#PC cooling solutions | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

himbocoups · 10 months

Text

˗ˋˏ CRAWL (PREVIEW) ˎˊ˗ | 18+ Only

SYNOPSIS: If there is anything about the Devil, it’s that he always keeps his promises. The problem is, he’s mad that you seemed to have forgotten his promise.

PAIRING: devil!yjh x reader (afab)

GENRE: fantasy | smut, pwp

PREVIEW TAGS: featuring: sub!ksy, artist!xmh, housemate!jww | auditory voyeurism mention, pegging (m receiving), fingering, hickies, face sitting mention

PREVIEW WC: 2.1k

FIC WC: estimated 5-7k

MESSAGE FROM NU: hello! long time no see. i've been building this one for a while, so i'm so excited to share this preview with you all. this can be read as a standalone fic or a sequel to red horn. info regarding taglist and posting date at the end of the fic. take care and see you soon - nu ♡

FINAL FIC HERE

himbocoups's masterlist

It is a rusty metallic foldable chair that you sit on that squeaks and creaks even with the slightest movement. You try to readjust your posture — definitely not sure if you should sit up straight with your back against the dusty chair or with your hands folded neatly on the edge of the devil’s table in front of you. In fact, you’re not sure whether or not you are supposed to touch the devil’s office desk, so you choose to lead with the prior option. And the metal chair reacts, drawing out a long and uncomfortable creeeeak as you shift your weight backward.

Maybe you were just lucky last time, led by the Devil to believe that maybe you were worthy of being somebody special in this vast world. In this underworld where the universe’s menagerie of creatures visit with last hopes of finding a solution, you are finally coming to a conclusion that you’re only but a speck of dust in a world that knows no bounds.

The small office room feels humid and stuffy; its previously supposedly beige wallpapers are now a darker shade of brown that peels in large patches to reveal dirty and white painted-over bricks. Splotches of mold line the edges of the patches, and you find yourself wishing that mold spores aren’t a thing that exists in Hell. But it’s Hell, and anybody who dealt with mold before knows that the process of treating mold is basically hell. The navy colored carpet looks old and worn out. Several flat and black pieces of gum stick to it, already dried and surprisingly shiny in color.

On the desk and pushed to the corner is an old and vintage PC, the kind with the square monitors and the back that protrudes outwards. You can feel the heat from the computer console blow against your skin and leave a faint burnt metallic scent in its wake. Not sure what to do or if you’re supposed to do anything, you sit in silence as the devil behind the computer screen slowly types and moves his mouse on top of his mousepad to fill out the information he has in the giant manilla folder spread out in front of him.

You retract your lips inwards and bite the gummy and smooth underside of your lips while you stare at the stack of business cards pointed toward you. Craig. His name is Craig with no last name. Demon. So you’re wrong. He’s neither a devil nor is he the Devil with a capital “D” whom you were previously introduced to. He’s just office worker Craig, the demon you were assigned today.

“Do you think it’s too stuffy in here?” He asks you while lifting his mouse from the mousepad before setting it back down to readjust the roller ball underneath. Not once does he turn to look at you or make eye contact with you.

“A little,” you reply feeling awkward and a bit burdened by the question for almost no reason at all.

He nods his head while tracing his long and crooked finger against a line on the stack of papers in front of him before typing in the data in his computer. He sniffs and snorts his phlegm while clearing his throat. It was just small talk; there is no way an office worker in Hell would care about your wellbeing. You find yourself wondering if central cooling is a thing in Hell while trying to peek at the contents of your surprisingly large folder with no avail.

This room, this office worker, this situation…none of this is the same as the beautiful and luxurious office space you imagined stepping in for the second time. Long gone is the plush gray Persian rug and the mahogany desk that belongs to the owner himself. And your large file that is spread out before the demon you’re assigned, you cannot help but think about the event or even events that could have possibly added to the flimsy pieces of paper the Devil flipped through when he first met you. And the thought of Craig reading your file only causes your face to heat up in embarrassment.

“Um.” You force yourself to break the awkward silence. “May I use the restroom before we start? You still haven’t asked me what I’m here for, and I think I accidentally came under the assumption that I would be assigned to the same person. I’ll be quick in case you need me immediately.”

“Down the hall,” the demon mumbles while hunching his back to allow himself to squint closely at the screen in front of him.

Picking yourself up from your seat, you basically fling yourself out of the office while thinking about the fresh air that awaits you in the hallway. No thoughts about the demon nor suspicions regarding the fact that the demon didn’t really point you towards a particular route to the restroom floated in your mind. Coming here was a mistake, and you are willing to face any repercussions for walking out of a meeting with a demon if it means having to save yourself from the embarrassment of having that demon read your file regarding your previous request with the Devil.

