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mistfallengw2 · 4 months ago

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The Mist War (headcanons essay 2/4) Life and Death, dictated by the flow of the Mists

The Mist War is both an event and a place at the same time, one that in theory works like a massive Fractal, but in practice varies in particular ways due to its multiverse nature and much bigger scale. [back to masterpost]

Magic surges and resets

The Mist Warriors still only have a vague idea of the complex rules of the Mist War. Despite learning all they could through centuries of observation and trial and error, there's too much they can never be certain of. The recent help of the Priory and the new knowledge related to the similar yet infinitesimally smaller Fractals helped a little, but the margin of error is still very large.

Magic surges are what dictates the cadence and flow of the events of the Mist War, affecting all that's in it. Caused by the metaphysical shift of the overlapping different Tyrias, they happen everyday around midnight (skirmishes) and, on a much larger scale, when the worlds drift apart and connect with others (reset).

The daily magic surges are the most predictable event in the Mist War, and while they're not really observable by the naked eye, they're describable as a wave of magic that curses through the fabric of the Mists, a pulse strong enough for those magically attuned to sense it even if if they're not near a nexus, and a brief reinvigorating sensation for everyone. Despite their regularity, sometimes they might shift in potency and cause temporary alterations to the normal conditions of the Mist War, be them positive (MW feeling more powerful, resources partially restoring themselves outside of resets, forced truces, supercharge of arcane tools, etc) or negative (MW feeling physically weaker or their abilities changing, malfunctions of tools and magic, higher frequency of displacements, thinner air or weather conditions that make gliding unsafe or impossible, more frequent anomalies, lack of animals and resources, skipped resurrections, etc), which usually last from a few days to a few weeks before returning to normal.

As for resets, there's no clear schedule for them, but various signs act as a warning days before it does: magical readings start fluctuating as the Mists begin to agitate, the sky gets increasingly brighter even at night, magic surges become increasingly more irregular, and the fog covering the horizon steadily increases and thickens. Then, when the reset is about to happen, all living beings will sense a disruption in the fabric of the Mists (a sensation of falling, like the ground shifting slightly), shortly followed by enemies beginning to fade intermittently for each other. Not long after that, the fog on the horizon will roll in and cover the borderlands, rising from a thin layer at ground level until nothing is visible in front of one's nose. Notably, MW will always see the fog coming from the enemies' sides, and it's speculated to be the manifestation of each Tyria ripping itself away from the others. This process takes from one to three hours, and the MW will attempt to return as close to the land and nexuses they control as possible, while those in the camps hurry to dismantle everything they can and return to Tyria with the loot that needs to be extracted. When the reset finally happens, the fog itself becomes blindingly bright with the magic of the surge and, after what some describe as a "brief leap of consciousness", everyone finds themselves in the proximity of their new main camp and nexus. After a brief inspection and tune up of the gates for safety, those who left for Tyria return into the Mists, and everything begins anew.

All the extracted resources that are still on the Mists' side of the portal disappear as they "return" to their original place and status, while those that were brought into Tyria remain there. Tyrian items and materials that were brought into the Mists tend to remain or return to the nexus, but when the anchor point shifts at reset they might end up scattered around the camp, or occasionally remain where they were and get salvaged by the enemy. As such, any area other than the main camp doesn't receive much in terms of external supplies in order to avoid wastes, and MW have to rely on freshly harvested materials to survive and build defenses deeper into the territory. While many of the Mist Warriors are just soldiers, a bunch dedicate most of their time and effort to harvest and transport resources, with others pitching in when necessary. In the case of vital items that can't be easily moved back out of the gates, like the airships or supplies that are too far from the nexus, special runes are engraved in them during complex rituals, a necessary precaution to ensure that they'll reach the nexus every time. This is done especially for the waypoints, as setting them up at the keeps already requires a lot of time between transport and necessary security measures, and permanently losing one to the enemy would be a devastating blow.

Notably, the structures scattered around the land appear to always have been there in some capacity, and always reappear at reset even if destroyed or altered. While it's unknown whether they were initially built by ancient Mist Warriors or manifested by the Mists themselves, they're not fully immutable. They appear to reflect cultures from various points in Tyrian history, a patchwork of foundations, repairs and improvements added up over who knows how many centuries, and they were probably there already during previous Mist Wars whose details have been lost to time. At times, structures created by the MW will persist across multiple resets and become part of the lands, but what exactly triggers this kind of event is still unknown. Not only it can happen at any point with materials from either Tyria or the lands themselves, but it may also occasionally alter other Tyrias, or at least that's the accepted explanation for sudden structural alterations with no precedents. One particular case are the asuran gates themselves, as they persisted almost immediately instead of requiring to be rebuilt every time, possibly stabilizing so fast due to their direct connection to Tyria.

Death and resurrection

Unlike in the Fractals or Tyria itself, in the Mist War death is not permanent, or at least not always. The magic that forms the battlegrounds is so plentiful that it easily seeps into the Mist Warriors' bodies, changing them in more or less subtle ways [skills/traits being different in different game modes] and strengthening them, but most importantly taking an imprint of all who inhabit its lands for long enough.

The trauma and pain of death aren't lessened by the Mists, nor is that of watching fellow soldiers die and suffer, but MW usually tend to be braver and more self-sacrificial than they would ever be in Tyria, trusting in the Mists to bring them back eventually. The bodies of those fallen in battle always disappear after a variable time between a few minutes and a couple hours following their deaths, seemingly absorbed by the Mists themselves. Then, when the next magic surge happens, the corpses and souls of the fallen soldiers get pulled back to their original world and alive state... usually.

Those who are resurrected during the magical surges usually reappear at the nexus closest to the place of their death, which normally means the main camps of the corresponding battleground. The smaller magic surges usually happen every day around midnight, and so do resurrections. Not all reappear at the same time, usually in waves following the magical surge and roughly in the order of their death, but there are rare cases where some reappear during the rest of the day, or miss one or more surges before returning. The phenomenon is noticeable but quiet, just a small magical cloud forming less than a minute before the once-dead MW reappear in a relatively quiet burst, with mist-like residue around them or on them that quickly disappears. If one isn't there to witness it, they might as well think the MW arrived via the nearby waypoint, but someone always keeps watch to aid them in the first moments or call for help if needed. At times, people can get resurrected in places other than the main camp, and might have to travel through unsafe areas of the battlegrounds to make it back. Generally speaking, if someone is missing even after a few days and especially doesn't reappear after a "reset", they're usually considered dead for good or simply lost to the Mists, never to be seen again.

Resurrection itself is not described as a pleasant experience and the initial moments after it are always extremely disorienting, especially for first-timers and those who have been dead the longest or more often. While veterans might bounce back from it quickly, most often need some time to readjust, rest or even medical attention. Many say that the time spent in that limbo is just a flash between their death and being alive again, while others can't describe it before they can form words again and forget it like a seemingly bad dream. It's always generally described as uncomfortable and painful, like a strong magical shock that takes a toll and leaves one entirely aching, and it's not rare for people to start screaming or crying as soon as they get resurrected. While the trauma of it at times deters some from staying in the Mist War, overall MW tend to get used to it after a while, finding comfort in the fact that it's a fair price to pay for beating the alternative.

Things are equally puzzling on the physical side: most return to life as good as they were the night previous to their death [a sort of "saved state" at the start of the skirmish], while others still present the wounds they had just before dying or marks/scars of them, and a few fall sick with high fevers or still feel the phantom pains of what killed them. The worst cases tend to happen more often to those who have died frequently in a short period of time, but usually it's nothing that a few days of rest and helping around camp can't fix. Notably, those who survive with wounds also heal faster during the magic surges, but they don't get a "reset" to their pre-wounded self, which makes some willingly throw themselves into danger in order to die and avoid dealing with the recovery of particularly grievous wounds.

Mist degradation

The drawback of possibly beating death itself is that something can go terribly wrong in the process, and there's also no telling what could happen when one is killed.

The working theory is that people are "remembered" by the Mists like everything in the battlegrounds, and when a magic surge happens, it attempts to restore certain things to their previous state, just like a Fractal would do. However, as that attempt is being made, part of one's soul and/or life essence seems to either degrade or get absorbed by the Mists themselves, and if there's not enough of it left, the MW never comes back.

This phenomenon has been called "Mist degradation", and what exactly happens to those who perish definitively due to it is a mystery. Some say that their spirits are forever lost to the Mists, trapped in a sort of separate afterlife or directly consumed, while a few believe that they'll be reincarnated into one of the Tyrias connected to theirs at the time of death. Whatever the exact process behind resurrection might be, the data clearly shows that the risks of not returning and lasting signs on the resurrected increase with the frequency of deaths, but that it also decreases as time passes between them, along with variables such as age and overall health. How much those amounts are, no one exactly knows and varies on the individual, but this phenomenon is enough to keep most MW from repeatedly charging into battle without a single care.

Mist degradation is ultimately a game of chance that makes becoming a veteran fairly uncommon, as many underestimate its effects or overestimate their own abilities to survive it, or simply perish for good after a death like any other despite precautions taken. While the longer someone has been in the War does seem to increase their chances of survival, there's no clear mark of its threshold and one can still overdo it easily, be it through overconfidence or necessity, and in a constant state of war through harsh terrain it's hard to avoid dying at least once per reset. It's worth noting that not all MW fade into the Mists due to degradation, as many just decide to leave the Mist War for good before that happens, either by caving under the weight of neverending loss and horrors of war, or when they feel like they've done their part.

While dying during a magic surge doesn't really have an impact, dying during a reset is something one wants to avoid as much as possible, since it generally does not bode well for the MW involved. Such an event marks a statistical peak of sudden permanent deaths, more lasting effects on those that do get resurrected, and especially MW finding themselves far from the nexus after the reset itself. Due to such a high risk and the fact that the latter may happen to those who were alive but far from allied territories, all MW of any Tyria make sure to stop fighting and hurry back to their lands as soon as the last warning signs begin, especially in order to avoid those who specifically set out to kill retreating soldiers during the de-facto truce.

New recruits in particular are at risk of fading before they even get a chance to experience resurrection all, usually after ignoring the words of their veterans and getting themselves killed before the Mists have had the time to get a firm hold on their presence within them. Recently-revived MW are also discouraged from throwing themselves right back into the fray, at least as long as push doesn't come to shove. Even though the time taken to travel back to the battlefront is usually enough for the risk of permanently dying to diminish, the possibility of ambushes or running into other deadly issues on the way still keeps many from leaving camp too soon. Due to it all, MW are encouraged to take breaks and return to Tyria when they feel like they're close to surpassing their safe limit. Not all are inclined to do so, however, thinking their attunement to the Mist could irreparably waver and result in their permanent death when they return, so they usually switch to a safer role in the main camp or harvesting resources. It actually seems to be enough, as there are individuals who have continuously been in the Mists for decades and are still kicking.

Due to the many unanswered doubts, Mist degradation as a concept is also full of superstitions and subsequent scholarly debates over the validity of the huge variety of claims made by MW through the centuries. One of the more statistically possible claims is that the chance of Mist degradation happening becomes higher the deeper the fallen are into enemy-controlled zones when they are reassorbed by the Mists, but some take it to the extreme and believe that bringing the bodies of allies back to controlled areas or even closer to the main camp before they disappear will actually increase their chances of survival. As much as some try to do such a grim yet selfless service for their allies, it's a rarer luxury the further one is from their territory, and eventually many end up leaving it up to fate.

