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Wtf KCD2....

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Your honour, I admit that I do have a superiority complex over not watching Disney "live action" remakes, but in my defense, I am right

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support trans girl scouts, win delicious cookies!

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I have played through the first quest (The Smuggled Relic Case) in Minrathous several times, but this is the first time I saw this dramatic mf'er out here Assassin's Creeding it up just to make an entrance.

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Thoughts on Dawntrail

I have finished the MSQ and done some side quests, and I have finally come to a conclusion on my overall impression of the expansion so far. I will break it down into two sections, spoiler free and then spoilers.

Spoiler Free:

-The graphics update is great, I can't wait until all of the old zones/characters/gear are updated, it will be great to go back and see the changes.

-The art and design is, as always, lovely, and I really enjoyed the overall designs of most of the zones.

-The music was great, as usual, however, there are a few songs that are complete misses for me...especially when you have been in an area for a while and you hear the same tune repeat over and over again...I have muted my music more in this xpac than in previous ones.

-The jobs are good, I always level everything to MAX level and have 2 jobs at 100 so far, but, overall, the changes/additions to the jobs that I prefer are good changes and the additions don't change too much about the rotations that I know and like. I like current Viper and am sad to see that they are planning on making changes, I think it is fine the way it currently is and the positionals and other complaints that I have seen are silly in my opinion. My Pictomancer is only 90 at the time of writing, the job is cute, and I get how it works, but as I don't really like casters in FFXIV anyway, it isn't a job that I am going to play much beyond getting it to 100.

Now for spoilers:

-As to the overall story, it was fine, a nice break from doom and gloom, but I have several major issues:

-Let's let the cat out of the bag first; Wuk Lamat - I like her in general and I am sad to see that people are being such dicks about the VA being trans, I thought the voice acting was fine, it was the character itself that was a little annoying to me. I understand that we are supposed to be guiding her through a journey where she grows into the leader she needs to be, however, even at the end, she is still just very naive in ways that I just find annoying as a personality trait.

My biggest issue, with her as a character, actually happens in the later half of the story, after she has ascended to Dawnservant. Once everything starts hitting the fan and we recognize that the problem is an issue involving a Reflection and we have way more meta knowledge about what is really happening, it seems silly that we would still be holding her hand and trying to explain every bit of lore instead of addressing the issues at hand.

The whole vibe of most of the story felt very after school special with the power of friendship and rainbows solving the problems that happen. I also did not like it during the Interphos trial her busting her way into the fight and "winning it" with the power of positivity, that just didn't work for me.

As the WoL we have seen people like Sphene in multiple expansions, all trying to "save" their people and using that to justify atrocities...Hades, Elidibus, Thordan to name a few. And in each case, we said "Cool motive, still murder" and dealt with the offender as they needed to be, even at great personal cost, especially once we knew exactly who/what the WoL is and means to some of the characters.

So, why are we dealing with Sphene, who we saw at the massacre in Tuliyollal, with friendship is magic powers. It worked with Metion because she was the literal embodiment of despair and needed to be given some perspective on hope, but Sphene, as a character, did not earn that kind of respect/kindness from my WoL.

Overall, I am just glad to be done with the MSQ and look forward to the raid fights and hopefully some cool/interesting side quest stories.

-I think my biggest issue with the story overall, is just a problem that happens with all MMOs and that is the illusion of control in the story. We can't choose not to support Wuk Lamat, even if we feel one of the other candidates is a better fit. We can't choose how we deal with/approach anything that is happening in the last two zones of the game. That is a function of this type of game genre, once you have to create a story in a world that is beyond a single player scenario, you can't really give anyone any personal drive to change how the story plays out.

Compare it to a pure RPG like Baldur's Gate 3 - yes, in the end the story is still driving you on a path to defeat the end boss, but there are so many different approaches to how you get there, that you never really have the exact same experience twice - you can be good, evil, neutral, romance who you want, approach fights in many different ways, characters can die, actions have consequences and are permanent.

