Daisuke which is really funny.

- - - -

okay that's it you can go now, luv u

[prokopetz]

"Turn-based roguelikes going graphical is bad because old school ASCII user interfaces are so much more transparent and accessible" yeah, I love guessing which of three or four completely different things a given ASCII character represents this time. Having the screen transform unrecognisably between one turn and the next and trying to figure out what the fuck just happened by combing through a log file which somehow manages to be both cryptically terse and exhaustingly verbose at the exact same time is fun and enriching. Being forced to choose between navigating a menu system that puts hyper-specific commands you will literally never use at the top level while nesting commands you'll be using constantly four layers deep, and resorting to non-rebindable hotkeys whose semantic mappings were evidently designed by someone whose native language is Klingon? Genuinely the highlight of my day.

[arthenaa]

ikaw at ikaw (only you) — mizu x f!reader

synopsis: 4 times your team lead chose you and 1 time you chose her.

content: modern!au, office romance, you and mizu are creatives, specifically in the character and concept design department in a very very famous gaming company (take a guess), she is your creative director and lead designer and you are the concept artist, 4+1 format, FLUFF, work relations, dynamic, and position might not be accurate, forgive me, this is basically just me projecting yet again.

a/n: this is requested by @andieperrie18 ! the answer shit isn't letting me edit my answer so ill be @-ing you here. TYSM FOR ENJOYING MY WORKS !! means a lot ... u also chose pasilyo 🥹🥹🥹🥹 sunkissed lola is the best

1.

Being part of the creatives team was a nightmare.

To tell you the truth, the position for a Concept Artist with a specialty in 2D design wasn't actually all that bad. The monthly benefits and wage were something you're quite lucky to receive considering the constant side eye other departments have with the admin's treatment of the artist employees. This was also your dream job—having had to play their games, specifically, VALORANT, left you in awe and gearing to apply once you were ready for an Internship. After your OJT course, you were accepted for a position in Character and Concept Design and are considered one of the team's most beloved artists (Your followers on Twitter reckon so).

In short, the work environment was great. A solid 15/10 experience—I mean how can you beat a company that caters not only to you as an artist but also as a player? Nothing can beat that feeling of satisfaction once you see your work displayed on various monitors all around the world.

It was more of ... the relationships and interactions with that work space environment that left you grasping at a chance to breathe.

People think you're overreacting but you think it's completely reasonable.

"Yes, you are overreacting."

Your face falls at Taigen's words—watching as he plays a round of unrated in the company's leisure space decked with state of the art PC builds that could definitely beat your poor touchscreen fridge with just a move of its mouse. You could hear the familiar voicelines of Jett from VALORANT as he uses the character's abilities to swiftly enter the site and take a hold of the defenders' positions.

Taigen is part of the Gaming Development Department in the VALORANT Team. He often does routine user gameplay checks and one of its perks is that you literally just have to play the game and get paid for it. You think its unfair but then again, its Taigen. He's always unfair.

"I think you're just saying that to be mean," You frowned, eyes trained on his face—the lights reflecting back on his stupid, stupid, clear-skinned face. Taigen rolls his eyes but not an ounce of his focus leaves the game.

"Being honest equals to being mean, got it." Taigen's voice comes out in a sarcastic tone. You kick a speck of dust on the cement floor, twirling in the gaming chair you're seated on.

"I just think its a reasonable thing to complain about!" You throw your hands in the air in an attempt to get him to look at your side of things. "You're completely unfazed because your team lead has the patience of a mother with 7 kids."

You hear the familiar cue of an ACE kill as Taigen hits a headshot on the last player. The game's interface shifts to the winner screen and finally, he turns to you, pulling his headphones off and giving his best deadpan stare.

"You're freaking out over Mizu sighing over your concept design proposal for Neon and overanalyzed even the way she drank her coffee because you're obsessed with her like that." Taigen arches his eyebrow to make the situation all the more ridiculous. Your mouth closes and opens like a fish out of water. "Am I right? Wait no, don't answer that. I know I am."

"What the fuck?" Your voice comes out in a desperate attempt of self-defence but it ultimately just sounds defeated. Taigen chuckles as he turns back to his monitor to take a look at the game stats.

"Look," Taigen tries to be empathetic but you're pretty sure this is just to get you off his back. The queue for competitive is already up and running. "As your friend, I say this with the love that I have for you and your works but please, Mizu is just one woman. If my mind process went like yours, I would've assumed Akemi hated my very existence and this is coming from someone who IS dating Akemi."

You purse your lips in thought as he raises his eyebrows in exaggeration. You're not exactly sure why you approached Taigen with this problem but he was the only familiar face that you saw after walking out of the meeting room in a hurry.

But then the question in this situation is who exactly is Mizu?

Well, there were a lot of things you could associate with the familiar blue-eyed director. Mizu is your boss—the creative director for Concept and Character design for the VALORANT team. She oversees character ideas, map visuals, detailing, and the final approval for character and asset ideation before it's sent for building in the 3D and VFX departments. She is your employer but you can also consider her your friend, albeit a highly respected one (she did the character design for Jett and Yoru).

It's not that you were obsessed—Taigen is wrong, he's always wrong—it was definitely because you respected her very much. Being a Riot Design Lead is basically fucking God. You create and give life to ideas. She's part of the original team that worked on the pre-release of VALORANT during its early stages and got to see the whole thing unfold. Something you wished to see back then but glad that you were able to become part of the journey despite being a few patches late.

You respected her enough to always want to be on her good side. I mean, who wouldn't? She's talented and very... youthful-looking and one of Riot's youngest leads, you honestly think that being worried over her approval like this is just a matter of respect and definitely NOT obsession.

"You're doing that thing where you space out and I have to assume that it's probably because of Mizu, yeah?" Taigen's voice intercepts your reprieve and suddenly, a curl of your eyebrows creates a look of annoyance on your face.

"I am not obssesed with Mizu," You reiterate, but this time with your mouth. "I just... respect her."

Taigen leans back on his gaming chair, nodding as if you just told him that he didn't need to double double-click everything.

"That's the most unbelievable shit I've heard today," Taigen finally replies with a scrunch of his nose. Your jaw falls open.

"I do not!"

"Do too."

"Do not."

"Do too!"

"Do fucking not—Stop it."

Taigen purses his lips, and makes a motion of zipping his mouth and shaking his head. You huff in anger. Taigen was never going to believe you.

Just as you were about to chastise him again for being mistaken, a knock on the glass doors notifies you of a new presence. You turn by instinct and your eyes widen in shock and probably, dread—who knows.

"There you are," Mizu's voice filters through your ears like classical music on a good Friday evening. You stammer slightly as she enters the area, eyes trained on you through those tinted orange specs. Mizu momentarily greets Taigen who only raises his hand in greeting before turning towards the screen (only you can see through your peripheral vision that this motherfucker is laughing). "I've been looking for you."

"You did?" Your voice comes off quiet. Mizu furrows her eyebrows.

"Uh, yeah?" She replies with a confused tone. "I had your concept design for Neon approved, it was more direct compared to Matt's. I wanted to tell you in person since you just bolted from the meeting room."

You fall silent at her words. She looks a bit concerned as you try to make sense of the information.

"You seem in shock—Are you okay?" Mizu asks, eyes glancing towards Taigen who looks at her before shrugging.

You feel your heart speed up. You momentarily calm yourself before finally responding. "Y-Yeah, sorry. Just didn't think that you'd approve it."

Mizu tilts her head like a fucking cat and you're quite sure you would drop dead then and there. "Why not? It's your work."

You're not sure what she means by that but a sudden shiver runs through your veins at her praise and suddenly your cheeks are flushing.

"Ah," You're voice fills in the silence, awkward and quiet. "Thank you?"

There's a pause of silence before Mizu chuckles. She heaves a breath before pulling the glass door open.

"I'll see you at my office, Y/N." She smiles. "Great work."

The silence further pushes you into the void as you and Taigen watch her exit and disappear into another hallway through the glass windows. Just as you were a few minutes ago, you lean forward to slouch over your knees, hands on your face as you meltdown from what just happened. You hear Taigen chuckle beside you.

"Give it a few more months and she'll give you a ring on your finger with a bent knee on the ground."

You sob into your hands as Taigen erupts in heaps of laughter.

Oh my fucking God.

2.

The release for Neon was a hit. An all-time new duelist originating from the Philippines, your concept design took off without a hitch. It's safe to say that your hard work paid off as you stood over the central common room—leisure areas decked with your coworkers trying out and celebrating the release. A sense of satisfaction fills you.

"I hear you spearheaded the design concept for Neon," A voice infiltrates your sense like a lure. You can't help but smile at its familiarity. Akemi wraps her arms around your waist, chin on your shoulder as she continues. "Marketing was thrilled with the positive response. Good job."

You turn around, her arms loosely accommodating you. "Akemi," you coo.

The girl grins wide and pulls you into a hug. You return the affection in a grander gesture of squeezing her tight against you.

Akemi's part of the Marketing Department for Riot. While she often creates publication material for VALORANT, she also has cross work with League of Legends for its various strategic releases (ie. KDA).

"I just want to say that I already predicted Neon would be a sure hit, it's your work after all," Akemi pulls away from the hug with a smug smile. She grabs your hands in hers, swinging them slowly. "Marketing it was like a breeze in the park."

You laugh softly at her enthusiasm. "You give me way too much credit."

Akemi rolls her eyes affectionately. "Humility is a disease—live a little."

You shake your head at her quips, opting to smile in response. A member of your team passes by, eyes widening in recognition of you before giving you a thumbs up. Akemi watches the interaction—eyes trained on that person's figure as they walked towards Mizu who was busy talking to other creative team leads. Your eyebrows furrow in confusion at her prolonged silence.

"Who are you—?" Your words trail off as you turn to look at what she's so focused on before turning back at the sight of Mizu. "Nevermind."

Akemi raises her eyebrow with an amused look on her face. "Taigen always has a penchant for exaggerating but I didn't think it was this bad?"

Your face falls at the information. "Taigen told you?"

Akemi gives you a 'duh' look—eyebrows raised and eyes half-lidded. "Taigen's a loose lock if you pry hard enough. He basically can never keep a secret."

You give her a deadpan stare before shifting in your position. Akemi crosses her arms over her chest as she eyes you up and down—filled to the brim with amusement. "I'm fine, stop making a big deal out of it."

"Uh huh," Akemi squints her eyes playfully. You could only glare back in response.

The loud cheering at the front catches your attention as resident workers, interns, and newbies alike begin to tune in at the commotion. Akemi and you move to the sidelines, eyebrows furrowed in confusion as you tried to find out what's happening.

"What's happening?" You ask the person to your front. He turns, eyes beaming with excitement.

"The creative director for C&C got pulled in a 1v1. They're playing against Beckham."

Your breath hitches at the information. Akemi nudges you with her elbow, overhearing the conversation. The two of you move to the side, finally getting a glimpse of the two team leads focused on a custom game of VALORANT. Your eyes zone in on familiar raven locks seated on the right monitor.

A live stream of their game is projected on the monitor up front and suddenly you feel sick from the amount of butterflies fluttering in your stomach.