Mist anomalies and corruption

Some areas are also said to be cursed places to die into, and while the curse itself is considered just a superstition, there have been confirmations of weird magical fluctuations in those areas, which may result in Mist anomalies.

Some theorize that such anomalies are rifts in the fabric of the Mists caused by degradation or other unknown phenomena, but their effects have rarely been documented so far. Any equipment left to record said events gets moved during the reset, and volunteers willing to be there in person are scarcely found, so no hypothesis has ever been reached, let alone a definitive conclusion. The most common way to refer to it is that "the Mists swallowed someone", following the words of some who witnessed such events from afar. While these anomalies are rare and even more rarely stick around for long, they sometimes leave some small places of power behind, not as strong as nexuses but useful nonetheless. While they're generally safe to interact with and study, superstitions tied to dying in the exact vicinity of those places are widespread across all Tyrias, and it generally leads to temporary truces between enemies around their area of influence.

In some rare cases, MW might barely survive Mist degradation, being resurrected but appearing "changed" in ways that are not "right". While usually the effects are temporary (phantom pains, illness and weakness) or only affect the mind (amnesia, erratic behavior, etc), sometimes the MW can present notable physical differences or be so weak that they may quickly die for the last time. Such differences often appear as rashes or wounds, ones that often weren't supposed to be there and can't be easily healed, which eventually end up becoming "Mist-corrupted", as the affected body part degrades and twists in disturbing ways, all as it starts emitting misty particles and at times expands to the rest of the body. Sadly, a non-trivial amount of those so severely affected by Mist degradation end up becoming dangerously hostile and have to be put down, or eventually wander off on their own, but a few do remain stable and continue to act normally, at times barely noticing their affliction.

Mist-corruption also incidentally happens to MW who still make it back after a long time of being supposedly dead, or that come in contact with Mist anomalies. It's still unknown whether there's a link between the two phenomena or it's all just a coincidence. One notable example is Dugan, who mentions that he managed to get his armor infused with the mist coming from the places of powers of the battlegrounds, and that another fellow who tried to touch the same energy orb ended up turning into a rabbit that allegedly still roams around camp. Curiously, very few veterans say they remember both of them, but they all also mention that many years passed between their disappearance following the event the human described and his sudden return with quite an array of treasures for sale. Perhaps there's more that Dugan isn't remembering or simply avoids saying, along with dodging all questions about his partially mist-corrupted body and not taking off his mask or clothes around others, but no one seems to really mind his presence.

#Mist War #gw2 wvw #wvw #gw2 world vs world #mist warriors #gw2 headcanons #gw2 lore rambling #gw2 mists #the mists #pics are all taken from promotional material (gw2's own news) or the wiki. the Dugan screen is mine #my writing #Skye writes words #this one is big but it felt weird to split it since it's all tied together

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burlveneer-music · 1 year ago

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Green-House - A Host for All Kinds of Life - studiously avoiding the "New Age" label, they nonetheless represent the best qualities of that much-maligned genre

In an era of rampant, man-made climate chaos, “solastalgia” (the longing and distress experienced by individuals as a response to environmental change/degradation) has emerged as a useful, semi-viral concept — a catch-all term for the pervasive sense that the world as we know it is far from well, and only growing less so. But, for many of us, a problem, a trap, an ineffable hollowness, exists at the very crux of this concept/premise: how can we mourn (or even sense the loss of) that which we have never known? Especially for lifelong urbanites estranged from nature, who nevertheless grasp the severity and complexity of the problem—how might they remember? How might they mourn? Perhaps indirectly—that is to say, in an exploratory and non-dogmatic fashion—Green-House, a project birthed by Olive Ardizoni and now officially a duo project featuring long-time collaborator and confidant, Michael Flanagan, seeks to address this gap in understanding. Six Songs for Invisible Gardens, the debut Green-House EP whose 2020 release coincided with the depths of Covid-19 “lockdown,” responded to the rampant heartsickness of human and plant life, especially in non-rural areas. The packaging of the cassette release famously included wildflower seeds for the listener to scatter. This gesture (at once simple and daring, especially when one considers the logistical element) exists as testament to the sincerity and seriousness of Ardizoni’s convictions. Music for Living Spaces, the first full-length Green-House LP, followed in 2021— a refinement of the formula that enshrined Six Songs as a cult, eco-ambient hit. Out October 13, 2023 on Leaving Records, they have returned with the LP A Host For All Kinds of Life, a third entry in a series of releases whose titles have incidentally all revolved around the “for” construction: an unofficial canon of offerings, or maybe rather instructions as to how the music contained therein might, could, and should operate in/on the listener’s life and “living space(s).” Decidedly the most expansive Green-House release — one need only consider the LP’s title and the kaleidoscopic, fractal cover art designed by Flanagan—A Host For All Kinds of Life troubles the very notion of “ambient music,” a category with whom Green-House has always existed in some degree of tension. What if a song’s seeming softness constitutes its biting edge? What if easeful, contemplative pleasure can radically alter our mindset? Our very role as worldly subjects? Drawing on the works of Lynn Margulis and our burgeoning understanding of the evolutionary role of biological mutualism (associations between species in which both species benefit), A Host For All Kinds of Life is a deeply entrenched and politically grounded song suite. And there are indeed discrete songs here, with defined structure, momentum, and sway; see the gilded, sixties-evoking melodic arabesque of the record’s ninth and penultimate track, “Everything is Okay” (which incidentally ends with the release’s only human voice—a tender message left for Ardizoni by their mother). In conversation, Ardizoni speaks often of the centrality of joy—that Green-House’s very existence can be traced to a conscious decision they made to not only choose joy as an act of rebellion, but to find that joy in whatever plant life they could access in their immediate environment. In this sense, all of Green-House’s releases (and A Host for All Kinds of Life especially) embody a radicality that may elude the casual or first-time listener. To choose, model, and express joy in an ailing world requires courage, a courage that must be jealously guarded and constantly replenished. A Host For all Kinds of Life encourages the listener to slow down, take stock, tune in to the more-than-human world around them, and gather their courage and joy in light of the uncertainty to come. All songs written and produced by Olive Ardizoni and Michael Flanagan Bio by Emmett Shoemaker

#Bandcamp #Green-House #ambient #plant music #electronic #new age #leaving records #2023 #los angeles

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dustedmagazine · 2 years ago

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Tetragrammacide — Tantric Aphorisms from the Arachneophidian Qu’ran (Iron Bonehead)

youtube

Death metal act Tetragrammacide likes to deal in maximalist gestures. If you think Tantric Aphorisms from the Arachneophidian Qu’ran is a hifalutin mouthful of syllables and concepts, check out a couple of the monikers the band has hung on its songs: “Mandelbrot Scarab of Fractal Manifestation Trapped in the Arachnid Webs, Spun above the Hidden Pathways into Non-Euclidean Interbetweenness” and “Intoxicated Bees of Sekhet-Aarhu Circumambulate the Abode of Self Beheaded One Who Forever Danceth in Her Shaktisexual Ecstasy.” Say what? And also: thanks, dudes. Now I have a baseline schema for what a Mandelbrot Set is (but it’s tough to understand thoroughly without some advanced maths) and that Shaktisexual energy is a thing among the New Age types (marginally more useful knowledge to this intrepid adventurer…). All that is stimulating, and sort of fun, but what does any of it have to do with death metal?

Even after repeated spins of Tantric Aphorisms from the Arachneophidian Qu’ran, this reviewer can provide little enlightenment — though some sort of spiritual experience, likely involving rapacious sexual desire and significant acts of property damage, seems very much at stake in the music. Tetragrammacide is part of the ever-evolving death metal scene in Kolkata, and like fellow West Bengali band Aparthiva Raktadhara, the band seems intent on articulating a malign underside to India’s rich religious and cultic traditions. While the band’s semiotic antics seem superficially more suited to the perversely playful energies of dissonant tech death, on this record Tetragrammacide has pushed further into the black/death aesthetics they have explored for close to a decade.

That is: there is more speed and burl to this music than there is absurd complexity or an acrobatic, linear compositional sense. The riffs ring clear, and the rhythmic are flexible but driving. Tunes like “Fundamental Reconciliation between Maya and Yama through Perpetual Okbish-Ouroboric Cunnilingus” are less bestial, more ecstatic (no shit…). But that’s in the ear of the listener — and Tetragrammacide is taking a chance interweaving terms and concepts like Yama and Qu’ran in India’s current social and cultural climate. Some listeners might find those thought experiments more blasphemous than bestial, or criminally bestial in their blasphemy. In nations like the US or Sweden, adventurous death metal has always been intent on shattering taboos and offending moral sensibilities. In Modi’s India? The stakes of those intents and acts seem a lot higher.

Jonathan Shaw

#Tetragrammacide #Tantric Aphorisms from the Arachneophidian Qu’ran #iron bonehead #jonathan shaw #albumreview #dusted magazine #death metal #india #Youtube

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skytechgamingpc · 4 months ago

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fracturedgodhead · 6 months ago

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Learning Tarot Is Fun I Think #9

I didn't really realize quite how juicy tarot is as a lore. There's so much hermeticism and mysticism wrapped up in everything, it's so cool. I'm honestly worried if I'll be able to do it justice...

I like The Magician. I think the idea of a person who is so knowledgeable, aware, and in tune with the world that will is the only barrier to their success is very attractive, simply because that is what I lack. Right now I have will (if a will that is hampered by executive dysfunction), but I lack some vital understanding of many different things.

I need to start working on drawing tomorrow. I've got no experience with this kind of thing so I'll need to use all the time I have. That means I need to come up with a character today...

I think I will go with The Magician for the first one. He will be named Anaxon Talgot

These characters are primarily defined by the piece of Them (still need a name for this Thuy) that they happened upon. I think for The Magician, it was a concept. Something memetic, that they couldn't let go of, they learned it and it got stuck in their head. Something that causes them to be some of the time incredibly driven and capable, but also other times deluded and ineffectual.

A pattern.

A wildly complex pattern, something fractal-like perhaps. A pattern in the world, understanding it can allow you to manipulate it and affect events. It is far beyond the capacity of the mind to fully understand, but this character understands it enough to occasionally be near a reality bender's level of ability, but just as often he is deluded and unable to function because he has come to depend on this pattern to understand the world, and it simply does not fit in the mind.

He was originally a scam artist, and a master of his trade. He wrote at least three books on his methods for manipulation and deception, but eventually he started noticing a pattern in the behavior of people. The pattern.

His public ability began to fade, but privately, he kept on pursuing this strange pattern, finding out more and more about how it works, obsessing and learning and growing dependent on it to understand how the world works. When he is operating with a part of the pattern he understands, he is practically clairvoyant, but when he encounters aspects of the pattern he is unfamiliar with, it's like sensory overload. He either shuts down or has a break down unless he can will himself to keep going through it.

