#But implementing them would improve so many things and systems

[a-very-tired-jew]

So I've seen a few of my mutuals clutching their pearls over the UHC shooter being praised, others cheering him on, and some cheering him on reluctantly. While nobody asked for it, I'm going to give my input as a forensic specialist and consultant.

We have a multi tiered judicial system that splits things into "price points". If you're in certain tax brackets you get tried a certain way. If you're a corporation, CEO of a big corporation, or a board member / officer then you also get special treatment as well.

(In fact, one of the best recent representations of this is the trial scene from the new season of Helluva Boss where Solas is not executed when taking responsibility for the crime Blitz is accused of when Blitz was going to be executed for it.)

We then split all of this into what we call "blue collar" and "white collar" crime. White collar crime does more damage to people than what we classify as blue collar crime.

The latter is what we make television shows and podcasts out of, the former is maybe touched upon in a legal or financial drama.

The latter involves people who fall in the realm of Ed Gein who maybe kill into the double digits, the former involves people who make decisions that harm and/or kill into the hundreds if not thousands.

The latter involves robberies and assaults, the latter involves people going into debt because of a corporate decision and maybe committing suicide because they can't pay it off.

The latter involves vandalism of a building, the former involves a company being slapped with a fine because they polluted an entire area and now the residents have to deal with life altering and damaging health issues.

In my time as a forensic consultant I have worked cases that would fit into Hannibal very easily. So have my colleagues. It's not uncommon for us to encounter something at a crime scene that we would call ontologically evil because it is absolutely horrific to witness. I've been on a few cases where I would definitely classify the perpetrator of the crime as such.

But considering all of that... I would still say the worst crimes are committed by corporations and their leadership because they do so much more damage. They harm so many more people and our legal system is not set up for that.

It's set up to handle the murder, the robbery, and so on. It's set up so that people can receive justice for very immediate and visceral crimes. It's punitive and handles the individual.

It was barely set up to handle something like Love Canal.

It's definitely not set up to measure and act upon the scale of harm that corporations and their leadership impart upon the average citizen through exploiting loopholes in regulations, committing actual criminal behavior, and other unethical acts that simply result in a fine. It doesn't know how to prosecute a company and its leadership for causing lifelong harm to people.

We are still using criminological theory from the 18th century as the basis for a lot of our criminal justice system. So you can understand why it's not set up to handle white collar crime that would impact whole populations.

I personally can't recall any conversation with a colleague where we discussed a CEO or board members actually being charged with something that encapsulated the harm they did to people. It's always some form of fraud or embezzlement, because money matters more.

That's the issue. Those charges usually result in a fine which can easily be paid off and then they're back to it. Maybe they get fired, maybe the company is dissolved, but rarely do we get a Bernie Madoff like ending. Even then, the charge against Madoff was for the ponzi scheme he was running. A financial crime.

And that's the crux of it all. We are all witness to the privileges given to certain tax brackets here in the USA. The blatant corruption, bending of ethics and morals, and exploitation of legal and regulatory loopholes with no real recourse. I'm not surprised something like this happened. I'm shocked that it didn't happen sooner to be honest. Yes, we can change the system in some instances. But in others? You're naive. Completely and utterly. Remember my post about the ghost gun and how the NRA controls firearm research in this country and threatens careers? That's been since the 90s. That's 30ish years. You sound just like the grad student who comes in with big ideas who thinks they can change the system and we all look at you and go "good luck kid, but here's all our attempts, our continuing attempts, and the threats we've gotten." It's a been there, done that situation that only changes when the powers that be actually feel that they're no longer untouchable and under threat. It's the way it has always been (I even have some examples in entomology like this I can throw out there as well).

Now, I'm not saying we should go full Robespierre and drag every CEO out to the guillotine. I'm not an accelerationist or maximalist by any account. But I'm not crying over this at all, nor am I shaming anyone who is cheerfully celebrating. Hell, many of us recently celebrated the death of leaders whose crimes would fall into the blue collar category (and you should be able to understand the impact of both and how bad both things are).

But our legal system needs a complete and utter overhaul to handle white collar crime that happens in the modern era and address the very real harm that these companies and leadership do. I would love to see actual legal repercussions for these companies and have them held accountable for the harm they've done. But I realistically don't think that will happen in my life time, and neither do a lot of others. Hence why something like this did happen, and will likely happen again.

[wip]

A very very minor thing I have been curious about for a while, and I'm finally asking: why do you calculate queue posting times the way you do? For example, if I set my queue to post 3x a day, naively I would expect it to post every 8 hours. But in reality it posts every 6 hours with a 12 hour gap between days. Why complicate the math like that?

Answer: Hello @circumference-pie!

Buckle up y’all, it’s story time again!

First: nobody who works at Tumblr right now was a part of the work of planning the default queue implementation, which was more than ten years ago. So the full story behind “Why does it work that way?” has unfortunately been lost to the sands of time. All we can do is tell you how it works today and surmise some reasons why. The queue is actually a very clever system and part of how it works explains some of why it works the way it does. Also, there have been attempts to do what you ask—we still have “Queue 2.0” available in your Tumblr Labs settings, which tries to get closer to how you expect things to work.

Anyway! How the queue works today is not actually a queue in the traditional sense. There is no single list of posts that are in “your queue”. Instead, when you “Add to queue” after creating a post, we’re actually scheduling it to post at a future time, as if you had used the “Schedule post” option instead. We’re just calculating that time on your behalf when you use “Add to queue”, based on your settings, and how many other scheduled posts you have already. We use a secondary “index” model, called “ScheduledPost”, to keep track of posts you have scheduled on your blog. We do mark the ones that are a part of “your queue”, but the data model doesn’t keep one list of your “queue” per se.

You can see this in action on your blog, hiding in plain sight. If you add a bunch of posts to your queue, and then schedule a post for a specific future date, you’ll see both in your blog’s “queue” list, side by side. Because technically to us, they’re the same thing: queued posts are really just another kind of scheduled post, relying on the same always-running service to publish scheduled posts across all of Tumblr. Here’s a fun fact: we typically have about ~14.5 million future posts to publish from this list at any given time and are publishing hundreds of these scheduled posts every second.

So when you’re adding a new post to your queue, what we’re doing behind the scenes is starting at the beginning of your “day”, and creating time slots based on your queue settings. If a time slot is already filled, we move on to the next one. That’s why the default queue scheduler works how you describe—we’re trying to fill those “slots” based on the start of the day, rather than trying to divide the calendar day evenly. This just makes it much simpler for us to understand, scale, and predict when our “peaks” will be. At peak times, the publish-scheduled-posts service is publishing tens of thousands of posts in a manner of seconds. We did rewrite that post-publishing part of this architecture a few years ago to improve its efficiency and solve a lot of “lost post” bugs, but we didn’t change how “Add to queue” works.

However, the Queue 2.0 project available in Labs was an attempt to change the queue system to work as you expect—instead of starting at [beginning of day] and creating enough slots to fit [number of slots] every [number of hours], it tries to divide the calendar day into [number of slots] and fit the result back to the original algorithm’s mapping of the day. We never productionized this alternative approach, because it has a few bugs that some blogs hit in extreme cases, and we’ve never had time to fully fix them. It also can cause a bit of weirdness when time zones diverge, like with daylight savings time. Also, a lot of people prefer the default algorithm, and we haven’t thought of a nice way to transition everyone from one to the other. So for now, both options exist, and you can choose which algorithm for queue-slot-generating you want to use. We hope that makes sense! 

While complicated, it is a great example of a system built by engineers to make sense and be scalable and predictable. But sometimes these kinds of systems, while clever, aren’t very intuitive to understand without digging into how they work.

Thanks for your question, and keep ’em coming. 

[gr0undswell]

reading a former bethesda employee (Jean Simonet)'s blog and i thought these two entries were really cool :-) it's nice to be reminded of the work that goes into systems that most players would never think twice about and i think the pride and enthusiasm with which he speaks of it is really endearing!

"I joined Bethesda about two thirds of the way through the development of Oblivion. Not long enough to have an entire system to my name, but enough to have had a small, visible impact.

I implemented various minor AI features for the game, but the one thing that really stood out was that I gave the characters 'shifty eyes' !

The characters in Oblivion would already look at you when you talked to them, and sometimes blink, but never look away. It was creepy. I was asked to add a little bit or randomness in the eyes, and so I took the opportunity to tie their eye movement to their disposition.

If a character was happy, I would animate their eyes up slightly and of course down when sad. When angry I would give them really fast saccades. When scared, they would look left and right. All very simple stuff, especially by today's standards, but it added a tremendous amount of life to the NPCs."

"Skyrim is probably the game I enjoyed working on the most at Bethesda. Not only because it was the first Elder Scrolls game I worked on from beginning to end, but because it was the one where I had the most opportunity to add my own touch.

Along with significantly improving the Pathfinding system I had begun work on for Fallout 3 (including a complete overhaul of how it interacted with the animation system, or how it handled quadrupeds), I was able to add a completely new aspect to the game itself, namely the critter system.

Butterflies, Dragonflies or fish weren't supposed to be in the game, or if they were going to be, they would simply be animated meshes, because the actor system of the game couldn't support that many new intractable entities in the world.

