maeve-is-annoying-about-books

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Overwhelmingly bemused that they made Carl Morck into God's Wettest Little Kitten and then surrounded him with people who could make him look like a dry dog. The man is survivor's guilt personified.

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all hush house librarians know how to do is read books, cook food, dip candles, garden, make inks and paints, play instruments, break curses, cure corruption, beekeep, raise chickens, swim in the ocean, pet beasties, do occult rituals, pay people to do their laundry and lie

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Look at this adorable Lesser noctule!!!

Nyctalus leisleri is a species of insectivorous bat belonging to the vesper bat family, Verspertilionidae.

[picture taken by me :) ]

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hmm

dragonflies. haunting implications:

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Aeromachina got an update so I guess my post can get one too. As a special treat.

I can now JUMP ANYTIME IN A BOOST. Instantly, Bogey's aerial capabilities have gained a ton of smoothness in the fine control. It's pretty fun hitting the boost right-off and bunny hopping to keep up the momentum. Love the speedometer in general and now I super love it just for keeping track of my hops. I don't know how I feel about the loss of "runway time" though. Needing to fulfill the full boost length before a jump. I feel a bit bad for the level designers because it's a clear limitation on gaining glide speed, which is an easy element to add to add platforming puzzle variety. Also, there's some loss of flavor with the runway effect of the original boost.

However.

Holy shit it is so fun to boost around and glide from anything. You have so much movement and using all of it is satisfying and agile, not to mention the added dimensionality that you get from allowing glides in midair.

I didn't mention it last time, but fighting the boss is a great deal of fun when you master aerial movement. I really felt like I was dogfighting as Bogey, and my aerial juggling skills greatly improved. I love the simpler controls and combos for it, too, because it allows me to focus on making the necessary movements around my foe and what tells they give me. Love that I can't cheese a boss by shooting it forever, too. Bullets are an important resource now, instead of baseline filler.

Also I DID fight those damn aerial enemies before the nerf. Where's my t-shirt, devs?

I really love this game, I'm eager to see it through.

The demo for Aeromachina really took off with me. I don't know what it is, maybe the way the enemies explode into fruit gummy crystals you can hoover up or the cute plane gijinka you play as. Something about it really tickles the Mega Man Legends part of my brain and I'm shocked that more devs haven't gone for that game's vibe like this one has. Like, the old abandoned places, the comms from your operators. Delving for treasures. If they add in Zenny crystals (if money and shops is a mechanic they deign to do, not every game needs one) then it's just dopamine city. The way digging was in MML.

I'm really liking Bogey's physics. The glide feels right, the dash is well-spaced for the knockback your attacks can do. The double jump has it's own feel to it that isn't every double jump ever. There's part of me that's wishing I could jump immediately after dashing. But at the same time I can respect the design choice of an airplane needing some runway to get going. Like, it's thematic, it's got a bit of clunk and sometimes clunk is a mood. It's a weight you can feel in the world.

Bogey is really cute. I cannot stress that part enough. Having his main weapon be a fucking propeller is cute.

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[maeve-is-annoying-about-books]

The demo for Aeromachina really took off with me. I don't know what it is, maybe the way the enemies explode into fruit gummy crystals you can hoover up or the cute plane gijinka you play as. Something about it really tickles the Mega Man Legends part of my brain and I'm shocked that more devs haven't gone for that game's vibe like this one has. Like, the old abandoned places, the comms from your operators. Delving for treasures. If they add in Zenny crystals (if money and shops is a mechanic they deign to do, not every game needs one) then it's just dopamine city. The way digging was in MML.

I'm really liking Bogey's physics. The glide feels right, the dash is well-spaced for the knockback your attacks can do. The double jump has it's own feel to it that isn't every double jump ever. There's part of me that's wishing I could jump immediately after dashing. But at the same time I can respect the design choice of an airplane needing some runway to get going. Like, it's thematic, it's got a bit of clunk and sometimes clunk is a mood. It's a weight you can feel in the world.

Bogey is really cute. I cannot stress that part enough. Having his main weapon be a fucking propeller is cute.

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Book of Hours is an utterly hilarious videogame, when you think about what the mechanics actually mean in-universe.

You are a librarian! You have taken on management of a Mystical House full of secrets, which you must slowly reveal room by room. But! A catastrophe struck before your arrival, so you gotta clear the rooms out as you go.

Except you're just one person, you gotta go get your neighbors to help out.

Most of the people will charge me money to help out, but the towns blacksmith, my old war-buddy Denzel, he'll help for free.

"Denzeeel!" I pound on his doorway at the break of dawn. "Come up to the big spooky house, why don't you?"

He comes to the house. And I show him the best time. We drink a smoky tea, feast upon rare pears that only bloom in the fae seasons, I gift him some metal and encourage him to look at it's cool magic properties. Dawn to morning to afternoon, we have a wonderful time. And then, as the day grows dark and he's thinking about heading home, I stop him.

"before you go, can you do me a quick favor?" And then I walk them into the basement, through some caves, and point to a room with roughly one billion bats.

"you can clear out roughly a billion bats, right? I really need to get in there."

And then my sweet, long-suffering friend goes into the room filled with roughly a billion bats to clear it out for me. Good man, I think fondly, as he stumbles home to his smithy after.