That's how it is at the height of his progression into understanding his arcanum. The effects of the pattern will increase over his lifespan as he learns more and becomes more dependent on the pattern. I think a specific timeline would be: he first notices it at 30, then for 25 years he progresses, then he either dies, or has a meltdown bad enough to make him forget the entire thing (still undecided lol). In those 25 years, he is connected to Them, and Their influence starts affecting his beliefs and thoughts through the arcanum. Their beliefs and thoughts simply start overwriting those of Anaxon, driving him to seek out other pieces.

Anaxon is tormented for these 25 years, his abilities make him powerful, and they can keep him alive, in terms of being able to support himself, when he would otherwise be borderline catatonic half the time. He is driven by beliefs he does not understand and feelings alien to him arc through his mind like lightning through a phone charger.

Edit: I just woke up this morning and realized I didn't post this last night 😭

#gamedev #devlog #writing #character design

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anonymous-dentist · 2 years ago

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REBLOGS WELCOME!!

Arin doesn’t know what “death” is, but it scares him nonetheless. There’s an aching in his chest when he thinks about it, about nonexistence. Longing, perhaps? He knows that feeling. He doesn’t know how he knows it, but he does. Longing, or maybe fear. He knows fear.

Skittering between trees with both eyes focused on the sky above searching out the Admins, Arin’s heart skips in his chest.

Oh, yes, he knows fear. He knows it quite well.

But “death”? As a concept, he can assume that it’s much like sleeping. That’s how Foolish and BadBoyHalo made it sound. Luzu’s dogs are “dead”, so deeply asleep that they still haven’t woken up after nearly a month of going to bed. Maybe Spreen did such a good job at tucking them in that they don’t want to wake up. Arin can’t blame them for that; the world is a scary place.

Tilin’s bed must be very comfortable, then, if she hasn’t woken up after being buried four meters below the surface of the earth. Arin personally can’t imagine it’s all that nice, but it’s probably just a matter of opinion. He prefers slightly more formal clothing than Luzu does, it’s probably something like that. While Arin prefers nice button-ups and vests, Tilin prefers dirt.

That must be it!

Foolish and BadBoyHalo had said that Tilin was “dead”, but Arin hadn’t had much time to check her code before having to run away back to Luzu’s house. There was a distinct absence of… of something, but the code for sleep is so complex- what with dreams and all- that it was hard to take any of it in.

Arin can wake Tilin up, he thinks. He just needs to figure out how, and, to do that, he needs to see her himself. And if he can’t give her an extra pillow and maybe a nightlight or two, well, that would be a shame. Even the “dead” deserve some light in their rooms. Otherwise, it would be awfully dreary.

It’s dark now. Arin waited for the sun to set to sneak to Tilin’s bed. He wants to minimize the risk of the Admins seeing him, and maybe he just prefers the dark. Luzu doesn’t like all of the monsters, but Arin can’t help but look at the skeletons and wonder if Luzu’s bones look the same as theirs. If Arin’s bones do, he supposes. Sharing a body and all.

He can see the redstone torches through the trees, he’s just close enough to be able to smell the remnants of the soul sand that Luzu had taken. He’s close enough to be able to hear a quiet humming, just barely audible over the ambient forest noises. It’s muffled, but it’s familiar, almost like a memory poking at Arin’s brain with a tuning fork with sharpened prongs.

After one last look to the skies, Arin takes the risk and bolts out from the trees, pressing himself up against the large concrete bow as soon as he’s done. His chest heaves, and his bones ache (Luzu is so old, maybe he should be “dead”, too.)

The humming continues. It’s a person, and they’re underground. There’s a thin line of code reaching down from the sky and into the earth in front of the pyre; it caresses a flower, stroking its petals softly.

Oh, he thinks. He knows this code. His fists clench unconsciously, and he knows that Luzu is going to wake up confused about the blood that’s going to be under his nails, but, frankly, fuck Luzu. Maybe he should try investing in a nice pair of gloves if he doesn’t want his hands to get bloody. His nails are sharp, anyway. It’s his own fault.

(“This is all your fault!”

“Me? You’re the one killing my people and our- my children!”

“Your people? My God, you’re pretentious. They’re only yours because you stole them. From me!”)

Arin lets out a nice long breath, watching its code fractal away into the ether. Luckily, he shares Luzu’s code as long as he’s in his body. It would be annoying if he got caught because of his breathing.

Underground, there’s a sniffle, and then the humming continues. It’s a sad TikTok song, Arin recognizes it from… from somewhere.

He tiptoes up to Tilin’s bed, peeking over the wall. There isn’t a hole above the bed, so Quackity must have buried himself with her. He’s such a good parent…!

If Quackity is here, then Arin doesn’t need to be, right? For the pillow, anyway. Tilin probably doesn’t need that anymore if she has her dad there. But the code…

There’s an absence of code above her bed. It’s just Quackity’s, and the forest’s. No egg.

“Death” must be a very deep sleep, then.

Arin hops the wall, glancing up at the sky as he does so just to… just to make sure. There’s nobody there, but…

The humming stops just as Arin touches down. Quackity’s code is hesitant. More importantly, it’s sad.

Arin’s heart aches. He might hate Quackity, but he likes to think that they’re still friends. (Still?)

It would be rude to barge into an egg’s bedroom, so Arin sits down and leans against the wall, his legs spread out in front of him. His shoe is untied, but he doesn’t bother tying it. That’s a Luzu problem, not an Arin problem. (And it definitely isn’t because Arin doesn’t know how to tie his shoes, that would be a ridiculous assumption.)

Arin can’t talk, so he can’t announce himself or anything. Not properly, anyway. And he shouldn’t use Luzu’s communicator because Luzu might start getting suspicious of any weird-looking messages… so…

So he just watches the stars blink in and out of existence. His stars look different- his are red. These ones… aren’t.

These stars don’t have any code behind them, and Arin doesn’t know what to think about that.

Below, Quackity is silent. He probably doesn’t want to wake Tilin up, how sweet!

And then slowly, so very, very slowly, the dirt beneath Arin’s shoes starts to shift. He quickly pulls his knees up to his chest, and he sits, and he waits, unblinking.

Quackity pokes his head up with narrowed eyes. He’s facing straight ahead, so he doesn’t notice Arin at first.

And then he does.

And then his face reddens like an angry little tomato and he crawls out of Tilin’s bed.

Arin waves with a forcefully-cheerful grin.

Quackity pulls out his axe.

Arin’s smile drops, as does his arm.

“You,” Quackity growls. “What the hell are you doing here?”

But Arin can’t answer- he can’t, not if he doesn’t want to be discovered. So, instead, he tries not to look as threatening as he thinks he is. He shrinks back against the wall trying to make himself look as small as possible. It’s easy enough to do in Luzu’s baggy hoodie, though the skinny jeans make it a bit difficult to move anything more than a centimeter. (Freak…)

Quackity looks rough. He’s covered in dirt, he’s practically caked in it, and there are circles under his eyes dark enough to rival Luzu’s. His hands shake, and his legs look like they’re about to collapse out from under him at any moment. He looks tired.

Slowly and with very deliberate motions, Arin pulls out Luzu’s communicator and opens the notes app. Quackity watches with faltering eyes.

Arin types, and then he holds the communicator out for Quackity to see.

‘I’m Arin, not Luzu.’

And then, after a double space line break: ‘Hello, Quackity!’

Quackity slumps immediately, falling down onto the ground in a heap of limbs and weaponry. Arin awkwardly shifts the fallen axe away from any squishy bits; Quackity doesn’t stop him. His code is faltering, blinking in and out like a collapsing lighthouse.

“You know, I was kind of hoping that it was him,” Quackity weakly says. His voice sounds like it had just come out the wrong side of a wind tunnel. That is to say: he sounds like shit.

‘I get that a lot.’

“I’m sure you do.” A pause, and then, “What do you want? I’m kind of busy.”

Arin’s stomach churns unpleasantly, but maybe part of Luzu is awake after all because he can’t help but type out, ‘Are you busy? I can help!’

Quackity’s face wrinkles, as does Arin’s. Yeah, no, not happening. It seems that Quackity is still as fond of him as he is of Quackity.

“I don’t need your help,” Quackity spits out. “Now, tell me, what do you want? I’m busy.”

He isn’t busy. Arin knows this, and Quackity knows that Arin knows this, and Arin knows that Quackity knows, and… and…

‘I wanted to check on Tilin. Foolish and BadBoyHalo told me that she was resting, but I didn’t think that it would be very comfortable to sleep underground.’

Quackity stares at the communicator. His eyes are starting to well up with… something (are those tears? Is this what tears look like?) as he just stares.

And then he looks up at Arin, tense.

“Tilin isn’t resting,” he says. “Tilin is dead.”

‘That’s what they said, but I’m not sure what that means.’

And then, before Quackity can bring himself to respond: ‘Can I see her? I need to see something.’

Quackity snaps himself out of whatever he was feeling with a bitter shake of the head. “What? No, of course not, I’m not going to let you just-” He shakes his head again, reaching for his axe again. “No, you can’t. You can’t see him. No. Of course not.”

Arin cocks his head with a slight frown. ‘Are you okay?’

“What?” Quackity laughs. He shakes his head yet again. “No, yeah, no, I’m fine. I’m fine. My son is dead, no, yeah, I’m fine.”

‘You don’t seem fine.’

“What do you know, anyway? Who the hell asked you what I’m feeling, huh? ‘Cause I’m fine. I’m going to kill Slime, and then I’m going to…”

Quackity trails off into a cough. His fingers curl around his axe, a white-knuckled grip.

(“Are you okay?”

“What do you care, asshole? Aren’t you supposed to be trying to kill me right now?”

“Yes- well- uh-”

“Save your excuses, Luzu. I don’t want to hear them.”)

Cautiously, Arin reaches a hand out to touch Quackity’s shoulder (it must be Luzu again, the asshole.) Quackity slaps his hand away and scoots back, nearly falling back down the hole he had come out of.

“Fuck off!” Quackity wheezes. “Get out of here! No, you can’t see him, so- so get out!”

Arin doesn’t know what “death” is. He does know a few other things, though. He knows fear, it’s his best friend. He knows sadness, he feels it every time he wakes up in this world.

He knows grief. Maybe that’s what has been sitting in his chest since his first appearance in this world. It’s what hits him like a truck every time he so much as thinks about Quackity, a grief so heavy that it makes it impossible to so much as breathe, let alone think.

Quackity’s code is blue, it always has been. Tonight, it’s almost black, barely discernible from the night sky. The emptiness surrounds him like, well… like an egg. He sits in the mud above his child’s grave curled into himself, and Arin can’t help but wonder what it would be like to pull him out of his shell and see what true human grief looks like.

Instead, and entirely for Luzu’s sake, Arin writes, ‘I’m sorry.’

Quackity reads it, and then he laughs, short and painful. “Right, sure you are. You didn’t even know him.”

‘Do I have to know something to be sad about it disappearing?’

Quackity sighs, wilting. “No, I guess not.”

Arin doesn’t really know what happens when he’s asleep, but he remembers Foolish and BadBoyHalo whispering to each other about Luzu being Tilin’s other father. Something in Arin’s throat burns at that, a laugh, maybe. There’s a memory right there, right at the edge of his vision, but he can’t get to it. Maybe he shouldn’t. (He probably shouldn’t.)