However, what awaits you on the other side of the door isn’t the hallway from which you entered the office you were in. Instead, you find yourself in an oddly familiar bedroom. Light navy blue floor-length curtains cover the window with their original pleats from when it was first purchased about a year ago still intact. Pushed against the window is the full-sized bed with the orange-stained wooden headboard and the mess of frost blue blankets haphazardly strewn on the mattress. The soft and rotund tiger plush lays threateningly close to the edge of the bed, able to be toppled over even with the slightest movement on the mattress.

The owner of this bedroom is in the middle of it all. Kwon Soonyoung kneels on his bed with his legs spread and his ass up. He already looks so fucked out. His left cheek is pressed against his mattress while he looks back at you with his hands tied behind his back. The position he’s in doesn’t seem comfortable at all, but his expressions, demeanor, and soft whimpers coming out of his mouth digress.

“Please,” he practically begs you from his pitiful position. You can see how his lean thighs tremble while he struggles against his restraints. He wails with such desperation, “I want it. I want it so badly,” so much that it almost sounds as if he is going to cry from your lack of action.

You don’t realize it until now, but an object manifests itself in your hands. A thick and ribbed silicone dildo, one that you’re too familiar with, is being stroked by you unconsciously. You feel the girth of it and how the lube prepares the toy for insertion. Then comes the teasing. You find the words naturally flowing out of your mouth: “Conciseness in your language, Soonie. What is it that you want?”

But the thing is, you know what comes next. You know what his response is as you slowly make your way over to him.

“Peg me. I’m ready,” he gasps while a tiny translucent pearl gathers at the tip of his dangling cock. “Blow my back out.”

You already know exactly how many times you will yourself to slap his ass to prep him before his legs give in. You already know how lewdly he would gasp as you insert the tip of the toy, how he would bury his face in his blankets as he moans out loud. You find yourself repeating actions as if being controlled by a machine, yet you don’t hate it. You’re magically stuck in a limbo between reality and déjà vu, presently recreating the past.

You feel his walls sucking in the toy, taking it in so well. Like a special switch in an escape room, once you grab onto his aching cock to stroke him while you peg him, the scene immediately switches.

Naked and in the middle of a studio apartment that reeks of paint fumes and essential oils, you look at yourself through the standing mirror in front of you. Despite the fan blowing in the background and his window propped open, you don’t feel cold at all. Instead, your skin pricks with heat as the sensation of arousal gathers itself at your core and spreads to the tips of your fingers. Beneath you is a mop of platinum blonde hair of the artist who sits by your feet.

Xu Minghao gently grabs you by the waist so that he can angle you so that you can get a better view of his artwork on your body. You remember that with him, you always felt safe and appreciated. He traces his slender finger along the length of your thigh, bringing it up to your ass. He makes you feel valuable through your soreness, the entirety of your right ass cheek covered in his carefully placed hickies. Your pussy throbs with eagerness, waiting to be filled before all of the juices run dry.

“My work of art,” he mumbles before he brings his lips to your ass. In the open space where the bruises connect, he bites it with his teeth and swirls the flesh in between his teeth with his tongue. His left hand makes its way to your opening, thumbing the smooth nub that immediately makes your knees buckle. So he positions himself behind you, strongly wrapping his long right arm around your legs to keep you steady as he nips and sucks while he takes your time to circle your clit before he finally slips his finger in your core as if the action is like second nature to him.

Pleasure builds in your soul and makes your body scream with pleasure as Minghao meticulously massages your inner walls, stroking and tapping your spongy insides as you writhe in his arm. He adds another finger, filling you up and building your high, scissoring you while you moan his name as your liquid drips down his fingers and collects in his palm.

“Done,” he breathes as he shifts his body so that he sits between your open legs. You can feel how his warm breath hits your skin as he speaks with his lips nearly on your cunt, “Flower on your ass. Sweet and puffy rose sitting on my face.”

Before you can re-experience what it felt like to sit on Minghao’s face like a chair, you find yourself in another room. This time, you’re in your own place in the room next to yours. From the placement of the desk to how the bed is pushed against the corner of the room, flush against the wall, the layout of this room directly mirrors your own. There are a lot more notecard art prints taped to the wall than you last remembered. The LED lights built into his mechanical keyboard softly pulses as it switches colors. And there is the all too familiar smell of his laundry detergent and dryer sheets that fills his room — he had just unloaded his laundry from the dryer, but didn’t have time to fold his clothes as they still sit in the laundry basket placed in front of his closet.