She's playing Neon. The character you designed.

Oh God. You watched her take kill after kill, headshot after headshot as she sprinted across the map—zapping characters with Neon's electric abilities. You've never seen someone look so fucking hot playing an FPS game before. It's doing things to your brain.

Just as you expected, the winning banner appears on Mizu's screen and the C&C Team erupts in cheers. You become entranced at the sight—a few of your co-workers patting her on the back before she erupts in smiles and laughs. This is not healthy for your heart.

And just as you think the night couldn't get any better, one of the people from the Marketing departments begins stirring up an interview.

"What made you choose Neon on the character pick? You usually go for Sentinels, no?"

Your eyes meet and suddenly you could feel your heart skip a few beats. Mizu chuckles.

"Wanted to do a duelist around for a spin," Mizu replies. "The design and character visuals for Neon was amazing and I ought to pay the artist who did it a homage."

Suddenly all eyes are on you—some of them even "ooh-ing" for being praised by Mizu. You pale at the attention before doing a hesitant bow in gratitude.

Mizu pulls the headphones off her head and smiles. "Congrats, Y/N. Hope you liked the win."

You feel Akemi stir up beside you, chuckling at the interaction.

You're going to die. You can feel it and its all because of your boss.

3.

Okay, maybe admitting that you were a little bit obsessed and crushing over your employer was a bit overdue. You weren't exactly the type to parade your feelings around the office but if people were to zone in on you acting sheepish and awkward around Mizu, there was a 55% chance that you could tell based on that alone.

It wasn't like your admiration for Mizu started on a whim. As said countless and countless times, it had a foundation of respect until Mizu started trying to get to know and interact with you and those same feelings of admiration started to change. What else were you supposed to do? Mizu is a fucking all-in-one holiday basket—you didn't have it in you to resist the charms.

It also didn't help that over the past few days, Mizu seems to have her undivided attention on you. Showering you with praises, asking if you wanna spearhead a certain project, revel in your work—all that shit. It's messing with your productivity and mindset and that's not a good idea.

The Head Director for the VALORANT Team had decided to call a night out for drinking to reward the team for the positive feedback for the latest patch. You were quite thankful for the opportunity as this was a way for you to get a moment of rest from Mizu's constant attention. Not that you were complaining, it's just a little... too much.

You were seated at the far right booth of the restaurant, keeping to yourself as you watched Ringo and Taigen begin to have a debate about team composition. Akemi grumbles beside you, clearly not enjoying whatever the fuck these two were talking about.

"Look," Taigen holds his hands out in front of him, trying to make a point. "All I'm saying is if you keep putting DPS builds on your team comp, how in the hell will you be able to maximize their kit? Supports are there for a reason."

Ringo rolls his eyes. "It's called enjoying the game, Taigen. So what if I want to put dick 1, dick 2, and dick 3, together?"

Taigen's jaw drops. "Do you know how much skill point dependent they are? I'm even surprised you could bust a skill out." The raven haired man pauses before continuing with a face contorted in disgust. "And stop calling them dick 1,2,3? It's Dan Heng, Blade, and Jing Yuan."

"Of course you'd police that as well. You look like that fucking emoji." Ringo raises his prosthetic hand, imitating pushing up a pair of glasses. "Um, actually—"

"You are as annoying as my grandmother, do you know that?" Taigen snarls, eyes pulled into a glare. Your tall huggable co-worker only grins and bats his eyelashes.

You begin to tune out the two as Akemi excuses herself to take a cigarette break—already having enough of their banter. You eye the glass of beer in front of you, watching as the liquid sloshes around with each twirl of your wrist.

You had hoped to end the night with silence but alas, you can never get everything that you wanted. You feel a pair of eyes on you—direct and unashamed. Already having a feeling on who this was, you looked up and met the reflection of the ocean.

'You okay?' She mouths, concern overflowing her features. It's subtle enough for people to not notice her sudden shift of attention but enough for you to understand her. Your cheeks flush as you nod back with the same softness that she had thrown your way.

She nods in understanding, sending a soft smile your way before turning back towards her conversation with the Head. You hang your head down, wishing that the night would end faster so that you can finally have the moment of peace you have been wanting ever since this morning.

It was as if the world decided to cast hell upon you and revoked you of your rights to peace at the arrival of yet another problem.

"L/N!" The Head Director's voice encompassed the whole area—eyes turning towards him then at you in amusement. "You're one of the star employees and yet you haven't touched a single speck on that glass of yours!"

His hearty laughter follows—giggles and cheering from you co-workers following suite. You sweat drop, eyes darting to Taigen and Ringo who both looked away at your glare before turning towards the window where Akemi sends you a gracious thumbs up, a cigarette hanging from her lips. You groan.

"I-I'm fine," You wave your hand, laughing it off. Your eyes connect with Mizu, an unreadable look on her face as she takes a sip of her chosen beverage.

God decides to punish you more as the team lead beside Mizu chimes in. "Oh c'mon! You're a great asset to the company! I suggest drink up!"

One of your team members passes a full pint of beer as the others begin to urge you to drink up. You hadn't felt the intensity of peer pressure ever since your dance recital on 10th grade and that wasn't even as half bad as this. You weren't feeling on drinking yourself to death as well so trying to down a full pint of beer was a ticket for you to the afterlife (ie. you on your bed with puke all over the floors). The previous pint you had was enough.

You tried to decline as humbly as you could, afraid that this might be the instance that you could finally be fired off from Riot. You knew that if they kept pushing a 3rd more of their attempts that you'd probably give in for the sake of never doing this again but while the need hasn't yet arisen, you'll try fighting off the urge to be a people-pleaser.

Just as you finally begin to decline for the nth time, a hand emerges to your right—pushing the pint of beer in your co-worker's hands. The table falls silent. Your breath falters as the familiar scent of lavender and probably a hint of sunlight begins to seep in from behind you.

"Stop pressuring her like that," Mizu's voice sounds so close —your heart hammering off your chest. Your co-worker gives Mizu a sheepish smile.

"C'mon Mizu, let your team live a little!" The Head laughs once more before leaning forward with a smug smirk. "Unless you'll save this one yet again?"

There's a pause of silence as your co-workers darted between them—back and forth. You feel Mizu sigh behind you before her arms encase you against the table, one arm placed on the beside you each. Your breath hitches.

"Sorry," She mutters as she reaches for the pint. You stammer, turning towards her as you reach out to her wrist by instinct. Mizu blinks with her eyes wide open, suddenly surprised by your actions.

"Y-you don't have to!" You murmured, trying to keep your voice low. Mizu's eyes are unreadable. "You don't drink—!"

The woman chuckles before patting your hand and gently pulling herself off your grasp. "It's okay." She says.

You watch with stammering breath as she gulps the pint in one go, others cheering as she did. The Head claps.

"Didn't expect to see Mizu downing a beer today but here we are," The man bellows in laughter. Mizu chuckles, wiping the residue off her lips. You could only stare at her in shock.

Mizu glances down at you with a smile before patting your head then walking off. Your gaze trails on her and somehow the hammering within you becomes all the more intense.

Oh, Lord.

4.

It was supposed to just be a little game—a past time that the others decided to force you along. You really had no qualms joining games like this but if it concerns the people around you, especially in your work place, somehow you feel the risk of being outed for liking someone in you work space.

"If you guys wanted to date someone in the office, who'd you pick?" Ise leans forward, eyes squinted as she gives you and Akemi a smirk. The three of you were currently lounging in the cafeteria during you lunch break. There weren't many people present due an event going on in one of the building's sectors, so having a conversation like this somehow was less anxiety inducing.

"Taigen, unfortunately," Akemi deadpans. Ise rolls her eyes.

"I mean! Besides him," Ise whispers excitedly. "There's a newbie from marketing that looks cute but kinda quiet, maybe he's nice."

"You mean Takayoshi?" Akemi raises an eyebrow as she takes a sip of her tea. You glance back and forth between them.

"Is that his name?" Ise watches Akemi nod in response. "Well, I'll just have to go get his number then."

Akemi shakes her head at Ise's musings and you had hoped that the conversation would end there, but Ise suddenly turns to you with that mischievous look in her eye.

"What?" You whisper out, eyebrows furrowed in innocence. Akemi side glances you, the corners of her lips upturned in a smile. God, she was enjoying this too.

"What about you, Y/N?" Ise props her arm on the table, placing her cheek on her palm. "Got someone you're interested in?"

You avoid eye contact. "No."

Ise leans forward with a gasp. "You do!"

"I don't!" You reiterate with urgency. You turn to Akemi with a frantic stare. "Tell her I don't."

Ise turns to Akemi who smiles. "She doesn't."

"Bullshit." Ise deadpans. "The moment I'd believe Akemi with a smile on her face is the moment I'd die," Akemi flashes her middle finger at her to which Ise returns generously. Finally, the girl turns to you—chair scooted over to your right as she flashes you her doe eyes. "So? Who is it?"

You Akemi chuckle against her cup as you stammer in front of Ise. "I don't really like someone though?"

"Lies," Ise declares. "We might not be that close but you got that twitch in your eye that already tells me something. Who is it?"

"Ise," You plead, eyes darting around the space. Somehow, saying it out loud meant that you're solidifying the fact that you liked Mizu—an occurrence you'd like to keep to yourself as much as possible. You loved Ise, you really do. You worked with her hand in hand in bringing Neon to life (You worked on her design while she worked on the 3D build) and have become tremendously grateful for her critique and contributions to your work. But this, this was something else. You could feel your heart speed up as she started listing some names.

"Is it Beckham? That piece of shit always too full himself." Ise places a hand on her chin in thought. "Or Ringo? Nah, he's way too focused on content map-building."

There's a pause of silence before an 'aha!' look spreads through her face. You prayed that she would get it wrong but this is Ise we're talking about.

"Is it perhaps," Ise pauses, eyes darting all over your face. "Mizu—"

"What about me?"

The three of you tense, eyes darting behind you as you turn to find the familiar stance of your boss. She leans forward, a hand on the back of your chair as she gives the three of you a curious glance. You hadn't heard her at all, and something about Ise's frantic glance towards you says she didn't expect the same thing as well.

"W-we we're just listing people we found attractive," Ise laughs uncomfortably under Mizu's stare. The creative director glances at Akemi who raises an eyebrow at her. Somehow there was a silent conversation going on between the two that left you confused.

"Really?" Mizu asks, the ends of her words trailing off as she glances back at Ise. "Who said I was attractive?"

"It was Y/—"

"NO ONE!" You exclaimed, cutting Ise off with a jump. You flush under Mizu's wide gazed, surprised at your interference. Somehow, the way you said it implied that no one found her attractive at all, and that was way too wrong so you caught yourself before you delved into a pit of despair. "I mean, w-we haven't started and was just listing people off."

Mizu nods slowly in understanding, eyes examining your face for any slip-ups. You looked away from the intensity.

Ise finally saves your ass. "Yeah. What she said."

"What about you, Director?" Akemi chimes in from your left and both you and Ise turn to her with wide gazes. She simply smiles over her cup, face contorted in a mischievous look. You couldn't read Mizu at all. You had expected Akemi to drop it—after all, she wasn't even joining in on Ise's incessant need to know everything about everyone. "Who do you find the most attractive in this office, hm?"