This time when Arin reaches out, Quackity doesn’t recoil. He lets himself get pulled into a loose, awkward hug- Arin’s first. He doesn’t quite know what he’s doing, but Luzu’s body seems to have some sort of muscle memory going on. As does Quackity’s, because he tucks his head into the crook of Luzu’s body’s neck and hides his face like it’s second nature.

A word burns in Arin’s throat, a dreadfully familiar one. But he can’t say it, he doesn’t know how, and he can’t exactly type with a man in his arms. So he simply thinks it and hopes that the message somehow gets across.

Quacks…

Fucking Luzu. Arin doesn’t think that he’s homophobic, but he is Quackityphobic. Ugh.

Arin’s skin crawls uncomfortably as Quackity sniffs right into his collar. Gross.

But… they are friends, aren’t they? Fit told Arin as much, he and Quackity are friends. Friends don’t let each other grieve alone. That isn’t right.

(“If we’re really about to die, I want you to know that I hate you.”

“I know. I hate you, too, Quacks. I wanted to kill you myself.”

“I know, right? I’m almost disappointed that he’s doing it for me.”

“If we survive, let’s just kill him first, alright?”

“You’ve got a fucking deal.”)

“You would have liked him,” Quackity quietly says. “Tilin.”

Arin pulls back just enough to type something on his communicator and to show it to Quackity, whose face falls into a sad little smile.

‘Tell me about him,’ Arin says.

Quackity takes in a deep, shaky breath, and then he starts to speak.

#qsmp #qsmp fic #a.d.'s fics i suppose #look this may not be canon compliant anymore but i make my own lore #let's hope this one isn't cursed...

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joemuggs · 2 years ago

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The Lonnnnng View

The brilliant Charlie Fracture just sent me his new blog post, Let's Take It Slow: The Wonders Of Slowing Down Music And The Importance Of The Long Form Listening Experience, saying "thought you might enjoy reading it". And I did, I really did. It REALLY spoke to me. I love slowing things down, I'm always doing it when DJing, as on this short mix when I took early hardcore rave and slowed it back towards the speed of the hip hop it was sampling. And I thought, hmm, I'm sure I've written about this somewhere... after a bit of head scratching and searching through old emails, I found the following article from the 2012 WIRE end of year issue. It's a bit sprawling, but it's on to something, you know... and somehow looking back over decades (as Charlie's piece does too) suits this topic. So.........

👇🏻

Off the grid

Club music's relationship to its own regularity has always been complicated, but 2012 saw these complications multiplying and the music pushing at its patterns and grids in some radical ways. While for many the story was of a retreat to the safety of familiar forms – mid-nineties house and techno in particular dominated, with a jungle revival nascent – in darker corners things were pulsing and warping, starting to ooze and waft around the steady four-square rhythm patterns that have been foundational at least since the invention of the sequencer. This was not a new genre or style in the conventional sense, rather the convergence of some key trends in 21st century music, the coming to a head of certain pressures, creating an uneasy but thrilling sense of potentiality. These are: slowness, rhythmic slippage, and a more physically expressive interaction with the digital means of production.

The tendency to slowing has been brewing for a long time but was everywhere this year. In 2012 the likes of Andy Stott, Demdike Stare, Raime, Holy Other, Old Apparatus, How To Dress Well, Lukid, Om Unit, Hype Williams and Downliners Sekt all dropped releases with rhythms so stretched that they become textural waves rather than percussion, magnified so that every surface of every sound becomes an environment. The tracks, when played on suitably sizeable speakers, are chambers into which one can enter – sometimes desolate and forbidding as with Raime, sometimes voluptuous and dangerously seductive like Holy Other, sometimes Tron-like and glossy like Om Unit, sometimes fantastical and bejewelled, as in the baroque complexity of this year’s EPs by Old Apparatus. This was “post-dubstep” not in the standard sense of simply applying dubstep's tropes to new rhythms, but in building from first principles entirely new takes on what it could have been.

Dubstep itself had an eye on those first principles, too. This was the year that the “dungeon sound” became prominent: the creepy-crawling update of the earliest half-step rhythms with added production finesse and technologically-enabled sense of detail saw the stock of originators like Distance, Tunnidge and Kryptic Minds, and newer talents like Mancunians Compa and Biome rising. It was a reminder that dubstep's original appeal was about bodily immersion and undulating push-pull physical dynamics rather than about the rave rush and the spectacle of the “drop”. Though we were reminded by the increased profile of Digital Mystikz's Coki – incredibly only now after a decade of dubstep production becoming a full-time musician and launching his own label – that even the harder end of dubstep doesn't have to be predicated on percussive impact: at the heart of even Coki's most violent tunes is always the sluggish undercurrent of his preposterously fractal, semi-liquified “scrambled egg” bass tones.

Even drum'n'bass continued a relationship with slowness. While one end of the scene intensified like commercial dubstep into hyper-pop, reaching vast new audiences, the spaced-out half-tempo “Autonomic” tendency of the last couple of years continued to develop. An album from ASC, various releases on the Space Cadets label, and most fascinatingly a terrifyingly psychedelic EP by Archer & Asanyeh on Romania's DubKraft label all turned d'n'b's velocity in on itself, creating suspenseful, gravity-loosened environments in place of demented drive. House rhythms, too, proved capable of suspending time, particular in the hadns of those re-examining the sparser strains of UK Funky and its potential to draw dubstep and Grime’s sonorities and double-time funk into a more considered space. Wen, Visionist, Beneath, Filter Dread, Shy One, DVA and Cooly G all to some degree created eerie, strangely static rhythms in this way. And throughout the underground, like an underlying pulse that influences all around it, increasingly ran samples of or references to the ‘trap’ sound of US hiphop: layered 808 kicks separated by large space through sheer necessity due to their gigantic size, and looping pitched-down vocal samples running throughout, a 21st century counterpart to the dread signals of reggae vocalists that were cut up into 1990s Jungle.

As Bristol DJ/producer Pinch put it in his Wire Invisible Jukebox interview (The Wire 346), “the way we perceive tempo and the rhythms we're most affiliated with does change, based on situations you're in and the way you tune your head to the world.” What it seems the new techniques of music creation allow is getting closer and closer to real-time manipulation of these changes, to “tune” not just the head but the whole nervous system of the listener in more and more precise ways: where the rhythmic codes of other dance rhythms may aim for the head, hips and feet, the enveloping flows and larger spaces between beats of slower music speak to the entire body as a whole. All of this is about the positioning of bodies in relation to music, allowing new ways of coming close to and entering into the music: about sculpting the affect of the sound in four dimensions. And it's technologically-enabled, the ability to zoom into the finest detail and view all the inhuman complexity of those sonic surfaces and spaces a function of just how much information is being pushed through digital signal processing (DSP) now: we are reminded in no uncertain terms that the dancefloor experience is the interface with that vertiginous information flow. As the hyper-acceleration of jungle illustrated the foaming wave of the digital future cresting as it rushed towards us, so this tendency speaks, perhaps, of it having broken and immersed us.

Rhythmic slippage is directly related to the way that slowing music makes it come in waves as much as beats or pulses. Dubstep, as mentioned, continued to prove it was about tones that undulate around and over the beat as much as the beat itself. Chicago's footworking sounds established that their determinedly tricksy rhythms were here to stay as part of the international dance language. The psychedelic hip hop of Flying Lotus and co has been elaborating on the lurch of J Dilla and the astral analogue funk of Sa-Ra for some years now, but in 2012 we saw plenty of proof in tracks like Fly-Lo's “Pretty Boy Strut”, Mark Pritchard's beats for Wiley, and the gloriously juddering melting pots of Geiom's and dÉbruit's albums, that this too is now established globally as dancefloor-rocking music, not just some over-elaborated gentrification or neo-triphop. It's no coincidence that the London club night where Kutmah, Om Unit, Kidkanevil, Blue Daisy & Offshore play these decentred beats is called “Tempo Clash”: this is, again, about grooves slithering out of expected tempo constraints, and more generally out of expected patterns.

Once again, this was about the body in relation to data: about the physicality of musical (re)production, the sampling of complex jazz playing, the hands dancing across MPC pads, the passed-down skills of the scratch DJ being applied to CDJs, touchscreens and other Ableton controllers. Whether in footworking beats or Fly-Lo's Brainfeeder imperative, it was the return of the repressed b-boy drive, a deranged scrawling of digital wildstyle lines across the weird, wired world. And again this was a tendency that had been building for some while, but in 2012 it became apparent that a convergence was taking place between tempo meltdown, rhythmic looseness and this new sense of placing of the body in relationship to the music. We begun to see – in dramatic contrast to the overtly cerebral abstractions of 1990s “IDM” – how the input-output between fleshy bodies and digital transmission systems could be made bigger, sloppier, stranger and more involving.

In this there were close parallels with The New Aesthetic – the (mainly) visual movement that coalesced in the spring of 2012 around a panel organised by British theorist James Bridle and popularised by Bruce Sterling. The New Aesthetic zooms in on the cracks in our day-to-day datasphere, glitches in normality, the sudden Turing Test fails, the moments when the comforting shields of digital culture wobble and you see the bots' myriad eyes peering out at you and assessing you. It's about revelling in ruptures between what we have naively cast as two separate worlds: the physical and the digital. The New Aesthetic – and the lurching, pulsating weirdings of electronic club music that warp and crack the regularity of sequencer patterns – are about the horror and thrill of realising that what is inside the computer and what is outside are all the same system, that we are submerged in floods of data.

It may even be that Burroughs's adage that “when you cut open the present, the future bleeds out” has some traction here: by defamiliarising the rhythms of common genres, by warping and cracking them, we may be discovering ways through the illusory impasse of the everything-available-all-at-once overwhelming by the past and present. Certainly these techniques are a way of breaking the comfort and ease that readily available sound manipulation technology – in particular the omnipresent Ableton Live – engender. Whether it's the excessively sensual surges of sound in Holy Other, the flailing iPad abuse of Gaslamp Killer or the rusted and irregular-edged grime of Filter Dread and Sd Laika, everything here can be seen as a reaction to the predictably mixed and mixable flows of the Ableton DJ generation. When precision and perfection become easier than making errors, magnifying and repeating errors suddenly seems hugely compelling.

Whether it can go further, or whether these remain just pockets of resistance, is questionable. Dance by its very nature is predicated on some degree of regularity and coherence, and the global forces of “EDM” – the all-encompassing term used since house and dubstep bizarrely gatecrashed the US mainstream at the turn of the decade – seem to increase the pressure to conformity and easily-packaged units of DJ culture. Again in The Wire, Pinch talked of wanting to emulate the freedom of tempo and metre in the Qawwali music that he has often taken inspiration from but bemoaned his lack of the “musical intelligence” of the Qawwali musicians – hinting towards an entirely new understanding of the production of rhythm that needs to be collectively built to cope with the possibilities of more flexible and expressive technology.