I created a small actor system that relied almost entirely on scripting for lightweight processing. This way, butterflies to would have their own (extremely simple) AI and interact with the world, landing on objects, running away from the player, etc... all under the control of designers and artists. By removing the hurdle of needing programmer time to add new behaviors, the critter system spread like wildfire and pretty quickly every world artist in the company was adding small animals to the world."

[sk-lumen]

High Value Woman Formula: The 4 Key Pillars

Are you passionate about leveling up, but find yourself daunted by the overwhelming list on how to become a high value woman?

Don’t fret, you’re probably not the only one! It may sound complicated at first glance, but when you truly understand what it’s about, the high value woman formula is… quite simple.

In this article, I will show you an easy and concise roadmap to becoming the woman of your own dreams.

Let’s get started.

Pillar #1: Body

Much like Maslow’s pyramid, in order to have a mind that is clear, a heart that is at peace, and a soul that is fulfilled, you need to first attend to your basic physical needs (and not only).

Getting enough hours of sleep

A healthy diet

Fitness & exercise

Haircare

Nails

Skin

Dental health

Make-up

Pillar #2: Mind

Next ingredient in the high value woman formula is polishing your mind.

Upgrading your looks and physical health is great, but if you don’t follow it up with a mindset glow up, you’ll find yourself repeating the same mistakes, and bumping into the same limiting beliefs and bad habits.

Planning goals and keeping track of them

Improving your mindset / develop a growth mindset

Confidence

Embrace failure

Reading extensively to broaden your mind and your education (includes financial education)

Courses, trainings and masterclasses

Listening to podcasts

Watching TedTalks or insightful documentaries (if you’re curious about my recs for TedTalks/documentaries, let me know in comments below)

Pillar #3: Heart

So you’ve leveled up your appearance, improved your mind, now what? Now it’s all about your heart and your emotions. Think about all the things that nurture your emotional dimension and makes you feel appreciated, seen and heard!

Building a support system (friends, family, therapy)

Therapy

Healing your attachment style

Journaling

Self Love

Setting boundaries

Being your authentic self

Speaking your truth

Embracing your journey

Feeling & processing your emotions

Pillar #4: Soul

Last but not least, I’m a spiritual woman, and these are my personal beliefs which some may or may not resonate with. If that’s the case and you’re happy with just the 3 first pillars, that’s perfectly valid and you can skip this section.

But I do believe you have to take care of your soul. You can have the looks, the money and your self-concept in line, but you might still feel empty, unfulfilled, like something is missing from your life… if you ignore the spiritual aspect.

For the girlies that need a deeper connection to the divine, to God, the universe, here are a few action steps.

Joining a community that resonates with you

Prayer

Yoga

Meditation

Various spiritual practices that align with your beliefs

Detoxing from social media, toxic people or environments

Conclusion

What do you think about this list, did you find it helpful? Are there any essentials you’d add to the list? Let me know in the comments below.

This is a topic I believe many women (and not only) would benefit from, and I’m passionate about helping my readers become their best selves.

So, I’m currently working on an in-depth guide that expands on this topic/article, complete with practical steps you can implement in your daily life, in order to become a High Value Woman.

💖 If you want to be the first to hear about the HVW ebook's launch make sure to join my Soultribe! 💖

🎀 More glow up articles and guides on sklumen.com 🎀

[talenlee]

3e: Magical Rings

Rings. Simple circles of metal, worn on the fingers or toes or sometimes in the ears, these delicate pieces of human artistry are some of the earliest examples of creative expression we know can last beyond our lives, and therefore, serve as some of the most iconic examples of the way we use our signifiers to craft narratives of our lives. The promise ring, the engagement ring, the wedding ring, which are of course, all the same thing but companies want us to gild that lily forever, rings serve as a circle present in so many stories to symbolise a bonding, a binding, an eternity that we commit to in our lives and that we can only hold up as long as we continue to believe in that which the ring symbolises. Every ring can be called a ring of power, because it is the belief in stories we imbue in the ring that serves to give it that power.

And as any good item with significance, Dungeons & Dragons decided to start jamming a mechanical system onto them.

This is by no means a new thing for 3rd edition D&D; since earliest versions of the game, I’m sure there were people making ‘magical rings’ important on day dot. This is a game for hacks who want to remind you of the cool fantasy books we’ve read and back when the game was brand new, there really were only so many fantasy books that could be considered cool. Unbelievably, people considered Lord of The Rings one of them, yeah, I know, and apparently, they enjoyed those books and implemented their ideas into their own work. Wild, I know. Point is, it wouldn’t surprise me if D&D’s vision of magical rings predate D&D. What 3rd edition brought, in my experience reading the rulebooks, is a sense of acceleration and omnipresence.

The rules around rings in 3rd edition onwards is that you can wear two rings, and those rings will give you some magical benefit or advantage based on what they’re supposed to do. This is where stacking bonuses tend to rear their head for newer players. After all if you have a Ring of Protection that improves your armour by +1, and you have ten fingers, and those rings are cheap, why not buy a few of them, wear them on different fingers and get a lot better armour? The game saw you coming and instead, the rules limit these bonuses by type and also limits you to one ring per hand.

My time with 2e, towards the end, represent the loot cavalcade that was Baldur’s Gate 2, in which the world is lousy with magical gear which is designed to make it possible to approach a reasonably open world of quests. In this case, you wind up with enough magical rings you just start selling them in sacks, to the point where it can honestly not be worth picking them up in the early game because who’s gunna carry that malarkey? I do not want to pretend that 2ed lacked for this situation. Instead I want to describe the way that 3rd edition brought the idea of Unspecial Rings to everywhere. Almost every resource in the game that players got access to would bring new magical items, new feats, new character options to the board, and with that, you’d see some new rings.

When creating new magical items, the game provided a set of rules that described things that magical items could do, and the general family of effects they could have. Weapons, you might not be surprised, were good at making you better at attacking, and did special things when they hit things. Armour increased your defensive stats and made you better at surviving or enduring things. This could have some interesting side effects, some things that were judged on vibes — like, a trident that meant you could breathe underwater while you had it was probably okay, but it was definitely less okay than a suit of armour that gave you a swim speed and also meant you could breathe underwater. These were all put together by a complicatedly designed set of formulas that tried to price effects based on spells and then on the duration or effect of those spells.

What this meant is that knowing the best spells meant you knew the best ways to break these rules in weird outlier ways. An example that came up commonly was the ‘ring of true strike’ design a lot of players would conceive of, where you would make a ring that cast the spell true strike on use (ie, whenever you attacked). The formula for this implied that as a 1st level spell, cast as a 1st level wizard, this should cost 1x1x2000 gp. Since true strike granted you a +20 to hit on the next attack you meant, this item would obviously trivialising hitting things and that’s pretty nuts.

(Please ignore that a wand of true strike was a level 1 item for 750 gp that would give you this effect for 50 attacks, but only if you were a wizard or a character with the appropriate spell on your list.)

Anyway, the math kicked in at this point and looked for the most expensive way to price the effect. This ‘ring of true strike’ was granting a +20 to hit, and that was priced differently to the 1st level spell that gave it to you, meaning that instead of 2,000 gp, it cost you 20x60x2,000 gp, or 2.4 million gp, which is, uh, a lot more than 2,000. This is because to craft a tohit bonus like that, you needed to be 3 times the level of the bonus, meaning that you needed to find a level 60 wizard who had the time to waste on your nonsense.

Point is that things were examined in terms of their effect and their style. Armour did things that weapons didn’t do. Some weapons could improve your armour class but they needed a good flavour for it — like deflecting something, or blocking hits in melee. Staffs could store spells, wands could store spells but wear out, scrolls could store spells but only once, amulets could protect you in some way like improving a saving throw… and rings…

Rings could do anything.

Where most of the magic items have rules in them that make them hard to use in most situations, or gave them specific types of things they were best at replicating, rings could do anything. Permanent spell effects, on-use spell effects, permanent bonuses, a ring could be a real everythingamajig.

This was such a problem because it meant that even low level rings would wind up being useful, handy even to have around. A ring of sustenance turned off your need for food, for good, so you should probably have one of those for long distance travel. It’s real cheap, after all, and all it takes to swap it off is to swap a ring on a finger. A ring of feather falling could be jammed on a finger while you fell if you were falling far enough. And a ring of jumping could be handy for mobility, and none of these things were particularly expensive (by the standards of an adventurer) by the middle of the game.

The really cracked thing though?

These rings were so good and so worth keeping around in a big keyring for handy applications most of the time because they let non-wizards access all the handy utility stuff wizards had all the time from day 1. When a category of magical item is desireable because it lets you replicate something that the wizard can already do for a fraction of the cost – oh hey, there’s that wands conversation all over again! – you may have a problem class in your game.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

[dailyadventureprompts]

The Mechanics of Baldur's Gate 3

As someone who's constantly tinkering with the mechanics of my favourite RPG, I LOVE a lot of what Larian has done with D&D; not only accurately translating the base system but improving upon in ways I never thought of.