You can feel Mizu shifting behind you before a chuckle pulls out from her lips. You turn towards her in curiosity as she flashes a smile towards you.

"I'd pick Y/N, of course,"

Huh?

Akemi rolls her eyes, somehow already expecting the answer. Your jaw drops at her response as Mizu turns to Ise who already has a knowing look on her face.

"She's just that reliable," Mizu looks back down towards you, those shades of blue peeking from her tinted glasses. She pinches your cheek in a flash before pulling away. "Cute too."

You turn away, afraid that the flush on your cheeks might've given you away.

"Anyways, I just dropped by to see what's happening outside the event," Mizu sighs, pushing her glasses back up the bridge of her nose. "I'll see you girls around."

Your interactions always end up one sided somehow. She gives and then leaves—resulting in you malfunctioning from whatever she's left for you to deal with.

Ise turns to you with a mischievous grin when Mizu finally turns the corner. "You and the Director huh?"

"Shut up, oh my God."

+1

"Why do you always do stuff like that?"

"Like what?"

"Like you're not leaving me any room to process the shit you do?"

Mizu lets out quiet laughs from beside you. 10:47 pm. Normally, work hours in the office end at about 9 but you've learned that staying late is where the good things happen.

"I literally just told you 'good job' the other day and you malfunctioned in front of me," Mizu giggles, leaning forward as she tapped you on the nose with the pen to her digital tablet. "And I heard everything by the way. Quite adorable of you to deny everything."

You flush under her affectionate gaze. "Everyone's so gossipy. You can't blame me."

Mizu turns her chair towards you, arms reach out to take a hold of your own before pulling them close to her side. You lean back at her sudden proximity.

"Well you can't blame me either when you're this adorable," Mizu grins. You furrow your eyebrows, finally leaning close as you cupped her cheeks within your palms.

"You even drank beer," You whisper, tone apologetic. "You don't even like alcohol."

Mizu leans into your touch. "And you don't like being pressured into something you don't want to do. I can sacrifice a little bit of something I don't like just for you."

You melt at her words, eyes darting over her softened features. "Thank you," You whisper, grateful.

"Anything for my girlfriend," Mizu teases. You roll your eyes before pulling her into a soft kiss. She kisses back instantly, hands gripping the arm chair as you take lead of the kiss. After a few pecks and chaste kisses here and there, you finally pull back—reveling in the soft flush across Mizu's cheeks.

"Also," You chime in. Mizu raises an eyebrow. "I was the one who pursued, not you. Correct that when they catch on."

Mizu chuckles at your words. "Right on. Akemi threatened me the other day, saying something like, 'I forbid you from dating Y/N Y/L/N, Mizu Tagawa!' Funniest shit, I've heard. If only she knew."

You pinch her cheeks, giggling at her words. "Of course, she's say that."

There's a pause of silence before Mizu turns to her work, a sketch of VALORANT's newest agent displayed on screen.

"Want to help me with the new guy?" She nudges towards the screen. "Heard he's French."

You turn to her monitor, dozens of details sketched on the edges with a version of her idea of the new agent. You grin, placing a kiss on her cheek.

"You could've just asked me to marry you." You tease. "Also, sure."

You turn towards the table and pulled her tablet towards you. Mizu scoffs as you take over her work.

"And if I actually did?"

"Sure, Mizu, sure."

"I'm serious!"

a/n: hey guys!!! this was so fun to write and honestly i was just inspired to do this request bc ive been drafting an office romance for mizu after the roommate thing. hope yall enjoyed ! if yall arent familiar with valorant, here are the agents mentioned or referenced (neon & chamber (french guy)). also mizu's last name is derived from master eiji's va! cary-hiroyuki tagawa!

[andmaybegayer]

Skyrim VR is interesting because it's like the polar opposite of Half Life: Alyx. Skyrim VR is extremely bad stock, because they did the bare minimum required to make it work and threw it out the door, as a joke. Alyx is incredibly well designed to work well in VR, the levels are all perfectly designed around it, the interface is smooth and fluid and constrained specifically for this. Skyrim is a game where you spend 50% of your time in menus.

As a result, mods have sprung up to fix Skyrim VR but they can't do it by streamlining Skyrim because the fun of Skyrim is being able to do all that shit, so instead it's about trying to make interacting with menus turbo-efficient. Well it's also about correctly handling inverse kinematics and having weapons that deal damage proportional to speed and also the usual texture and bug fixes. But a lot of it is menus! How can you cram as many UI elements into things that you can do with your body.

Press these buttons and summon a huge floating menu of items in front of you. You can stash weapons on your back, on your hips, on your forearms, wherever. There's a few mods that run voice recognition on your mic which allows you to do everything from talking to NPC's to voice-selecting equipment to actually doing the dragon shouts in real life and having them register.

It's incredibly clunky but the tradeoff is that Skyrim was already made 15 years ago so unlike other VR games they don't have to make a profit on this one, they already have a game world the size of Manhattan that you can walk around in, and it feels like it! It's fucking huge! Solitude is like. A small city in the game, right, it's a comically small city, but when you actually have to stand in there and feel the stone walls tower over you and walk through the arches and step inside the buildings it feels enormous.

I think my wireless VR thing is giving me some bad rendering artifacts but it might just be LOD? Not sure. It looks really good in some places are really dated in others, even with mods. Might need to figure that out. I wasn't getting headache but this would probably be rough on other people, although I did turn off all the anti-motion-sickness vignettes. Anti motion sickness design is interesting because it makes a lot of sense but really constrains designers a lot, and I think that a lot of heavy VR users either have or gain a knack for just handling horribly mixed motion input. I never really suffered from motion sickness other than in one poorly programmed game (Fantastic Contraption) and you can just throw me around.

(This has, hmm, interesting interactions with VR pornography, which even more so than other VR video formats targets the lowest common denominator, it really limits the art form when your camera position has to sit in a fixed position and angle. You could do some very interesting things if you didn't have to worry about making half your audience throw up.)

Anyway I spent a couple hours in here with an alternate start just tooling around Solitude doing low level bounties.

Combat is so finicky if you don't have a ton of room, which I don't. You have to suppress your instinct to just jump aside, I whacked some chairs swinging my sword about. Aiming bows is very hard but that might just be practice, these mods make it so that it's more bow-like but it might be worth having a reticle. Magic is obviously the thing to do in VR, stand back and blast enemies with fire and ice, and it has aiming reticles. The mods here adjust the angle so that it comes out of your fingertips instead of your palm so that aiming is more natural. I mention all the tweaks to show just how much this has to be beaten into shape.

Skyrim's slow and unidirectional equipment progression works to your favour here. You simply aren't changing gear that often, so it doesn't matter that menus are kind of clunky. I have a few quick settings to handle basic gear and then weapon wheels on a key combo and that so far has handled it. Being a mage probably involves some horrible weapon wheels but they do theoretically support like 36 items per wheel.

The IK mods allow you to grab NPC's which is funny, not really viable unless you're in 1:1 but you can just pick a guy up and hit him. Comical. A lot of player retune melee combat way way down and I can see why, with a sword you can just wail on someone as fast as you can flick your wrist, it's so easy to score half a dozen hits on something as it runs past you. It would be interesting to make it so you have to swing at the right speed with haptic feedback or something for different weapons, it buzzes you if you're going at the right speed to land an attack.

Skyrim lacks a lot of the intentional sense of space that VR games use, but it trades off on just, scale and stuff. There are a lot of interactable items in any Skyrim location, tables of vegetables, shelves of armour, piles of books, even though they're not made for VR. With the addition of the very popular dimmer lighting mods, caves feel positively abyssal, I was going so slowly through those things.

I could see someone playing this from start to finish like this if they were really committed, with all the tweaks it is a pretty playable game, but it would be a hell of a commitment. I can see why you'd want to have a "sit down and play" mode.

[mappingthemoon]

my library is migrating to a new and terrible ils this summer and i am, ugh, finally coming to terms with the fact that i am really truly going to have to find a new job because i simply cannot deal.

without getting too much into the technical details: i am a cataloger, which is essentially data entry work, and when your job involves "touching computer all day for money," you just don't want to be fucking around with an interface that requires a lot of mouse-clicking and -scrolling. there are a lot of other issues, such as a god-awfully un-accessible layout that is somehow both too much extraneous crap crammed onto the screen and too much white space, a total inability to do the kind of analytics we regularly do in our current system, the loss of a lot of our historical metadata that can't be mapped into the new system, having to redo metadata cleanup that we've already done from our last migration 8 years ago (!!!), and just, like, not being able to do basic catalog maintenance tasks like moving an item from one holding to another or properly shelf-listing non-LC call numbers. people who sit wayyy up at the tippity-top of our institutional hierarchy and know nothing about library work made this decision years ago because they thought it would save us money and the end result is going to be the enshittification of our catalog (bad for users) and our daily workflows (bad for employees).

so now i'm in this dumb and precarious position of trying to figure out what the fuck to do with my ~career~ as an overeducated 40-something woman lol. certainly this is not the worst problem in the world to have rn, but also, from my personal perspective, it is like, basically a giant cosmic turd laid upon whatever it is i've been working to build up for myself over the past ~20 years of "trying to get my life back on track." i've been at the same library for over 10 years and the job i have now is the job i had been slowly (SLOWLY) but steadily advancing towards since day one... and now i'm barely two years into the position, finally feeling a bit comfortable in my role, and this fucking software is going to make my 9-5 life absolute hell. like, i genuinely enjoy the work of cataloging, it's kind of incredible to me that they have designed a way to make it so very terrible. i'm trying not to be a total baby about this but jfc no one wants to go to work everyday and deal with a garbage-ass machine that adds 10 extra steps to your procedures and/or doesn't even do the basic things you need to do for your job, you know?

anyway, idk. i have my eye out for job postings but it all feels so overwhelming. if i want to stay in special collections, or even if i want to stay in libraries at all (precarious itself in the current political climate, har har), i would most likely have to move, and while i never expected to stay in this town as long as i have, i don't have any strong feelings about where else i might want to live, other than i'm pretty sure i don't want to live in a place with actual winter, which limits my selection because most of the special collections cataloger jobs i see are in new england or at least the northern us. (and yet! i always keep a lil window of consideration open to returning to pittsburgh because my parents are getting older and i don't know my nieces & nephews as much as i'd like to, i feel the distance more and more every year and it might be time for me to stop being so prodigal, ugh, so all there's all that thrown into the mix as well.) i remember when library school felt like an impossible goal but i did it and now i almost feel like i painted myself into a corner by specializing in the thing i wanted to do. it is slim pickins out there already, i can't afford to take a pay cut with all the debt i'm carrying, i don't know what else to do at this "stage of life" and i hate that it feels almost like a sinful luxury to even want to have a job that i don't despise & won't destroy my mental & physical health for the next ~30 years of my working life. i know that i am resilient af and i will always do what i have to do, even if that means going back to washing dishes for minimum wage again in order to survive but like, BIG SIGH, goddamn. please give a bitch a break :(

[trashworldblog]

beth how are you liking watcher tv? im thinking of getting the annual with the discount but idk if i want to commit to it and im weighing my options

i like it! It's got good navigation (im a ux minor, so i was curious about what the design and interface would look and work. It's good! they clearly have designer(s) and probably user tested it at some point.) and i know I'll be watching watcher for the next year, so i got the annual subscription. if you can afford it, and you know you'll be using it for the next year, it's definitely worth it, in my opinion. ~4 hours of good fucking content a month for 5 bucks is worth it to me. also, i hate being advertised to. it's such a relief not to have to skip past ads and spons all the time.

plus, i really enjoy posting about episodes as soon as they drop and talking to my pals about it and sharing silly memes so relying just on youtube a month later would be harder to do that.

i think the comments section will be fun, and it's definitely way better than the nutoriously bad youtube comments section. i like that they added it so they can keep getting feedback from us directly on videos. plus, i already recognized some pals on there.

pretty sure you can get a 7 day trial on the app ? or thats what ive heard.

its professional and well done and easy to use. gets an easy pass from this designer!