You’re not sure if you’re allowed to be here at all. It’s not often that you find yourself in Jeon Wonwoo’s bedroom, but when you do, you’re usually near the threshold of his door. And to be sitting on his plush gray sheets, you think it feels too intrusive. Still, you’re not sure if you should move from your comfortable position despite the fact that you’re not close enough to him to enter his bedroom just to chill without him present. And the worst of all, you’re pretty sure you’re still soaked from your previous encounter with Minghao. And that you’re still definitely in hell because there is no way you would ever allow yourself to feel this close to coming on Wonwoo’s bedsheets without his permission.

Two soft knocks on the door diverts your attention to the closed door.

“Yn,” Wonwoo's deep and tender voice calls your name from the other side of the door. “Is everything okay? I’m coming in.”

The thing is, this occurrence with Wonwoo had never happened before. You’re stuck in a scenario far different from the other two. So, you shouldn’t be as surprised as you are when you saw him walk through his bedroom door. Instead of the tall and built housemate that you sometimes find yourself secretly fawning over, is the sinister yet charming man you haven’t seen in ages.

Yoon Jeonghan steps into your housemate’s bedroom with the irresistible charm of his while flaunting an oversized black t-shirt whose sleeves almost touch his elbows. The Devil is here, and he knows everything that you’ve been hiding from him.

END OF PREVIEW // FIC OUT DECEMBER 2ND // TAGLIST OPEN

#svthub #seventeen imagines #seventeen smut #svt smut #jeonghan smut #jeonghan x reader #seventeen scenarios #jeonghan fic

173 notes · View notes

loser-female · 1 year

Text

Math masterpost!

So you want to learn math. Good. Math is amazing. I studied physics for two years and I miss it SO MUCH. Learning math isn't just cool, but it's a great way to improve skills such as:

Resilience: sometimes you will get stuck for a while on a problem - this is absolutely normal for college-level problems. You won't start from here though;

Self confidence: mastering a subject known to be difficult is fun;

Problem solving: you will be less likely to just sit down and do nothing if something comes up in your life, you will be able to try to find a solution.

It will change your approach to failure as you will become more flexible in your thinking.

Unfortunately most people never learn how to properly study math. We all probably know how to study a book over humanities. We start by reading the material, then we take notes of the keypoints. But this method doesn't work with math, and math teachers often don't really know either.

For the basics I've made this post here. To sum it up:

Please don't start with "but i suck at it". Because then your brain will actually prevent you from learning (self-fulfilling prophecy, anyone?);

Realise that you need to master one topic before covering the next one or you won't be able to progress;

Really, the methods you use for things like literature or psychology or whatever won't work

Now I'm not a genius, I always was and I always be a terrible student. I have adhd, depression and chronic pain, all of which add a difficulty layer with learning.

I feel like most people fail because of the first point. I've seen this with people I've tutored IRL, people I try to fix their pc... Don't be the person that gives up before trying because no one likes that. Just don't. Remember that you are learning on your own and no one is going to grade your excercises. Now take that and make a poster out of iy.

Now, resources Where To Find The Stuff.

Khan Academy. I didn't follow this courses becuase well, university, physics, but everyone references them.

Professor Leonard

The Math Sorcerer

3b1b (curiosities in math)

Vsauce2 (fun)

numberphile (this for understanding math memes)

r/learnmath resources are great!

A great study method

Proofs? Proofs.

A 3 page document on learning math (but it's cool)

Terry Tao's famous post "there is more in mathematics about rigour and proofs"

Remember that, even if you don't like a specific youtuber, source or anything it has been a while since college and high school teachers started to upload their own material. Generally, looking for like "calculus pdf" will give you a lot of resources. Youtube is full of university courses of every kind and it's so good to access all of this knowledge for free. I cannot recommend you anything regarding textbooks because I still have my high school one. Also yes, i've used the Rudin as a complementary textbook in university but that's a bit too much.

I really, really want to emphasize the mentality part. Leaning formula is useless if you feel like garbage because you weren't able to solve the first exercise you picked up after a decade not doing anything.

My personal and sparce advice:

Unless you have dyscalculia don't use the calculator. I know, I KNOW. But this "lazyness" will make everything 10 times more difficult.

Beware about overlearning. Basically, when you solve everything at the first attempt and you keep doing the same thing over and over because it feels good, but the truth is that you are wasting time. This is the time to move forward.

Try to differentiate between a knowledge error(did I actually study the subject?), a conceptual error (did I understand the material), or a mere calculation/distraction error (fo example a missing sign, writing the wrong thing etc)

Try to solve the problems in different ways if you can.

After a certain time, It will be useful to review things done in the past, (ref: spaced repetition method).

Write everything down. Reasonings, steps etc. It will be easier for you to review them.