Playing BG3 feels good, and I want to see how much of their work I can adapt for my own table. As such, here's a breakdown of a bunch of little tweaks they've made to 5e (taken from the bg3 wiki) and whether or not I think they're a good fit for regular pencil and paper d&d.

Shove is not a part of the attack action. It is a bonus action available to all characters. Shove only pushes the target back an amount that depends on the shover's strength and the target's weight. It normally does not knock them prone unless they are shoved off a high ledge.

This might be THE best design Larian implemented and is instantly going in my games. Bonus action shoving is such a natural addition to combat, gives so many more tactical options. My one protest is that I am NOT calculating the weight of every creature and object ( mainly because I'm terrible at guessing weights for things) so I'd go with the distance calculation based on the creature's size and con score.

Gaining inspiration based on backgrounds

Gee, a mechanical reward for roleplaying your character, one that's way more straight forward than the DM arbitrated "ideals, bonds, flaws," system. From now on I'm going to give each of my players an upfront " You gain inspiration when you ______" note on their character sheet based on their backgrounds.

The party is limited to two short rests per long rest. Short rests restore each ally's hit points by an amount equal to half their maximum HP (rounded down). There is no hit die rolling. Long rests require camp supplies, which are food items that must be looted or purchased. In towns you will be able to rest at an inn.

This is a mixed bag for me only because I like hitdie as a mechanical abstract and I don't want to see them removed. Tbh I wish more mechanics interacted with them and they were called something abstract like "stamina" or something. That said I ADORE the camp supplies idea because it not only gives you something minor to reward exploration with besides GP. On the otherhand tracking all those supplies without the game's inventory management would be tedious as hell so it'd need to be highly simplified.

I especially like the idea of limited short rests/supplies in larger survival based adventures where time isn't at a premium like it is inside a dungeon.

If you hide while not in a creature's sight cone, you automatically succeed. If you try to hide while in a creature's sight cone, you automatically fail. If you are hidden and enter a creature's sight cone, you must roll stealth against the creature's passive perception. This may be a straight roll, advantage, or disadvantage, based on the creature's senses and the level of lighting. Some creatures with different senses such as blindsight may follow different rules

Congrats on fixing stealth rolls Larian. No notes.

LOTS more opinions under the cut.

When a creature is at least 10 ft above their target and makes a ranged attack, they receive a +2 bonus to the attack roll due to high ground. When a creature is at least 10 ft below their target and makes a ranged attack, they receive a -2 penalty to the attack roll due to low ground.

This is fine, and quite inline with a lot of fixes I've seen for flanking rules. I'm fine with a little extra battlefield math in order to make moments of advantage (spending inspiration, reckless attacking etc) shine.

The game does not stop a character from casting a leveled spell with both an action and a bonus action

Mixed on this, on one hand I've played enough clerics to know how much it sucks to have to use your bonus action to do a necessary spell and then be stuck with a so-so cantrip or melee attack for standard. On the other hand there's some design balance issues at play here.

Help is an Action. This ability allows characters to aid an ally in combat and remove negative Conditions. Using the help action on a downed ally brings them back to 1 hit point and leaves them prone.

Love the idea of help doing multiple things AND being a solution to minor status conditions. and giving everyone the ability to help means I can be a lot more aggressive when it comes to knocking character to 0. if I had to further patch this, I'd say that this also allows for a medicine check to allow a creature to spend a hitdie when they're downed, or allows the helping character to make a "SNAP OUT OF IT, WE'RE YOUR FRIENDS" charisma roll for charmed allies.

Jumping is a bonus action which consumes 10 ft of movement speed. With a Strength score of 10 or below, a creature can jump 15 ft, and this increases by 5 ft for every two points in strength above 10. At 20 Str a creature may spend 10 ft of movement speed and a bonus action to jump, and can travel 35 ft effectively increasing the creature's movement speed by up to 25 feet.

This, combined with the prone rules (see below) is JUICY, as it allows for risk-reward battlefield mobility . That said I'd add some caveats/clarifications: The jump always succeeds in moving you, but if you're taking damage, jumping up or down more than 10ft, or into rough terrain you need to make an acrobatics check not to beef it and fall prone (ending your turn). Your jump is likewise a buffer for how far you can willingly fall before taking damage, but if you fall after your jump, you always land prone.

Weapon actions, 'nough said.

It's more complexity than I'd give to first time players but HOT DAMN if it isn't a great idea to give the martial characters some options instead of just making the same attacks over and over again. I've actually been sockpiling 3rd party versions of this for a while now and I can't wait to add them in.

All The conditions are great:

Blinded: In addition to the other effects, ranged attacks are limited to 15 ft range. Blinded creatures can also make opportunity attacks.

Frightened: Creatures which are frightened are unable to move at all (rather than being unable to move toward the source of their fear), unless the effect instead makes them "fearful" which gives them the frightened effect as well as making them flee.

Prone: Being prone gives disadvantage on Strength and Dexteritysaving throws, attacks against a prone creature have advantage out to a range of 10 ft rather than 5 ft, and ranged attacks against a prone creature do not have disadvantage. Your character cannot do anything while prone. Starting the turn while prone will cause you to automatically use half your movement to stand up. Becoming prone during your turn automatically ends your turn.

Wet: This is a new condition that prevents the character from burning (e.g. from Searing Smite) and grants resistance to fire damage, but also makes the creature vulnerable to lightning and cold damage

[sasquapossum]

The last thing any US leftist/progressive/whatever should be doing is undermining our political and civic institutions. To explain why, let's talk for a moment about revolution.

I see people talking about a revolution as though it's a solution. It's not. A revolution in the US would be a disaster for the left. Just look at the most basic item: guns.

The vast majority of privately owned guns are in the hands of the right.

Most police are thoroughly in the tank for the right.

The military is split. AIUI the officers tend very slightly left, while the enlisted tend more strongly right. Just as importantly, a lot of military members would respect rules and traditions precluding political involvement. At best, some military members or units might support the left, while more would support the right and more still would just stand aside.

That's already bad, but also consider who controls the areas where all of our food is grown. Where oil and metals and other raw materials are produced. Where transport and communication lines run. The right has every military advantage. Financial or technology advantages would count for nothing in that scenario. The left would be confined to a few enclaves on the coasts, isolated and ready to be picked off one by one. This is why the right is itching for a revolution. Don't be on their side in that.

So, back to institutions. The only reason the right hasn't already started a revolution is that either our institutions or respect for them preclude it. That's our only protection. Majority we might be, but we rely on the rules to protect us more like a minority typically would. In particular, institutions like the FBI and the court system - as flawed as they might be - are the only way leaders of the right's insurrection can be brought to justice and taken off the board. The only entity that can do that for the military is the military itself, and I sure don't see a lot of leftists working on that. The capitol and metropolitan police were the ones who kept January 6 from turning into an actual coup, and many of them paid dearly for it. We need the good people that exist in all of those organizations to keep pushing justice and reform, but the general tendency is to demonize them along with everyone else. Not smart.

Every time a leftist repeats "our government can't do anything well" or "our government is part of the problem" tropes, they play directly into the hands of the right. By all means, criticize. Hold accountable. Demand improvement. But don't strike at the institutions themselves, at their reasons for existence. Don't weaken the one wall we have. Unless and until we've spent twenty years or so arming and training the left to reach parity with the right (ain't gonna happen) and implementing reform within the police/military and filling the essential industries with our people (both possible but still unlikely), our institutions as they exist are our best defense against a coup turning this country into the exact opposite of what we want. There are too many people already doing the right's work of sabotage, whether they mean to or not. Please stop.

[namistrella]

Please pay close attention to the language used to talk about public service workers and civil servants in the coming days.

There is (understandably) a lot of anger and frustration felt by people who have been left behind, ignored, and swept aside by bureaucratic processes limiting access to benefits and aid. SSA has notoriously denied most first disability benefits applications, FEMA has left people without housing after disasters for far too long, there's red tape everywhere and it's harmful first and foremost to people without the time and resources (money, health) to navigate the systems. This is all true.

BUT. (And this is the important part of this post.) The new administration is, purposely, leveraging those feelings to get public support for gutting those systems and programs from the inside out. The truth is that we need these programs, and we need the everyday people who work to deliver them. We can't afford to vilify them.

Pay attention to the language in the new executive orders, such as:

"Return to Work" (as if everyday public servants have not been breaking their backs trying to get passports processed, job offers sent, and critical grants awarded, whether or not they do some of that work from home or in a too-small, poorly maintained office)

"Improving Accountability" (as if agency heads are all corrupt or something, rather than just being people who the new administration is afraid will choose to be accountable to their conscience rather than accountable to King Trump)

Yeah, yeah, every office will have some bad managers, some underperforming employees, and bad agency leadership once in a while. This is NORMAL. Literally look at ANY office, private sector or public sector or academia or whatever. Rank and file government employees are not inherently evil, or lazy, or entitled, any more than the rest of the workforce.

And in fact, government employee pay has fallen far behind inflation while the benefits have been slowly stripped away over the last decade or two (pensions cost more and pay less; healthcare options are expensive and don't cover as much as some other private plans; annual raises are a joke and barely even cover the rise in insurance premiums let alone housing).

