icarusavery

[icarusavery]

nah þis is peak actually. totally using mþ now.

had a dream that someone suggested the best gender neutral form of address would be Mþ (pronounced Myth) and i immediately said "mith me with that gay shit HEYOOO" and woke up at 4:30am hanging sideways off of my bed

[icarusavery]

Hey, so I kinda want to talk about Brickshelf.

For context, Brickshelf is an old website, I'm talking 1998, that early fans of Lego (including Bionicle) used to host images, specifically for their creations. A ton of fanart is on this website, too.

In late June, it was reported by a journalist that the founder of this website, Kevin Loch, passed away last year (additional Facebook source). I am not clear who is running the website at this point.

According to LUGNET, Kevin's estate is currently paying to keep Brickshelf online. I don't know how much time we have, but my estimate is two months, because one of his websites (https://bsrender.io/) has a public notice that it will be disabled this March.

Brickshelf is host to 4,942,783 image files organized into 431,130 folders. That's a lot of early Internet history potentially being lost.

If you individually want to preserve your files, there is a python script for downloading a user's files here.

Is anyone here interested in helping archive this website? I'd like to make an archive, I just have no prior experience. Thank you.

Edit: The Bio-Media team sent me a reply that they're one of the groups who are willing to volunteer to help with archiving. More info in reblogs.

[icarusavery]

the warrior of light as a game-breaking force of violence

there's a moment, relatively early in dawntrail, that establishes succinctly how out of place the warrior of light (as the savior of eorzea and main character of four successive final fantasy game plots) is in what is essentially the story of fresh new final fantasy protagonist wuk lamat. and it sets up quite nicely how the framework of fantasy video game conflict pulls the warrior of light forever towards violence as the expansion goes on.

spoilers through 7.0 follow

consider wuk lamat's kidnapping and rescue. bakool ja ja holds his blade to wuk lamat's throat, taunting you. his lackeys line up against your party in neat little ranks suspiciously reminiscent of a classic final fantasy encounter screen.

and it simply does not matter to the warrior of light. you stride right through their combat setup because you are beyond that by now. the warrior of light has absolutely no respect for the "we are about to do ATB combat" lineup. the camera even jumps the line for you in one continuous rotating shot, crossing the axis of action as though to emphasize through the disruption of visual convention how far outside the game's boundaries you are.

this is how far you are above the problems of dawntrail's first half. you cannot even be bound by the normal rules of cinematography and video game combat. everyone else here lined up for a good old-fashioned scrap and the warrior of light said haha nope actually. i'm going to stroll through here like a god of war astride this tiny battlefield. your henchmen cannot even raise a hand to me. i don't even have to engage in violence directly anymore. my mere presence is enough.

in fact, not only can bakool ja ja's henchmen not raise a hand to you, he's not even worthy of your direct intervention. he kidnaps wuk lamat and steals her keystones and frees valigarmanda and kidnaps hunmu rruk and none of it warrants the warrior of light so much as raising a finger. he's wuk lamat's recurring villain, that's not your problem. you're just here to take in the scenery.

zoraal ja spends his whole life aspiring to be thought of as his father's equal and a worthy successor to the dawnservant as the "resilient son." all it takes for gulool ja ja to acknowledge you as a warrior on his level is like a five minute sparring match. the acknowledgement from gulool ja ja that zoraal ja hungered for his whole life and would eventually go full cyborg supervillain to get via regicide is something the warrior of light receives casually in a throwaway line after their level 93 solo duty on the way to more important plot conversations.

it really seems for a second, in the first half of dawntrail, like you are strong enough and the problems simple enough for this to be a clean and easy adventure. bakool ja ja? power of friendship'd. mamook? successfully reintegrated, no worries about the crimes against humanity. rite of succession? handily won. nothing can stop you. even duty finder queue times have been conquered: you can do all your duties with trusts now.

all of which only makes it better when the second half has sphene ask you and wuk lamat directly: could your strength have been enough to save alexandria? could you have found a different way?

i know some people get very annoyed we don't intervene in the gulool ja ja fight. now personally i think if you see arthur and mordred squaring up it's rude to intervene, but beyond that, it simply wouldn't have mattered. by the time zoraal ja's forces arrived in tuliyollal, alexandria and tural were already on a collision course and doomed to conflict. your hands alone could never have averted this conflict. sphene was always bound to do what she did—and certainly a gulool ja ja without his reason would not be any more inclined to peace than wuk lamat and koana were.