Dr Matt Yee-King, teacher of Computer Music at Goldsmiths college, and researcher into technological interfaces between sound, mind and information says: “musicians might start to realise that the best way to escape the grid is not to use the grid,” that is to abandon sequencers entirely in favour of all-live coding and manipulation, but it is still extraordinarily rare that club musicians and DJs feel able to break loose completely from the metronomic diktats of sequencing tools like Ableton. The grids are still in place. The slippage and melting of rhythmic and tempo constraints that have come to a head in 2012 are not a revolution in themselves, and whether one is possible is yet to be proved. Could a digital Coltrane or Hendrix, or a collective sound as improvisatory and free as Qawwali, emerge from these new opportunities, and actually become a part of the world's nightlife rituals? For the first time maybe since the peak of jungle's rhythmic fury, these extreme possibilities don't seem entirely ridiculous.

#slow music #slow it down #low and slow that is the tempo #dubstep #chopped & screwed #jungle #autonomic #dub #trap #space #irregularity #off-grid #improv #jazz

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valdomarx · 4 years ago

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La Campanella

McShep + Rodney plays the piano Rodney never could resist a challenge, especially when it’s set by Sheppard.

Atlantis is a place of many wonders, but Rodney's favorite is this:

In a distant part of the northern pier is a short, squat tower which he and Sheppard investigate on a routine patrol.

And in that tower is a large, unassuming room like a lecture hall.

And in the center of the room is an object seven foot long and three feet high, elegant, delicate, and familiar.

“Is that…” Rodney practically runs over to touch it, as reckless as that urge can be in Atlantis, but he knows this isn’t a weapon or a piece of broken technology or some dangerous machine. It’s a thing of beauty.

It’s an instrument remarkably like a piano: white and black reversed, keys slightly different lengths, but the same 12-step configuration making up an octave. Keys which strike strings stretched over a wide frame with soft hammers, and this can’t be a coincidence.

“How... ” he starts, and then he answers his own question. “The Ancients must have invented this instrument and brought the concept with them to Earth. But that would overturn so much musical history they’ll have to rewrite the textbooks, can you even imagine the implications -”

John does not look as fascinated by the profound repercussions of this discovery on the history of western classical music as Rodney is.

He waves questions of history aside and sits on the low stool in front of the keyboard, blowing away the years of accumulated dust. His hands instinctively settle into arches, his wrists loose, and he plays a few simple scales. The notes sound out clear and true, but -

He frowns.

“Something wrong?” Sheppard is leaning over the instrument, studying him and it with interest.

“This is tuned half a tone lower than an Earth piano. Feels a bit weird, that’s all.”

“How do you know that?”

Rodney affects his smuggest smile. “Perfect pitch, obviously.”

“Obviously,” Sheppard says, rolling his eyes.

Rodney looks around the room furtively, keen for reasons he can’t articulate that no one else should observe them, and he starts to play.

It becomes a habit, a place to unwind, somewhere they visit on off hours and in quiet moments.

Today Sheppard is flicking through a golf magazine while Rodney warms up with some Bach. The music is pleasing and orderly, and the sparse, bright notes explode in fractal-like patterns, unfurling and changing and becoming more complex the closer you look.

John tilts his head to one side and says, “You know there’s a whole bunch of classical music on the Atlantis server?”

Rodney grins. He did know that, in fact. Never get between a team of scientists and their file sharing. “I may have heard.”

“I listened to some of the Chopin you like. Then some other piano stuff as well.”

“Yeah?” Rodney picks at a fingernail. Something about the idea of John listening to music just because Rodney likes it makes his heart beat a little faster. “Find anything you liked?”

“A bunch actually. Have you heard of a piece called La Campanella? By a guy named Liszt?"

"Have I…" Has he heard of the single hardest piece in the entire solo piano repertoire? The fact he could never get those double stops right haunts him to this day. "Yeah, it rings a bell."

"I like that one," John says decisively. "It's nice."

Nice??? Sheppard thinks the most epic and demanding piece of all time is nice? Of course he does.

"You should learn to play it," John says casually, like he's suggesting they watch an action movie instead of a scifi.

"I should -" he splutters. "Do you have any idea how difficult that is? It's practically impossible."

John smirks and says, "I thought practically impossible was your specialty?"

Rodney is still spluttering when John throws him a wink and walks out.

And then, because despite being the finest mind in two galaxies, on some level he truly is an idiot, he stretches out his fingers and starts to practice.

It's not like he had copious free time to start with. But he makes space whenever he can to come to the piano room, chipping away at this ludicrous piece, bit by bit, phrase by phrase, over and over and over.

People think that learning to play is artistry, and maybe it is that too, but mostly it's a grind. You keep doing it again and again until you get it right. It's as much about stubbornness as about skill.

And stubbornness is something Rodney McKay has in abundance.

Liszt really was a sadistic old bastard, Rodney thinks sourly as he works on the right hand jumps until his fingers turn to lead.

Sometimes Sheppard comes and sits with him while he practices, and on those days he plays easier pieces, things which are familiar and casual. Not that John seems to pay much attention, but Rodney has the urge to impress him all the same.

He’s always having that urge around John.

He spends an entire week working on his goddamn trill.

It shouldn’t matter and it’s not like anyone will really listen to it. But it seems to represent something important — a sequence of paired adjacent notes, next to each other but never quite touching, bouncing off each other time and time again, a dance of two — though he doesn’t want to examine that too closely.

He doesn’t tell anyone else about the piano. He tells himself that’s because it’s convenient that he doesn’t have to share and can use it whenever he wants.

But really, he likes that it’s his and Sheppard’s; their own tiny secret in this vast and sprawling city.

He hears the piece in his sleep, and on missions, and when he’s working in his lab. It becomes a background hum of his brain, always there, a sort of yearning for the possible, the platonic ideal, the way that things could be.

He tries not to examine that too closely either, though the weight of the realization is becoming harder to ignore.

Eventually the piece is as ready as it's going to be. He scribbles a quick note during a meeting, folds it into a paper airplane, and throws it at Sheppard's head. He hits him right in the temple, and he manages to avoid cheering when Elizabeth glares at him.

I have something to play for you, the note reads. Meet you at 7? You know where. - R

He jots it down without really thinking, and only once he's thrown does it occur to him how soppy it sounds.

John doesn't seem too perturbed though. He smiles down at the note and meets Rodney's eye with a little eyebrow wiggle which Rodney takes to mean, Gonna impress me?

By the time John arrives, Rodney is all warmed up and more nervous than he's ever been about a performance. His heart is racing, and when John gives him a fond look and says, "Hey," it trips even faster.

Once he settles in to play though, there's a certain kind of mental clarity that settles over him. His hands know how to do this, he just has to sit back and let them.

His wrists are still tense as he sounds out the first few bars and then, all at once, he relaxes into it and lets the music carry him. Hours of repetition have made every chord, every melody, every insane and unreasonable jump into something almost effortless. He even forgets John is there: there’s only him, and the piano, and the music.

The music builds and builds, each section becoming more and more ornamented, more complex, more physically demanding, all at a relentless pace that sends most players reeling. But he's got this, he can do this, it turns out all he needed was a bit of motivation.

The penultimate section is his favorite: The technical parts are done and here he can throw himself into the wild, over the top glory of the final melody. And perhaps he shows off a little bit, catching John's eye and grinning at him, but that's all part of the fun.

The piece ends with a crashing, massive finale that makes him feel like a virtuoso, and then in a last few epic chords it's done, as tight and perfect a five minutes as you could wish for.

The final chord reverberates on and on through the stillness of the room, glowing out beyond the city and into the night.

"Wow." John's eyes are wide. "That was great."

Rodney preens, because that ineloquent little comment somehow means more to him than an auditorium full of ecstatic applause. Having John look at him like that makes the months of practice worth it.

"You liked it?" He's fishing for compliments, but he figures he's earned it.

"I did," John says, staring at Rodney's hands like they hold the secrets to the universe.

He looks up and blushes at having been caught staring. Then he deflects and shrugs one shoulder. “Honestly, though, it’s not my favorite piano piece.”

Rodney narrows his eyes. He has the distinct impression he’s been played. “What was your favorite then?”

"I prefer Songs Without Words."

"Mendelssohn?" he explodes. "You wanted Mendelssohn? Jesus Christ, I learned to play that when I was eight!"

John grins. "I appreciate simplicity in music."

"Then why on earth did you make me learn Liszt?!"

John has this joyous, manic light in his eyes, like he's having the time of his life here, messing around with Rodney, of all the things he could be doing. "I like watching you do impossible things."

He sucks in a breath. "I hate you."

"No you don't." John leans in, smug and delighted, and oh, Rodney is so in love with this ridiculous, infuriating man that he could burst. "You learned La Campanella for me."

"It wasn't that hard," he says quickly, because he has a reputation to maintain here. But John laughs and gives him this soft, teasing look, one eyebrow quirked at a ridiculous angle beneath the chaotic mess of his hair, and Rodney is defenseless.

"Whatever you say, McKay," John says, and Rodney has the feeling he sees straight through him. "Now play it again."

#mcshep #stargate atlantis #my writing #where my fellow classical music nerds at this one is for you

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oblivionknight · 4 years ago

Note

Sora had been standing there in the hallway for quite some time, playing with a gentle flame in his hand while holding a small box in his other hand. It was definitely one of the most important days ever and Sora wanted to make sure this turned out right. It didn't seem like much to others, but to Sora - and hopefully to Riku - it was something precious and incredible and something to treasure. Sometimes you didn't need something big to prove the other was special right? Hopefully not. ❝Riku!❞Finally he was awake, a brightened smile on the others face before he shoved something forward.

Well – no, just kidding. . . Sora actually threw his arms around the other and pressed their foreheads together. That was the first thing that needed to be done. Their hands were gentle against one another as he passed the present between them, and took a step back.

❝I just wanted to get something for you. Or. . . well make you something.❞ Inside the beautifully wrapped present was a necklace shaped by the mixed swirls of constructed fire and blizzard, burning in essence of the chains. Dangling against them was a pendent that shimmered with the colors of Mirage Split and Nightmare’s End. As though it would catch the light just right and the bursts of fractals would flicker like stained glass.

It was meant to be an oath that no matter how far away they were, their hearts were always in tune, always singing to one another. Like their combined Keyblade, they were always just one call away, always in tune. Leaning forward, Sora pressed a gentle pair of lips to Riku’s cheek.

❝Happy birthday, Riku. . .❞

Riku couldn’t help but smile gently as he felt the gentle touch of their foreheads press against one another. How everything else just seemed to fade away the moment the two of them tenderly touched. It was such an innocent thing but truly a comfort for the both. It allowed them for just a moment to listen to each others hearts more deeply. Even if the two always seemed to do that no matter the distance that separated them. “Sora.” whispered Riku, his voice as tranquil as could be. After all, there was nothing more he loved when the boy he cherished more than anything made his heart leap. It felt like magic every time they locked eyes across the room or simply would hold hands. Reaching down he intimately intertwined their hands together, their fingers touching and interlocking together. The only sound for a moment was the echo of their hearts.

“You always know how to put a smile on my face every year.” It has been true, ever since Chiyoko; his dear mother had passed, the brunette seemed to make it his mission every year to give Riku one more reason to smile. To take time out of his day to properly appreciate the older boy. It was one of the many things that the keyblade master adored about Sora. Just how he could instantly reach his heart so easily. Sometimes it genuinely scared him slightly at how much sway the younger male universally held over his heart. Then again, these complex feelings Riku possessed for the other never faded or stopped.