This posts keep crashing so I have to call it quits now.

but:

have fun

#resources #learn something #math

262 notes · View notes

indieyuugure · 1 year

Note

So I saw the Raph post how Dorky is your Leo does he have an Ego like Rise and 2007 Leo’s (though the former’s is more of praise seeking apparently or whatever.)

Also how Aggressive is your Donnie in comparison to say 2012 and Rise Donnie one have a fierce But borderline mastered temper while the other one is violent XP

Also have the boys played any Square Enix Games (FF7 and DQ8 come to mind for me) and are they annoyed by Mariah Carrie’s all I want for Christmas song?

That was alot of questions lol

No problem! Let’s take these one at a time.

Alright, YES! Leo is a total dork! Silly dances, cringe one liners, and even cringier quotes from shows, movies and comics are all in day’s work for Leo. He’s definitely got ego, but it’s like average teen boy ego. I’d say Raph and Donnie are the really the ones battling for the bigger ego.

(P.S. while I’m still on the topic of Leo, the world’s biggest blue clad dork, I made this short awhile back that showcases more of his nerd side, Link here)

My Donnie is like a slightly more controlled version of Rise Donnie. Like he’s pretty aggressive, not as much as Raph, but solid second on the aggression scale. Violence is almost always a good answer, the only reason I say “almost” is because he’s more logical than Raph and does see that violence isn’t always the answer, just most of time. Leo is usually the one pressing for a solution that doesn’t involve tons of murder and destruction. Leo’s more of the mindset that life is something that should be spared if the situation allows it, whereas Donnie and Raph are cool with killing everyone and everything, they’re both kind of sadistic/apathetic that way.

Donnie plays FF6 on the SNES and later discovers that FF7 is available on PC which he gets as fast as he can. Raph and Mikey don’t really like RPGs because they think they’re boring, but Leo will watch Donnie play and help him with things in the game.

Lol, they all despise that song, but Mikey will purposely sing it just to tick off his brothers around the holidays.

Good questions! :]

#tmnt #q&a #indie’s turtles #indie tmnt #ninja turtles #teenage mutant ninja turtles

94 notes · View notes

sirfrogsworth · 10 months

Text

Wishlist Haul

All I asked for were pants, and those are coming Saturday. But you all came through in a big way with my wishlist and helped me solve some problems that have really been bugging me lately.

One of my biggest current issues is my decision to use my M1 MacBook Air as my main computer until I can move my PC upstairs at some distant time in the future. Which means I need to ask a lot more of it. And it is capable, as these Apple Silicon devices are amazing and very zippy, but I only got 256 GB of storage because I thought this would just be a secondary computer while I was taking care of my dad.

So I need storage. And if you do photography and use Lightroom, you know you need *fast* storage. In the days of spinny disc drives, going back and forth between images was maddeningly slow. I already hate the process of culling photos and picking the best ones. And sometimes you'd need to find 5 winners out of a few hundred. And when it took 3 seconds to switch between every photo, I wanted to die. And honestly, it could still be better.

But one of the best solutions is a super fast SSD. Which I had. I bought it right before my parents got especially ill and was planning to install it in my PC. But my priorities changed and I just never found the energy.

The problem is that was an internal NVME SSD. I needed it to be external.

Which is where this little thingie comes in.

This is an NVME enclosure, and if you are looking for cheap, fast external storage, this is so much better than those external SSDs they overcharge for. For $200 they give you a 2TB drive that can read about 2000 MB per second. Or you can get a 2TB NVME and this enclosure for the same price and get 3000 MB per second. Not only that, but it is upgradeable. In a year when 4TB is $100, you can plop that in. And the Mac's Thunderbolt 4 has a max speed of around 5000 MB/s, so there is room to improve there as well. Though sometimes advertised speeds are not reality speeds.

The only thing you need to be aware of is these drives run hot. You're going to think there is something wrong with them. Like, they top out at 90C. Which is nearly 200 degrees in freedom units.

I wanted a convenient way to mount my drive, but I didn't want 200 degrees on the back of my screen, so... MAGNETS!

And I can stack a few more if that section starts feeling too hot.

So, I have that problem solved. I can now use this as my main computer and work on my photography.

Next up... fashion!

I'm going out more and I want to look a little more presentable. I thought these two tone shirts looked a little more fashionable. And they are very comfortable too. I have a red one that I think I'm going to wear on my trip. I know you can't see the two tone well in the picture, so here is the product photo of the red one.

Next problem?

Well, it's maybe not a problem so much as something cool I wanted. A black light!