However, in an MMO-RPG the story always has to be the same path for every character, every time, for hundreds of thousands of people. The only real choice you have is which of the two zones you are going to go to first when you do the first branching quest after the main city. I love MMOs, I have played them for many, many years, but once you start to see the man behind the curtain, so to speak, it becomes much less interesting to really care about the lore. I kind of understand where some story skippers have a point - if you just want to experience some cool fights, does it really matter what the narrative framework used to justify the existence of those fights is?

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Dragonriders of Pern book series - Anne McCaffrey

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Happy Mother’s Day to all the parentified eldest siblings out there who never get acknowledged for the amount of parenting they did and have real difficult feelings about their actual moms!

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I am convinced Buck had NO CLUE.

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I cannot put into words how much I Fucking Loathe the fact that when you search something on youtube now it will randomly intersperse blocks of "people also watched" and "for you" into the results. That's not what I searched for, youtube. I typed in a search query because I wanted to see search results, not random unrelated garbage you have placed in my way apparently to either inconvenience me or force me to scroll further for actual results. I despise your wretched little games and every time I see it I can only instantly close the tab as I am overcome with the urge to burn something down.

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from that day on I was his

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Perception Check | Tom Cardy

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☆ weightless ☆

A sort of sequel to the Another Type of Intimacy comic

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In 2019 my Uncle drove to my apartment to park his truck and spend the night as he was planning to fly to Texas the next day and the airport is near my home. He lived in Maine and was flying out of Logan Airport in Boston. He was in the Coast Guard and was going to an official conference.

He died in his sleep, but because I leave for work very early in the morning, I didn't notice, neither did my sister when she left for work.

We didn't realize until 9-10 AM when he wasn't answering our texts. My sister went home and found him dead on our couch...the next several days were some of the most stressful days trying to get everything settled and arranged. Especially with the flights that needed to be cancelled and notifying the Coast Guard.

Oh, and let's not forget that when you die with porn stored on your devices your family is going to come upon that when they are trying to get your details from them.

My sister was the beneficiary for his 401k, which was a decent amount of money, but she had no one to advise her on how much tax money she should save, so she is still paying off debt to the IRS for getting that money...she paid off her student loans with the money, but almost had a mental breakdown when the IRS sent her the information about what she owed.

A guide like this would have been very helpful.

Hey you know how I said I was going to make a workbook on the kind of bullshit you need to do when someone you love dies? I actually did that.

HERE IS THE VERSION WITH LOTS OF SWEARING AT THE USELESS, SHITTY SITUATION YOU’RE IN.

HERE IS THE VERSION WITH A FAIR AMOUNT OF BLACK HUMOR BUT NO CURSEWORDS.

Featuring Helpful Sections such as:

Death Certificates – What you need, why you need them, and how to get them

Prepare to spend a long and miserable time on the phone

What the Everloving Fuck is Probate

Some Simple Dos and Don’ts

Shitty Mad Libs – Templates for writing Obituaries and Memorials

How to plan a non-religious death party

So you suddenly have to become some sort of hacker or some shit

This is an eighteen page book that you can print out, download, share, and give away; it is meant to be used to collect information about funeral planning and account management after a death OR you can use it BEFORE you die and give people information so they’re not stuck playing Nancy Fucking Drew while trying to keep seventeen cousins who crawled out of the woodwork from gutting each other in front of the fucking casket as they argue about who’s inheriting grandma’s favorite dentures.

It’s not exactly cheerful and it’s full of things that are probably going to feel really fucking raw if you’re processing a fresh death.

I’m sorry! I love you! Death is shitty! I’m trying to laugh about it a little and I hope you can laugh a little too because otherwise we’re all just going to cry together.

Good luck!

(in memory of my weirdo mother and her weirdo siblings who all died too fucking young and left me holding this flaming bag of dogshit)

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