It was only when Riku felt the present pressed into their joined hands. It was decorated with cute little dream eater wrapping paper. Slowly opening the gift, the older boy felt his eyes widen. Inside the box laid a beautiful gift and not just normal one. It was something that Sora had taken the time to make himself...a present from the brunettes heart. Even without words, Riku knew it was another oath between the two of them. It didn’t help dwell the slight pink running across his cheeks when a pair of lips pressed against the side of his face. Carefully slipping on the magnificent necklace. If Sora looked closely he noticed that Riku wore it proudly. The gift hanging just above his heart. The older boys hands reached out and gently held the back of Sora's neck before pulling him in for a tender kiss. Instantly closing his teal eyes, the keyblade masters heart seemed to speak for him. How quickly it rattled against his ribcage and gently his hands were holding the younger boys. "I love you...my dearly beloved. I make an oath to you..that I will always protect you.”

It was a reminder of the promise the two made so many years ago underneath the starry lit sky. A wooden sword held up as a child Riku proclaimed the promise. However, this time things were different. Neither of them were young boys anymore and the keyblade war hadn’t really allowed either of them to have normal lives. Suddenly two rings glistened in the sunlight, the two made to look like Mirage split and Nightmares end. This was another symbol of their future vows to each other.

“Someday..when we’re a bit older. I promise to fulfill that promise too.” Riku whispered before he leaned down and kissed the top of Sora’s hand. Today was a good day and yet again the boy he loved made him feel..wanted.

#Nightmare's End(Answered Asks)#The Other Half of me(Soaringcrowns)#Dearly Beloved (Soriku)#ooc: This was so soft and sweet so I present extra soft back #I'm sure you'll see the few references to some of our other threads in here

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thegrandkinghimself · 4 years ago

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--before the jump

Dying sunlight filters, dampened, in through the shōji as Hajime blinks awake, mind hazy with sleep. He notices shadows of dancing trees playing across the slat of the windows and across blank walls, the white covers of the futon he’s sleeping in, and the low table and bookshelf to his left. The computer on the desk is still on with its screen stuck on a page of text. Textbook, binder, mechanical pencil. Sticky notes. A Seijoh uniform is hanging on hooks in the wall, with crisp pleats in the khakis and a wrinkle-free blazer--meticulous as always. It’s spartan. And definitely not Hajime’s bedroom.

The door opens and Oikawa walks in, quietly humming to the tune of whatever song is playing in his headphones. He isn’t paying attention to Hajime, doesn’t notice that he’s awake, and just plops down in front of his computer. He unconsciously curls in on himself, knees up to his chest, as he resumes whatever he was writing in his notebook before he left. Hajime turns onto his side to watch. Pulls the covers up farther to cover his shoulder. If he tucks his nose down a little bit, Hajime can smell sage and a hint of camphor that saturate the sheets.

During the day, there is always the rhythm of footsteps and lightning fast movements that characterize Hajime’s life. Treadmills of habit. Even in the night, there is the breath drawn next to his side and muffled questions of tomorrow. But sometimes, it strikes him just how quiet it can be around Oikawa because, for all of his bluster, he can get so wrapped up in his head. Hajime won’t pretend he knows all that plagues this mystifying boy--this person who is more than even the most complex kanji can capture. But now Hajime understands, too, what it means to be so disquieted in a way that he rarely does.

These days, it’s hard not to feel like this--like even the wrong word could disturb the stillness that hangs over their heads as the clock ticks down to zero.

Hajime slips out from the covers and pads behind Oikawa, noting the Spanish that is displayed on the computer screen. He smiles a little, because that’s all Oikawa’s been obsessed with since their final match with Karasuno. The thought is bittersweet and his heart twinges.

He puts his hands on Oikawa’s shoulders, feels them tense before relaxing, and kneads them absentmindedly.

“I didn’t know you were awake, Iwa-chan,” Oikawa says, pulling his headphones from his ears and letting them pool on the desk.

“Just woke up,” Hajime replies. He pushes on Oikawa’s back until there’s enough room to sit behind him, legs splayed out and arms around Oikawa’s waist so he can peer over his shoulder at the computer. “’s quiet.”

“Mmm.” A pause. “Are you gonna stay for dinner later? I think okaa-chan is gonna make hōtō for dinner. She ran out to the grocers while you were sleeping.”

“Yeah, I’ll stay.”

They fall silent and Oikawa returns to his studying. Hajime can empathize. His English isn’t bad, he knows he’ll do fine on his TOEFL exam, but there’s still a lot to learn. He’s forgotten a lot from classes and he’s never been anywhere near as good at speaking English as Oikawa, who’s been practicing since junior high, to begin with.

It still hasn’t really hit Hajime. The fact that he’ll be off to America in a matter of months. He isn’t sure if he’s scared or excited or what.

The thought of English being a practical skill had always seemed like a pipedream--something that only mattered for those lucky few who could break into the international stage to challenge the whole world. Even then, back when Oikawa had been all of 13, he had taken to his classes with as much vigor as he did volleyball. Hajime has never had that amount of foresight. Or been that wishful of a thinker. He has that much more work to do now but he isn’t complaining. He just spends that time with Oikawa. Use as much time as they have to spend together before there’s nothing left and they’re saying “goodbye” into empty spaces.

“You nervous?” He asks, because he has to.

Oikawa just sighs and puts his pencil down, laying back into Hajime. He fidgets with his long fingers, picking at his pants.

“Of course I am. It’s really scary--I’ll be all alone. It’s the first time we’ll be apart for so long. And I don’t even know if I’ll even amount to anything in the end. I think that’s the scariest part. What if I go all this way--spend all this time and money on something that could just end in failure?”

“You know what I’m going to say, don’t you Tooru?”

“Yeah.”

Oikawa turns his head to look at Hajime and smiles.

Thing is, Oikawa smiles a lot. And no matter how much Hajime complains, he likes them all--even the disingenuous ones--because it’s all Oikawa. But there are certain smiles that Hajime likes most because they’re just for him. Like this one, where Oikawa’s eyes are all scrunched at the corners and the smile lines around his mouth are prominent.

“But you know that I’ll be cheering you on, too, Iwa-chan. I’ll send you a hundred text messages every day, and drain all your data. You’d better video chat with me every night!”

Trust Oikawa to know exactly what he needs to hear.

It’s a tide of he’s beautiful and it’s blinding when you look at me like that and Hajime has to kiss him then. Oikawa tastes a little like the chicken they had for lunch, a lot of snacks they picked up from the konbini after school, but his lips are soft and he sighs so prettily and melts.

When they break apart, Hajime can’t help but return the smile. He takes in the last strains of the afternoon fractal on Oikawa’s face, the shōji mullions creating a pattern of lines, highlighting the burnished gold specks in his eyes and the arch of his cheekbones. Hajime knows that in these last months together, he will try to memorize every little detail of Oikawa’s face to carry him into the unknown. The little freckle along his hairline, the long length of his eyelashes, the exact curve to his Cupid’s bow. Hajime also knows that he will have this memory to keep tucked safe in the box of homehomehome between the folds of his heart and his breath.

When Hajime takes the moment to think, he’s struck by the uncertainty of it all. Just how much they don’t know, what it will be like beyond the provincial limits of their small Japan and even smaller Miyagi. But he knows profoundly as he pulls Oikawa--no, Tooru into his lap and feels the grounding weight of him, that he is not alone. Warmth surges in his chest, so sudden it feels like it is bursting from Hajime’s everything.

He moves in for another kiss and nothing has ever been more perfect than this moment.

#haikyuu!!#oikawa tooru #iwaizumi hajime #iwaoi #haikyuu drabbles #haikyuu spoilers

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adastraperfortuna · 4 years ago

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I Played Cyberpunk 2077

Ultimately, Cyberpunk 2077 is an excellent video game. It’s hard to talk about it without acknowledging the backlash that it received around its launch, but the backlash was directly proportional to the amount of marketing that it got. This happens to a lot of games – and frankly, a lot of my favorite games. If I were working at CD Projekt RED and I was responsible for the kind of marketing that resulted in the kind of expectations that they built for themselves, I’d have to take that sort of stuff into deep consideration. But, as someone who bought the game, enjoyed the game, and desperately wants to talk about the game, I’m not sure that it matters. So, to reiterate: Cyberpunk 2077 is good.

There’s so much game to Cyberpunk that it might be easier to start by talking about my favorite part of it that isn’t a game: the photo mode. I’ve joked before about my favorite gameplay loop in Star Citizen being “taking screenshots,” and that’s not my intent here, but some of my favorite games in recent memory have made it easy to look over the memories I made during their runtime. Interspersed within this review will be some of my favorite screenshots that I took – the inclusion of precise controls for things like depth of field, character posing/positioning, and stickers/frames helped to make my screenshot folder feel less like a collection of moments in a game and more like a scrapbook made during the wildest possible trip to the wildest possible city.

And what a city it is. Night City is my favorite setting in a video game in recent memory. It’s not incredibly difficult to make a large environment, but to make a meaningful environment where every location feels lived-in and the streets are dense with things to see and do? That’s a challenge that very few studios have managed to step up to. More than that, Night City feels unique in the landscape of video game cities – whereas a city like Grand Theft Auto V’s Los Santos is rooted in a reality we’re familiar with, Cyberpunk’s retro-futuristic architecture (and overall aesthetic) help lend it a sensibility that we’re unfamiliar with. It really feels like stepping into another world - fully fleshed-out, fully envisioned.

The environment is obviously beautiful and unique, but I was surprised by just how ornate it was. The thought and consideration that went into details as minor as the UIs you’ll encounter in and on everything from car dashboards to PCs and menus both diegetic and otherwise helps the entire world feel diverse, detailed, and cohesive. While everything feels of a kind and everything is working towards the same design goals, the sheer amount of variety was shocking.

The biggest thing that stuck out to me about Night City itself within just a few hours of playing was how vertically oriented it was. Not just in the “there are tall buildings” sense, though there certainly are tall buildings – I’m talking about the way that Cyberpunk uses verticality to tell stories. The first time that you end up high enough above the skyline to see rooftops will inevitably be during one of your first encounters with Night City’s elite. The hustle and bustle of street life fading away as an elevator climbs up the side of a building and you emerge into a world you aren’t familiar with was astounding. That claustrophobic feeling of being surrounded by monoliths isn’t only alleviated by attending to the rich, though – for similar reasons, my first journey out of the city limits and into the “badlands” will stick with me. Cyberpunk successfully manages its mood and tone by controlling the kind of environments you’ll find yourself in, and while that may seem like a simple, sensible, universal design decision, its consistent application helped ground the world for me in a way that made it feel more real than most of its contemporaries.

Something else that makes Night City feel real is how Cyberpunk implements its setpieces. In a decision that reverberates throughout the rest of the game, CD Projekt was clearly all-in on the notion of immersion and seamless transitions. While it was consistently surprising and exciting to find bombastic moments embedded in the world’s side content (one standout involves Night City’s equivalent of SWAT descending from the sky to stop a robbery in an otherwise non-descript shop downtown), it never took me out of the world. And, on the other end of the experience, the number of memorable, exciting story moments that were located in parts of the city that you had wandered by before helped make the world feel almost fractal, this idea that every building and every corner could house new adventures or heartbreaks.