By and large, the people working in those day to day public service positions care about the mission of their agency, and helping people, because you kind of have to at some level in order to sacrifice higher pay for literally the same work. The ONE concrete advantage of a government job over industry is the stability... But the Trump administration is fighting tooth and nail to get rid of that so they can fire large swathes of the workforce and shut down public service programs.

If they can't fire everyone, they'll start by getting as many as they possibly can to quit.

Stoking public anger at civil servants is one of the tactics they are using to put the pressure on and get people to leave. Many federal workers are already scared to talk about where they work because of fear of harassment. Republican leaders encourage this shit. Why would anyone want to stay in a job they're underpaid, underappreciated, and now being publicly vilified for? A few might, for the mission; others will decide their safety is more important, or that they can't sacrifice any more.

You might think, why do we care if a few gov employees quit when there's so many of them? Well, most government programs are ALREADY severely understaffed. We're ALREADY going to have an even harder time accessing services and programs when people inevitably quit and program funding gets shut down.

We need these workers to stay. We need them to be there busting their asses over the next months to get important things processed before the option is taken away. We need them to stand up to Trump's political cronies and hold the line and drag their feet when told to implement harmful policies. We need them to buy us time to vote in 2026 and save some of the programs that serve our most vulnerable populations. No, the programs aren't perfect, but that doesn't justify sitting back and letting Trump completely gut them!

Take some time to thank a public servant in the next weeks. We need them more than most of us realize, and we can't afford to let Trump's propaganda make us blame the people standing between his policies, and us.

[poly-thot-one-piece-edition]

Office Hours

Cisfem!Reader x Shanks x (????)

Also on Wattpad and Ao3

Summary: If Shanks lets you stab him with your pencil you think things between you would improve.

Blame @hannahbarberra162 for this - she wrote the initial exchange between Shanks and the Reader for this first chapter, and has graciously allowed me to run away with it, cackling like the madman I am. <3

CW: Office AU, Enemies to lovers, mdni, so much swearing and even more smut.

Tag list: @mfreedomstuff

Chapter 2: The Fracture

It had been a long day, especially for a Friday.

You’d been putting up with Shanks’ shenanigans for months, maybe even almost two years at this point, and the last week he especially seemed to be trying to get under your skin. He was in your office every single day, and three times were due to filed complaints, the other two days was to talk about changes to the Employee Handbook.

You couldn’t stop him from making changes, in a way it was almost respectful of him to come to you to talk about the changes before implementing them, but that respect came with having him in your office for half the day.

The trade off was not worth it.

You’d been stuck over most of the week because of it. Aside from Shanks, you enjoyed your work, so it wasn’t the end of the world, but it did mean a good bit of takeout on the way home, versus being able to cook something. You skipped drinks with the office after work, however, to hurry up and get home.

Someone was at home waiting for you, and it had been a couple weeks since your schedules had lined up. Considering he was in sales and did a lot of traveling, and you could end up with long hours because of issues (Shanks) at work, it could be a week or two easily. Neither one of you would sacrifice sleep to see each other, mostly because you’d done so at the start of things and managed to give yourself the flu.

Which you then passed off to him.

And he gave back to you.

It had been an unholy nightmare, and not something you’d wanted to repeat. Especially since Shanks kept trying to bring you all sorts of cockamamie home remedies. On the plus side you had a valid reason to keep him at least ten feet away - at the door of your office - and make sure all interactions were brief.

It wouldn’t do to give one of the top executives of the company the flu.

Stepping inside your home, you turn on the light and kick off your shoes, setting your bag down on the counter and unbuttoning your work clothes. A nice shower, and a little tidying up, and you’d be ready for your weekend long guest.

With luck you could get him to bring a box of condoms with him, some rope and some flogs. You needed to work a lot of tension out of your system after the week you had. Toss in some wax and ice cubes while you were at it. Really dig deep.

You send a text, setting your phone on the counter as you peel off your clothes and step into the shower. You could hear the reply come in a few minutes later, the soft ding carrying either an affirmative, or a clarification. The last time you did the whole whips and chains routine in the bedroom, he’d been surprised to find himself on the receiving end.

A little give and take was good for the soul. You didn’t need to be in control all the time, but sometimes, especially lately, you didn’t feel like you had much control. Taking charge in the bedroom was grounding.

Plus he came so many times he called a yellow because it was starting to ache.

The hot water of the shower relieved the tension in your shoulders. You ran the tank empty by the time you turned the water off and stepped out. Wiping the phone off with your towel you check the reply.

Him: Check the bedroom.

Your brows furrow in confusion, but you have a smile on your face as you head to your bedroom. He had a key, so it wasn’t impossible for him to be a step ahead of you. Patience enough to be waiting for you, but you would’ve expected him to come into the shower if he was already here.

Opening the door to your bedroom you didn’t see him, or any signs of him. Turning on the light you step in further and see a single envelope sitting on the comforter. Frowning, you reach out for the envelope - it feels like an apology.

Until you pick it up, and it has all the weight of a farewell.

You know your key’s inside the envelope before you finish opening it. It doesn’t matter if you read it at this point or not, the point has already passed.

Standing in your room, nothing but a towel on, you read the words on the paper.

The hand writing is neat. The language is almost formal. It’s like being told farewell by someone who had been betrothed to you. Not that it had been the case between the two of you, but that was the emotion that settled around you as you read.

It wasn’t him, it was you.

It wasn’t his fault that your schedules matched so poorly he met someone else.

It wasn’t his fault you hadn’t accepted his offer to provide for you months ago.

It wasn’t his fault that you couldn’t be a proper woman.

The letter concluded that he was gentleman enough to keep your secrets. He wouldn’t ruin your professional image, or smear your name in a way that would lessen your chances of marriage. You were, after all, a nice enough person. Intelligent and kind.

You’d come around, he was certain.

It was a good thing that useless fop was too chicken shit to say such things to you face to face. Crushing the wretchedly florid missive beneath white knuckles you roar, throwing the crumpled wreck to the ground and stomping it with your foot before grinding it into the carpet with your heel.

“Craven little weasel!” You growl, storming out of your bedroom and snatching your phone off the counter where you’d left it. You start to type something in response, typing and deleting.

Breathe out.

Typing and deleting.

Breathe in.

Typing…

The next breath that came out was nearly a sob.

He was a spineless bastard, a completely cruel soggy bastard, but for two years he had been-.

Your sob turns into a nearly manic laugh. Acceptable. He’d been acceptable. You had been settling because your job kept you from really looking. You’d been settling because he’d managed the barest level of attention, and you were too busy with work to be truly bothered by it.

You’d almost settled because despite all the issues gnawing at the sides of your mind, there was nothing directly wrong. He wasn’t bad, but he had been just acceptable. He wasn’t rude, or certainly not directly enough that it couldn’t be dismissed as poor phrasing on his part, but after this letter you realized how nearly every compliment that had ever escaped his lips had been painted on the back of his hand.

You were hurt, angry, ashamed, and frustrated.

Instead of ordering in, you drank. That night alone you emptied two whole bottles of scotch. When you woke up Saturday afternoon you drained a bottle of tequila, some manner of left over food that you found in the fridge and water only because you were just lucid enough to know that dehydration would suck if you didn’t drink any.

A few crackers, a pint or two of ice cream and the last ten cans of a twelve pack you’d picked up last Tuesday. Usually you only had a beer with pizza or wings, but you chugged cans between spoonfuls of death by chocolate while watching some kind of weird campy horror movie sometime around 3am on Sunday morning.

It wasn’t him leaving that had really sunk you, it was the time wasted that kept pissing you off. Nearly two years of your life you could’ve been doing better things. Could’ve been doing better people.

You growl at the annoying thoughts rising back into your consciousness and crack open another can of beer. The sounds of your chugging blot out the dialogue of the movie you’re watching, but if you hadn’t sorted out what was going on before now, you didn’t figure it was going to matter.

The sunrise poked you in the eye on Sunday before you realized what time it was. Swearing in the face of the bright light you wander into the kitchen and fill a glass of water, drinking it down in heavy gulps.

Unfortunately, you’d reached a limit of what your stomach could hold, throwing up beer and water into the bathtub when you tried to grab a quick shower before bed. When you woke up in the afternoon you were cold, damp, and sore as hell, having fallen asleep in the tub by the time your stomach had settled.

Everything aches, but your pounding head is enough to have you crawling through your house. You eat some crackers while sitting on the kitchen floor, taking sips of water as the horrid realization sinks in that you’ve literally drunk yourself sick. You’re cold, but you can feel the heat rolling off your skin.

You didn’t need to check your temperature to know you were running a fever.

Forcing yourself to your feet, you grab the kitchen bin and drag it into the bed room with you. You put on a couple extra layers to help you sweat things out, drinking as much water as you felt you could risk, before setting an alarm and burying yourself under the blankets. With the trashcan by your bed, hopefully you could grab the edge and throw up into it without any other fuss if needed.

Pride won’t let you call off work because you fucked yourself by drinking too much, but seas and gods save you, if Shanks gave you so much as a smarmy grin you were going to stab him. It would add the perfect layer to the last two years, getting fired from your job for stabbing the office slut.

