some-triangles

[some-triangles]

Spaghettification

[some-triangles]

This book delivers the "young hero goes to magic school" experience, but the magic school is a women-only boot camp in the woods, and most of the other kids there didn't have a choice about joining up. So we're grappling with feminism and gender and community building (and race and sexuality and also land reform?), but the plot of a pretty standard wizard kid YA novel is happening at the same time. It's a lot.

[some-triangles]

follow up to my vivian james comic from 2023. local c-list internet personality copes badly with being pwned online.

[some-triangles]

Zack Sabre Jr wins the 2023 PWA Colosseum Tournament

[some-triangles]

Warning: Deltarune

On the one hand I'm sad that the dark fountain in the church didn't bring us Religion! in the same way we got TV! and The Internet! and um Board Games! in the previous chapters. I thought a steadily more aggro take on various opiates of the masses would be the natural progression, but no, church is where we get to think about predestination instead. There's a pretty strong narrative excuse for this, though.

GAME THEORY:

In chapter 4 we learn that anyone with a knife can make a dark world, and that the worlds made reflect the people who make them. Kris is definitely the author of chapter 3, and I think for thematic reasons (kings and queens who don't get along being a big one) they're the author of chapters 1 and 2 as well. This is why those adventures are all silly and teenage-cynical and full of pranks. We get two takes on Chapter 4, one of which is by Susie, who spends a lot of her time in charge making fun of nerds who think they're smart. The other author has a much more serious take on religion, as befits someone whose entire life is themed around said religion's one and only holiday. (She also includes a lot of theming around music and sound, as befits a musician.) She's the roaring knight, an impossibly cool girl named December, so cool she froze to death a while ago. It was probably Kris' fault in some way. December's mom has made a deal with Kris to try to bring her back from the dead using the dark fountains, but in the meantime she's flying around down there in the magic world being a witch.

Unfortunately there's this whole prophecy which says she can't come back from the dead. The prophecy is the basis of both the adventure and the light world's actual bible, which is completely bonkers as a narrative choice - if we're going to break the prophecy we're going to have to attack and dethrone god, essentially. The good ending is going to have to involve some crazy nonsense which allows magic to exist without destroying the ability of the reader to give a shit about what is happening. Have I mentioned that Chapter 4 is full of Homestuck references? Homestuck hangs over this thing, and so does Umineko. Ralsei is Sakutarou, it turns out. Susie is going to be Maria and will break the world if he can't be real.

BUT IS IT GOOD:

There are many things that I liked about Chapters 3 and Four of Deltarune, a Game by Toby Fox. As usual, the light world segments were outstanding. The sequence where you have to fly your soul through the HVAC system at the Holiday mansion while Kris swats at you with a hockey stick, all while Girl Date is occurring, is gaming at its finest. Crawling back home after killing a chaos god to find that Sans Undertale has gotten your mom wine drunk and they will not stop playing The Jazz on the victrola nearly destroyed me.

Also it turns out that Susie is the hero of the story. (Kris, of course, is the audience surrogate.) I should have known this when she refused the call way back in Chapter 1. If you want to beat the Chapter 3 secret boss (which I have not done yet and may not ever - more on that below) you better be outfitting her in all the best gear, because she's the one carrying both the fight and the narrative. In chapter 4 she even gains a mentor figure and then has to physically and symbolically best him. She's learning from her friends and growing and she's the one with the primary love interest and it is going to destroy her when she figures out that Kris is as fictional as Ralsei. Tragedy awaits! I'm putting this here because doing Hero's Journey in a way that's fun and surprising and doesn't overpower the narrative is really rare and deserves praise.

NONETHELESS:

Most of the actual video game here still involves running down long empty corridors dodging things and occasionally solving easy puzzles. You get one gimmick per chapter. The gimmick of Ch. 3 is fine, if you like Zelda 1 and/or edgy flash games heavily indebted to Zelda 1. The gimmick of Ch. 4 is climbing. There's so much fucking climbing.

Chapter 2 is still the most successful part of Deltarune because Queen is in it and that means jokes jokes jokes to distract you from the sameness of it all. The story is getting more serious now, so we can't do that anymore. The villain of Chapter 3 is a less-compelling retread of Spamton who wears out his sweaty welcome far before you're through with him, and this is intentional, and thematically consistent, but it sucks. We are successfully capturing the feeling of too much screen time, vapid serotonin sickness. This is unfortunately not a fun thing to experience.

SPEAKING OF FUN

Whether game should be "fun" or not is of course a long-standing thematic debate in Dental Rue as a whole. I have said before that if the point of the genocide route in Undertale was to punish players who chose it, Toby shouldn't have put such a fun boss fight at the end, where you get to listen to Classic of Video Game Music while you work away at the bones; as a result of this I believe that Undertale taken as a whole is not as morally didactic as people make it out to be. Whether this was on purpose or not is another question, but Deltarune may have some answers.

