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spicy banana moments are always fucked up but i gotta say i don't recommend the experience of having a major one while high

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Any idiot can like something thats good. It takes a real genius to like things that suck ass

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thinking about the time i was in the sticks of puerto rico (long-ish story, i spent a lot of time there as a kid, and when i say the sticks i mean it i'm not talking shit about PR as a whole) and there was this massive old radio dish we had to get rid of. like a three-meter-tall chunk of jungle-damaged metal. and we were unsure how to go about doing this and consulted a neighbor who, as if it were obvious, told us to stick it on the side of the road with a label reading "gratis" (free). which we were skeptical about, given our remote location and the questionable desirability of, again, a decayed radio dish with bromeliads growing on it. but we did it anyway.

it took half a day for one (1) car to pass us by. half an hour later someone came to grab it fully prepared and visibly quite excited. and while that was in part culture shock for us middle class white people (yeah this was a real gringo moment, i know), forgetting that scrap metal selling is a thing, it just fascinated me that. it implied the existence of a local network to report such things, so well-used as to, again, cause this highly specific and difficult to transport object to be picked up after one person passed it by. that's really cool i think

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"one [x], one [y]" phrases always go so fucking hard. one flesh, one end. one sky, one destiny. one sin, one grace. bangers all. more of that please

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replaying portal 1 and forever in awe of how funny glados is. like. as a person. she's just constantly out here doing bits. glitching her voice to censor information. the supercolliding superbutton. lying about not lying repeatedly. the deadpan "weeeeee." the whole companion cube drama. android hell. "this next test is impossible. make no attempt to solve it." like yeah she's trying to be malicious but actually she's coming across as just genuinely hilarious

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*sees a landmine* eh what the heck *steps on it and explodes*

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sollux captor on that dick yo

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worth noting that fixing this took. some work. they didn't care about pollution, i stuck incinerators in the middle of everything and it was still hitting overflow. the only thing i could do to consistently keep out of overflow danger while maintaining the same zoning layout was encourage crime. via heavily nerfing police. which while funny was also very annoying and not sustainable as a solution. in the end, i had to remove about 30% of my total park land. which wasn't as nightmarish as it sounds due to the extreme level of symmetry i build everything with, but still stung. anyway that did fix the problem, creating a gradient of (a small amount of) medium to (still mostly) astronomical land value rather than. the solid wall of astronomical i had before. the long and short of it is that simcity 3000 was released in 1999 and they accidentally coded in the 2008 housing bubble crash as a game mechanic which is pretty funny

i'm losing my fucking mind. a damn near perfect file in simcity 3000 was chugging along just fine and suddenly everything broke. tax income dropped by like 90%. i was getting warnings about low land value despite them being at their highest nearly across the entire city. baffled, i made a backup save and then let it continue for a bit and. i literally got fucking fired. i lost. i didn't even know you could lose simcity. and again, everything was still just as meticulously perfect as autism/adhd hyperfocus could make it (very).

the culprit, uncovered after significant investigation?

overflow error.

that's right. my land values were so high they looped back to zero. i got fucking nuclear gandhi'd. i was so good at simcity i literally broke it, i'm laughing so much. i think this means i won simcity, actually

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i'm losing my fucking mind. a damn near perfect file in simcity 3000 was chugging along just fine and suddenly everything broke. tax income dropped by like 90%. i was getting warnings about low land value despite them being at their highest nearly across the entire city. baffled, i made a backup save and then let it continue for a bit and. i literally got fucking fired. i lost. i didn't even know you could lose simcity. and again, everything was still just as meticulously perfect as autism/adhd hyperfocus could make it (very).

the culprit, uncovered after significant investigation?

overflow error.

that's right. my land values were so high they looped back to zero. i got fucking nuclear gandhi'd. i was so good at simcity i literally broke it, i'm laughing so much. i think this means i won simcity, actually

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bitches be Going Through It simcity-style

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y'all know that when muir talks about "soul permeability" she's just fantasy-ifying a normal thing that happens, right. she's taking a Known Feature of How Humans Work and framing it as horror. which is great, she should do that, she does it a lot and she's really good at it.

but like. when you love someone you will inevitably become "less yourself" because of it. whether you mimic their traits directly or change to match them, a mirror image as opposed to an exact copy, you are Being Changed and becoming someone that is Not Entirely You.

that's how it works? like duh. cam and pal were fine with being paul because they've been doing this On Purpose their whole lives. intentionally mimicking where they can and reflecting where they can't. and they're funny and great for that.

lyctorhood is a metaphor for and powered by love, because grief is a form of love. paul works because that's another form of love. all three forms we've seen are examples of allowing oneself to be consumed by love, which serves as the price and punishment and reward of lyctorhood.