[aghostwithnoname]

DATV GAMEPLAY SPOILERS

In other words, don't read this if you don't want my hot take.

So for the past week, I've fallen off the deep end to play Dragon Age: The Veilguard to avoid whatever the fuck is going on in the world.

First, for the pros.

The game is visually very stunning, and by the gods, the character customization is fucking amazing. The HAIR. The complexions! The scars and the FACT YOU CAN FINALLY BE A FAT HERO. My god, I spent two hours alone just creating my Rook. I LOVE that we finally have a Thedas that actually reflects the diversity of our world.

For the first time in the Dragon Age series, I can actually play as a nonbinary person and have that be recognized by the story!!!! I love that Neve is disabled, and it's not even the main focus of her character! Thank god for finally giving us a cast of companions that aren't white!

Partly why I wanted to support the game, despite knowing about all of its troubled development, was because we need to show as players that we want and support this kind of content and thus will show a demand for it in our capitalist hellscape. (I don't make the rules - that's just how this stupid industry works.)

Now, despite giving us ALL of that, this now brings me to the cons.

Veilguard just doesn't *feel* like part of the Dragon Age franchise.

Maybe it's just me but like 20-30 hours into it and I just... I'm not feeling it, guys. Like it feels like the devs just fired all the writers and threw the flashy battle mechanics of God of War, *some* of the relationship dynamics of BG3, and the user interface of Mass Effect (which for the record, I don't actually like Mass Effect) into a blender and produced... whatever this is.

The dialogue is so... bland. I skip through half of it and I *never* skipped through dialogue in any of the previous games. Progressing on this plot feels like a chore, because there is literally nothing else to do except pursue the main story line. The world deceptively *looks* expansive, but you're really just being funneled from one major plot point to the next with no room to breathe.

What was fun about BG3 is that you could drop down a fucking hole in some random part of the Underdark and the game REWARDED you for your curiosity or your weirdness (lick the spider, goddammit!). By contrast, even though GoW was basically one plot, it was poignant and meaningful because of the excellent dialogue, acting, and relationships - you cared about Kratos and Atreus and Angrboda and Thrud and Thor because they were excellently explored. Imo, BioWare clearly saw these games winning game of the year over the last decade that they've been working on the next DA game, got jealous, tried to mimic these elements to chase the success of these franchises and failed miserably, while also just not understanding the unique idiosyncrasies of the franchise they themselves created.

As someone who has played origins, awakening, da2, and inquisition, at least i felt there was some tonal consistency - despite the fact we can all argue what the "best" game was. Like, your companions are snarky and funny and weird in ways that are completely irrelevant to saving the continent, and we know the Chantry is fucked but so are the apostates and the Qun and the Dalish, and there are no clear "good guys" vs "bad guys", and not EVERYTHING said is plot-relevant.

Sweet Andraste, I think Bellara's said "The Evanuris - you know the elven gods!" like about 50 times already. I get it that they want new people to come into the world and understand what's going on, but it just feels like the devs are holding my hand like I'm a little kid who cannot be trusted to know what's going on or make their own decisions.

Don't even get me started on how Varric is narrating everything, telling me how to feel about what I am going through. It's like on top of all this disjointed gameplay mechanics and narrative design, BioWare is trying to tell me it's all okay, even though it is not.

Maybe the next 60 hours will change my mind... (I haven't even MET my loves Davrin or Taash yet) By the Maker, I hope it does.

[env0]

OH Wow yeah the Desktop update is awful as well. the chat looks HORRIBLE, its bigger its clunkier. It looks like a SHITTIER version of Facebook Messenger. It isn't integrated classically into the UI like it was before which was EXCELLENT, CLASSIC, and CUTE.

The interface switching to a drop down on the left is also TERRIBLE. This is the first time since 2009 that I DON'T RECOGNIZE MY DASHBOARD.

I know most REGULAR users who see over 25 posts per session (I've maxed out my post and ask limit daily before. I usually exceed the 99+ new) will be making use of 3rd party apps like Xkit(RIP missingE) to make CORRECTIONS to this godawful interface change up. I was zoomed at 120% because I liked how small things were, but not too space consuming. Now the chat bubble takes up 1/4th of my screen.

This is terrible awful no good rotten very bad.

OH GOD THE FUCKING ACTIVITY LOG, which used to cover nothing terribly important NOW JUST COVERS THE DASHBOARD. THIS IS NOT GOOD WEB DESIGN. THIS IS JUST DUMB. STOP DUMBING DOWN TECHNOLOGY.\

AND ISNTEAD OF ALWAYS KEEPING THE POST TYPE OPTIONS VISIBLE AT THE TOP?!?! You just put a shitty dinky little "CREATE" button at the bottom left of the screen?

Jesus christ. I'm gonna hop back on my phone this is terrible. Letter to follow

[understandableparadox]

A comprehensive rewrite of hazbin hotel

GUESS WHO'S NOT TIRED ANYMORE AND LEGALLY ALLOWED TO SPEAK, THAT'S RIGHT!!!! My lawyer has advised me that, while i'm allowed to set the joke up, I'm not legally obligated to finish it.

i'm fueled by unimaginable power and hubris, also i have a lot of free time so I would like to posit my ideas of a possible rewrite of the hazbin hotel series. this of course is not to say i am any more or less talented then vivziepop, nor that i overall hate their work, i just think that it could have been better. also i still really like helluva-boss, bring that shark guy back he was really funny.

for the rewrite, I'm going to give myself the same number of episodes to work with.

(also if you though i was long winded in the last post, Lmao, Lol, Laughing out loud. that wasent even a fucking fraction of the wind inside of me.)

Section one: systems and redemption.

To being a good rewrite of the series we must first understand create What Is Wrong. i think hazbin hotel is prime ground for the idea "if a system is rotten, rip it out."

luckily, we already have a system that is pretty darn rotten, we just need to give this more pulp for the mold to have its special little pedestal.

What Is Hell: it is a receptacle of souls deemed unworthy of heaven.

To me that sounds like you Start Worthy and as you go through your life you make decisions that can be considered Bad and Good and the more of each you make, the more likely you are to go to one place to another.

Problem though, we need a Book. a book that explains why you are in fact a naughty lil munchkin for not dropping a kudos on your buddies funny lil fic on a03! and yes we are steering directly into good place territory, do not worry this car ride is scripted and will only lightly graze your favorite actor.

we are going to work on the concept of "Commonly accepted to be Bad and commonly accepted to be "Good". does that sound boring? of course it does, that's why we are adding something Right in the middle.

Purgatory! the realm between heaven and hell! the area where god kobys those darn unbaptized babies, just three points those little bundles of joy from half court into the realm of eternal Who cares ism.

how does it work? its a somewhat de-saturated landscape that explores the deep existential horror of corporate encroachment on our daily life. if you are a soul that has been proven to be not particularly good but not particularly Good either, you show up in purgatory where an angel gives you a simple set of instructions.

They are to review 100 lives on earth and document each of their deeds as either Good or Bad. this of course comes with a vary handy and user friendly interface. What happens when they review 100 people? well depending on their job performance, they are either allowed into heaven or sent to hell. (hint hint, can you guess how you get a "attaboy" from your heavenly supervisor?)

anyways this system is designed to suck. a random asshole shouldn't be allowed to say "yeah you were bad at that time". its the point, the system is bad, its a bad system!

the only thing that defends it is the seemingly random nature of it and its ambiguity, no one remembers being in purgatory and only certain angels know that they are sending their divine judgement to a third party source.

its also the stupidest and funniest way i could possible think of for how to judge someone. yeah kyle from accounting is going to look over the vast life of someone and click the big colorful yes or no while drinking his slightly less neon green baja blast and chicken quesadilla (they were out of avocado ranch, it was a travesty).

so how do you get into heaven from hell? Simple, either you don't, or you do something so unbelievably selfless or noble, god accidentally notices and does a patch check. the last one is so fucking unlikely that more likely then not, it will not happen. (Wink Wink WinkWinkWinkWinkWinkWink, fuck i have something in my eye...)

Section two: How to structure the episodes

EPISODIC, WE ARE GOING EPISODIC, I DON'T CARE IF YOUR DAD LETS YOU HAVE LINEAR STORY TELLING! IF YOU WANTED LINEAR STORY TELLING YOU SHOULD HAVE GONE TO YOUR DADS HOUSE!

why episodic? because We Are Not Ready For Plot. we are like people in a dessert, we just got rescued. of course our first idea is to stuff our face full of a bowl of babushkas freshest hottest strogonoff that one can feasibly contain, but non non non my friend, we have to take it slow. drip feed, we need to take it slow or else we get this thing called re-feeding syndrome, that shit is real and it can kill you.

anyways, we are not aware of the world, we are not aware of the characters, we don't fucking know anyone yet. you cant walk up to a potluck in a different company and expect to bite into the macaroni and have it be your fave, shits going to be weird, shits going to have chitlins or raisins or some other insane bullshit.

so we take it slow. all of season one is the same follow through thread, its the first half of a year starting at the end of the extermination and fuck around for about 6 months, why? because the extermination is going to be next seasons finale.

another change is I'm going to blatantly steal unnus annus's idea and at the start of every episode, right under the name of the episode we get to see how much time has passed between episodes.

a little time may pass between episodes, a lot of time may pass between episodes, we don't need to see every single day, some of them are just going to be boring so we skip em!

Section 3: Characters and how they will be different:

Main cast:

Charlie morning-star:

still naive but crank it up, has only learned that hell is supposed to be the land of punishment.

Vary adamant that her grandfather, God, would not be so cruel as to eternally damn millions, thus believes she can make a few tweaks to the system and make it work.

Crank Up the Daddy Issues. Had a major falling out with her dad over her idolizing her grandfather, said some things she isn't exactly happy she said.