The chapter 4 secret boss is easy to find, fun to fight and has a remix of an old favorite tune to listen to while you learn. It encourages Susie (firmly the main character by this point) to use her healing magic, and lets you notice that it gets stronger every time she uses it. All the while, Gerson is talking to you about the philosophy of storytelling, and invites you to think about what it all means. Deltarune asks: is there a good kind of leveling up? (Deltarune also asks: what if there was a guy who was devoured by his own story but a young, bright-eyed disciple came along to finish the work the old master couldn't? Let's call this old author Andrew H.)

Chapter 3 is a different story. The roaring knight fight is not fun. The music is ugly, the space is cramped, the hitboxes unfair. You can't save and come back to it without going through the entire tedious TV minigame battle again. You have to do things that feel squirmy and morally questionable to get there at all, and it's a sequence break, which may or may not be a sin in this universe. Is this part of the Snowgrave route? Are you only supposed to get some of the dark shards? Are there good and bad ways of playing video game???

Only time will tell. Chapter five is supposed to come out next year, which suggests we may get all the answers before I hit retirement age, unless Toby's hubris in re: finishing the story gets the better of him. Deltarune remains an infuriatingly uneven yet completely unique and constantly surprising experience. I renew my pledge to live long enough to play the rest of it.

[some-triangles]

Happy 24-6-01!

[some-triangles]

my little green painting, 2024

[some-triangles]

"passive egression" Rough anim loop

[some-triangles]

This one's not even SFF, probably. At least two of the people I forced to read it developed migraines. Beware the color yellow. But if you're the kind of person who thinks the revolution ought to include universal basic sachertorte, do I have a treat for you.

[some-triangles]

Spare Everhood 2 thought: it is implied that some of the characters are based on dolls/toys and that a child was formerly in charge of telling the story. Everhood storytelling does feel like play pretend, and Everhood 2 feels like play pretend gone sour, when you're reaching the limits of what being the absolute GOD of hyperdeath can do for you, emotionally, and maybe it's time to put aside childish things. The punchline may be that all this adolescent fretting over death and identity might be less interesting than a single interaction between two properly developed characters - imagine, if one person's subjectivity is this dense, what if they collided

[some-triangles]

Funny thing:

Game called Everhood came out in 2021. Clearly Undertale-influenced. Lo-fi surrealistic gamemaker styles, but instead of bullet hell combat, you get rhythm game combat - and instead of deconstructed JRPG tropes, we're doing psychedelic euro-buddhism.

Spoilers follow.

As befits psychedelic euro-buddhism the goal of Everhood is the extinction of the self. Every character in the game is trapped in samsara. You get through the game world and meet all the characters, who are charming enough, but it turns out they're all immortal and stuck in limbo (the hood) forever (ever.) Your quest turns out to be to kill them all and turn out the lights on your way out. It's clear that this is the humane option. There are alternative endings which allow you to avoid this but they aren't good endings.

So: good game, popular. People enjoy it. Because the developers are humans who live in capitalism, they crowdfund a sequel. But because they're artists, they ask themselves: how do you make a sequel to a game where the point is to end the game? And the answer, ingeniously, is to make a game which doesn't end.

Everhood 2 is the failure state of Everhood. It's what happens after the endings where you weaseled out of killing everyone. Everhood was rangy but it had a plot and a structure and characters, more or less. Everhood 2 is just a giant bucket of slop. You keep going and going and going and you transcend this and you overcome that and you defeat your demons and you individuate (this game is so contemptuous of individuation) and you go and meet god and then you go and meet god again and finally you go meet the real god, we promise this time, and, no. The end is you get thrown back to some arbitrary point earlier in the narrative. The ending achievement (which you get like five times in a row) says that it never ends in Everhood. And, in a brilliant move, there's a breadcrumb trail to a secret ending (it mirrors the trail you get in the original Everhood!) and it leads exactly nowhere. The only thing it ends up giving you is a hint: you need to lose. The good ending is you quit. (And you have to quit twice, every time. It doesn't let you leave unless you really mean it.)

Maybe there really is a secret ending stuck in there somewhere; the game is so shaggy and unfocused that there are a million places a path could branch off. I won't be looking for it because I can feel the gnomes laughing at me. As a person of Homestuck experience I sense those "if you got the point of this story you wouldn't still be reading it, asshole" vibes. "And yet you still have my money," I say to the gnomes, proving their point.

[some-triangles]

[some-triangles]

i had my “badly controlled ps2 game in which Bart tries to save a Lisa locked in their pastel and cushioned basement by collecting red coins/rings/etc under an impossible time limit (and it’s a water level)” dream again… yes, i failed this time, too.

[some-triangles]

[some-triangles]

The group chat of J Alfred Prufrock

The .XLSX of J Alfred Prufrock

[some-triangles]

[some-triangles]

what is proshipping?

Answered here.

There is presumably a reason people are asking me these questions. Some post or other. One that escaped containment I guess. I no longer remember. I post and then the post is gone. The stone vanishes and I read the ripples in the pond.