"necromancy" (it's magic, y'all, it's just magic, the math is all bullshit, john is lying so much always or is possibly just an idiot) was from the start brought about by love, john's for alecto. tlt is about the goddamn horrors of love, we been knew. so i just wanted to check in and make sure we all got that with the whole "soul permeability" thing because sometimes i see people treat it as some Big Unique Concept when it's literally just palamedes and muir being right about how love works. okay that's all thank you goodnight

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it's funny that one of the more annoying fuckups in kingdom hearts is because roxas was actually *too* cool in kh2. like. even if he's a fairly standard square enix dork in the opening, his return in the game proper is. stunning. this sad edgy bitch dual-wielding two kickass keyblades with flashy moves and a soundtrack that tells you in no uncertain terms that this boy got put through the fucking wringer. like i cannot stress enough how hard the music sells this, good luck even fighting him through your tears.

and that introduction was so stupidly good that roxas got built up as this incredibly important and powerful and mysterious fan-favorite character. and in the years before 358/2 days was released that fanon interpretation had hit critical mass and rendered all else unacceptable. and this meant that 358/2 days, itself a great work of art albeit a bad game, failed to change that perception of roxas much despite him being, and i say this with affection, a whiny angsty idiot.

which meant that roxas had to live up to his hype or fans would riot. so roxas couldn't, say, have been ventus all along, a more elegant move which not only would have made ventus way less extraneous and confusing and annoying, but would also have cemented roxas's arc as meaning one thing (you are always you, even if you don't remember) and xion's arc as meaning another thing (you are the person you are because you choose to be). which is a shame, because as it is their arcs are the same but xion's does it so much better.

it also means that roxas had to roll up in kh3 still dual-wielding, which makes *no* fucking sense, considering the extra keyblade was xion's. the black one literally called oblivion. the one that riku stole when he fought roxas that made riku hear xion's voice when he grabbed it. roxas being made to live up to the hype Or Else meant that in kh3 xion was stuck with her copied generic keyblade and roxas just gets those two cool ones forever now i guess. which is big lame and lost potential.

tl;dr when writing don't be too afraid to surprise and initially disappoint or piss off your audience. and also don't ignore your themes and symbols and established methods of communication just for a Rule of Cool

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that classic homestuck obama eridan post but it's tlt. ianthe (ianthe)

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once again thinking about how well a practical guide to evil exemplifies what is good about metafiction. bad metafiction is "haha these characters are trope aware and abusing it, isn't that funny and wacky." good metafiction has the same starting point, except you realize that in being trope-aware, these characters are constantly and continuously *choosing which tropes they want their lives to be* even if their destinies are set in stone.

no matter what, catherine was always going to kill amadeus. it was simply unavoidable without killing catherine first. which is of course what everyone who cared about amadeus really, really wanted to do before it was too late. amadeus knew this going in, and at least to some extent, so did catherine.

early on, amadeus promises that he will not lie to catherine, because if he did catherine would no doubt find out at the worst possible moment and kill him because of it. catherine is of course fully convinced by the logic and wouldn't have trusted any kind of empty platitude, but she doesn't understand the full meaning until much later.

amadeus was never trying to avoid being killed by catherine. rather, he wanted to ensure two things: first, that none of his allies would kill catherine in revenge, and second, that he would die not because of hate but because of love. and he did, taking a mortal wound to save one of his loved ones from killing another and passing with both of them at his side.

whether he knew then that he would grow to love catherine as his adopted daughter is questionable. she absolutely didn't realize she was going to love him as her adopted father. but the point was that, even if his role and Name and status as a villain doomed amadeus to die at the hands of his student, he could still pick which tropes led to that tragedy. as he did with his first friends, and as catherine too did the moment she acknowledged that she cared for him, he chose love. a bittersweet ending was the best they could hope for, but they didn't hope for it; they made it happen. that choice, to seize the threads of their own narrative and bend them to reflect their true desires, is far more meaningful than how that narrative ended.

this wasn't even a new idea. the calamities, mass murderers and monsters all by nature and design, chose to, instead of casually scheming against each other as befits villains, love and care for and defend each other to the last. they couldn't be good or have happy endings. their reality forbid it. so instead they did as much good as they could manage with the tools of evil they were bound to and the time they had before their just deaths.

which of course has all sorts of real-life thematic application, but that's not what's special here. it's that through this constant discussion of the choices both presented and denied, and how each character claimed or failed to claim agency in a world devoid of it, apgte was explaining and demonstrating how stories work. how to operate under different rulesets and genres and limitations. how to craft thematically coherent and powerful narratives. how to write, and tell stories, and be good at it.

because characters never do have agency, do they? they aren't real. the writer determines everything. and every choice the writer makes should be made with just as much care and consideration and awareness of context as amadeus and catherine needed to achieve their goals.

apgte didn't have to be metafiction, is the thing. it could have been played straight. hell, it never even technically broke the fourth wall. but in being metafiction it becomes exactly what it says on the tin: a guide. and that never stops being so unreasonably fucking cool to me

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That looks like a really put together guy, we should trust him. Sure hope he doesn’t change the trajectory of our lives or anything.

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there are many dumbass infinite loop strategies in slay the spire but none amuse me so much as playing defect and getting two upgraded hologram cards and reducing their cost to zero with madness. some ultra instinct shit. or this gif, basically:

yeah there's a better version of the same loop that lets you attack too, but consider: this one is funnier