Your brow furrows as you start to drift off. It was very rude of Shanks to intrude on your thoughts outside of business hours, frankly. Maybe you’d file a complaint of your own on Monday. It wasn’t like he read any of them anyway.

[furinana]

Thoughts on how a SMT4 rerelease would realistically go ⬇️

Basics

-> SMT4A will come separately at a later date -> All previous DLCs will be in the base game -> The rerelease's own DLCs/preorder bonuses will provide the usual: expendable items (potions, gems, grimoires etc.), Doi demons that weren't in SMT4 previously and new armor (there's no way they're repeating the lame Amazon/Best Buy/LAWSON bullshit from before lmao)

Quality of life

The most common prediction is that they'll lean into remaking SMT4 with many of SMT4A's system implementations. What I find harder to get added are the ones that involve character writing related to your partners (it cannot be understated how text-heavy SMTIVA is from this alone).

Upon reflection, the system differences between SMT4 and its sequel (even if coincidentally) gave some interesting individuality that fit into the lore of each game; here are some examples that, in my opinion, will lose flavor if they decide to change them for the sake of quality of life: a) SMT4's map being easier to get lost Differently from Nanashi, Flynn is new to technology and never walked into Tokyo before so naturally it's expected for him to take longer when walking around the city. Also, remember: the Samurai's gauntlet's software didn't receive updates for 25 years! b) SMT4's Estoma being a normal attack that could fail instead of an invincible barrier The game puts emphasis on Flynn's role of self-sacrificial soldier that uses his own mortal strength while the weaker and younger Nanashi is only able to go far due to "cheating" death a lot with Dagda's help. c) SMT4's partners not being selectable Nanashi is the reincarnation of Akira, the character "whose leadership skills rival no one else". Nanashi's partners are similar to Akira's on the sense that they follow him on a centralized sense while Flynn isn't seen as such by his Samurai peers (as all four initially acts in behalf of the Monastery and then each switches to whatever authority figure they become aligned to).

Added story

The majority of people don't know of Flynn's deal with Krishna that was only brought in the artbook or the fact that Akira's sister was originally going to be in a DLC. Hell, SMT4 had enough material for even three or four games from Kaneko's drafts. Why the hell did we see so little about Noa and Tamagami aka the main reason for the entire duology happening?! We could go on forever about excuses for scraps of unseen content.

However, any more would make this go onto remake territory more than just a remaster per se, which would be unfortunately, asking for a lot considering how little budget a mainline game gets.

Art

This one is the hardest to predict.

One of SMT4's most prized qualities is that it contains the biggest compendium of all games.

On the other hand, the demons that were introduced in SMT4 looking "inconsistent" due to being products of collabs with non-Megaten artists received enough complaints that the role of demon artist was pushed solely onto Doi from then on; thus, Doi redrew a few demons in order for them to match with his human artwork, and what wasn't redrawn was never used again.

The only SMT4-exclusive that successfully leaped to another game

So when one thinks of a SMT4 remaster with "improvements" over the original, the first visual aspect one will think is the polishment of the collab demons to match Doi's style.

For SMT4A, Doi redrew Centaur, Napaea, Medusa, Tenkai, Merkabah and Lucifer. That makes it 6 of them. He not only slightly adjusted their designs but also gave them new poses.

The thing is... how viable would it be for Doi to do the rest?

We're talking about Minotaur, Dullahan, Kuebiko, Asmodeus, Koga Saburo, Tenkai, Astaroth, Yaso Magatsuhi, Lilith, Gabriel, Michael, Uriel, Raphael, Omoikane, Michizane, Yamato Takeru, Pluto, Kenji, Ancient of Days, Sanat, Chemtrail, Masakado, Masakado's Shadow, the second form of Merkabah and the second form of Lucifer.

25 designs left. And we also gotta count the variants Oread, Asterius, Aeshma and Plasma, although it's just a matter of adjusting colors.

Do you think it would be worth for Doi to spend so much time just retouching demons when he could be doing something completely new instead? We must remember that the cutscenes for the sequel were drawn in Ikumi Fukuda's style instead of Doi's because Doi was too busy retouching alongside designing both humans and his own demons. I particularly don't remember anyone being nitpicky about the shift in the cutscenes, but it's nonetheless also another "inconsistency" added to the duology due to necessity.

The point I want to raise with all of this is that SMT4 was only able to exist due to the work of multiple artists behind it. The duology was deeply built on collab work of different art styles. Even outside of what you think of replacing all of it to favor exclusively Doi's vision, it's still an excruciating amount of work for one single artist to do.

Which is why I think Doi redrawing the entire roster of exclusive SMT4 demons is a tough expectation to have. And on the possibility that he redraws just a portion of it, it'll taint the game artists with the impression that "some are better than others".

Basically, it's a DO IT FULLY or DO NOTHING situation.

Of course, the less troublesome way would be to call assistants to draw some portion in Doi's style (or he just finishes someone else's work). And, it has been what, 12 years since SMT4? Could it be that Mr. Doi has secretly been retouching work destined for a SMT4 rerelease gradually over the years? Well, we just don't know. But whatever it is, I hope this remaster will be the last of his "retouching-other-artists-work" career so poor guy can move on to only worrying over his own designs.

Retcons

In SMTVV, they retconned Kaneko's Lilith from the base game for Doi's Lilith. Therefore, we won't see Flynn being able to summon Vishnu or Ananta (Shesha's other form).

The most curious one is the sidequest where Flynn unlocks Kaneko's Odin; would they make Doi's Odin available for him or remove the sidequest altogether in order to avoid giving away one of the main antagonists of the sequel?

I could see Okuninushi having altered dialogue since he and Sukuna-Hikona are buddies. Likewise for Brigid that is protecting Dagda's cauldron. As long as it's not voiced, adding dialogue in random parts to hint about the sequel is pretty easy, so I hope they take advantage of it.

[kogratorm]

QSMP's Candidates Statements (Translated)

From QuackityToo June 19th Stream.

DISCLAIMER: My native language is Brazilian Portuguese, not Spanish nor English. Due to that and the differences in language expression, I made some changes/paraphrases while translating to accommodate the context, but the overall understanding remains 98% loyal to each candidate’s speech.

BadBoyHalo

BBH proposes that he is the only person capable of carrying out the necessary decisions that the president of Quesadilla Island must take. He believes he is the only one who has the courage to make the difficult decisions necessary to keep the island safe and sound for the residents and prevent a dictator from taking power, all while protecting the eggs.

Foolish

Foolish is excited about the opportunity that the island has provided. He says he wants to enjoy and make the most of the situation because it's not every day that you end up on a crazy island with a diverse population speaking a variety of languages. Some people would prefer to get out of here [Quesadilla] as soon as possible, but he wants to make friends with everyone and enjoy everything the island has to offer.

Etoiles

Etoiles stated that he is charismatic, generous, and that the only negativity he carries is for himself and never for others. Etoiles sets out to explore the island in order to better understand the environment of where they are; he will visit as many dungeons as he needs to get a better understanding of the island.

Baghera

Baghera stated that she has her head screwed on the right way and wishes only the best for the islanders. She values communication and maintains positive relationships with everyone. Baghera believes she is capable of dealing with any fervor or rash situations that may arise. Quesadilla Island is where she was introduced to motherhood, and as a result, she has a specific goal. The place that gave her family and friends is one she must protect at all costs.

Felps

Felps work(ed) as a shipping officer, bus driver, artist, and gardener. What he wants to do is make everyone happy by giving more rights to eggs, noodles, and pasta.

Forever

Forever stated that he is one of the most active players on the island, and as such, he will always be there to protect the people's interests. As a professional Minecraft player, he has many ideas for community projects. Forever describes Richarlyson as one of the happiest things that has happened to him, as well as meeting all of the island's inhabitants (despite the fact that the French make a lot of noise at the egg hotel), given how everyone is very friendly and entertaining.

Mike

Mike promised to restore order to Quesadilla Island, his favorite aspect of the island being the islanders themselves. He would forbid the use of waystones, which would improve the island's dynamics by forcing players to build paths between their bases, allowing them to finally implement a railroad train system.

Cellbit

Cellbit has had prior work experience as a tribute (HG), murderer, prisoner, and detective. He claimed to be Roier's husband, capable of making eloquent arguments and pose intricate inquiries in various scenarios and circumstances. In summary, he believes he is a good president for the Island's future, both for introducing new creative ideas and new narratives to other content creators, as well as for protecting the eggs. His husband, son, and friends are his most valuable things on the island.

Gegg

I swear this isn’t bad translated; it is literally what has been said.

Gegg said he's a businessman, going door to door Gegging. He's a Geggwar criminal. He is an influencer of the family lifestyle. Gegg changes the world. What Gegg likes most about Quesadilla Island is the humidity, the damp places and caves. Gegg promises you freedom. Gegg promises the truth. Gegg promises you power. Gegg promises the abolition of all government rules, taxes and any existing laws. The government establishment holds us, so Gegg will release us. Just one geggrule: believe in Gegg, because Gegg believes in you.

El Quackity

His speech is about his character as well as the election scenario (from the perspective of a Content Creator, not a character). I decided to put it all together because it was somewhat scrambled and also because it was an important reminder for the community.