I'm going to be liberal with charlies age, she is the child of Lilith and Lucifer, she was born after the abrahamic times but she is still pretty damn old despite people still treating her like she's early 20 something.

instead of going directly to the hotel, she crashed in heaven (this will be shown in a flash back later one, we do not see heaven in season one) for a 100 years after her fight with her dad in the home of Micheal her uncle. there she became Uber Besties with Emily the seraphim who has the same problem as her with the fact that she whole-heartedly believes in the system, both of them came up with the idea of creating a way for sinners to ascend to heaven through becoming better people as a addendum to the current system. sharing the belief that god is kind and would not create a system that is infinitely cruel.

after leaving heaven, she returns to hell and creates the hotel through her own magic, which explains why its slightly ramshackle in appearance.

she has lived alone in the hotel for exactly three hundred years because she forgot that she was supposed to actually advertise that the hotel is open. afterwards, it has had vary middling numbers, never more then five at a time.

charlie and vaggie have been a thing for maybe 200 years. She crash landed in one of the rooms with her wings already ripped, charlie assumed she was a guest, thus never really learned she was angel.

Stout pacifist, will never raise a hand if she can help it, which she doesn't need to. she is a freak of nature and no sinner can actually hurt her without something like an angelic weapon perhaps a small localized tactical nuke. this is for some more slap stick stuff, i think it would be funny if someone just chopped her head off and she just chased after it while scoldeing them about the golden rule.

Up the condescension by a tiny bit, has major "Little bird" syndrome with sinners and feels as though any problem they face can be solved with a little tender love and care. vaggie managed to get out of this phase after year 50 in the relationship.

Hack, cough, ack, ah what the fuck, what was that werid cough i had every time i said a specific name? damn, glad its gone now.

Barbiel

the name change is necessary, im not calling a her fucking vaggie if its just a vag joke.

its the name of a semi obscure fallen angel, i think we are good.

Former guardian angel, her job was to try to guide people that the archangels have chosen to lead fuller life's of virtue, she did so diligently and applied to become a angel of reckoning, someone who comes to the call of an exorcism to rip apart demons possessing creatures, code named: Exterminators.

here she falls under the command of Agent Lute, who told her that due to her prowess, she would be given a chance to partake in a specialty mission. she was told nothing about it until she was already in the thick of it. to her, it felt...Wrong. these demons didn't fight back, they didn't scream in weird garbled latin. she saw a few fighting but almost every time her spear skewered through the backs of sinners. she stopped when she was about to skewer a soul she personally guarded, starring up at her in abject fear. lute confronts her, gives her the ass beating of a life time and hurtles her through hell where she lands in one of the cozy beds of the hotel.

Up the military girl function of her, she lives by regimented rules, and thinks that a sinner needs the same regiment and discipline, somewhat unironically believes in the bootstrap parable.

Still struggling to associate humans with sinners, still has some disdain for them. Baby steps.

barbail works as chief of hotel security with her angel steel spear she """found""".

unironically has the build of that "I do want to be strong like man who looks pretty, i want to be strong like bitch that fights bears in the forest". thick arms, torso and legs. she can toss someone to another section of pentagram city with charlie perched on her other bicep.

Why did barbial fall in love with charlie? she saw in her a genuine unmistakable kindness and desire to help people and wanted to chase after that, at some point she couldn't distinguish it from charlie and started chasing after her.

bulldog for charlie, keeps forgetting that charlie is damn near indestructible.

stronger then most sinners, not the strongest in hell by a long-shot, willing to put in the work to close that gap.

Quick interjection:

How do sinners work?

sinners work on a few simple rules:

sinners are marked with the sin that ruled their life, this is either decided by their purgatory agent or in vary extreme cases, it can be attributed to them by the ring rulers who note humans who exemplify them more.

sinners appearances are dictated by the sin, their death and the grievances of their life. the axis being that some sins have certain animals that create the base, the death creates a modification or override, and the severity of their evil dictates how monstrous they are. a demon that looks more human is usually a dangerous sign as it means they are working Extra Hard to hide the fact that they were Extra Naughty.

every sinner can create a contract with someone, given they are manifests of their soul, the contract is binding. Contracts must be mutually beneficial in some way, you can take as much as you want but their must be some sort of give. you cannot be forced into signing a contract unless through a gamble. having multiple contracts does not make you stronger inherently. the only way a contract can make you stronger is if someone breaks it, in which case you can decide a appropriate punishment for the offending party. a vary popular punishment is absorbing the soul. this allows you to gain more power. though this can be risky as you stack up numbers as you are pushing yourself further from a human soul and more into a demon. this can get you Ejected from pentagram city and into the lower rings, where more likely then not stronger demons will rip ya to shreds as your network is no longer there. lastly, every contract must include some sort of escape clause, this can be absurdly convoluted or overwhelmingly simple. A hellborn can make a deal with any sinner, but a sinner cannot make a deal with a demon. they can trap a demon until they decide to do so, but you cannot force a hellborn into a deal. this translate into the demon setting all the terms of a contract, the benefits, the punishment and the escape clause. getting a demon to break contract is like hitting the god damn lotto because wooo buddy you are about to absorb a Shit Ton of power.

in short: must be mutually beneficial, has a wide range of punishments if you fuck it up, must have a escape clause.

Angel dust

how did they die?: angel was the son of a mob don who in secret worked at a gay bar as a drag performer in order to get closer to the bar tender who he had a crush on. a lower rank member caught them, the father refused to believe it so he sent his son over to "prove he ain't some glittery prancing f-g.". in the car ride over, he saw the bartender walking into the bar to start their shift, and instead of risk letting a bullet hit him, he sprayed and prayed in the car, causing it to veer into traffic, killing everyone inside.

most of the story i have for him lines up with the story. he has family in hell but refuses to join them, meaning he had no network while in hell, meaning he turned to being an entertainer where valentino took note of his amateur work and signed him on.

his contract benefits state that any company owned by vox corps has a account for him that will pay for his expenses. Outside of work hours, any labor stipulations (the set of clauses that allow valentino to do his abusive bullshit) are non applicable. if angel dust is killed, valentinos soul will become property of asmodeous.

the escape clause: the death out noted above. angel dusts contract can be temporarily bought out, while technically not an out, it still means he is not directly owned by valentino in that time frame. the final one is that if valentino can no provide proper monetary financial compensation to angel dust. this clause is to protect valentino in case of bankruptcy to save him from having to break contract if his cash runs out.

at the moment, he is at the hotel because charlie is currently buying out his contract again and again to give him a reason to be at the hotel and away from valentino. angel dust finds this deeply annoying as charlie uses this as a to essentially Hoist her teaching on to angel dust.

despite finding it annoying, he is relatively happy that he has a running excuse to stay away from valentino. if he sees valentino he will pretend to be just as angry about not being able to come into work. this sometimes backfires as valentino will offer him time at the studio since he has free time. the moment he steps in, even if charlie has his contract bought out, he is now back under valentinos control until the work day is done.

angel dust has become a bit of a recluse, he rarely leaves the hotel and tries to stay in his room. unfortunately as the first and only guest of the hotel, he feels obligated to keep charlie happy by participating.

obvious crush on husk, reminds him a bit of the bartender he used to know. sometimes gets angry that they can't click like they used to, has a problem of projecting the bartenders virtues onto husk.

Still vary much into drag, passes a lot of the time creating new outfits and styling wigs. a vary useful part of his power is being able to create silk from his fingers. he posts most of what he makes online.

treats his pig wiggles like those hyper pampered pit bulls you see on tik tok. the editing is done by a site, he sucks with social media and isn't aware that people are commenting on his videos or posts. which is great for the mental honestly.

still has a drug problem, charlie doesn't allow drugs into the hotel but he manages to sneak them in and takes them at night.

Alastor

They are now replaced with a png of Louie armstrong

for real though, make this man black, two sugars, no cream and get that fucking at the crown ass bob with swept bangs into the depths of hell where it fucking belongs

No Voodoo, no symbols no fucking nothing. we dont need tentacles, we dont need puppets we dont need carnivals we dont need any of that shit to make this bitch spooky.

tentacles are now replaced with wires s- "BUT DOX, DOX, WIRES ARE A TV THING!!! WIRES ARE SUCH A TV THI-" gET OUT OF MY HEAD! anyways, wires are a tech thing. if you have ever seen a radio center and looked into their server room, you know that its a fucking wire hell hole.

antlers are replaced with antenna

symbols are replaced with this

(this gives us the added benefits of Sigils that the average person will not know or understand so extra spooky, and lines that can travel across surfaces when making a deal. )

how did they die? alastor was a prolific radio talk show personality, they played jazz tracks and took in anonymous calls, he was also a fucking serial killer. he enjoyed hunting people, he would take the small amount of info he received from calls and used that to find and kill them. why did he do it? because no one knew what he looked like, no one could match his voice off air to his name. he did it because he was bored and wanted to do something thrilling. he died when someone decided to hunt him. someone finally got a picture of him killing someone. he found a picture of him dragging a body into the bayou stabbed into his office door with a stag horn, warning that if he isn't where he left the body by midnight, then his mother would take the bullet meant for him. alastor refuses to talk further about it.

alastor is marked by the sin of pride.

alastor showed up at the hotel after his disappearance in hell, originally portraying himself as the second person ever to want to better himself as a person, doing so by taking a managerial roll within the hotel and even gathering people much to charlies joy.

he is vary interested in keeping his cards close to his chest. hates showing power, hates making threats, hates standing out. he wants to be anonymous.

his room is a underground radio broadcast center that he carved out.

He is Really good at twisting charlies heart strings with his poor boy act, a fact he uses to sway her towards making choices that are more beneficial, rejecting certain requests, cutting herself out of deals, forgiving him if he has a relapse by crying and saying it was self defense.

i want him to be very manipulative, i want him to take more joy in runing people by being the devil on their shoulder whispering horrible advice to them. he dose not give a shit about charlie or the hotel, he wants to see someone high and might crash and burn. he cant kill charlie but he truly wants to see if he can ruin charlies life for the shits and giggles.

throughout the season, he serves as a minor antagonist that's also part of the main group as occasionally, even if he makes something goes wrong, he may catch himself actually liking the company.

he becomes bigger in later seasons but i want him to be something a little more background, we dont need to know everything about alastor, im good with him being a snarky little shit that's good at twisting people around his finger. if anything he would be written a bit like that one asshole form fosters home for imaginary friends, that guy who kept blaming shit on blu? yeah that douche. this is the only thing im slightly iffy on because i know people love alastor, so its hard to balance how much he should be in episodes and his narrative weight. but im going to trust my gut on this.

he dosent like how much he's enjoying his time at the hotel with everyone, he really dosent like how comfortable he has gotten. i want there to be a scene where he waits for charlie to barge into his studio and a caller has to ask him if hes still there to bring his attention back to his broadcast.

lets not mince pigeons and call it quail now, alastor is still a monster, but i want to toy with the idea of being a monstrous person in a world where everyone is a monster and trying to distinguish yourself among them.

his human form is his altered form, his true form is that of a horned demon made of radio receivers bound in wire, meat and dripping mud.

feels superior to vox but is still slightly jealous of him for stealing his title of "The Vox Populi Demon" as part of his plan to go into hiding.

the song "stayed gone" is recontextulized into being about vox attempt to scare alastor into staying in hiding by showing he knows Exactly where he is and alastor responding back with image shattering shit on him.