My mom had all of this uranium glass and I had no idea my salt shaker was marginally radioactive all these years. I really wanted to take a proper photo of some of the glass before it all gets sold at auction. So this should be a fun experiment.

I will say, if you don't have uranium glass, don't get a black light. You will want to burn your house down. It does not matter how clean you think you got something... you didn't clean it enough. And I have all of this dry flaky skin on my feet. It doesn't hurt. It doesn't bother me. You can't even really see it unless you look really close. But when I shined the light on my feet they looked like they had some undocumented disease. I will not be sharing a photo of that.

But the depression glass, that's super neat.

Some proper photos coming soon I hope. Maybe after my trip.

Next problem!

My key fob. This thing is a piece of shit.

Even if it looks cool under a black light, it is THE WORST.

It's cheap plastic, it takes a stupid watch battery, the symbols on the buttons all wore off. And all of that I could handle, but for some reason this fob has an effective range of about 2 feet. I literally have to be standing next to the door before it will work.

I had a black fob that worked much better, only the plastic casing was falling apart. But I taped it up as best I could and hoped it would not fall apart. Then I went to get my tires changed and they needed the fob to do some special reset of the pressure sensors and the battery died before they could. I went home to try and change the battery, and the entire thing basically disintegrated on me.

The inside looks like this.

The battery retention contact is held on by a tiny dab of solder. And if you pull the battery up even a little, it snaps off. And that's what happened. And to make matters worse, the rubber buttons were falling apart and the unlock button just... fell off.

So I was either stuck with the 2 foot range green one or I needed a new fob. Thankfully, they are only 20 bucks for 2 on Amazon. Unfortunately you need a dealer or an auto locksmith to program them. The lowest quote was $100 for about 5 minutes of work. The dealer actually wanted to sell me the fob as well, which they quoted as $150 for ONE. Same cheap plastic piece of shit and everything.

So, I got all of the parts from the broken fob and I hot glued that battery contact back into place and I transplanted that into a shiny new casing.

Works just like new. The buttons feel much better, I can actually see the symbols, and it has a range of at least 100 feet. And that hot glue isn't going anywhere. Changing the battery might be an issue, but these lasted several years.

Next problem!

An intervalometer is a fancy shutter button for a camera that allows very long exposures. It is detached from the camera so you don't shake anything and it needs a backlit screen because if you are using it, you are most likely in the dark.

My intervalometer is about 12 years old and uses another dreaded watch battery. And the backlight on the screen seems to be dead. So it is pretty much useless.

But look at this!

The light even works in the... well, light! And it takes normal batteries. Seriously, watch batteries need to stay in watches.

I don't know if I will get to take a long exposure in Florida, but I want to have this with me in case I do.

Next problem!

This one I actually solved on my own. But I found these stainless iron (yes, iron!) shims and I covered them with black tape and now all of my most used kitchen items never take up counter space.

Yes, I use magnets and hot glue to solve most of my problems.

Next problem!

My garage door is not very smart. And the remote control for it is huge and does not fit in my man purse.

So I downsized the remote.

But I wanted to fix the non-smart thing as well. A while back my brother got into my garage without me knowing. He must have taken a remote of his own. And I really don't feel like figuring out how to change the frequency, so I now have a sensor that lets me know when the door is open with a phone notification. Beyond that, I can open or close the door from my smartphone from anywhere. And I can give access to anyone with a smartphone in case of an emergency.

I will say, this company is really paranoid about people being crushed by garage doors. The instructions tell you to put up this sign in your garage...

And if you use the app to close the door, you get a light show with annoying beeping...

And I know that these accidents happen in real life. But whenever I think about how that could actually happen, all I can imagine is that scene in Austin Powers...

In any case, I am really glad I have this now. And I also like that if I forget to close the garage door, I can check the app and not have to get up to do it.

OH! I almost forgot. If I want, I can have Amazon place packages inside my garage.

Next problem!

What in the heck do I need galvanized steel plates for?

In product photography you need a diffusion panel called a scrim. If you try to buy one of these already made, they are hundreds of dollars. They are mostly made for movie productions, and those items always have inflated costs.

So most product photographers make their own out of tracing paper or a special plastic called Translum. It's $80 per roll, but lasts forever. I used to hang my scrims from the ceiling. But you can't really angle or move them, so you have to move the object you are photographing instead. Which is just a backwards way to work. So I invented my own scrims with two strips of very thin wood, metal chip clips, these little plastic feet that held up plexiglass barriers during COVID. And to weigh everything down... steel plates.

This is version 1.0 where I glued the plastic rather than affixing it with the chip clips.

The clips work much better and allow me to put different weights of plastic on, or even double plastic, for more or less diffusion. And I ended up not needing that board at the bottom which allows me to curve it as well.