One thing that did take me out of the experience, unfortunately, were a few of the celebrity (or “celebrity”) cameos. While I think that the core cast was well-cast, with Keanu Reeves as Johnny Silverhand in particular being an inspired choice, the game, unfortunately, wasn’t immune to the tendency to include recognizable faces just because they were recognizable. Grimes plays a role in a forgettable side quest that felt dangerously like it only existed because she wanted to be in the game. There are also an almost concerning number of streamer cameos (“over 50 influencer and streamers from around the world,” according to CD Projekt), and while most of them completely went by me, the few that did hit for me only served to disrupt the world. The only perceived positive here is that most players won’t have any idea who these people are.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the only thing that broke immersion in the game. Due to what I can only assume are particularly harsh memory restrictions imposed by the game’s release on last-generation hardware, the game has some of the most aggressive NPC culling that I’ve ever seen. While NPCs don’t strictly only exist in screen space, it often feels like they do, as simply spinning the camera around can result in an entirely new crowd existing in place of the old one. This is obviously rough when it comes to maintaining immersion in crowded spaces on-foot, but it gets worse when you’re driving. Driving on an empty road, rotating the camera, and finding that three seconds later there was an entire legion of cars waiting for your camera to discover them, far too close to slow down, was always a deadly surprise. It doesn’t help that your cars take a while to slow down.

Cyberpunk’s approach towards cars in general is interesting. While I certainly had trouble with them when I began playing, I eventually began to get into their groove. If you want to learn how to drive effectively in Cyberpunk, you have to learn how to drift. After the game’s latest substantial patch, the team at CD Projekt finally fixed my largest problem with the game’s driving – the minimap was simply too zoomed-in, making it difficult to begin to make the right decisions on when and how to turn when traveling at speed. Now that that's resolved, however, whipping and spinning through the streets is fun, and the cars feel appropriately weighty. I’ll still occasionally boot up the game just to cruise around its streets and listen to the radio.

Speaking of the radio, did I mention that Cyberpunk 2077 has one of the greatest game soundtracks that I’ve ever heard? The radio is filled with great original songs from some pretty great musicians, but that’s not where the soundtrack’s beauty starts and it certainly isn’t where it ends. The original soundtrack (composed by P.T. Adamczyk, Marcin Przybylowicz, and Paul Leonard-Morgan) was consistently beautiful, moving, and intense. The world feels gritty and grimy but ultimately beautiful and worth saving, and a great deal of that emotion comes from the soundtrack. While the heavy use of industrial synths could’ve lent itself towards music that existed to set tone instead of form lasting memories with memorable melodies, the sparkling backing tones and inspired instrumentation helped keep me humming some of its tracks for months after last hearing them in-game. I’m no musical critic, I don’t know how much I can say about this soundtrack, so I’ll just reiterate: it’s genuinely incredible.

It certainly helps that the encounters that so many of those tunes are backing up are exciting as well. I was expecting middling combat from the company that brought us The Witcher 3, and while the experience wasn’t perfect, it was competitive with (and, in many ways, better than) the closest games to it than I can point to, Eidos Montreal’s recent Deus Ex titles. Gunplay feels tight, shotguns feel explosive, and encounter spaces are diverse and full of alternate paths and interesting cover. My first playthrough was spent primarily as a stealth-focused gunslinger, using my silenced pistol to cover up the mistakes that my feet made when trying to avoid getting caught. Trying to sneak into, around, and through environments helped emphasize how complex the environments actually were. While it’d be easy to run into a wealth of the game’s content with your guns loaded and ready to fire, that may contribute to a perceived lack of depth in the game’s world design. I’m trying to write this without considering what other people have said about the game, but this particular point has been something of a sticking point for me – there are individual, completely optional buildings in Cyberpunk that have more interesting, considered level design than some entire video games, and the experience of evaluating and utilizing them was consistently mechanically engaging and exciting.

The sheer number of abilities that the player has can be almost overwhelming. While leveling does encourage the player to specialize into certain traits, especially when said traits can also serve as skill checks for the dialogue system and some traversal opportunities, every trait houses a bundle of skills that each house a sprawling leveling tree. Far from the kind of “three-path EXP dump” that you’ll find in a great number of AAA titles, Cyberpunk’s leveling experience can be legitimately intimidating. It’s difficult to plan the kind of character you want to play as when you’re trying to project eighty or a hundred hours forward for a character that will be constantly encountering new kinds of challenges. I certainly didn’t begin my playthrough by wanting to be a stealth-focused gunslinger – in fact, I was originally aiming for a melee-focused hacker build. While I was drawn to what I was drawn to, hearing stories from other players about the kind of builds that they ultimately considered to be overpowered made one thing exceedingly clear: Cyberpunk is a game that rewards every kind of play, possibly to its own detriment.

Cyberpunk’s main story is notably short. I wouldn’t consider this to be a problem, considering the sheer amount of engaging, exciting, heartfelt side content, but it might be the core of the difficulty scaling plateauing so early on. As you progress deeper into the game you’ll find that almost every build, as long as you are willing to commit to something, is more than viable. Look around long enough and you’ll find people saying that every single build is overpowered. For me, that fed into the central power fantasy in an exciting way. By the time that I rolled credits a hundred hours in I was more or less unstoppable, walking into rooms and popping every enemy almost instantly. For others, this was a problem – it can be frustrating to feel like all of your work to become stronger wasn’t met with an appropriate challenge when the time came to put it into practice. This is a difficult problem to solve, and I don’t have a solution. I’ll fondly remember my revolver-toting, enemy-obliterating V, though, so I can’t complain.

Regardless of the scaling, however, the content you play through to arrive at that pinnacle of power was consistently, surprisingly robust. While the differentiation between “gigs” and “side quests” is confusing (word for the wise: gigs are generally shorter and more gameplay-centric missions that are designed by CD Projekt’s “open world” team while the side quests are made by the same team that made the main quests and are generally longer and more narrative-centric), both kinds of side content are lovingly crafted and meaningful. Of the 86 gigs in the game, every single one of them takes place in a unique location with a hand-crafted backstory and (almost always) a wealth of different approaches. These don’t exist separately from the rest of the game’s design philosophy, even if they are made by a separate team, and you’ll often find that decisions made outside of gigs will reverberate into them (and, sometimes, the other way around). I’ve played a great deal of open world games, and never before has the “icon-clearing content” felt this lovingly-crafted and interesting. While the main quests will take you traveling across the map, the side content is what really makes it feel dense and real. You’ll be constantly meeting different kinds of people who are facing different kinds of problems – and, hey, occasionally you’ll be meeting someone who has no problem at all, someone who just wants to make your world a little bit brighter.

It’s surprising, then, that one of the most obvious ways to integrate that kind of content in Cyberpunk is so sparsely-utilized. “Braindances,” sensory playback devices used to replicate experiences as disparate as sex, meditation, and murder, play a critical role in some of the game’s larger quests, but they almost never show up in the side content. You would imagine that the ability to freely transport the player into any kind of situation in a lore-friendly way would’ve been a goldmine for side content, but its use is limited. This isn’t even a complaint, really, I’m just genuinely surprised – I wouldn’t be surprised if they used them more heavily in 2077’s expansions or sequels, because they feel like an untapped goldmine.

Another thing that the game surprisingly lacks is the inclusion of more granular subtitle options. While the game does let you choose the important stuff – whether or not you want CD Projekt’s trademark over-the-head subtitles for random NPCs, what language you want the subtitles to be in, what language you want the audio to be in – it doesn’t include something that I’ve grown to consider a standard: the ability to turn on subtitles for foreign languages only. As the kind of player who avoids subtitles when possible, I went through most of Cyberpunk with them off. Unfortunately, a tremendous number of important cutscenes in the game take place in languages other than English, and I didn’t know that I was supposed to understand what these characters were saying until I was embarrassingly far into one of the prologue’s most important scenes.

NOTE: I was pleasantly surprised to discover after replaying the ending of the game earlier today that they've fixed this issue in a patch. Nice!

I can only complain about the game’s language support so much, because there’s something important that lies between the player and the story they’re there to experience: a fucking incredible English localization. Ironically, it’s so good that I can’t help but imagine that most players won’t even think about it. It’s easy to notice and talk about an excellent localization when it’s from something like a JRPG, something with a clearly different style from what you’d expect from a work made in English, but never once in my entire playthrough did I even briefly consider the idea that it was natively written in anything other than English. I knew that CD Projekt was a Polish studio, but I just assumed that they wrote in English and localized it backwards. The language is constantly bright and surprising, the jokes land, the characters have memorable quirks, everything feels natural, and the voice acting is legitimately some of the best that I’ve ever heard in a video game. Both versions of the main character’s voice were damn-near instantly iconic for me, landing up there with Commander Shepard in the upper echelon of protagonist VO. I can’t praise it enough.

That said, even if the localization was incredible, it’d be hard to appreciate if the meat of the story wasn’t up-to-snuff. I was ecstatic to discover, then, that Cyberpunk 2077 has an incredible story. Every great story starts with a great cast of characters, and Cyberpunk hit it out of the park with that. The core cast of side characters are some of my favorite characters in years. Judy, Panam, River, and Kerry are all memorable, full, charming people. Kerry Eurodyne in particular is responsible for my favorite scene in a game since the finale of Final Fantasy XV. The quest “Boat Drinks,” the finale of Kerry’s quest line, is quietly emotional and intensely beautiful. He, and the other characters like him, are more than the setting they’re in, and the way that the game slowly chews away at the harsh and bitter exterior that the world has given them as it reaches to their emotional, empathetic core consistently astounds. Night City is a city full of noise, violence, destruction, and decay, but you don’t have to participate in it. You don’t have to make it worse. You can be different, and you can be better. You don’t get there alone, you can’t get there alone, and Cyberpunk is a game that revels in how beautiful the world can be if we are willing to find the light and excitement in the people around us.

Of course, Cyberpunk is a video game, it’s an RPG, and the story is more than a linear progression of memorable moments. Something that struck me while making my way through Cyberpunk’s story was how expertly and tastefully it implemented choice. I’m used to games that give you flashing notifications and blaring alarms whenever you're able to make a decision that matters, so I was initially confused by how Cyberpunk didn’t seem reactive to the things I said and did. The game would give me a few options in conversations, I’d select one of them, and then the story would progress naturally. However, as I continued, I began to notice small things. One character would remember me here, a specific thing I said twenty hours before would be brought up by someone there, an action that I didn’t even know I had the choice to not take was rewarded. The game slowly but surely established a credibility to its choices, a weight to your words, this sense that everything that you were saying, even beyond the tense setpiece moments that you’d expect to matter, would matter. It was only after going online after completing the game that I realized just how different my playthrough could’ve been. While nothing ever reached the level of the kind of divergent choices that The Witcher 2 allowed, there were still large chunks of the game that are entirely missable. Three of the game’s endings can only be unlocked through the completion of (and, in one case, specific actions in) specific quests, and multiple memorable quests were similarly locked behind considerate play. This isn’t really a game that will stop you from doing one thing because you chose to do something else, most of the choice-recognition is simply unlocking new options for the player to take, but it always feels natural and never feels like a game providing you an arbitrary fork in the road just for the sake of making it feel artificially replayable. CD Projekt has already said that they made the choices too subtle in Cyberpunk, but I deeply appreciate the game as it is now – more games should make choices feel more real.