Husk

get rid of those ye ye ass eyebrows, get rid of those marquee ass wings and get this man a god damn plate of mash potatoes and steak seared in butter, we need to put some god damn pounds on this guy.

fat cat of hell, the king of gamblers row, the owner of aces high, a entertainment company that was the only material threat to the vox media empire.

how did they die?: they used to be a vages strip mini casino attraction, forced essentially to work for this shitty joint due to racking up a major dept. they found that despite being being an unlucky bastard, he was a class act, enough to make the casino a tidy profit with his natural showmanship and magic. his death was slow, he didn't entirely mind it. despite knowing he could be more, he was safe, he had a roof, he had people clapping and shouting his name, and he could drink away all the other troubles. he drank himself into a stupor and passed away in the night from blood alcohol poisoning.

Marked by the sin of sloth.

their time in hell was a perfect intersection of luck, ability and circumstance, the old owner of gamblers row was a card counter, someone who thought that they could see through any trick, which husk was more then happy to take advantage of.

he was not a great overlord, with a body that had no functional need for a liver, he essentially partied every night on the expenses he sucked out of his patrons, letting people spiral into the same dept cycles he did and then forcing them into absurd contracts, which is partially how his own attempt at a media empire started, turns out a lot of great movie directors are in hell and also suck at gambling.

he was forced into a contract after making a bet with alastor over a poker game. alastor posed as a newbie with a bit to much money that was awestruck that he was able to play at the table of a overlord, losing hand after hand until he was offered a service contract, promising to abide by the same contract if he lost the hand. a little magic here, a bit of stronger proof in husks cup and boom. the fat cat is on a leash.

husk hates the hotel, he believes charlie is overwhelmingly condescending, as she has banned alcohol, she keeps trying to get him into "mocktails" that he can serve to guests. under threat of possibly breaking contract, he has to play nice.

has lost a lot of his gusto for practical magic trick, Really good with hell magic.

somewhat enjoys having angel-dust at their bar, they don't like the weird jokes or the way they look at them sometimes but they find it nice to have someone to be a snide bastard with.

cant help but to believe sometimes that maybe charlie is on to something, i mean... its the granddaughter of god, telling him to cut drinking, say a few hell Marys and he can be absolved and go to heaven.

Nifty

How did they die?: nifty was switchboard operator, she was good at her job, went to church on sundays and gave her husband a smooch good morning and good night everyday. if anything she was a model citizen! which is really unfortunate when she found her husband and the housewife next door dancing the cupids shuffle with some extra moves. she killed both of them in a jealous rage. she was found by the police the next day in an immaculately clean house, wearing the housewife clothes and playing host to two corpses. she insisted that she was the housewife that she killed, which lead to a insanity plea. she would die in a mental hospital.

marked with the sin of envy

got into a contract with alastor because she thinks alastor is hot, honestly alastor is worried about how willing she was to give up her soul.

has to pretend to be a repentant sinner in the hotel, dosent seem to mind it. seems to deal pretty well with charlies overly doteing nature.

angel dust has noted that she has stolen a wig that looks alot like barbiels hair and refuses to acknowledge it. he has also seen her practicing a werid voice when shes alone and on her type writer.

im keeping the fan fic thing, that's really funny to me.

not a lot to change, i think she was a fine charecter with a lot of good funny moments that added a lot of levity.

Sir pentious:

how did they die?: back in fucking Victorian England, a trans man tried to put on pants, everyone said good heavens, tried to give them a lobotomy and created a hyper intelligent super villian with apathy problems that kept creating flying war zeppelins to harass the common gentry. honestly they were british and deserved it, why pentious went to hell is beyond me. they died in a gas explosion.

marked with the sin of wrath

part of me wants to leave him unchanged because i thought he was so fucking good as the secret season one redeemed but i think in the rewrite, he ends up in heaven because of the prior mentioned "God patch note". he dosent need to do the big sacrifice, its just funnier if charlie asks "hey why are you down here?" and he disappears in a god damn column of light.

has a burning hatred for doctors

the lobotomy think lasted in hell, they are like that now forever, it has done nothing to their intelligence.

surprisingly killed no one, their war zeppelins did not have any ammo in them but they were fucking scary.

the hell war zepplins do have ammo but they have also not killed anyone. it is common to get pentious insurance.

genuinely, why are you here in hell?

they went to the hotel under the idea that they would challenge two known overlords and the child of lucifer, charlie challenged him to speed run redemption. it worked.

is currently attempting to construct a rocket that will launch them into heaven.

god i fucking love pentious

Section 3: Season one?

here is where i run out of hubris, this is a show made to be written by a group of people, this is a show where i need people to bounce things around, which is why so much of hazbin hotel is fun, its made by a group of the astoundingly talented, which is where i think the disconnect is.

hazbin hotel is marked by talent, it is marked by industry giants and those who can create whatever they want, but like all fiction, everyone wonders what it would be like if things were slightly different. what if the show did not feel as though it was forced to rush through its initial season? what if they were guaranteed multiple seasons to tell a story that they wanted?

which is why i think the trend of rewriting has occurred. we like the show, but are fundamentally frustrated by it because we know it could be better then it is If, it has all these different factors.

what if the velma show wasn't written by people who fundamentally dislike the idea of the mystery gang? What if the new kung fu panda was written by people who wanted to disregard the previous movies? what if what if what if, at the end of the day, you want to know the what if and that means the series is at the bare minimum good enough to make you think about it.

I am not talented to write a full season for a show on my own that can make you want those what ifs, I do not have that follow through. i can tweak characters, i can rewrite them into something that have more meat, more comedy, more strings to pull but i do not have the talent to create a story in which you care about them on my own. So how would you do it?

Section four: Reader input

a comprehensive list of everything wrong with hazbin hotel.

quick note before i lose myself in madness, my standards for helluvaboss are non existent because its a free show on youtube. also i kinda like helluvaboss and i will indulge in any bias i damn well please.

oh and spoilers. i guess.

the greater narrative of the entire season is "White lady civilize inner city hoodlum". ex: The blind side. rich girl, affluent family yadda yadda.

the story is set up to be like amphibia, owl house, svtfoe, steven universe, that being starting as something episodic then transforming into story driven narrative. why? because we know the benefits and drawbacks, episodic starts allows us to wander the world, it allows us to understand the dynamics, we are not forced to reckon with anything because there is no deadline. characters are allowed to bloom and shine and the audience can actually get attached.

the source material is Vary Clearly formed from remnants of something out of a middle school edgelord narrative. the usage of transformation, the big spooky grins, the "and then i smile as my eyes glow and-"-isms which in most cases i don't mind because in some instances but in a vary Particular case its astoundingly annoying and that annoyance is like a mold, shit spreads quick.

the color Red. as a lover of homestuck cherubs and karkat and aradia, as someone who fucking loves the color red, it is so painful to say but holy shit tone it the fuck down, i know its hell but their are so many other colors that you can use, its everywhere, the streets, the air, the windows, the screens, the characters, i know the pride ring is represented with red but change up the palates every so often for backgrounds

the rush, this ties into the second point made but i think the story itself is rushed. we know everything way to early. i know way to much and it makes it hard to care about anything because im still trying to digest the last chunk of info. "oh ok, so they clear out hell once a year. oh hell has a heaven embassy? ok. oh that adam the angel, i though he wou- oh its every 6 months now. wait the exterminators die a lot? then why is everyone sca- people in hell already have weapons that can kill angels? w- oh we are in heaven now, ok ma- no one in heaven except for the elites know the exterminations occur? how do-" and its that, just this incessant rush to explain everything to you. notably that's just the god damn spark notes, we need to know everything about the characters now, every single bit of their story, their insecurities, what charlie needs to fix, how she can fix them, the major bad guys, everything. you are never allowed to dwell on a character because we need to rush towards something else. it almost feels like this should have been like... season three, it would have been a fantastic season three if you dropped the introductions honestly.

the concept of redemption. for a story of redemption to work you need to look at three things. What is there crime, Do they want to change, What is preventing them from changeing? there is only one single character that has a notable path of redemption, angel dust, but if you look through their story it feels off. What Exactly is he guilty of? he has sex, does drugs and drinks. his apparent nymphomania is tied to his sad backstory as someone forced into the sex industry so how is that their fault? then if you think about it you start to spiral and notice "hey why are most of these people in hell?" like sure some of them may deserve punishment but then you see the fucking dichotomy and its like "I was a inventor in england and died of the fucking plague, i may have made evil little contraption hoohoohoo" vs "I was a cannibal, a full on cannibal, i fucking killed people and ate them and then someone shot me". ONE OF THESE THINGS ARE A LITTLE MORE FUCKING EXTREME. i'm going to go fucking nuts, the thing they went to heaven with when presenting a case to angels on the idea that redemption and becoming a better person is actually real was angel dust not drinking at a party and not having sex with consenting adults and i want to go fucking insane. WHAT IS THE CRIME, WHO IS THROWING THE BOOK, WHAT DOES THE BOOK INTEL, ARE WE ON GOOD PLACE RULES?! half the cast dont Need redemption they need fucking help, and the other half of the cast do need redemption but they do not seek it making the point moot. sir pentious acts like he has the brain of a hyper intelligent toddler tossing about toys, its almost like he did his one bad thing of spying and then got caught, sank his little diddy about forgiveness and second chances and become a null point through out the rest of the series, sure their was Some weight to him sacrificing himself, he was a decently funny character and he had good moments but him popping up in heaven felt like a fore gone conclusion, he didn't deserve to be in hell so why do i care that he is suddenly in heaven? because its working on the concept the good place already made. no one actually deserves eternal punishment they just need help processing what makes them a dick, but instead of looking at all the parts of the afterlife that make it bad, inefficient and then creating and trying ideas to see if it work instead over a few seasons, we crash dick first into all the major plot points in regards to that and say "tada, we fixed it.".

having a sub-plot about sexual assault and its victims then having multiple sexual assault related gag ruins your point.

don't make a bunch of stereotypically jewish characters into cannibals, that was a big thing, really shouldn't have to say it.

if you are going to make a character black, make them black, you can say alastor was black but sweet seren-fucking-dippity that's not a black man.

pot meet kettle but yeah the cursing could be a little less liberal. maybe just blue hair or the pronouns, not both.

there is a very distinctive art deco/jazz aesthetic which normally i love but i feel as though it is not used to its full extent and in some cases really hurts the character design in and of itself.

this is a vary obvious bit but the story is a million times more interested in gay men then it is of lesbians, which culminates in this insane thing where the writers clearly have more talent or perhaps it would be more abt to say practice writing male gay pining then they are with lesbian pining. which i personally think is hilarious because i did not know you could min max fujoshi-ism that hard.

this next section is more to do with each character on a fundamental level, for the sake of brevity whatever there is left, i'm just doing ones with speaking roles.