there's a great little moment just before living memory where estinien, champion at reading the room, is like "okay so if thancred and i stay here that frees up you up, aibou, to do what you do best and save the world and have epic fights. woo!!!" and immediately afterwards you basically have to apologize to alisaie because part of the sort of unspoken premise of this whole trip in the first place was that you were, finally, not going to plunge into mortal peril to save the world. you were finally going to take it easy. you were finally done with that. and she has to sort of ruefully be like nah it's fine bro. i was trying to get you to take it easy and not do insane risky world-saving violence. but y'know these things (interdimensional invasions) happen.

by the time you reach the very last trial, all pretense that the warrior of light could have ever been beyond these problems has vanished. you were, very emphatically, not strong enough to hold onto all that was dear without sacrifice. gulool ja and otis and cahciua died. yyasulani was irreversibly changed, physically colonized and culturally decimated by another dimension. you systematically shut down each part of living memory, and all its friendly, charming, loving ghosts, with your own hands. with your own clicks.

not even the vaunted strength of the warrior of light is enough to overcome sphene's inexorable logic of conflict. and so, in the end, she plucks you out of the crowd and says, explicitly for reasons of your strength, that you are going to have to do a boss fight now. you are going to have to kill her and you are going to have to do it in a proper 8-on-1 trial, and she forces you to affirmatively state that you understand you're going to kill her.

did you think you were above it all? did you think you could get away from here with your weapon undrawn, with your hands clean? that for you and you alone the logic of conflict comes undone? wrong. wrong. wrong.

your strength cannot redeem you, says sphene. your friends cannot make these sacrifices for you. if you would play the hero then you must play the hero. no half-measures.

back to the duty finder with ye.

[icarusavery]

[icarusavery]

Community reference aaaay

[icarusavery]

I have nothing against trans girl headcanon stuff where people are like "this character would dress and present exactly the same as they did pretransition" but its always applied to characters it absolutely would not apply to

[icarusavery]

So I have this headcanon about Larry...

[icarusavery]

I mean this in the gentlest way possible but you all have got to stop calling characters in their early 30s "middle-aged."

[icarusavery]

we all know pokemon was made by an autistic person but consider the idea that it was made for autistic people as well:

1. absolutely nothing in the entire game requires dexterity or quick reaction time. you can beat the game with no problems even if you have the reaction time of a shuckle

2. game mechanics based on categorization, things placed neatly into categories that are easy to memorize

3. there are multiplayer elements but the game itself? completely single player. no social interaction required to enjoy the hell out of this game

4. you are not only encouraged but expected to have empathy for and form an attachment to these virtual creatures that do not actually exist, which is very easy for an autistic person with hyperempathy to do

5. the whole point of the game is collecting things. autistics will understand this one

[icarusavery]

fallen london is funny because it leads to the wildest phrases ever. things I have said or heard said in fallen london discord (mainly bone market) conversations:

amphibians are basically an ape with a multiplier

i'm six birds away from a worm

it's better then grinding orphans nowadays, at the very least

Even with 4 milkings per day that's still less than 1 oil per week. meanwhile, we'll probably average at over 2 Popes per week

Im gonna probably try to breed him into the owl

the bees aren't consenting

having arms is generally kind of bad yes, there's a lot of incentives against using them

All in all, very good if somewhat card-dependent. The Pope's still got it!

I just don't love how when I'm doing my weekly firing of the tentacled entrepeneur she gets a little racist about it

Some rivers snake, this one IS snakes

i need to get more poop for my railway

I want to conflagrate a bunch first cause I heard that helps

[icarusavery]

Honey B Lovely'd

[icarusavery]

and that’s an Onix Fact™️!

[icarusavery]

beta server stress test going on so we are now the beatles

[icarusavery]

They're not just assholes, they're stupid assholes, too!

this guy in my ffxiv guild befriended a woman also in the guild and started being a creep after he saw what she looked like, she was highly weirded out by this so she pulled the "you know im trans, right" card to try to get him off her back

and this dude backpedaled so hard because of his fear of being attracted to a trans woman that he left the guild with all his little buddies and made an anti woke guild LOL

[icarusavery]

BDSM gets a bad rep as like a violent (male) dom pushing the boundaries of a reluctant (female) sub but in my experience it's a lot of subs with wildly elaborate fantasies screaming shit like "PUT MY ASS IN THE CHILI" while a new dom is like "Okay I think, we are reaching yellow for me,"

[icarusavery]

💍

[icarusavery]

The Third Promise