According to ElQuackity, there is a lack of organization and order. He believes that in the ideal scenario, this can be resolved. He believes that his candidacy in this work and position is critical, and that it will be the best possible. One thing to be clear about it: during his campaign, he will do whatever it takes to ensure that the people have a good president. Thus, he reminds and states that this election event isn’t predetermined, scripted, or planned, and there is no pre-written ending. Elections will be decided by the votes of creators, the efforts of creators, and the votes of the community. He warns that if If he decides to kill a candidate or an egg because it suits his political campaign, he will do so. And, if another candidate decides to kill him for their own benefit, it will be done. No one (except the creators) can say anything to encourage another narrative. We, as a community, need to understand that none of the creators will truly hate each other if one decides to attack the other or kill the other for their own campaign benefit. He encourages the community to support their favorite candidate, but if a creator decides to do something bad to another creator within the game at any time, those who send hate towards creators for actions taken by players in game will be rightfully banned and restricted from all QSMP chat streams. It is, after all, a game. It's a block game. The decisions made within the game will be made by the creators themselves. If the creators ever have a disagreement, it will be solved in private DMs. And nothing bad will ever happen because all the QSMP members are adults who understand that this is all for entertainment purposes. The QSMP Elections ARE for entertainment purposes ONLY.

[quirkwizard]

Hey, Wizard. Since some people say that My Hero Academia's is too simple but is effective, what other Power system you can add to it? Like, would someone be able reverse the effects of their abilities and use chants like Jujutsu Kaisen? Would they be able to create their own Stands like Jojo? Honestly, the sky's is the limit if you can adjust it well enough into the universe.

I mean, chanting would just make super moves cooler and more impactful, literally and figuratively. Like, do you imagine people with overly unnecessary long names for their moves? It might serve a purpose besides the excuse that is "That's just traditional manga". Not that I have a problem with it though.

Maybe because chanting doesn't have room in a series that isn't about magic and would just make the moves come across as really goofy?

That aside, I don't get this sentiment. There is the problem is MHA being more sci-fi of a setting that has a hard magic system. Meaning elements like that would be out of place at best and near impossible to implement. The bigger question would be, why implement that at all? The beauty of Quirks is that they are so simple. You have one power and that is your gimmick. Push it till it breaks. You want something else? Tech, physical training, or non-Quirk skills, take your pick. It's not like Naruto, where there are can so many amazing techniques that can be learned by anyone but aren't used. Or Jujutsu Kaisen, where you need a flow chart to understand half of what is going on in a fight. If you wanted to twist my arm, I think that taking ques from Nen could be interesting. That Quirks could be more of thing that augments that body and can do it in ways outside of the power they get. I've always believed that Quirks jump started humanity and greatly improved them. This could explain the characters' greater, non-Quirk abilities, such as Aizawa's superhuman physicality, and give them ways to expand themselves out of Quirks. However, even that I think is going too far and doesn't really add anything to this.

[pomplalamoose]

Hey bae 🙏 do you think we could get something about turning sith!luke to the light side?💗

Hiii dear anon, thank you for your ask🩵

It's been a while since I received one and I'm sooo excited, especially since I get to talk about Sith!Luke, my beloved

I wasn't sure what exactly you wanted but I hope you like this discussion of possible scenarios anyways <33

• when it comes to turning Sith Luke back to the light, I think it really depends how and why he choose the dark side in the first place and what interpretation of him we're talking about

• if, for example, he turned during the original trilogy, you'd have to approach him differently than it would be the case if he grew up raised by Vader

• while his struggle to remain on the right path for himself and the galaxy is often highlighted in the movies and books, trilogy Luke never strays too far away from what Obi-Wan and Yoda taught him

• he certainly has his darker moments in which he considers everything he loves lost, but ultimately, even then, he'd rather sacrifice himself for the greater good than reach for the power Vader, and later the Emperor, offer him

• "Never. I'll never turn to the dark side"

• "Soon I'll be dead and you with me"

• so should he fall or, for whatever reason, deliberately make the decision to join the dark side, I see two possible ways in which this could turn out, his stubbornness and wish for justice and equity being one of the more important factors

• 1) he's convinced it's for the best and in favor of many

• it's hard to resist a seemingly easy solution in times of crisis, especially if it's offered in a tempting way and Luke is by no means unreceptive to manipulation

• however I do believe he'd realize his misconception rather quickly and so the most prominent thing keeping him from pursuing the light again wouldn't be his ignorance but his deep shame

• because of the weight he carries he's very hard on himself and no less so as a Sith

• consumed by the dark side he'd probably be less focused on improvement but on self doubt and hatred instead

• he may even go as far as to remain in this situation willingly as a way to punish himself

• not only would he think himself deserving of being miserable but also think it's for the better if he never comes near his loved ones again, afraid to hurt them

• here his stubbornness hurts him decidedly more than others because obviously there's still good inside of him, he just isn't allowing it to be there in favor of another misconception and self doubt

• ("I don't deserve to be around my family after what I did.", "Because what if I'm truly evil and don't know it?", "What if they fall victim to one of my mistakes and get hurt?")

• in this case it'd definitely be possible to make him see reason

• Luke is able to and eager to learn from the past, as well as adapt to a new point of view

• if he can believe it's for the best to join the dark side, he can believe the opposite once more

• it may need patience and coaxing, much affection, assurance and insistence but through your love (romantically as well as platonically) he'd be able to find himself again

• 2) his opinion of the galaxies political situation changes to such an extent that he's convinced his fall to the dark side is genuinely important in order to implement a just system

• I will be honest, I have no idea how that would even happen but let's stick with the idea anyways because we're taking about Sith!Luke here

• (maybe he was brainwashed???)

• in this scenario I imagine it to be rather difficult to make him reconsider

• not only is he now convinced of what he's doing is inherently good but also of the fact that the people not sharing his opinion have some devious plans to make those he's so set to protect suffer

• Luke firmly stands by what he believes in and while that is a wonderful attribute to have it's rather problematic when it's used for harm

• that man is ready to fight for his convictions and I see him defending them in a way similar to how he resisted the dark side in RotJ

• he's still Luke though and not stupid, I belive it still possible to reason with him especially if you're someone he admires or otherwise holds dear

• in order to get him to listen to you though you'll need time and patience to get under his skin

• now let's take a quick look at the interpretatiom of the Sith!Luke I write about

• to some extent he's still the same person as trilogy Luke but while they share certain traits, they turned out like opposites due to the circumstances they were exposed to during their lifes

• basically my Sith!Luke is a "What if Luke and Leia were raised with the dark side by Darth Vader"-version in which he grows up in a galaxy after the Empire defeated the Alliance and thus doesn't know anything about Jedi since they just,,,don't exist anymore

•(granted, this is a rather dark AU but I saw no other way in which Luke would act like he does in my fics, without any hope of him changing his ways)

• (there are of course works that discuss a different outcome, exploring Luke turning to the light side despite being raised as Sith, so it is of course a possibility if that's what he's set up to do)

• (I, however, like to center my Sith!Luke around the idea of just that being unthinkable since it's so far fetched and ooc for a person so full of light and good)

• (please keep that in mind when continuing to read, xx)

• this too is the only case in which I think it wouldn't be possible to turn him to the light side because the concept in itself is a foreign and outdated one

• it does exist, yes, and Luke is aware of it too, after all he's well studied and educated, has to be if he is to be the successor of his father

• but it is nothing that seems worth looking into further since the classical "fight" between good and bad is a thing of the past

• because while Luke may not agree with every political stance his family takes he knows he'll be the Emperor sooner than later, able to make changes as he likes

• in this regard, depending on the role you take on in his life, you might be able to slightly influence his decisions and/or his treatment of a certain group of people

• if you're important enough to him he'll listen to what you have to say, though he won't necessarily implement it into the system

• you are well advised to approach such attempts carefully though since you don't want him to suspect you of disregarding his status and position

• or, even worse, want to alienate him from his family and loved ones

• because no matter the universe, Luke would move worlds for those he cares for and accordingly (mainly Sith!Luke) grows easily suspicious when someone so much as questions their behavior, motives, etc. or insinuates to be against them

[thewakingcloak]

The State of Things Present

this post was available for patrons a week early! please consider supporting me over on patreon!

I kept trying to make this post fancier and better and more engaging, and then I realized I was doing that thing where I make myself too overwhelmed to actually finish and post it. The other thing was I kept gunning for a once-a-week posting, and uh… yeah that's not sustainable. So here we go!

The Ghost of Spacefarer Present appears before you He whispers, very quietly, yet in a voice that resonates: "Time to resurrect the Spacefarer"

Ok so the spacefarer (me??) was very tired, but he's awake now and doing things!

Life status

We moved! My wife and kids and I packed up and headed some miles south of our previous house. It was a risk for sure. We didn't know how things would pan out. We really needed to get away from our old environment, our old town, our old house. We loved that house, and we'd said so to each other many times even as we were halfheartedly searching for a new one. But at some point that house had become too burdened with bad memories and traumas, not to mention that after the pandemic, we had no more real roots there. Everyone had moved away, the communities we were involved with had disbanded or changed. And anyway, my wife would be starting a new teaching job down south.