13. Charlie:

(see what i mean about that red thing?)

as originally stated charlie fits rather comfortably into every white saviour narrative, though that seems to be part of her joke. though i'm not entirely sure how much of a joke it can be when its rewarded and expected to advance the plot.

her character design says nothing, it has the motif of old puppets or dolls, she wears something vaguely similar to service suits, her demonic form is just some extra horns.not to say every character needs to have their life on a clothes rack but some more snake and goat imagery would be nice

its not the chol design of charlie with snake hair, not an actual problem but its a problem to me, damn you @cholvoq for ruining my ability to look at any of the characters without wishing i was seeing your designs instead.

character wise aside from the white savoir bit, i'm having a bit of trouble understanding what the arc of the character is. she is shown to be naive, someone who doesn't understand how the world works but everytime she says something its something astoundingly clear like "people can actually get better". and its treated like someone demanded faygo in every water fountain. is the joke that the world around her to cynical or is so to naive? please pick one or the other.

now if you know me, you know i fucking hate overpowered characters with a blinding passion, one that would set alit the god damn abyss but in this one special instance, i feel like its warranted, she's the direct descendant of fucking God, she can swing her weight around a little, i mean god damn. she in so many instances looks like shes cowering so often, why would the daughter of lucifer get backed down by some rando pimp? why wasn't she the one to fight adam? sure you can say she is young but how young? her parents were there since pre-abrahamic times, most of the characters showed up in hell in the 1900s, some of them showed up in the 1600s, how old is charlie??? how long does it take for her to learn how to be strong? The story does not suffer if charlie is strong and knows she is strong. it can easily be a case of "i don't believe in violence to a weird degree". fit it into her apparent naivety about the world to believe that violence is never the answer even when dealing with a being that is unilaterally horrible and abusive and monstrous.

she ga- no im kidding, i do think her romance was waysided a bit, it would have been fine to have more scenes of them togather and in love you know?

14. Vaggie

why did you name the lesbian vaggie...? Don't do that maybe?

I like how her design is almost moth like but again i feel as though you could have amped that up.

she feels as though someone tried to combine undyne and pearl from steven universe, same story beats and design elements. it makes it hard to really distinguish her as a character.

i honestly dont have much to say about her. she is fine.

christ kill me, lets just get the big one out of the way

15. Alastor.

God Damn

where to start.

"alastor is mixed race" mixed with fucking what? concrete? there is not a single black feature on that creature, now im not saying you have to make him a png of louie armstrong but it wouldn't hurt to add a curl to the hair maybe? make it a tiny bit more wavy? Something? a crumb i beg of thee?

his symbolism is all over the god damn place, native american monsters (you know the one), voodoo, radio, puppets, stitches, circuses??? and Tentacles i guess. two of those are from closed religions so if you dumped those you would actually get a more concise character focused on the concept of vox populi as a means of societal control and influence as we see in his first song. but again that gets drowned out repeatedly by all the other random toy box bits shoved into him.

tumblr sexy man bait

he serves no purpose in the story. he does spooky stuff, pretends to do things and then goes back to sitting around looking spooky. i understand that his motif is supposed to be aloof mastermind but maybe have him do more mastermindy things? if you remove most of alastors scenes, bar the songs, it doesn't change all to much. husk and nifity can still be at the hotel, they could be looking for outs in their contracts the same as angel dust. hell it even helps with the one scene where he dose some spooky shit, asking charlie for a favor in exchange for his help in the fight with the angels instead of asking him about angel weapons which should have remained a strictly vaggie scene.

his presence in a way delegitimize the story, as I noted in in the section regarding redemption, the three parts are "what is the crime, do they want to change, what is stopping them?" and alastor kinda just spits in the face of that. he is a serial killer cannibal that has no qualms about how evil he is and apparently must continue being evil due to being under the control under someone legitimately called the Root Of All Evil. show him take a slight interest in the idea that maybe shit for him could be better, make him Want Change at the bare fucking minimum or dont have him at the hotel.

his stupid little fucking horns, big shot the troll liker wants characters to have big fucking horns, make them noticeable or dont have them.

he looks more like a dog boy, which could have been an interesting thing with the collar motif but fuck me i guess.

personal pet peeve but i fucking hate characters that have a million plus powers, stick to a set number, be creative.

im getting more petty as i go on so last point: he could have been in less episodes, he didn't need to be in dad beat dad, that should have been just a lucifer and charlie episode. inverse the red and black and i think he would be fucking great color wise, his body type is the same as ten different characters, he isnt radio enough, aside from the voice and and staff if you told me he was the fucking Cat Demon i would have been just as convinced.

16. Angel Dust

what the fuck, gay spider? its hard to actully articulate all the thoughts i have on angel dust, not in the sense that he is a deeply thought provoking character but in the fact that there is not much meat on the bones.

all around i think angel dust is kinda middling. he has a decent enough romance with husk, he has a decent enough story line that revolves around battling addiction and removing yourself from an abuser (which the story tries to brand as "Redemption???")

I dont like that most of his jokes would qualify as sexual harassment, i don't mind him being sexual as a character but continuing on when clearly someone doesn't like the jokes hurts the character.

not a critique but he is pink, which honestly ill fucking take at point, as long as its not more fucking red.

i think his design is an improvement over some of the old vivzie designs but it feels like it could have done with going a few more rounds of design changes.

same thing with alastor, charlie and vaggie, there is not enough of the animal that they are supposed to be. You could have told me angel dust was a fucking bee or something and i would have had to believe you. nothing about angel dust initially says spider, hell he dosent even have enough limps to be a fucking spider.

17. Carmilla carmine

are... are you supposed to be a rabbit...?

Big Yoai Hands

ballet fighting style, could have been cool, wish she fought more like sanji or chun li.

A single mom that works to hard, who loves her kids and never stops-

her song was decent, not great, decent. it feels as though the actress has experience singing but not in the way they tried to make her sing during her two songs. they have a obvious mexican influence, honestly just let her sing in spanish in the english dub. go listen to the spanish dub, "out for love" sounds great in spanish.

i wish i had more thoughts on them, fucking rip.

18. cherri bomb

that's not a punk aesthetic that's 2010s alt

decent character, they showed up once or twice i guess, no real thoughts.

19. egg boiz

absolutely perfect, i have not notes on them, these are perfect creatures.

20. Emily

im so fucking happy to see a singular blue character

does the naive dreamer bit better then charlie

We really shouldnt have seen her until the end of season two or middle of three.

good contrast with the other angels on screen.

Wait she is supposed to be black??? Where???

21. Husk

keith david you absolute delight, Why on gods green earth did they only give you one singing part?

one of the few charecters where its clear husk is a cat, i do like the kinda... marquee design, he is a magic cat, thats neat. i still think you can toss the wings and eyebrows and still have just as good of a charecter.

has a deeply intresting story of someone who died as a nobody, became the fat cat of hell and then was forced back to the bottom by their own vices, not used at fucking all.

huge potential, little pay off.

22. lillith

I know nothing about her except she ditched her kid and husband to vacation in heaven and i think thats kinda funny.

alot of werid things floating around her, again she shouldnt have been shown in the show at all until next season.

23. lucifer morningstar

no notes, funniest charecter, did a song based on friend like me.

few notes: i do like the idea that the immortal symbol of pride is a constant emotional wreckage constantly seeking approval through grand showmanship and manic energy that threatens to take over anything they touch.

would have liked more snake stuff on him, maybe some more goat things like horns.

that is such a stupid fucking staff lmao.

24. Adam.

alex brightman you absolute fucking delight, you should have had more songs.

I wish his design was more focused on the idea of him being a glam rock wash up

I fucking hate his mask

We shouldn't have met him until the end of the season.

25. Niffty

again she is supposed to be a bug or cockroach but nothing about her points to that.

token straight

keeps rocketing back and fourth between sexulization and infantilization

you had kimiko glenn but didnt give her a single fucking song?

26. Sir Pentious

the secret season one redeemed.

the pilot version of him felt more like someone that could do a season one redemption arc, a megalomaniac constantly attempting territory grabs, there is something you can work with, actual character flaws to work through.

essentially a child after the first episode.

actually a snake which i appreciate.

no where near steampunky enough.

27. the villians of the show dont make much sense, each one feels like they should be season long deals on their own instead of a bunch of team rocket esque idiots that show up on occasion, do a bad thing and then leave.

28. Valentino

gOD THERE IS SO MUCH RED

only a moth some of the time.

sucks as a villain, maybe they need more screen time to show why they suck in a more substantial way aside from being told that he sucks.

it is interesting that angel dust is only under his magical control when in the studio, it shows that angel dust has to make a conscious choice to return, which in turn can be made to show how abusers can draw back their victims. I do not think it was done well in this circumstance as it shows him to be cartoonishly evil, constantly flying back and fourth between sweet and utter psycho, there is no actual reason for angel dust to ever actually go back to the studio, he just does so every so often.

29. Vox

legit who cares? the only thing about him that is in any way substantial is all the dope ass fan art we get.

propaganda machine angle that is not explored at all, just hinted at. no actual barring on the story whatsoever.

why didn't he try to do the same shit as alastor by the way? he knows its bad if alastor gets in good with charlie so shouldn't it be a ass kissing race?

same body shape as literally every other male character.

tumblr sexy man version of pyrocynicals fursona.

30. Valvette

the actual poster child of the shows huge problem of "Show me, don't tell me".

apparently the glue that holds the villains together. never shown.

apparently the one that makes the love potions that valentino is famous for. had to learn about that in the fuckin wiki trivias

we know so much about her from things outside of the show.

was there to call carmilla a coward, that's her plot contribution. she shows up every now and again but its never anything substantial and serves to more around take up run time for people We Don't Need To Know Yet.

im not trying to be mean, animation is animation, we need smaller studios to have success in the industry so that other indie studios can have that success, felling a tree makes it easier for others to follow. showing that its possible to number brain rot exacs helps all animators.

but this show has so much bullshit attached to it, it has so much fucking potential that it fries my brain with unyielding frustration.

this took a bit to write, im tired, thanks for reading.

[bisluthq]

How did Apple fuck up the user interface so much though? The reason why I choose Apple over Samsung is that everything about Apple looks pretty, clean and easy to use. I hate and I mean HATE the design of anything Android so much. I’ve tried to give it a chance (look at the phones in a store) and I despise it. Apple is so good at making everything thing else look good, how is Apple TV this bad??

I also don’t understand but it’s all their TV related products imo. Like I love my iPhone and I love my MacBook (because of the user experience) and iPads are also very cool and they’re all laid out in a far more intuitive manner for me than Windows or Android products (I’ve also looked into those - I’ve tried the phones in the shop before I bought this 11 and I actually bought a windows laptop in 2020 during lockdown because the specs were better than the Apple products and the price was a fraction lol and I really needed a new laptop then because my 5.5 year MacBook was dying and I hated it SO much I sold it at a loss obviously and bought this Air eventually) BUT Apple TV (as in the streamer) is very oddly laid out and I also don’t like the Apple TV smart device thingie - we have one but I never use it myself and my bf uses it for if we pirate movies or to watch cuts he’s made of stuff on a bigger screen so essentially it’s a way for him to cast from his iMac to the big screen. When *I* pirate movies he doesn’t care about, I don’t even bother with it though like that’s how useless I find it. I just watch on my laptop then. I’m not sure why they can’t figure TVs out. Maybe because they don’t make the device itself? Idk. But like I love the Samsung TV interface and it makes a lot of sense to me and we have a TCL with the Google features integrated in the bedroom that we bought recently which was SUPER cheap lol like I think cost the same or even less than the little Apple TV smart device thingie (I didn’t buy that thingie and never would lol and the TV I co-bought and had known I like from the shop but yea idk how much he paid for the smart device thingie) that we have on the main TV and it works absolutely fine (granted we mostly use it to watch porn and sometimes sitcoms to fall asleep) and is very sensibly laid out 🤷🏻‍♀️🤷🏻‍♀️

these people should get me to review their products lol I’ll tell them 👌🏼 or ☹️ and Apple TVs and Apple TV+ are both ☹️ from me.