And these scrims let me take this photo...

It's called graduated lighting and it makes things look neat.

I also got a backpack for my trip and shorts, but I am going to forego an explanation of those.

To all that helped, thank you so much. I hope you can see I am putting everything to good use.

72 notes · View notes

three-fulm-thaumaturd · 3 months

Text

Dawn? Trailed.

Finished Dawntrail MSQ tonight. Assorted scattershot (and spoiler-heavy) thoughts under the RM.

-I came to DT without much preexisting hype or emotional investment. All I wanted out of this expansion was to have a break from being the main character who has to save the multiverse from extinction, again, and to have some cool scenery to look at and some banger music, and we sure got that!

-There are a lot of things about how this expansion was written that didn't effortlessly or instinctively emotionally appeal to me in specific, but that are, when I think about them, really good, solid workmanlike choices re: how to construct a video game narrative.

-I know J-media tournament arcs are “well worn” in the same sense that the Grand Canyon or the Marianas Trench are, but they provide a plausible pretext for the things that MMOs are set up to do. Better than a host of supposedly highly-realized and virtuous precursor beings insisting that we repeatedly justify our existence by fighting, for sure.

-Being Wuk Lamat's mentor/emotional support Eorzean/800 pound gorilla was an interesting conceit. I think the writers carried off "non-protagonist PC" fairly well, and I've played other games where that was tried and didn't work (lookin at you SWtOR, re: KotFE). Lamat'yi feels like a more competently-written version of Stormblood-era Lyse. She's got both a core personality that remains consistent and a trajectory of increasing competence and maturity. I think she's well constructed as a protag/viewpoint character: she's primed to like things and people, her ethos of addressing conflict by seeking understanding and consensus is a good pretext to deliver exposition, and she feels/empathizes intensely but doesn't get stuck on her own emotional reactions. I wouldn’t say I effortlessly enjoy her as a character, especially early on when the writing leans hard into her immaturity and desperation to be liked and to prove herself, but I understand and respect what that’s for. It’s no different than Naruto or early-OT Luke Skywalker.

-I like the variety of Central/South American cultural inspo (Aztec, Quechua, Yucatec Maya, Pueblo, etc), we got in the setting and culture for this xpac, and the conception of Tural as a very racially/culturally heterogeneous place where power comes from the aggregate of a complicated network of relationships that have to be negotiated on an ongoing basis. It's not zero-sum, and finding solutions that benefit everyone is hard but worthwhile.

-I was excited to be able to bring Krile, my favorite Scion, along this time. I feel like the ShB/EW A-team had enough presence to appeal to people who like them and not so much that they upstaged the new characters or the change of scenery.

-I think there was effort to add cinematographic interest to the many, dense cutscenes other than wide-angle shot/reverse-shot over paragraphs of text. Some of the camera angles (switching between the faces of my minimum-height lalafell and 2m+ Wuk Lamat) and long shots of characters' expressions resulted in...sometimes-intentional uncanniness and unintentional comedy. This probably was not the devs' intention (their intention was probably a performance with emotional subtlety that the graphics overhaul alas still doesn't permit), but my instinctive read was that it felt like unnecessary padding/stalling for time.

-Re: other stuff that felt like it unnecessarily lengthened the playtime and the amount of text to read, sometimes I resent that it feels like I'm being not just spoon-fed, but bottle-fed plot and character beats that are not complicated or hard to understand. Then I see people evincing failure to comprehend what they're reading elsewhere on the internet and understand why it's done that way. :\

-There's basically one trademark Ishikawa conflict: Local man driven to extremes by inability/unwillingness to come to terms with loss, aging, and death. There's also one trademark Ishikawa sin that characterizes all of the ShB-and-after antagonists: a delusional insistence on harming the living to feed the dead. Those come up so consistently that her style is instantly recognizable...and I wonder some about what she's experienced or how she's doing.

-The hairpin turn in the plot about 2/3 of the way in and the by-now very familiar tropes aren't my narrative jam at all, but it was engaging enough to mostly keep my attention until the end. I'm beyond weary of Ascians/Ancients and shard math, so I'm glad those things were referenced (and there's some interesting stuff to chew on re: Lalafell history in particular) but not focal.

-I'm a little mad, because my pre-Heritage-Found speculation that El Dorado was going to turn out to actually be an aetherologic Superfund site (which would explain the security, the giants charging in and coming back dead, sick, or unable to reproduce, the teratogenic effects on eg Blessed Siblings etc and the fight for control of it as a putative military asset) seemed to have a lot of fun possibilities. I guess you could argue that Living Memory might be a very abstracted nod in that direction.