We were fortunate enough to find a new house we loved, and fortunate enough to be in a position where we could actually make the move. I'm aware this is a privilege, given the economy and the market, and so I can only express my thankfulness and consider it a blessing, especially as we healed through our grief.

I have an improved office now! This is where I work on my day job (software/web dev) and my unday job (Studio Spacefarer). With my genetics stacked against me, but also with my desire to be able to keep up with my kids and be there for my family, I collected a standing desk, a walking pad treadmill thing, and an ergonomic keyboard. I'm walking or at least standing most of the day now, which has made a surprising difference already.

I was gonna post a wider view of the office, but my 3yo son ran up while I was taking pictures and started "working" (mashing the keypad), so this is automatically the better pic. Them's the rules.

Anyway, in short, we made it, and it hasn't been a smooth ride the entire time, but it has been well worth it. I've been able to get back into gamedev, which has been a huge boon to my mental health too.

Speaking of… (ghostly drumroll)

Game status!

The good stuff. Here's where I'm at presently with Episode III!

The game is completable from start to end (definitely NOT feature complete)

Jumping, swimming, and dashing all work like a charm and are super fun

Three enemy types have been added, including custom A* pathfinding for the sea monster

Two new collection mechanics (one is heart containers, the other will be a small surprise)

Depth sorting and fake-3D, as mentioned previously, which lets me do lots of fun effects

Day/night are now on a new system, and cave darkness is now a thing (I tried to implement this in PD2 but couldn't figure it out)

Palette swapping for night and lighting effects now uses GameMaker's built in layer effects

Much of the game is now decorated

Updated the game's palette to be more pleasing

Better borderless windowed mode, frame toggling, etc. (I'd made a post about a third party plugin I used to do this previously, but not long after that, GameMaker added an official setting to be toggleable at runtime, so I switched to that… much easier lol)

New audio library which has been a MASSIVE boon (Juju's Vinyl)

New flexible debug/inspector mode which allows me to change values on the fly more easily

State machine rewrite using structs instead of data structures--extremely flexible and less  error-prone (in fact the data structures here were the #1 cause of crashes in Episodes I and II)

Save system rewrite, also using structs instead of data structures (thus fixing the #2 cause of crashes in the first two episodes)

Adjusted the way walls get displayed in interiors--will make a post on this later

Lots and lots and lots and lots of bug fixes

Post end status!

I'm not exactly sure how to wrap this up lol, but y'all can be encouraging me, if you have the emotional space to do so! There's still a lot left to do on PD3, and it can be very daunting at times.

Next post up will be looking forward to the future of Studio Spacefarer. I'm very excited about this! Keep an eye out!

[miloscat]

[Review] Demon's Souls (PS5)

It’s Demon’s Souls again… but it looks so pretty!

After tackling the Dark Souls trilogy, I wanted to revisit the oldest Souls game… which is now also the newest Souls game, thanks to a PS5-exclusive remake by Bluepoint Games. Their take on Shadow of the Colossus was faithful but gave the game the facelift it needed for me, so their handling of Demon's Souls didn't surprise me too much.

As FromSoft’s first entry in this metaseries (not counting the related King’s Field and Shadow Tower games) it’s understandable that Demon’s Souls is simpler than its successors. The structure is more straightforward, with separate levels to battle through. There’s fewer options for your build and armour loadout. It also predates mechanics like jumping, or plunging attacks, charge attacks, weapon skills, etc.

The remake does very little to add complexity or ideas from the many sequels into this game. For the broad strokes of the game design it’s faithful to a fault. Even no-brainer quality of life features like adding status effect bars or not locking armour pieces to your body type (ugh) were not implemented. At least rolling directions were improved, I guess. There’s a few new items and weapons, and apparently a hidden scavenger hunt much like Bluepoint’s coin collectibles in SotC, although I didn’t find any.

There’s a lot about Demon’s Souls that is clunky and obnoxious on a revisit. Your only source of healing being consumable is obvious, although I found the balance matched my skill level a little better this time. The weapon upgrade system continues to confound me, with different paths requiring specific materials that are locked to certain worlds, and lizards decrementing their spawn count if they escape you. The upshot of this is hours of grinding in particular locations to max your weapons, and god help you if you want to experiment or change your mind. Losing half your maximum health if you die, or sacrificing a precious ring slot to lose only a quarter, that sucks. And don’t even get me started on the World Tendency mechanic that locks content, items, and NPC interactions behind requiring you to either play perfectly or jump through hoops to manipulate a poorly-communicated stat.

None of this is addressed in the remake. The big change that Bluepoint did decide to make is to the inventory load system. It’s still there unfortunately, limiting the total items you can have on hand and requiring constant visits to Stockpile Thomas in the hub. I can see the idea, of planning your loadout and strategically balancing your items against their mass, but in practice it’s just a constant fuss and bother that feels restrictive and needlessly penalising. Bluepoint’s band-aid slapped over this mechanic is letting you send items to the stockpile at any time (but not retrieve them), including a prompt when picking up something that would be too heavy. It’s a step in the right direction but doesn’t address the underlying issue, and they felt the need to counterbalance this generosity by dramatically increasing the weight of all healing grasses. Gee, thanks.

With the rant out of the way, I do have some nice things to say. The foundation of the game itself is strong and I get on well with the straightforward approach to level design; there are still side paths, shortcuts, and surprises after all, and being able to tackle them in any order is great, especially when there are clear intended solutions to enemy weaknesses and such. Many of the bosses are gimmicky or puzzley which is a fun change of pace from the later games’ approach, and the settings are all very distinctive and cool, especially the Tower of Latria stages; you can see why From likes to revisit ideas from this location so often! I was also pleased by how useful equipment with passive health regeneration were in this game compared to its sequels… this may seem minor but it adds up, especially with the way healing items work.

Bluepoint has of course made good and thoughtful choices in areas other than game design: for starters, the game looks stunning. I’ve heard art design quibbles where their changes have overridden strong or lore-important choices from the original game, but actually having a stable frame rate for the first time was far more impactful for me! On top of the richly detailed looks, the remake also uses the PS5’s grunt to minimise loading times between warps which also helps a ton with the game’s flow, although it can’t reduce those long runbacks! They've added a bunch of unique and brutal backstab animations. The Dualsense too gets a workout with lots of little rumble effects (contrasting with Elden Ring barely using them at all), but I could have done without having half the sound effects coming out of the controller for no reason.

I have to give a shoutout to the character creator, which has a lot of fun presets. There’s admittedly not as much fine-tuning you can do but Bluepoint did a good job making the task of creating a cool-looking player character more accessible. A focus on nice-looking faces carries over to the main game where NPCs now have lip-synced dialogue and facial movements, which is nice, and they’ve added a series-first helmet toggle if you want to see your own character’s mug during gameplay. With how lovingly modelled the characters and armour sets were I was disappointed that the Soul Form effects are more overbearing in the remake, with particles and a heavy shader obscuring your appearance.

After their Shadow of the Colossus remake stuck close to the PS2 game’s content despite a plethora of unfinished content in the game files and in concept art, I can accept that Bluepoint didn’t add any big new stuff to this remake. But come on, look me in the eye and tell me it wouldn’t have been the most awesomest thing ever for them to fix that sixth broken arch stone and flesh out the game world! There’s unused data and ideas out there that just didn’t make the cut in the original game, and restoring and completing that would have gone a long way to making this a more definitive edition of Demon’s Souls. As it is, I know a lot of people who prefer the PS3 version.

Part of it is that From were not involved at all in this remake. Sony owns the thing legally so it’s fair enough I suppose, and at least they did credit the original game team (side-eyes to Nintendo who have been failing to do this in their remakes). For me personally I enjoyed this more than my original DeS experience between the enhanced performance and graphics, and my greater familiarity with the series and its demands. I did miss the item duplication glitch that eased my PS3 playthrough greatly though!

[arkus-rhapsode]

Let's Talk About Fire Emblem Supports: A Discussion on the State of one of Fire Emblem's Iconic Mechanics

So I'm sure if you are someone who is keyed into the Fire Emblem community, something that has been discussed for some time is the current state of the support system. Arguably Fire Emblem's defining feature which in recent years has almost come to eclipse other facets of the gameplay.

However, with that has come some pretty noticeable backlash. Lets back it up for a second.

This is not going to be a "This is the right way to do this and if you disagree you are wrong" post. This is me as a long time fan of the franchise giving my honest opinion on how I feel about these aspects of the game and why I think they are the way they are and what I think could be improved and what I think works as is. I don't think Fire Emblem or InSys are gonna go be "diluting" themselves if they don't make these improvements, nor do I think someone who has different interests in how the support system should be implemented is wrong. I'm just a fan with an opinion.

So Fire Emblem's support system has been with us since FE4 in a primordial state, but its modern day form really started in FE6. While entries after that varied in terms of things added to it, it was around Awakening with the franchise on dire straights did making it so every character could support and marry for their prime future baby. This pairing mechanic brought on a bunch of new fans that enabled them to get a bunch of character interactions that resulted in loads of content for fans to then take into transformative properties. But the thing is that a lot of Awakening worked in context. What was assumed to be the last FE means its flaws were less evident and were built with the child mechanic in mind.