Apple TV+ content is 👌🏼 but the user interface is not it.

[hunter-rodrigez]

tags by @maythray

#sit in the back of a tesla model 3 and it becomes painfully (used literally) clear how these arent designed with the backseat in mind #theres nowhere to hang on. the seats are entirely flat so you make a sharp turn? regardless of if youre strapped in youre sliding. #the roof also being entirely glass above makes it incredibly hot in the back. but ac should fix this yeh? wrong. #theres only one tiny central ac unit in the back. and its never on by default or even anywhere near as strong as the fronts #theyre hellscapes for people looking for any kind of comfort. it feels like a tomb back there. #and god forbid you have motion sickness. or that the air filter in the car isnt freshly changed. cause itll stink fast #1. making you nauseous. and the constant sharp changes jn speed do nothing to aid this #the inability to even hold on to something just gets so much more worse like this#half the time i end up digging my fingers under the cheap plastic edges around the window in a desperate effort to have stability #i hate teslas so bad so so so bad. #their cons far outweigh their pros (electric car) #the screen in front too? the glass ceilings again? makes the glass on the screen (VITAL USER INTERFACE) painful to use. #ive gotten light burns trying to use it after the cars been jn tge sun for a short while. i hate jt. i hate it

Fucking hell...

As sketchy as the oceangate submarine was... you can bet your ass every single one of musky's endeavors would look just as sketchy if it wasn't for the fact that he's forced to work with government regulators.

Hell, most of his projects are this sketchy if you look a bit closer. For example: the tesla tunnels.

No fire suppression system, no emergency exits, no emergency lighting, no way for EMS to get through, no fucking nothing. I am pretty sure it's not even big enough to open the car's doors.

Or the Cybertruck that's a deathtrap for both the people on the outside and the people on the inside because it utterly disregards the last 50 or so years of advancements in car safety technology such as crumple zones or safety glass

Or the tesla model 3 where you can't even open the back doors without power. So if you're in an accident and lose power... good luck getting your kids out of the back, especially when the huge battery is turning into a huge, unextinguishable flamethrower.

Or the fucking starship launchpad that was utterly destroyed by the rocket and threw huge concrete chunks and other debris around for miles... which, incidentally, also destroyed the rocket.

That's what all these self-proclaimed Silicon Valley tech bro geniuses are like.

They all think they know better than everyone else, and that rules or consequences don't apply to them, and they see safety as little more than an afterthought.

It's why Ai and social media algorithms are used sooooo ethically. It's why amazon and facebook try to find out everything about you and happily sell that data with no disregard for what it could be used for.

It's about damn time one of these CEO dipshits got killed by their own dipshitery, I just wish it had been musk or bezos instead...

Once again, in conclusion:

[n0thingiscool]

The Apple App Store's rating system is fixed and Notability nuked itself

Apple's App Store rating is a joke. It has to be. There's no fucking way Notability's rating is still sitting at almost 5-stars after what they just did to their graphic interface. The downgrade pissed every Notability user off from every corner of the internet. Literally every single recent review on the App Store is a lowered star rating and a dig at the asshole developer, Ginger Labs.

It's pretty obvious Ginger Labs is perfectly happy taking payment from its user base while also expressing how much it hates them. "Thanks for the cash but fuck you." More importantly, we have the Apple App Store doing a blatant bold-faced lie. The App Store's review board for Notability has seen a stream of people changing their rating and review of the app to something angrier and lower - yet the store's star rating hasn't budged. In contrast, I've witnessed apps who made shit decisions on the Android Store app ratings plummet in less than 12-hours. (Looking at you, Cocone.) I'm not seeing this on the Apple App Store at all. Something's fucky.

Notability has been the premier note taking software for iPads and Mac interfaces for easily half a decade. Maybe longer, but that's how long I've used it for. Every student on my campus loved it back in the day. It was simple and used to only cost a $9 flat rate. It ran well and predictable for years but then all of a sudden Ginger Labs decided to fuck with its user base (for literally no fucking reason other than greed). Their first fuck up was when they told their thousands of users that the $9 one time license was changing to a $15 monthly subscription. That was a HUGE "fuck you" to students and other note takers who had become reliant on the app to get through their classes and projects. Ginger Labs had to walk that decision back because it pissed their user base off and, if I can recall, I think it was against the Apple App Store's TOS.

Fast-forward to 2023 and we're seeing a whole new scam from Ginger Labs in that they gave no warning before updating the entire Notability interface in one night - in a way nobody asked for. They took away useful tools everyone liked, changed the whole app's UI design absolutely, while continuing to ignore all the requests their user base has been asking for, for at least the last five-years. Why? "To AtTrAcT NeW UsErS" - according to their Spez loving reddit page.

At this point, it's safe to say Notability - and anything Ginger Labs works on, needs to be bypassed for the competition. Ginger Labs and Notability are no longer a trustworthy software/company to give money to. All anyone is paying for, in the Ginger Labs environment - going forward, is to be perpetually be ignored and fucked with. No one needs that.

Back to the real point, though. If Ginger Labs being assholes isn't bad enough, the real rub is how Apple is backing their bullshit. Personally, I only use Mac products for school productivity while using Android for daily usage and this is a clear example of why: Apple's got some Yelp style "pay to play" bullshit going on with their app ratings system and I want no part of it. This whole "Editor's Choice" business is an example of why I stay the fuck away from Apple as much as I can. Apple is actively hiding app ratings while telling you what they think is the best on the front page of their store. Really, Apple? Out of the hundreds of other competitors? Really? Clearly, it's a paid status thing.

In conclusion - Apple's "Editor's Choice" and its store are a farce. We all know there's no benevolent "app store editor" out there handing out free "Editor's Choice" awards. If that were the case, then there's no fucking way anyone handing out free "You're Doing Great Sweetie" awards would look at Ginger Labs's behavior in the last five-years and maintain Notability is still doing great. Especially after what they just did to their interface.

It's pretty clear Apple's App Store ratings are fixed because Ginger Labs/Notability have been treating their customers like trash for a while but the App Store ratings refuse to reflect that in any real time way. I know a lot can be complained about within the Android App Store environment but at least you can see when a software developer fucks up in real time on their store. You can't say the same for Apple.

[tlonista]

I feel bad for all the writer logistics venting here but god, RIGs. They're futuristic cellphones that are central to huge amounts of the action in Dead Space, except each one is hyper-specialized in ways that only work if you wear one type of clothing -- they chill out over your sports-bra-and-tank-top except when they're built into a gigantic armored suit or clamped to the back of your jacket with 20 metal ribs. Yes I understand it's a fun diagetic interface thing I'm just not used to actively worldbuilding to let my characters change their damn shirts.

So my working theory is that a RIG is basically a combo health readout, biometric sensor array, and lightweight personal computer, all of which is simple enough in the 26th century that companies can build lots of models and expect people will sync info across more than one, and I don't need to worry about characters keeping a single one straight. For lightweight models let's say people have magnets implanted along their spine that anchor them -- unobtrusive, simple, works with Ellie's tank top. (And when Isaac's unhooking the ribs in the remake, it's some manual failsafe that idk reverses the magnetism to release the RIG.)

So then there's the controls. As of the remake we can see Isaac using a combination of taps on his wrist and on the icons of a holographic projection, which is fine, except it raises the troubling question of "how is that screen appearing." Maybe the screen around his neck is an oddly angled projector? We see wrist-mounted projectors in Dead Space 2, which also seem to have cameras that let users stream video of their faces. I don't believe they make an appearance in the remake, but I don't think they're ruled out?

The other answer I've seen is "everyone's a cyborg, they have AR built into their eyes" or some such. But I feel like this doesn't mesh with the vibe of the universe, which is if anything very rough and physical. It's also not clear why someone would design a system that lets everybody know what you're watching on your cyborg-vision, as we see in the remake's introduction. So I guess after all this, my conclusion to "how does this technology that is central to the characters' lives work" is still technically "I have no fucking clue."

[noficbyhalves]

Okay I don't have as much to say about the 'its ugly' parts of this, I didn't notice the color change all that much, and I had pretty good success fiddling with the channel list layout and classic text size settings to make it look at least palatable (though I am on android and that may factor).

But the UX choices. The bugs.

I'm not sure which is a more insane decision, the swipe-to-reply (a thing that no one wanted, destroyed the ux mirroring of that motion, and actively penalized users for their muscle memory from every other version of the app), or using a menu style commonly used for swipeable panels (at the bottom w/ servers, dms, etc) in a way that is not swipeable at all. Anyone with any understanding of ux would call you a moron.

Also I'm just going to say that this is far and away the buggiest rollout that I remember... maybe in the entire time I've been using discord? Consistent bug #1: If you open the app from a notification, then swipe to see your servers, 80-90% of the time the animation finishes on the same channel you were in. Swipe again, you clown. Numerous people have had the 'message still in the chat' bug, and I've had several instances where no matter which channel you try to select, it only shows contents of the same one until you reboot the fucking app. And that's not even counting all of the weird animation delays and the odd floatiness and non-responsive-feeling-ness of the whole interface, which I have no idea if that's a (bad) intentional design decision or a bug, because *gestures at all of this bullshit*.

pissed abt the new discord mobile update so heres my rant.

the new hud is ugly, laggy and impractical. the lil servers button will ALWAYS have a blue light unless you read every server message which is dumb. they should have an option to turn that off or revert it back to the old HUD (like how reddit has its current site and its "old site HUD" verision), it feels laggy to swap between servers and messages and its slow, making it hard to balance having two conversations at once. you cant even see which people are online in servers by swiping to the side anymore and have to press the search button (which takes a moment to even load, adding more to the lag factor), not to mention, messages look weird now since you ALSO cant side swipe to see whos online/status messages, you must press the search tab and then itll lag to load and show up like how instagrams messaging system does, with it separating the media sent, link and some other stuff. overly complex and unneeded.

not to mention, the new "midnight" color background doesnt even look midnight, you'd expect it to be pitch black on all parts but instead they made it blueish, which is dumb and knowing current discord, they'd put pitch black behind the discord nitro color themed backgrounds (which is also stupid but thats a whole other can of worms.)

overall the new interface is annoying, laggy, UGLY, and hard to traverse, the seperation of areas was unneeded, made worse by the fact that discord themself have said that a setting to make it go back to normal wont be made and if anyone doesnt like it, to delete their accounts. (most likely not caring due to the fact that they have no competition in purely texting apps), it is also full of glitches such as: people being able to send messages but it STILL being in the text box, being so laggy its unuseable and from what ive seen, nobody online is happy as it completely removes all user-friendly access to things and makes it generally hard to use.