And then, as night turns to morning, I contemplate the next room, deep in the library's secret prison, burning with an eternal flame of the monstrous prisoner that broke his chains.

"you know who can help me handle this?" I say cheerfully as my skin reddens and cracks as I reach my hand toward the door. "My good friend Denzel!"

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armadillo on a pillow

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how much butter ends up on my english muffin on any given day is a secret only god knows the answer to

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It’s frustrating when your body can’t handle the amount of activity you want or need to do- and I’m not talking about exercise, I’m talking about activities as in the things you do everyday: showering, hobbies, work school, chores, hanging out with friends, watching tv, etc. Now just imagine not being able to do all of those things, even if you absolutely need to, imagine having to pick and choose every single day what you can do, and what is worth pushing past your symptoms for. Will I shower or do the dishes today? Cook dinner or do a hobby I haven’t been able to get to in a week? Rest or ignore the symptoms knowing I will feel worse later if I do so? It may seem like a silly, inconvenient, even stupid way of doing things to you, but to me this is my everyday life, if I do not make these wagers I will suffer for it, and oftentimes I will still suffer for it despite these sacrifices and my best efforts.

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Y'know, playing pokemon crystal again has really reintroduced me to the "joy of being mildly inconvenienced".

Like if I want a Jynx, for example, I specifically have to sit down and my little brain has to get on its hamster wheel for a moment and go, "yeah alright but they only appear outside normal play time. Do we have a spare thirty minutes somewhere to catch one real quick?" Then I go and do it when I have the opening. It's really nice, actually. Or when I want to gather berries. I can't go to the berry farm so now I have to make a time of it, cycling across Johto to gather stuff and make sure I have room in my pack for it all. The little apprehension created by apprehension then makes completing it a bit more rewarding.

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My circadian rhythm was honed by getting shot awake at midnight by TANK!! blaring over the speakers. The way god intended it to be.

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a MASSIVE amount of manga series (at least 140, and still counting) just got nuked from MangaDex from DMCA.

some of them have no official english availability.

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Nothing will ever fill me with vitriol faster than someone not understanding a very basic and easy-to-infer term, and then "correcting" me with a close-but-critically wrong one like they're my second grade teacher.

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AKIRA

I finally watched Akira.

Holy fuck what an absolute master class of writing and animation. Especially animation. Everything is animated, so many details in so many little scenes, and I can see where several famous shot techniques have found use across animation in general. I could go on, I really could. Production must've taken an age and a serious toll, but as a result I can count the number of "low effort" scenes on my hand instead of the "high effort" ones. But the story.

The story is something really special. On the face of it, what I most see is a story about the old adage "A child not embraced by the village will burn it just to feel its warmth." We see Tetsuo, the runt of his group with a huge chip on his shoulder, and what power does to him. What he does when he actually can pick the city by the shoulders and shake.

In that same breath, it's a story about the next generation in general. And our worries about them. The esper children are, to my understanding, kept as children medically. Because the one to grow was Akira, and Akira... Well. What really gets me is it's almost as if the previous generation is desperate to see these espers as children. For them to remain this way until the elders are finally "ready" for them. The insistence that to have their way would risk everything we had built and yet relying on them to keep the status quo regardless. They're tools. They're kids. They're adults.

No wonder Tetsuo, a teenager, is a problem. Not only in personal reasoning with his complexes about being the inferior to Kaneda, but in narrative meaning as well. He, as a next stage of humanity, has firmly stepped from being a safe and impressionable child to a teen. The period of life in which we begin to develop our opinions and begin to cement our worldviews. The newer generation often clashing with the elder.

It's why Kaneda, this random biker gang kid, is so prevalent. He's on the same wavelength as Tetsuo in ways that the adults and esper children can never really be. Out of anyone in the entire movie, he's the only one that emotionally understands him by the end. A viewpoint no one else has but the viewer and a vital one to understanding the side of Tetsuo that is human, still. Even when he's melting into a flesh monster.

Akira, the movie, is about the anxiety of what comes next. That why it's cyberpunk, rather than starting with the setting it really feels as though the setting was inspired by the story they wished to tell. Of course it's the near future, it's the most worrying one. Technology is present, it's our last desperate leap to keep up with what's coming next. Of course there's grime and unrest, this place is done for. Let's make a new one already. Or more accurately, let's have Akira do it for us.

But it doesn't solve the problems of "normal" humans. I think a part of the melancholy of Akira is the realization that, by months, years, or decades, if there ever were a new wave of human or societal evolution, there are entire generations that will not be a part of it. Kaneda might be of a similar age but Tetsuo is the younger. And so Kaneda must stay a mundane human while his friend goes on to forge a universe with his esper peers. The Colonel must live with the fallout in the city he cares for. So many have to live on in mundanity after witnessing a miracle and watching their future as a species come to some ultimate fruition. You made it. It was terrible and beautiful. Now how do we live beyond it, knowing we weren't "picked"? Imagine, for example, that superpowers suddenly became real in the next generation. How would you even begin to handle that as a bystander, let alone parent, teacher, or older sibling? Would you be jealous it had just missed you, or glad it happened at all?

This is to say nothing of how incredibly the writing handles all its characters, keeping to mind the scope they engage with and see the world through rather than them all having the same worldview in different circumstances.

What an utterly inspired movie, honestly.

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