Now, Awakening's supports are seen as okay supports plagued with a bunch of redundancies due to the fact that one character interacting with everyone character can only produce so much dialogue. That and each support's length could also lead to loads of padding. The child units were also discarded after Fates basically proved that the mechanic without some proper context can feel more intrusive. But that still leaves us with games with many many characters and a lot of interactions.

The criticism of modern FE Supports can vary but the general points are

Too many characters

Too much repetition in interactions

Length of each support

Separated from the events of the narrative

The supports themselves are just poorly written

This is also not ignoring the ways this has been shaken up like Shadows of Valentia's use of memory fragments, the base conversations of the Tellius games, the monastery scene of Three Houses etc. So any discussion of how these support systems could be improved often calls back to other variations of the support system. And that's at least how we will be trying to examine FE's support system, using its other systems and variants for reference and comparison.

So firstly, I think the stance people take on this will actually be different depending on what aspect of the game you value most. If you are a gameplay fiend your focus will be more on integrating supports into the gameplay the way a Persona game might. If you are a more narrative fan of Fire Emblem you would more take the stance that the supports are relevant and reactive to the plot. And if you're a character fan, you likely want the content of the supports to be plentiful but endearing to the characters. So I want to at least establish that where you fall on how supports are implemented will be of personal preference.

As this is my post, my personal stance is Fire Emblem is a narrative game with supports acting as ways to elevate the characters. As such, that is why I feel confident in saying that I am personally not a fan of the idea of making every FE character support relevant to the narrative. The narrative is important to me, but critical world building and character motives shouldn't just be buried in the supports or battle conversations. I shouldn't need to play with certain character combinations to find out vital information for the plot you are writing. In my personal opinion, the best remedy for this was the creation of the base convos. These were interactions the played out when certain conditions were met at certain points in the story.

This had allowed for a lot of side characters to feel as they had some relevance even if they weren't plot relevant. To contribute to how far along this journey has been and how a map scenario may relate to them. A small version of this was done in Garreg Mach Monastery where each chapter would allow for Byleth to walk around the hub world and speak with characters who would provide their thoughts on the previous chapter or what might be coming in the next chapter. These weren't as long as base convos, much shorter. But it still gave the idea of everyone contributing a new insight. That said, as much as I think base convos are good in games like FE9, they should not be a replacement for the current support system but rather an enhancement. These I would consider as narrative moments that often hinge on events that happened in the narrative. With character commenting and interacting off of it. But I feel that if we were to remove the support system and only have base convos we would be distancing a lot of the casual fans of FE who want to see characters interact, but not always as serious. And because FE is often a war story franchise, the tone of base convos are often serious in subject matter.

With Engage and the implementation of the somniel and even walking around defeated battlefields, I actually really would have liked base convos to be implemented this way. Perhaps after a battle you may be able to walk around a camp and see an indicator of who you can talk to about an event that just happened that would trigger a more fleshed out cutscene. I say camp, because while I appreciate the monastery, but one of the issues I have is that it is a stationary location and makes FE not so much a journey but rather just able to fast travel to certain conflicts. Making the world feel smaller and repetitive.

Most likely than not, you will not unlock every support in game on your first try. This to me adds replayability and an incentive to grind with characters you may not regularly use. However, in the case of base convos, unlocking them often hinges on them just being alive at the time. So if you were someone like me who impulsively starts over even on casual mode to not lose a character, when you see all base convos, you have seen them all. You can only walk around the Monastery and ask Sylvain what he thinks about fighting Miklan only so many playthroughs before you just don't bother. The replayability will then come from difficulty spikes and not character or story incentives. So I do believe base convos should return but as an enhancement not a replacement.

(Some may suggest that one could implement a support system lock like FE3H did with its time skips, but that suffered from an issue of not accounting for everything interaction when the time skip happened. So it actually feels very bizarre to watch Ashe and Petra have a lunch time excursion in Faerghus when the country is apparently under occupation. So I think weaving supports with narrative dependency for some supports but not others will actually be more confusing.)

In fact I daresay, supports that are disconnected could actually add levity. Mia and Ilyana's support is almost completely comedic, and it feels more endearing than watch the two of them brood over Daein and Crimea.

Speaking of repetition, lets talk about support redundancy. This is part of another issue in FE's supports which we will get into, but let me at least try to establish what people mean by redundant. I find saying FE characters are "too anime" rather lazy and dismissive. At their core a lot of side FE characters are stock characters with some limited traits. So when you hear Sully talking about working out, or Rosado's obsession with cute things, or Raphael loving food, a lot of the supports they have can come back to or revolve around these topics. And when you have games with the other issue of many many characters hearing them have these convos around these topics again and again can be very boring.

Some could say that this is an easy fix by simply reducing the number of characters. Focus more on say the size of a persona cast. Well the difference is that FE is a tactical RPG with permadeath while Persona is an RPG with a focus on time management. The smaller sized cast benefits the player in ways that help them interact with every character, but not having to worry about one becoming unplayable after you spend a lot of time on one. FE however as a tactical RPG where the mass amount of characters is so you have options to solve strategic map scenarios. Reducing the number of characters to only plot relevant ones would be very difficult. Hypotethically, if we reduced Engage to the characters who have to be around for the plot that only leaves you with Alear, Vander, Clanne, Framme, Mauvier, Veyle, Alfred, Ivy, Diamant, and Timerra. Not exactly a plethora of options for making interesting maps.

Now InSys seems to have begun implementing changes to this already. No longer are we going full Awakening or Fates with supports. Supports are much more limited in scope but not quite as anemic a line up as Shadows of Valentia did with who could support who. 3H and Engage have honestly made far more strides in lowering the number of supports and honing in on who may be relevant for a character to interact with and who outside of that circle could they interact with. Three Houses often relies on the house members each being to support each other with maybe one or two students from other houses or the monastery staff. Engage seems largely to focus on characters from countries having the same interactions with a few from others. This is a good thing, honestly if we were to get a remake of Radiant Dawn, I would love for something similar to be implemented between the Ike, Elincia, and Micaiah casts with some crossover supports when you get to the back half of that game.

So if this is already something InSys is improving, why is it something people are still critical of? Well I think what some may miss is that even if we compact a cast to more manageable interactions, that still leaves the interactions themselves.

Remember how I said Fire Emblem characters are stock characters with some limited traits? Well that is often done with identifiability. When you meet L'Arachel as a holy women but she has a snotty attitude or Sylvain the noble who hits on every woman, its done so you can recognize this character. But when you get into their supports, you often see that there might be reasons for why they act this way or it makes them more fleshed out and rounded characters than how they may seem at face value. This is where I think some Fates fans will often argue that Nohr's cast is very compelling in their supports even if the game's narrative had made many come off as one note. But you can see the flippside with Engage where its supports are more manageable, people didn't think supports were elevating the characters in ways that you had known them. That's not to say all of them, Yunaka is a stand outing how her supports both inform her as a non plot relevant character but also endear her to the audience. This to me is a sign that supports will ultimately be cases of writing. And there can just be poor writing and utilization of characters. This can also hinge on context as well as 3H has recruitment of characters far different from any FE game and just hands you your house with the expectation your interactions with them will make you learn more about them rather than just playing and recruiting on a quest like some may want.

I may have been a bit snide to Shadows of Valentia as even by the account of wanting less quantity of supports, I still found it almost too small. But even then some of the supports are the best in the franchise. Particularly Python and Clive's. But I don't think this was good because SoV had less character supports, I think it was good because the writers had looked at this pairing of characters and what each one was about and what depths could the reveal about each character. I would very much like to see that for a majority of supports.

Last point is length, and honestly we've seen this improved with games like 3H. Some supports can just be short. In fact some people can have only two support chains. Honestly, just doing more of that would've probably led to less issues overall and hope for that to cut down on padding.

So with all this in mind, what is my final take away. Well I ultimately think it comes back to what I usually want out of a Fire Emblem game. The narrative should be all there in the campaign with characters arcs for plot relevant characters, but the supports should be used as a way to enhance these units. Adding dimensions to characters who ultimately don't factor into the plot as a whole. I think 3H did make a lot of these improvements particularly because it was made with the social aspect in mind with that game practically carried by all of its characters and their depths. But I did feel as the narrative of 3H had suffered and wasn't all that tight. Post Engage, I think we are seeing a system I'd like to maintain, but I think what was lost was some of the added depths to cast members that supports can provide as well. Yes, Engage was made with a lot of celebratory fun in mind so it wasn't all that serious, but it would be nice to get more Yunakas and Pandreos in that case than say Ambers. Another aspect is the pairing, and I really hope that pairing characters without the need for child units returns as well.

I am all for the return of base convos like FE9, but I don't think it should be a replacement. Again it is another form of enhancement not replacement for supports. I think completely junking supports in favor of the base convos would be a bad idea especially with newer fans of the franchise. Overall, FE supports I feel are where they should be, but there are plenty of minor tweaks that could be implemented, if just more utilization of the characters beyond their face value.