-*Queen Sphene*? Really, you couldn’t have named her anything at all else???

-I'm not at all satisfied that "he felt overshadowed by his father's accomplishments and wanted to prove his worth independent of his unusual heritage" is sufficient justification for how Zoraal Ja was, especially prior to his first contact with Alexandria. I figured based on his behavior and Krile's remarks, that he had to be Tempered, or affected by an equivalent kind of magical compulsion.

-The final trial, and to a lesser extent the last dungeon are an unmitigated (and unmitigatable until mods become available again) accessibility nightmare if you're photosensitive or prone to motion sickness. I hoped the devs would take the feedback they got from the ShB alliance raid series under consideration but they sure didn't give a shit. Guess I'm not doing roulettes for a while.

#ffxiv #dawntrail #dawntrail spoilers

28 notes · View notes

ungodly-amounts-of-godly-trauma · 1 year

Text

wotw round 1

propaganda under the cut!

anders:

So for context as to Why This Has Happened, he does happen to be an incredibly controversial character because of bad writing and that time he blew up a catholic church (complicated), so a lot of fans, even fans who otherwise wouldnt do so, of him swung HARD in the other direction of "he has basically no flaws at all" which is. Not True. Even if you agree with the blowing up a church thing. He is RUDE and MEAN and HAS BOUNDARY ISSUES. also he js very much the epitome of Extremely White activist and doesnt know how to communicate unless he is arguing (he is not good at arguing and he does not like doing it. these conflicting traits cause exactly the amount of problems you think it would).

Now are these various issues he has generally due to "forcibly imprisoned in a cult", "a year of solitary confinement", and "hes mentally ill and his writer is incredibly ableist"? Yeah for sure. But that doesnt mean the solution is to scrub every flaw he has away or pretend like they dont matter or blame it on the (very cool and sweet) guy possessing him (willingly) its SO uninteresting. And then if you try to talk about these flaws you get people excitedly talking about how they always without fail kill the passively suicidal man and how his romance is inherently abusive to the pc or some shit. Im DYING out here

link:

I know this is like really minor but it bugs me SO much. Ok so. At the beginning of the game, Link gets woken up by Zelda. She calls him a sleepyhead. Later in the game, she references that he would oversleep sometimes. Some of the other npcs do this also. Fandom decided that this was one of his only personality traits, being a sleepy little soft guy who loves his girlfriend soooo much (ok, he does love her a lot, but that's not the point).

This just makes me so upset because he. is. not. sleepy.

Oversleeping doesn't make you sleepy! Many fics portray him as someone that's very soft and gentle and kind and can fall asleep anymore!

At the very most, he's tired. He pushed himself hard during his quest, losing sleep. Afterwards, he would probably go back to a regular sleep schedule and sleep fine (barring nightmares). This is a very different thing than sleepy!

Anyway. Next point. Soft and gentle. He is a kind person, he's on a time sensitive quest and he'll stop to help a mother find her lost child, help a demon become human, find a LOT of lost things, all sorts of stuff like that, but he is not soft and gentle. At the very beginning of the game, he tells the bully "nice hair" (it's kinda ridiculous). Many of his answers are short and blunt. He says "not that guy" when he has to enlist the help of someone he doesn't like. He broke a chandelier for the equivalent of five dollars. He eavesdropped on a private argument-- like literally if you walk by the house at the right time control is taken from the player and he'll walk towards and listen to it. He tells a guy that his elder is dead just for shits and giggles (he's not).

Anyway. Fandom, of course, remembers none of this. He's the peacemaker, he's the soft and gentle one, he falls asleep whenever possible-- he is none of these things! The only thing they get right is that he loves Zelda!

I just want the fics where he's properly snarky and rude and tired (of this bullshit), is that too much to ask?

#tournament poll #anders #dragon age #link #legend of zelda #loz #wotw #round 1 #fun fact i did not remember

54 notes · View notes

tanoraqui · 2 months

Text

the only generative AI I want is one where I can input the details of a discrete party of the D&D PCs I constantly make up for fun, including my ideas for character arcs and some suggestions for plot beats, monsters to fight, any key NPCs, etc, and it’ll give me the highlights of a 17-level campaign including RP conversations, particularly dramatic dice roles, and key battles shown in a little flash animation. Maybe it goes level by level and I have to feed it a new adventure prompts each time. To be clear, the solution to this problem is NOT “write a book”, because I don’t want a clean narrative; I want the story medium of a longterm d&d campaign, the charmingly clumsy, surprisingly intense narrative blend of 5 main characters improvised in real time over several years. And I can’t just hand character sheets to my friends and get them to play it out with me, bc a) they want to make their own characters!, and b) I come up with a full party’s worth of characters with interesting dynamics and a potential cool shared plot premise way more frequently than I could run a full 17-level campaign.