It helps that the dialogue system backing up some of those choices is dynamic and the cutscene direction backing those scenes up is consistently thrilling. The decision to lock you in first-person for the entire game was an inspired one, and it resulted in a bevy of memorable scenes made possible by those interlocking systems. There are the obvious ones – being locked in a smoky car with a skeptical fixer, getting held at gunpoint by a mechanical gangster with his red eyes inches away from your own and a pistol’s barrel just barely visible as it presses against your forehead, having to choose between firing your weapon and talking down someone with a hostage when in a tense, escalating situation. There are also a million smaller ones, situations where the scale of the world becomes part of the magic. The first time that I sat down in a diner and talked with someone I had to meet or the first time that I rode along through the bustling downtown of Night City as a politician sized me up will stick with me because the perspective of the camera and the pacing of the real-time dialogue interface combine to make almost everything more powerful. There’s so much effort put into it – so many custom animations, so many small touches that you’d only see if you were staring intensely at every frame. All of that effort paid off, and the controversial decision to strip third-person out of the game was ultimately proven to be one of the smartest decisions that CD Projekt has ever made.

Another decision that helped power an exciting, engaging story was how the game freely manipulates the time and weather during key story moments. It’s a small touch, it’s one that you won’t notice unless you’re looking for it, but every once in a while you’ll walk into a place during a crystal-clear day and come out five minutes later to discover that it’s a cold, windy, rainy night and you have a city to burn. Along with the first-person limitation, this initially feels like something that could only harm immersion, but when it’s backed up by a story that motivating and scenes that thrilling you’d be hard-pressed to notice it outside of the flashes of telling yourself that this scene or that scene is the best that you’ve played in a long time. This also helps avoid a problem that games like the Grand Theft Auto series consistently face – instead of letting scenes happen at any time, compromising direction, or doing something like a timelapse, sacrificing immersion, Cyberpunk manages to always keep you in the action while also presenting the action in its most beautiful and appropriate form. There are moments where it truly feels like it’s meshing the kind of scene direction that’d be at home in a Naughty Dog game, the gameplay of Deus Ex, and the storytelling of the WRPG greats, and in those moments there is nothing else on the market that feels quite like it.

I sure have talked a lot about this game’s story, considering the fact that I have barely brought up its central hook. The early twist (unfortunately spoiled by the game’s marketing), the placement of a rockstar-turned-terrorist-turned-AI-construct firmly in your brain after a heist goes wrong and your best friend dies, helps establish a tone that the rest of the game commits to. Johnny Silverhand starts as an annoying, self-centered asshole with no real appreciation for how dire your situation is, but by the end of the game he had more than won me over. Reeves’s performance was really stellar, and the relationship between him and V is incredibly well-written. More than that, his introduction helps spur on a shift in the way that you engage with the world. The first act is full of hope, aspiration, the belief that you can get to the top if you hustle hard enough and believe. After you hold your dying friend in your arms and are forced to look your own death in the eyes, though, things begin to turn. Maybe the world is fucked up, maybe it’s fucked up beyond belief. But there Johnny is, telling you to fight. Why? Every time you fight, things get worse.

But the game continues to ruminate on this, it continues to put you in situations where fighting not only fails to fix the problem, but it makes it worse. Despite that, it’s positive. For me, at least, Cyberpunk’s worldview slowly came into alignment, and it’s one that I can’t help but love. Cyberpunk 2077 is a game about how important the fight is, how important believing in something is, even if you’re facing impossible odds, even if there’s no happy ending. It’s a story that posits that giving up is the worst ending of all, that your only responsibility is to what’s right and to the ideals that you and the people you love want to live up to. The game uses every story it can tell, every character it can introduce you to, and every encounter it can spin into a narrative to drive that home. And, when the ending comes, it was phenomenal. All of the endings were powerful, effective, and meaningful to me, but I’m more than happy that I went with what I did.

Cyberpunk 2077 is an excellent video game. It’s not flawless, but no game is, and at its core it's one of the most fun, beautiful, narratively engaging, and heart-filled games that I’ve ever played. I couldn’t recommend it highly enough, and I sincerely hope that everyone who has skipped out on it because of what they’ve heard is able to give it a shot someday. Maybe they’ll love it as much as I do. Wouldn’t that be something?

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slowlyteenagestarlight · 4 years ago

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callofdutymobileindia · 1 month ago

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Artificial Intelligence Classroom Course in Mumbai: Your 2025 Guide to Learning AI In-Person

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is no longer the technology of the future—it's the core of the present. From personalized recommendations on Netflix to advanced fraud detection in banks, AI is transforming every aspect of modern life. As demand for AI professionals continues to surge, enrolling in an Artificial Intelligence classroom course in Mumbai has become a smart choice for anyone seeking a future-proof career.

Mumbai, India’s financial capital and a rapidly growing tech hub, offers a rich ecosystem for AI learning and career advancement. Whether you're a student, a working professional, or a tech enthusiast, taking a classroom-based AI course in Mumbai gives you access to hands-on learning, real-time mentorship, and direct industry exposure.

Why Choose a Classroom-Based AI Course in Mumbai?

While online learning has its perks, classroom-based AI courses offer distinct advantages, especially for those who value real-time interaction, structured learning, and peer collaboration. Here's why a classroom course might be ideal:

1. Live Instructor Interaction

Face-to-face interaction allows for instant doubt resolution, real-time discussions, and personalized feedback—crucial when grappling with complex AI concepts.

2. Peer-to-Peer Learning

Collaborating with fellow learners fosters team-building skills, better retention, and diverse problem-solving approaches.

3. Structured Curriculum

Unlike self-paced online courses, classroom programs maintain a fixed schedule, ensuring consistent progress and discipline.

4. Local Industry Integration

Many institutes in Mumbai have partnerships with tech firms, enabling guest lectures, live projects, and on-site visits.

What You’ll Learn in an AI Classroom Course in Mumbai?

A good Artificial Intelligence classroom course in Mumbai provides a comprehensive blend of theory, tools, and real-world projects. Here's a snapshot of what you can expect:

Core Modules:

Introduction to AI & Machine Learning

Python for AI Programming

Supervised and Unsupervised Learning

Neural Networks & Deep Learning

Natural Language Processing (NLP)

Computer Vision & Image Recognition

Model Evaluation & Tuning

AI Ethics and Responsible AI

Tools and Frameworks Covered:

Python, NumPy, Pandas, Matplotlib

TensorFlow and Keras

Scikit-learn

OpenCV

Google Colab & Jupyter Notebooks

Capstone Projects May Include:

Chatbot development using NLP

Image classification using convolutional neural networks

Predictive analytics models for business forecasting

AI-powered recommendation systems

Who Should Enroll in a Mumbai-Based AI Classroom Course?

Artificial Intelligence is an interdisciplinary field. If you're driven by curiosity and want to build intelligent systems, this course is for you.

Ideal Candidates:

Engineering and Computer Science students

Working professionals in IT, data science, analytics, or software development

Entrepreneurs looking to incorporate AI in business

Academicians and researchers entering AI-focused domains

A background in programming (especially Python) and mathematics (linear algebra, statistics) is helpful, but not always required—many courses begin with foundational training.

Top Benefits of Taking an AI Classroom Course in Mumbai

Mumbai’s tech-forward atmosphere provides significant advantages for in-person AI education.

1. Proximity to Tech & Finance Giants

The city is home to firms like TCS, Accenture, J.P. Morgan, Fractal Analytics, and numerous AI startups—offering rich internship and job placement opportunities.

2. Networking Opportunities

Classroom settings help you build professional relationships with instructors, alumni, and peers who may become collaborators or employers.

3. Access to On-Site Events and Hackathons

Many institutions host in-house AI bootcamps, seminars, and hackathons that enhance your learning beyond the classroom.

4. Career Services

Reputed AI training centers offer resume-building workshops, mock interviews, and connections with hiring partners in Mumbai's booming job market.

The Rise of Generative AI in Classroom Learning

2025 has seen a surge in the application of Generative AI, like ChatGPT and DALL·E, across industries. The best AI courses in Mumbai are now incorporating modules on:

Large Language Models (LLMs)

Prompt Engineering

Text-to-Image AI tools

Agentic AI Systems

Hands-on exposure to these tools prepares learners to innovate in creative domains like content generation, design, marketing automation, and more.

Career Opportunities After Completing an AI Course in Mumbai

Mumbai, India’s financial and technological hub, offers an expanding landscape of opportunities for professionals trained in Artificial Intelligence (AI). With the rise of smart technologies, automation, and data-driven decision-making, completing an AI course in Mumbai can open doors to diverse and lucrative career paths.

1. Machine Learning Engineer

A Machine Learning Engineer designs and implements algorithms that allow machines to learn from and make predictions based on data. These professionals are in high demand across sectors such as finance, healthcare, and e-commerce. In Mumbai, tech giants, fintech startups, and multinational corporations are actively hiring ML engineers to build intelligent systems.

2. Data Scientist

Data Scientists use statistical analysis, machine learning, and data visualization to uncover insights from large datasets. Mumbai’s vibrant industries—ranging from banking to entertainment—rely on data scientists to drive business decisions. Completing an AI course with strong data science modules can provide a direct pathway to this role.

3. AI Researcher

For those interested in innovation and theoretical aspects of AI, a career as an AI Researcher could be ideal. Research roles are available in academic institutions, R&D labs, and leading tech companies. Mumbai’s IITs, research centers, and MNCs like TCS and Reliance are hubs for AI innovation.

4. Business Intelligence (BI) Developer

BI Developers bridge the gap between business needs and data capabilities. They design dashboards, analyze data trends, and support decision-making processes. With Mumbai being a corporate and banking center, there is significant demand for BI professionals equipped with AI knowledge.

5. AI Product Manager

AI Product Managers oversee the development of AI-driven products and ensure they align with business goals. These professionals need a mix of technical understanding and business acumen. Startups and large firms in Mumbai seek such roles to lead their AI initiatives effectively.

6. AI Consultant or Freelancer

Many professionals also pursue freelance or consulting opportunities after completing an AI course. Businesses across Mumbai seek AI consultants to implement automation strategies, optimize processes, and train teams.

Final Thoughts

Artificial Intelligence is not just a career trend—it’s the foundation of innovation in the digital age. Enrolling in an Artificial Intelligence classroom course in Mumbai gives you a competitive edge in a fast-evolving job market.

The combination of in-person mentorship, peer interaction, real-world project experience, and industry exposure makes classroom learning highly effective. Mumbai’s tech and finance ecosystem further enhances your chances of landing a rewarding AI role right after completing your training.

Whether you're stepping into the world of AI for the first time or upgrading your existing skills, Mumbai offers everything you need to succeed—from top-tier institutes to vibrant career opportunities.

#Artificial Intelligence Course in Mumbai #Machine Learning Course in Mumbai #Artificial Intelligence Classroom Course in Mumbai

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