#d&d #dnd #the struggle is real #my d&d

10 notes · View notes

emi-maru · 3 months

Text

<rant>

I know I've joked about "Wayland is great because who needs screen sharing anyway", but I've spend about an hour last evening and another hour today trying to share a window in Discord.

Of course "just install [package] bro trust me" didn't work. After a ton of digging I found out that this is due to Discord somehow getting past the X11 screen sharing and accesses Wayland directly, which then screws up because of course it does.

the solution is to force Discord to run with an environment variable that forces the old X11 screen share and then run that through xwaylandvideobridge. Cool. Wish that worked natively but whatever, it's working right?

It is, but only from the terminal because environment variables do not get set correctly when a program starts from a .dekstop file. If I had to guess this is because of some user permission shenanigans that Linux loves so much. I'll have to manually run Discord via a console command but I can live with that.

And that's kind of the point why I'm writing this. I can live with that, but 99% of PC users can't or don't want to put up with this because they expect this to just work without going down a rabbit hole for several hours because they wanted to show a friend their base in Oxygen not Included or whatever.

</rant>

#linux #i love this os genuinely and i'm not going back but ffs shit like this gets to me #especially when wayland is considered the default nowadays

8 notes · View notes

open-hearth-rpg · 1 year

Text

Engagement & Flashbacks: Great RPG Mechanics #RPGMechanics: Week Three

I have sat through hundreds of in-game planning sessions. There’s an objective, maybe specific, maybe general, maybe- god forbid- we’re discussing which objective we want to approach. These can be wonderful and interesting moments to explore character and role play to show what your PC values. They can be. But those are exceptions rather than the rule. I look back at the hours sunk into those which ended up in painful, circular, player-tension exacerbating, and time-consuming bad meetings.

My particular pet peeve from this is the player who listens and waits until someone has proposed a line of action and then says they don’t like it. They point out corner-case problems and wild possibilities which *could* make things collapse. But when pressed for fix suggestions or alternatives, they shrug their shoulders. I loathe them. I’ve seen many of them. Playing them at the ttrpg table made me that much more ready to flip out when people did this in actual work meetings in the real world.

Don’t get me wrong– I love it when a plan comes together. There’s few things more satisfying as a GM than to watch the players consider a problem, develop a solution, and reveal how their individual talents can save the day. But setting a planning session into motion is like lighting a stick of dynamite. Sometimes the players come together and manage to extinguish that fuse. More times the dynamite goes off and blows a hole in the session.

So that has long been an established problem that GMs have worked through, usually by degrees of heavy-handed riding the whip.

Blades in the Dark provided another solution and one, honestly, which completely changed my approach to this at every table I run. You have a job, a score, an objective. You can keep choosing that tight by filing down the number of options. Once you know generally what you want to do, you define the kind task and what’s your key element. Then we go to the engagement roll.

That roll is based on the challenge of the situation, the resources and information you have, and preparation (but only in the loosest sense). Good stuff gives you more dice, bad stuff takes away dice. You roll a pool of d6s and check the result. If the highest die is a six, we start the scene on the job with your characters in control. They’ve gotten past the easy layers and are in the more challenging part, but in a good spot. On a 4-5 it's more a mixed bag– you start out with some things at risk. You have to overcome a standard challenge right away. On a 1-3 we drop you in the shit. You’re in but things have gone wrong and the situation’s desperate.

But it's the other half of the system which completes this and makes things brilliant. Players can flashback to preparations they’ve made. They can improvise these on the fly. They can cost stress and require a test, but that’s dependent on how wild or impactful that prep is. Combining that with the flexible loadout system makes the players feel OK about rolling into a situation without having spent an hour working out all the possibilities.

And at least at my tables, the secret is that flashbacks don’t get done that often. Sometimes PCs will get jammed in a corner or a player will have a particularly clever concept. But Flashbacks IMHO provide a mental cushion for risk-adverse players. It’s the GM saying, “let’s get to playing, I’m not going to screw you over, and you’ll have the chance to pull cool stuff out.” And it works– and I promise you I use it in just about every game I run. We still do meetings and planning discussions, but I know I can wrap it up and move it to the play if that begins to look like it is going to blow up.

Side-note: Blades isn’t the first game to lean on flashbacks as a key element. I think that would be Leverage, which is an amazing ground-breaking game by a dynamite team of designers. It uses that to model the reveals of the TV shows it's based on. There may be others, but that’s the one I remember.

#ttrpg #rpg #rpg mechanics

20 notes · View notes